Eldraeic Phrase of the Day: Tramézashíël Eslévár

el tramézashíël eslévár (n.): Empire of the Star; the largest and oldest eldraeic polity.

Broken up, this phrase reads: tra (DESCRIPTION OPERATOR) – méz (METAPHORIZATION OPERATOR) – ashíël (star) — eslév (empire) – ár (PREDICATION OPERATOR), which is to say in long-gloss, “the empire which is like unto a (metaphorical) star”. Replacing this with the English “of” is acceptably inaccurate for such an imprecise target language.

It should also be noted that eslév is linguistically unique, appearing only in this phrase (and abbreviations thereof: el eslév unambiguously refers to “the Empire”). It is not used to represent any of the other possible meanings of “empire”; the technical meaning of a union of multiple peripheral polities beneath one metropole, for example, is el vielmóniramóníë (loosely, “a commanding country-of-countries”).

It has no strict root-based etymology; rather, eslév is a nonce coined for its conceptual resonances: it resembles, for example, proto-Cestian words for “created” or “our creation”; Selenarian terms for “lunar crescent”; various Silver Crescent words with meanings approximating to “celestial”; a Veranthyran term meaning “propriety” or “high culture”, and so on and so forth.

April Questions

Posted by Associated Worlds

It’s known that the eldrae (and Imperial culture generally) place a premium on rational belief, but they also place a great amount of value on preserving extant diversity of beliefs and opinions inasmuch as they can be reconciled with rationality.

Given this, what do they make of Aumann’s Agreement Theorem and the assertion at its root — that all truly rational sophonts with accurate knowledge of one another’s beliefs must (and, by eldraeic moral standards, should) eventually converge on a single “correct” belief?

In the presence of complete and unambiguous information and upon matters in which there is a correct answer, certainly, this is trivially true. However…

More particularly, what of the further derived implication — by combining the above logic with an acceptance in pattern identity theory — that all truly rational sophonts must and should eventually converge into a particularly kind of Bostromian singleton that I am tentatively dubbing an “aumannsoph”?

…inasmuch as the sphere of factual matters on which there is a correct answer is dwarfed by the sphere of matters of taste, upon which there isn’t, any such convergence is necessarily limited to a mere fragment of the noösphere.

And now, some older questions I dragged up while cleaning out my inbox (not all, but many):

We hear a lot about “childhood” being a modern concept in human culture, that as soon as children were physically able to do adult work they would, so no one would think about their formation etc.; how do the Eldrae approach the question “childhood: exist or not?” or its definition?

“Ah, yes, ‘childhood’. We have dismissed that claim.”

Okay, that was glib. Let me ‘splain.

The elephant in the room, of course, is demographic. For humans, childhood (in which, since it is ambiguous, I include adolescence) takes up roughly one-fifth of the lifespan, and so there are a lot of children around. For eldrae, childhood is a tiny, insignificant chunk right at the start of the lifespan, and so there aren’t.

This changes the shape of things in a lot of ways. For one thing, even if they were to conclude that schools per se were a good idea (unlikely), running one would require an enormous catchment area to find enough pupils. For another, it means that a child’s primary interactions are not with a “peer group” of other children, since there are very unlikely to be enough in their vicinity to make one; they’re with their muse, their extended family and other adults.

(An Imperial shown the way we raise children on Earth would thus conclude that nature had greatly favored them in their demographics, since if you expect children to grow up into civilized, responsible adults, they can hardly do so from other people who don’t know either, and yet this is what we surround them with. Feh.)

Anyway. To return to the core topic, childhood, the way they think about it, is the process by which one turns from a squalling bundle of id, via a learning process of play and education and emulation and general becoming, into an actual person. (Amy points out that that implies children aren’t people, which isn’t really what I intend since they are obviously sophonts with personhood, but they aren’t, y’know, fully-able-to-assume-the-rights-and-responsibilities-of people.) Which makes it obviously really important, but is so as a process, not the per se way we tend to think of it.

So on the one hand, children are introduced into society early on – there’s no “children should be seen and not heard”, and certainly no off-in-the-children’s-society-ghetto. You attend the dinner parties, you join in the conversations around you (and the adults in those conversations are expected to extend you the same courtesy as any other participant, and while to explain, not to condescend), and so forth, and you are given real responsibility – with the real authority that goes with it – as soon as you can handle it, because that’s how you learn to adult.

(And, indeed, are also held responsible; far from considering, say, bullying in childhood to be just one of those kids being kids things, your would-be bully is setting himself up for My First Court Appearance, possibly followed by My First Judicial Redaction.)

On the flip side, the importance of play is also recognized, and indeed is, if anything, more so, because eldraeic society never derived a “put away childish things” syndrome. Obligatory C. S. Lewis quotation:

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

In Imperial culture, adults are allowed to play, and to maintain a sense of wonder, and to be (childishly) enthusiastic about things, and thus find it easy to join in with such things when raising their children.

(By comparison, our common notions of adulthood appear relentlessly jaded, desperately in need of de-sticking, or both.)

Or: Education in general.

Ah, education. Well, this is something else that is very different *there*. Partly that’s because of the demographic issues mentioned above (in the absence of schools, early education is generally in the hands of the parents and extended family, for example, who tend to take extended child-raising sabbaticals), but it’s also due to a significant difference in educational philosophy. Specifically, our educational system is based on a Prussian model for turning out industrial factory workers, and as such education is often a distinctly secondary objective of education, as it were, compared to inculcating conformity, obedience, and routine. (The prevalence of bells to regulate the school day, for example? Based on factory shift-changes.)

This would not work at all well in their society, which considers anything achievable through conformity, obedience, and routine to be something best achieved by clockwork automata, clanks, or non-sophont robots. There simply aren’t enough sophont minds around to waste them on that sort of thing. Intelligence, reason, creativity, and hustle are the things that are valued – and not just in claim, but in actuality – and so that’s what they optimize for.

So to break down their education system, it has four stages: pre-natal, fundamental -divided into the Triad and the Decad – and higher.

Pre-natal education is the province of a little technological wonder called the axiom feed, which can imprint knowledge directly on the brain. It’s somewhat limited because the brain is obviously very early in development at that point, but much as early childhood stimulation is important to promote brain development, that’s most of the axiom feed’s job. Get started early, so to speak. It also works to imprint some survival instincts that nature skipped over: staying afloat in water, exhaling and closing the eyes when exposed to vacuum, an aversion response to standard perhazard warning signs, that sort of thing. It also prepares the way for further education by priming the brain with the basics of language, and suchlike.

Then we get to the fundamental education, which is the universal part, usually delivered at home, taught by parents, tutors, and one’s muse, which is capable of answering virtually any question, and acting as a storyteller, ethical guide, playmate, and general companion. It’s also something that concentrates heavily on how to think: innovations like the neural lace, mnemonesis, the Transcend, etc., mean that there’s essentially no limit on how much information an individual can access as easily as their personal memory. There is no particular need for students to spend endless hours acquiring data: what they need to learn is how to convert that into knowledge and ultimately wisdom.

And so we have the Triad and the Decad. The former is purely concentrated on the how of thinking: its three courses are Eldraeic Language and Grammar, i.e., how to express yourself in precisionist-grade language; Logic and Thought, which covers epistemology, formal logic, Bayesian probability, mathematics, statistics, the Great Art of Memory, the scientific method, simulation techniques, and pretty much every other sound cognitive technique anyone’s ever heard of; and Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and the Civilities, which covers the art of functioning in society like a gentlesoph.

The Decad, following it, is the Imperial version of a liberal arts education on steroids: its ten courses are intended to cover everything that an Imperial gentlesoph should know:

advanced logic and mathematics;
business, finance, and economics (the world, after all, runs on trust, contracts, and enlightened-self-interest);
domestic arts;
engineering;
ethics and civics;
fine arts (both the appreciation of and the practice of – traditionally, one is supposed to learn two of the latter, one to serve to amuse one’s companions, and another to decorate one’s domicile and provide one with the ability to construct personal gifts);
history of civilization;
literature of civilization;
martial arts (taught both as excellent forms of exercise and builders of character and self-discipline, but also for the secondary reason that even in these enlightened and civilized times, one may be called upon to defend one’s or another’s person and property or react well in emergencies; while not a full exploration of the field, completing one’s basic schooling will teach you how to fight unarmed, with the blade, and with the gun, simple information warfare, basic tactics and strategy, simple survival techniques, and field medicine);
and natural philosophy (which is to say, science, and a much broader general education in it than schools *here* typically provide).

(This is, of course, perfectly indifferent to what we might think of as gender roles. Imperial culture delivers its best how-can-you-possibly-not-know-this to the man who can’t sew on a button or bake a soufflé along with the woman who can’t repair her own plumbing or build a bookcase.

Also, if you are under the impression that Imperial culture sees Heinleinian generalists as a baseline standard, you’re not wrong. Specialization may not be for insects, but premature specialization is the root of much incompetence.)

Mastering all this typically takes you from birth to somewhere in the 15-19 range. (Since there aren’t schools, everyone obviously completes it at their own pace.)

This is also where the rigorous part is, inasmuch as there is a great premium placed on self-control and competence during the period of fundamental education, simply because as an Imperial – well, freedom demands discipline, living life by one’s own qalasír demands discipline, and wielding the power natural to (bear in mind, for example, that everyone has technological psychokinesis and so can literally kill people with their brain) and the superempowering technologies granted to you really demands discipline.

There are no “high-school dropouts” *there* . If you don’t pass the Triad and the Decad, your competence is insufficient to achieve the IQI, and you will therefore never achieve majority, and therefore citizen-shareholdership, and by virtue of both access to anything that might be dangerous. As for self-control: well, any young citizen-intendant who doesn’t learn to show an adult’s self-control will likely be culled by the age of 12 or so, simply because they’re too bloody dangerous to keep around. This is acknowledged as harsh, but also as regrettably necessary; when temper tantrums can shatter bones and blow out walls, you can’t afford to permit them.

Following that, and into what the Empire would consider adulthood (contrary to the way we often seem to see college students as some sort of extended adolescents, given how we expect colleges to treat them), comes higher education, which starts then and finishes… well, finishes when you’re dead. Education is something that may be most intense at the start of your life, but when you live forever, you either climb on board with the notion of continuing education, or you end up somewhere between a zombie and a fossil.

Such higher education is when you specialize: often taking multiple individual courses of interest from multiple different institutions, which term in their praxis includes anything from universities, guild academies, remote learning courses, traditional apprenticeships, and so on and so forth, even including autodidaxis once evaluated. Degrees aren’t earned by completing specific formal paths (and so are often not “in” any particular subject), they’re earned by demonstrating a particular quality and quantity of education, which in turn lead you up the academic exultancy from a mere Academician (you earned at least one and get to wear an academician’s chain on formal occasions) all the way to the coveted title of Polygnostic (have earned many and performed original research both in and across multiple fields, and receive a complimentary entrée to the Court of Courts). A typical first round of higher education might last thirty years or so to turn out an individual of astonishing competence and flexibility.

(Beyond that, well, over a lifetime, people will probably spend decades more attending to their education, accumulating dozens of degrees in a variety of subjects.)

Or: Hell, kids’ games and their integration into the culture in general.

Some of this territory has been covered above (mentioning, for example, the importance of creative play), but I’m going to need to do some more creation before I can really give specific examples, I’m afraid.

One thing worth mentioning, though, is the number of games that are designed to be educational without being, well, obvious “education games”. As per Gilbert and Sullivan:

For he who’d make his fellow creatures wise
Should always gild the philosophic pill!

And so there are lots of games that fit that criterion; their equivalent of Monopoly, for example, is a game which is to trade as chess is to warfare, and one wins by creating the best positive-sum outcome for all players. There are mere brain-stretchers like ithréth, which is similar to four-dimensional go; lariärleth, which translates ecological and ecopoetic principles into a mahjongg-like setting; and so on and so forth.

It seems that antimatter is heavily relied upon as an energy storage (and source if there are better ways to make the stuff) – like in most science-fiction, actually.

One thing that seems surprisingly rarely used is the micro-black-hole/singularity generator. It seems to be the Singularity inductor I’ve seen referenced in “going critical”.

A singularity inductor isn’t a generator, per se, but a contraterragenerator. Basically, it’s a micro black hole that’s kept close enough to its evaporation point to produce prodigious horizon radiation. By feeding mass (all matter) into it at a rate which keeps it in balance, then collecting and segregating the horizon radiation (50-50 matter/antimatter), you’ve got a very efficient way of converting matter to antimatter.

(And one which, conveniently enough, can be operated by societies well below the level of technological sophistication needed to build one.)

The difficulties I perceive are that it either is very, very heavy or emits lots and lots of energy, it’s very small (and emits a lot) and as such is hard to feed, you have to keep it electrically charged to keep it where you want with magnetic fields, and if small enough and you stop feeding it for too long, it emits more and more, then blows up, then if you’re still there you are left with one less generator. Also, just in case, I would never let them anywhere near a planet surface or a populated civilian installation.

However, with the level of technology in the Eldraeverse, it would seem like a pretty affordable mass-energy converter, a bit higher-end than antimatter but more practical once you master it. Also, it could be used as a weapon to a pretty devastating effect: a neutralized black hole will pass through any conventional defence and will blow up at a precise instant that can be calculated to be right in the middle of the target. Though that’s for a step higher than the generator, technically. (And it gives dramatic explosions when a ship drive fails in combat, and it gives “Eject the core!” and such some actual meaning).

Seeing them used so rarely, I wonder what I’m missing about those. Is there a reason why they aren’t more prevalent in the Eldraeverse?

They’re actually fairly widely used for contraterragenesis (although not so much by the Empire, which has the Dyson bubble at Esilmúr, which produces antimatter in quantities so great that they store it in lumps the size of moons; it does, however, sell them as export products, as seen back here).

As for why you don’t see them used more often in starships for power generation and weapons systems, the answer boils down to one thing: mass. Even the tiny microholes used as contraterragenesis cores are hundreds of thousands of tons of mass-energy that you have to haul around, and if you’re going to start firing microholes at people, that’s a smaller but still huge mass you have to haul around… per shot, along with the equipment and energy you need to implode it and form the hole, not to mention then accelerate to fire.

Vector control and other space magic can make the practicalities of that easier momentum-wise, but conservation of energy is still very much not your friend. No-one’s found a hack for that law yet. 🙂

Not so much a question as an idea that I thought might be particularly suited to the eldrae mindset: A beverage that is marketed not so much for its quality (though it would undoubtedly have high-quality taste), but for the “gimmick” that, in order to drink it, opening the packaging itself involves some sort of test of skill.

Think like our world’s Ramune (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramune) with its glass marble seal, except tailor-made for a species for whom doing transcendental calculus in their heads as a hobby while also enjoying a nice, cold drink probably isn’t exactly unusual.

Already canon, at least in the notes! Academiciale (and yes, the portmanteau is almost as bad in the original Eldraeic), one of the indie synthdrinks not produced by the Lovely Atom Synthetic Drinks and Liquors Company, ICC, comes with an individualized puzzle in the neck of every bottle. Solve to open.

Ironically, it also has noötropic properties.

What cultural meanings are attached to colors in the core cultural zone?

It varies considerably, because there are more than a few cultures within the core cultural zone, but I can offer a few generalities:

Gold is, as ever, the color of wealth. Because gold.
Solar yellow, a little to the orange side, is a holy color, the hue of the Flame.
Indigo, the color of blood, represents nobility and exaltation. (And yes, these are the colors used in the flag.)
Turquoise, intermediate between blue and green, represents life.
Crimson is the color of diplomacy; heralds, messengers, and couriers wear it or are trimmed in it to indicate their status. Likewise, if you want to parley and/or surrender, you fly a crimson flag to indicate that. (This isn’t because it’s the color of blood, because it isn’t; it’s just because crimson stands out very, very well.)
Pale gray-blue, the shade of the sky on a still, rainy, gloomy day, is the shade of mourning for those who die untimely.

For the record, what was the fate of the assassins (and the people who presumably dispatched them)?

Once their weregeld was paid, they were released accordingly. They were, after all, guild professionals, not just some random thugs off the street, and there are certain courtesies attached to that. One need not punish the hand for the deed of the brain, as it were.

As for the mandarins of Ochale who dispatched them?

They were assassinated, of course.

This sounds like a specific example of a broader question: if you accidentally instantiate a fork of yourself, what do you (plural) do?

Hope you can agree with yourself.

…But seriously, this and other comments scattered hither and thither on the matter, referring to it both directly and indirectly, lead me to believe that eldraeic stylistic conventions (and, by extension, the cultural mores of those under their influence) are governed by a sort of cultic devotion to the idea of “the unfashionable human body” (or whatever you might dub the local analogue).

Well, yes, that’s pretty much what you would expect from fervent believers in the principle of improving everything until it’s asymptotic to perfection, no?

But more to the point: being utterly gorgeous is your birthright, thanks to generations of bodysculptors and gene-wranglers. If you go to the public baths where everyone walks around naked, your eye-blinding, heart-stopping, stupefyingly unsurpassable beauty is… well, it is impressive, but it doesn’t stand out among everyone else’s eye-blinding, heart-stopping, stupefyingly unsurpassable beauty, unless you’re of a particularly exotic clade or into custom body design.

If you want to stand out as an individual, fashion is the way to do it, because what you were born with, everyone you know was born with, and there’re only so many variations to go around.

Why the Photonic Network keeps everything shiny, polished, gleaming, and in perfect working order same degree, if not more so, as the Empire? Do they have certain psychological and/or ideological reasons like the eldrae? Or is it something they are inherited from their distant, spinbright ancestors?

It’s a common personality quirk of AI whose native realm is the virtual. Data doesn’t erode, break down, stop working, etc.; it’s always perfectly, Platonically, pristine. This tends to manifest as something looking similar to OCPD when it comes to dealing with messy, entropic physicality.

And how much “real” Vonnies are shiny? Our typical ST level? Or even less?

The Republic’s hardware looks fairly like the Federation’s, TNG era; which is to say, it looks like it’s trying to be shiny and modern, but you don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to realize it’s kind of plasticky and cheap, and that there’s a surprising amount of asceticism (ever notice how empty most crew quarters look?) for a supposedly post-scarcity culture.

And why the Photonic Network does not run patrol fleets?

The easiest way to explain why they don’t is to explain why the Empire does.

Which is to say: like the British, and later American, empires, it’s a maritime empire, or at least the spacefaring equivalent of a maritime empire. and a hegemony – albeit a gentle one – an architect of galactic civilization. As such, trade is its lifeblood, and its far-flung interests (all those stargates, and so forth) are the vessels through which that lifeblood flows, the need to defend which leads directly to the omnipresence of the Imperial Navy.

The Photonic Network isn’t, and isn’t. It has a much smaller merchant fleet and is much more concerned with its internal affairs than with any grand designs to reshape the universe in its own image.

In short: it doesn’t need them, and it doesn’t care enough to have them anyway.

I do have to wonder: Are there any “AI-supremacist” movements out there? (I.e. organizations that exist on the opposite end of the spectrum that claim that pure digisapience is “the wave of the future” and that any meatbound intelligence that willingly remains such is a “primitive throwback,” regardless of their openmindedness to AIs or sophotech enhancement)

That would be the Electron Reign, who are generally regarded as just as big a bunch of whackos as basically every other supremacist movement out there.

Could we at some point get an “in-depth” look at the Antithetical Heresies — causes, signs and symptoms in thought and behavior, common paths of progression and “terminal failure modes,” corrective measures you can take if you suspect you or someone you know might be falling into one?

…there may be more said on the topic when and if I receive an inspiration, but you do realize that in this general form that’s like asking the Pope for a complete and comprehensive taxonomy of sin, right?

Eldraeic Word of the Day: Serev

Posted by Associated Worlds

serev (n.): Blood, or other primary life-fluid (e.g., myneni crystalplasm, codramaju suspension, mezuar sap, etc. – even, to stretch a metaphorical point, digisapience electricity.)

A word notable for its use in many metaphor-based compounds and etymological cousins, notably seredar (“blood-person”, or paramedic); seredhain (“blood-war”, or war of extermination/genocide); seredáné (“blood-precursor”, or genetic parent); sereglés (“blood-key”, or biometric security system); sereqártill (“blood-price”, or weregeld); seredelefí (“blood-oath”, a contract secured on one or both parties’ lives); and saráv (justice).

Yes, It Does

Posted by Associated Worlds

A quick question with a quick answer:

How would a virtuous eldrae answer the eternal question “Does this dress make me look fat?”

Honestly and accurately.

But then, if you had spent any time at all in their cultural sphere, you’d know better than ask damn silly questions that you don’t want an honest, accurate answer to. Or, at the very least, you’d know what you were about to get.

(To generalize, if comforting white lies and other forms of sugar-coated bullshit are something you look for… man, are you in the wrong culture.)

Question Update

Posted by Associated Worlds

Hey, folks, guess what? Super-busy-development-crunch-time is done, and back to regular development-crunch-time. So while it may not be full-time writing for me, at least I might get some fiction done this month.

Anyway, on to the questions…

Under the heading of “the laws and customs of war”: Do the Associated Worlds have anything analogous (in spirit if not strictly in letter) to the Roerich Pact, or the ideas underpinning it?

(For reference: http://www.roerich.org/roerich-pact.php )

It’s almost certainly covered in the Conventions of Civilized Warfare section of the Ley Accords. That said, there are going to be some very careful allowances of wiggle room in there – the Repository of All Knowledge has its own favorite way of dealing with cultural artifacts people are endangering unduly.

An odd thought I had while reading some of the back catalog: Do the eldrae have a term for, or any “literature” on, the state that could be described as “the incorrigible and ironically irrational belief that you are the only rational person in the room / on the Planet / in the Universe”?

There are almost certainly a variety of terms in the professional lingo, but you might be looking for quor vaníälathdar, which would translate as “total ultracrepidarian”; i.e., one who opines beyond their knowledge on every topic.

(Or, at least, that is the one I presently have the vocabulary handy to express.)

Another approach would be to describe them as failing the eighth and fifth virtues of talcoríëf; caution and argument. The former, which reminds you that it is not rational to fail to anticipate your own errors; and the latter, then, in the sense that those who wish to fail must prevent their friends from helping them – and assuming your own rightness is an excellent way of doing that.

(The Twelve Virtues of Talcoríëf are essentially a culturally-translated equivalent of this. Except that *there*, they teach you this sort of stuff pretty much as soon as you can scrape up two neurons to rub together.)

So the Empire in the modern day has very strong exit rights, but what was situation post unification of Eliéra but pre interstellar colonization? In particular how does a society of consent handle people having children who don’t have the ability to live anywhere other than a polity they didn’t consent to be born into?

Brave New World had its Savage Reservations and its islands; in those days, the Empire had its “Outside”. If you didn’t consent to truth, justice, and the Imperial way, you were perfectly free to go and live on the healthy-sized chunk of land designated “Outside” against exactly that circumstance.

(It’s not like there’s an obligation to provide you with a choice if you don’t like the menu on offer, but who wants to hang on to a bunch of malcontents?)

What exactly is “semislavery”? I’ve seen isolated references to it crop up, and a few ideas suggest themselves from what context is available, but it would be nice to see what the official definition is in Imperial jurisprudence.

Semislavery, or Deprivation of Ability to Consent, is defined thus in the short form:

The crime of editing (deprivation) or building (semislavery) sophont minds in such a manner that they always obey you and cannot conceptualize the notion of not doing so, or form the volition to act upon it.

Or, to put it another way, it’s building sophont minds with imposed false worldviews such that they volunteer to freely act as if they had no free will, and thus always unquestioningly act as you would have them act.

(It’s not technically slavery, in the same sense as the use of say, conscience redactors, pyretic inhibitors, or loyalty compulsions, not to mention more history’s more crude methods – but it’s close enough for there still to be a pyrolysis chamber waiting with your name on it.)

The Guardians of Our Harmony

Posted by Associated Worlds

So, you wanted to know about the Guardians of Our Harmony?

They’re the thought police.

Well, okay, not like that. That’s what paranoid outworlders would say, but really, they’re more like the thought paramedics.

There’s a quotation from their ur-founder which I think appears in Vignettes, and is here under the title Liberty’s Praxis, which I shall abridge thus:

“Freedom is sanity; sanity is freedom. They are natural co-dependents. One cannot exist without the other.”

“Consider, first, the Precursors. The ancient lin-aman were exemplars of whim untamed by reason; self-interest without enlightenment; a void of talcoríëf. And without rationality to guide them, they were slaves to their passions, to their instincts, and for all their powers and the glories of their civilization, they warred themselves into extinction.”

[…]

“To the first [necessity], the Collegium exists to keep us fit for its exercise.”

– Academician Selidië Ciellë, founder of the Eupraxic Collegium

This is the paradox of the free and open society, after all, especially when you’re talking about one in which superempowering wealth and technology is freely available. (Get your nuclear devices at the hardware store, folks!) Your public safety problem can be summed up as “how do we stop a few crazy people from killing us all”.

The standard Earthling (and many places in the ‘verse, for that matter) response is to lay heavy restrictions on what anyone can do on the grounds that that restricts the crazy people too, or at least the ones who aren’t sufficiently creative, and everyone else can suck it up.

You can guess how that would play out, there. So instead, the Empire went the other route, and banned craziness (specifically, in the jargon, “pernicious irrationality”). If your problems are caused by the irrational, enforce rationality; you can believe as you wish and do whatever the hell you like, so long as you’re sane, to wit, rational. Granted, this is a very rigorous definition of sanity that would probably send a very high percentage of Earthlings straight to meme rehab, and yet.

(To an extent, this is the mental reformulation of “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts”; i.e., “you’re entitled to your own conclusions, but not your own [defective or corrupt] epistemic and logical processes”.)

The people in charge of this, the iatropsychic branch of the governance, are called the Eupraxic Collegium (created by the eleventh amendment to the Imperial Charter). They have several divisions: the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology and Conclave of Common Protocols, who ensure people can communicate and deal with each other on common ground and with full understanding; the Conclave of Clionomy, who keep an eye on culture-level shifts and head future trouble off at the past; the Bureau of Internal Memetic Defense, who track down toxic memes and hostile psych ops, launching appropriate memetophages; and the Guardians of Our Harmony, who deal with individuals.

Now, when I say “deal with”, I do not mean “make disappear in the night off to Room 101”, obviously. And while some of their work is formal, like the conducting of audits (except for Transcendent constitutionals, because the soul-shard obviates the need) and prescribing, if need be, some form of iatropsychic treatment, most of it isn’t: it’s education, and offering advice, and even things like turning up with a kind word, a listening ear, and maybe a hug when someone’s sitting in the dark in the lonely hours of the night and finding that that shotgun’s looking awfully appealing.

In short, they exist to keep thinking clear and people connected, not to pass judgment on approved ideas.

(Inspirations here, to give you some idea of the angle I’m coming from, include the Mental Health Board of Beta Colony – noting the author’s post here – in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series; the Order of Silent Confessors in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Three Worlds Collide; and a lighter and softer version of the Zhodani Tavrchedl’, from Traveller¹.)

1. The Tavrchedl’ as implemented by the Princess of Friendship, sort of thing, maybe? There are people in the Guardians whose mandate could be fairly summed up as “solving friendship problems”.

Worldbuilding: Space Opera Clichés

Posted by Associated Worlds

I commented on this post of Charlie Stross’s before now – about when it was first posted back in ’16 – on G+, but while I wait for compilers to compile and linkers to link, I thought I’d post a commentary on the giant list of hoary and terrible space opera clichés here, too, with specific ‘verse relevance.

Here’s the list, or at least those bits of it I felt like commenting on:

Planetary civilizations
This subheading covers common cliches/mistakes made in discussing inhabited (Earthlike) planets and the people who live on them.

Planets are small and easily explored

Depends what sort of exploration you have in mind.

On the one hand, there’s no denying a planet is a lot of real estate.

On the other hand, you can fit a satellite constellation capable of producing an arbitrary-resolution sensor map of a planet into the cargo hold of a free trader or scout these days.

On the gripping hand, acquiring the data is easy: processing the data is not. Sure, you can read every page of every book on the planet that happened to be open and visible at the time, but you’ve got to identify them first.

You can fly anywhere at Mach 2.2+ without worrying about Air Traffic Control and NOTAMs

Well, you can – because if you ignore Atmospheric Control and skyway routine, the people you have to worry about are air defense command.

Coriolis force, trade winds, cyclones, what are those?

In the case of the last of the above, a bloody nuisance. Especially in the case of worlds like Phílae, which averts the below entry by being almost all ocean, and thus having absolutely huge hypercanes that circle the globe multiple times and make a cat 5 hurricane, Earth-style, look like a fart in a bathtub.

Oceans are small, land-locked, and mainly useful for fishing

Sticking just to the original Thirteen Colonies alone, while Sevára resembles this to some extent (30%- water coverage, which might as well be land-locked since it’s a chain of seas around a single continent), they also include Phílae, which is 95%+ water, with most of the single small continent buried under the northern polar ice-cap (also water). Most of the population lives, you guessed it, on, in, or under the sea.

Most garden worlds are somewhere in the middle.

Deep carbon cycle, subduction, ionosphere UV splitting of water, long-term terraforming stability: why worry about little things like that?

Why, indeed?

I mean, the Protectorate of Balance, Externality, and the Commons (in particular the Offices of the Atmohydrosphere and Bioecology) and the Ministry of Settlements and Habitation do worry about things like that, as do various ecotects working for ecopoesis corporations, their liability carriers, and the obligators who write out the terms of the million-year warranty complete with comprehensive lists of things to do and not to do to, with, on, or near your shiny new planet.

But unless you’re in the ecopoesis or planetary management business, even in a civilization that thinks on those timescales, you personally as a representative of 99.999% of the population probably don’t need to. And from a fictive point of view, planning the next aeon’s atmospheric replenishment cycle is not what you might call an action-packed field.

(As a side-note, we can contemplate how many civilizations whose governances have the more traditional mayfly-like political attention span are going to have a really embarrassing Three-Generation-Rule moment when the warranty runs out and they realize they haven’t done any of the recommended maintenance to ensure their planet will still have an atmosphere.

And their revered ancient ancestors seventeen governances ago lost the paperwork somewhere in between the time the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas.

But it’s not like the Worlds have been around for long enough for most of the grand acts of ecotecture to be showing their age. Hell, most of ’em still have that new planet smell.)

Plate tectonics is easily ignored, unless the plot requires a Volcano/Earthquake

Again, it’s something of a specialty…

Some planets have a breathable atmosphere but no water

Maybe occasionally possible if you don’t breathe oxygen and live on The Planet Of Massively Hygroscopic Rocks… nah, can’t happen. Forget it.

Space and cosmology
Common blunders in cosmology, planetography, orbital mechanics, and related.

Planetary ring systems are picturesque, not dangerous

Planetary ring systems are picturesque and dangerous. But if you can’t acceptably solve the problem of dangerous, why the fnargl would you set up shop near one?

(General rule ignored by Obstructive Naysayers: sometimes problems are solved.)

Planets rotate east-to-west

While not true *here* by the IAU definition, true in the ‘verse, because *there*, the direction of north is determined by which end of the spin axis spins counterclockwise when viewed from above. Planets which have retrograde rotation are deemed to be upside down from a N-S point of view.

(This difference is probably because in Eldraeic it sounds bloody stupid to have the sun setting in a direction whose name literally means “sunriseward”, and there’s not anything particularly useful to be gained by aligning north and south across planets anyway, especially since they all have different axial tilts. If you need to talk about which planetary pole is above the invariable plane of the star system, you’d call it the acme pole and eliminate the ambiguity.)

Planets have magnetic poles that approximate their rotational axis

The thing about magnetic poles? They don’t have to approximate the rotational axis, certainly (just look at Uranus, which is 60 degrees off), but especially in the case of lithic worlds, they very often do.

Why? Well, a typical lithic world (like, say, Earth) gets its magnetic field from its spinning iron core. (Technically, convection currents in the outer core powered by core heat, shaped by the Coriolis force, but the spin and spin axis are important here.) And given viscosity of molten rock, friction, and the like, planetary cores tend to end up with a fairly similar spin and spin axis to the rest of the planet.

You can change orbital inclination easily

With torchy torch drives, you can. Although that does depend on having the aforementioned torchy torch drives.

Actually, hitting a space rock or other spaceship is no big deal, a bit like being in a minor car accident

… Even though the kinetic energy released by an impact increases with the square of the velocity, and you’re travelling hundreds to millions of time faster

A world of nope.

Gas giants are good for mining volatiles

Being big piles of volatiles, yes – although relative abundances are, of course, relevant…

… Because dealing with Mach 6 wind shear, 10,000 Bar pressure, and a lethally deep gravity well is trivial

…10,000 bar, huh. According to my handy-dandy chart of the Jovian atmosphere, that pressure is reached somewhere way down below -132 km (which is where Galileo stopped transmitting), beneath the cloud layers and the tropopause. At that sort of level, the pressure is around 12 bar, which is where hydrogen becomes a supercritical fluid.

Which means the really obvious question is why exactly I need to plunge that deep into Jupiter to skim gas? What’s wrong with the 0.1 bar zone, at the top of the tropopause, or hell, chunks of the stratosphere? You can skim freely through that without going anywhere near the dire pressures down below, and here’s the fun part, that also means skimming the gravity well, and that the winds aloft are easier to deal with. And as a free bonus, you don’t get nearly so much miscellaneous crap in your hydrogen-helium mix to filter out.

(I picked Jupiter here, as my example, because it’s pretty much the pessimal case.)

tl;dr It’s not trivial, but it ain’t no thing.

… Because we need volatiles such as 3He, to fuel our aneutronic fusion reactors (hint: Boron is cheaper and much less scarce)

It also requires a substantially higher ignition temperature (200 keV vs. 30keV for the ‘verse’s preferred 3He-2H or 5.2 keV for 3H-2H), has a poorer energy density, and is inconveniently solid, not to mention actually less conveniently ubiquitous.

(On this latter, boron ores are lithophile evaporites, which basically means they get concentrated in the Earth’s crust and further concentrated by hydrologic processes. Boron “ores” you’re likely to find in space are going to be crap-grade ore, because there’s not a process concentrating them.)

Supernovae happen routinely and are no big deal

The CASE INFERNO ANTEDILUVIAN team beg to differ.

Interstellar space is totally empty

… You can fly as fast as you like without worrying about dust particles

You don’t have to worry about interstellar gas, either

While the in-system speed limit of 0.1 c is based on safe flight control, the lighthugger speed limit of 0.9 c is based on the survivability of said lighthuggers behind the best foreshield and associated technologies that science and engineering can produce.

… Except when there’s not enough of it to keep your ramscoop accelerating

Incidentally? Ramscoops totally work! (Larry Niven said so in 1968.)

They make great brakes, though.

Don’t let the fact that space is full of exciting high energy physics put you off going there, squishy meatsack-persons!

“It’s not like the multitude of ways in which other places can kill you nastily put us off from going to those places, either.” (Your humans may vary.)

(Again: problems? Have solutions. Solving problems is what sophonts – and even prosophonts – do. This is what sapience is for. If you’re just going to sit on your ass and complain about mean old high-energy physics making things haaaaard, you might as well be a rutabaga.)

Biology
Biology is complicated—so much so that many SF authors suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome in approaching the design of life-supporting planets.

As a general note on the below items, while you can argue that the native biochemistry is one we can’t possibly derive nutrients from or argue that the native microbiota will eat our crops and give us parasites and allergies while the ship’s rats run free like Australian rabbits, it takes some chutzpah to try and argue both at the same time.

The native flora and fauna use a biochemistry that we can derive sustenance from

Not all of the time, or even the majority of the time, but surprisingly often. The phase space of biochemistry is big, but it ain’t that big, and it’s filled with local optima, like amino acids, and simple sugars, and fatty acids, and – well, you get the picture.

… This includes weird-ass micronutrients

This, on the other hand, no. By and large, if you’re going to try and subsist on exoflora and exofauna, you will need your nutritional supplement pills, or tailored yoghurt, or Exploratory Service-grade gut flora. And most of it will need some kind of pre-processing to take out those portions of the exobiochemistry that isn’t only indigestible, but actively toxic. (The process of ecopoesis – on garden worlds – and ecosystem blending thus tends to require a lot of genetic and other bioengineering.)

Pay no attention to the native microbiota, they’re harmless

For the same reason as above, also mostly nope. If you can eat them, they can eat you. Viruses you don’t have to worry about, mostly, since they depend on identical genetic mechanisms and encoding, but bacteria, fungi, etc., just need a compatible growth environment, which is much easier to meet.

(The eldrae had early experience with this with such conditions as bacterial cachexy, which is a bluelife bacterium which is more than happy to grow in greenlife, ultimately causing death from circulatory failure.

And which happens to need a completely different set of antibiotics to treat than greenlife bacterial conditions, ’cause it doesn’t have the same internal processes to interfere with.)

Most newly-encountered garden worlds come with their very own extensive suite of new exotic diseases to keep you busy. You don’t just take off your helmet and breathe the local air unless you’re either fixin’ to die or have an Exploratory Service-grade artificial immune system – and even if you have the latter, you do it cautiously.

… You won’t even suffer from hay fever! Much less systemic anaphylaxis.

Oh, you will. At least the hay fever – histaminic triggers are everywhere where there’s exoflora. (Bring your standard-issue strong histaminolytics.) Probably not the latter, so much; the bioengineers have had plenty of time to work on disastrous evolutionary bugs, and capping mast cell activation at a point below that at which it kills you was pretty close to the top of that list.

Ecosystems are robust; why not let your ship’s cat stretch her legs whenever you land?

… This goes for your ship’s rats, too

The question is not why you should let the rats, it’s how the hell are you going to stop the rats? Rats are everywhere, and always will be. Rats are the ultimate survivors and the most cunning stowaways. When the universe finally collapses into the screaming void, there’ll be a rat watching munching on some popcorn.

Any ecosystem that can be destroyed by a few rats will be. One just has to reconcile oneself to that.

…or you can co-opt them into your civilization (yay, smart-rats, a.k.a. Rattus faber) on the grounds that one way or another, like it or not, you are going to have rats, so you might as well try and achieve mutualism.

Terraforming is really simple; you can do it with algae capsules delivered from orbit

Good grief, no. Ecopoesis is a highly complex hands-on engineering discipline, and for every ecotect carrying it out, there is a small army of specialists in dozens of fields working under them applying hundreds of technologies to create an orchestrated symphony of gradual, managed change.

It’s not that hard to get some result, but getting a result that’s sticky, useful, and anything like what you intended to get… that’s hard.

There are no native parasites that might eat Maize, so we can turn the entire largest continent into a robot-run plantation

See above, mostly, plus an arbitrarily huge number of reasons why it would be both terrible and bloody stupid to turn an entire continent into a monocultural plantation.

(*There*, this even to the extent that current Earth agriculture practices it has long been considered a very bad no good idea that’s going to fuck your planetary ecology right up, even on your homeworld or a world whose ecology is entirely artificial. Massive-scale commodity green-goods production is something for arcology-sized vertical farms where you don’t have to demolish your way through a delicately-balanced ecosystem or contaminate the crap out of entire continental watersheds and even oceans.

Eutrophication, red tides and other algae blooms, and so forth, are generally interpreted by professional ecotects as a sign that You Failed Planetary Management Forever.)

You can keep a starship crew healthy and sane indefinitely using a life support system running on blue-green algae, tilapia, and maybe the odd soy bean plant

Only for relatively short periods. Now, specially engineered foodstuffs like algiprote, nutriyeast, and mycoprotein, those will keep you healthy indefinitely, but I wouldn’t want to vouch for the sanity of anyone who had to live off those indefinitely, even if they also had access to an unlimited supply of flavor-and-texture kits, and didn’t just end up chewing on a heap of rat bars.

Life support systems are simple, stable, and self-managing

Well, you wouldn’t need a Life Support Engineer if that was the case. Given a lot of time to work on these things, large, non-canned systems are self-managing to a degree – sane engineering design being to build appropriate negative feedback into the systems to keep ’em in the right zone without need for even automatic intervention – but microecologies will never have the buffers of macroecologies, and as such Direct Intervention will occasionally be Necessary.

It is safe to put bleach down the toilet on a starship; your algae/tilapia/soy will totally deal with it when it comes out of the recycler

You. Do. Not. Put. Harsh. Oxidizing. Agents. – or acids, or inorganics, or poisons, or raw hydrocarbons, or other such shit that downstream won’t like – Into. The. Black. Water. It’s not red water (i.e., industrial sewage where the water is acting as a carrier for all sorts of nasty shit and is heavily processed to be safe); it’s black water, which is treated via hot composting and biocleaning cascades before being reintroduced into the ecosystem.

And that’s something that’s been true *there* since long before space was a thing, so it’s not like anyone had to learn something new about life-support safety.

(So use eco-friendly enzyme-based cleaners, people! And keeping the pipes clean is what the genemod eels are for.)

Vitamins? Naah, we’ll just genetically modify the crew to make their own

Them or their gut flora. But that? That’s the emergency backup system and a way to make the trans-planetary micronutrient problem at least somewhat less problematic. You don’t want to rely on it as the first-string solution.

If you implant humans with the gene for chlorophyll they can magically become photosynthetic

… Okay, if you add the genes for RuBiSCO and the C3 pathway they can magically become photosynthetic

Well, first, that’d be a terrible design. What you want to do is give humans endosymbiotic chloroplasts, which is to say, the way plants do it. It’s not like they have genes for chlorophyll either.

… Because of course two square meters of skin is enough surface area to photosynthetically capture enough energy for a high-metabolic-rate mammal to live off

Indeed, it isn’t. (Nor does the green skin of a chloromorph-clade produce all the other necessities of a balanced diet.) But as in the case of those photosynthetic animals we know about, it does provide a useful energy supplement.

Also an excuse to dress skimpily and sunbathe at the drop of a hat, if you feel you need one.

Humans can too hibernate/deep sleep between star systems! All you need is a cold enough chest freezer

… Just as long as their intestinal flora go into cold sleep at the same time

… and so do the low metabolic rate arctic pseudofungi spores they picked up at the last planetary stop

I do not know if this is intended to include cryonics with skiffy cold sleep, here, but if so, there are certain thermodynamic limitations that suggest they’re going to have to be downright magical intestinal flora/spores to get much of a party going at 77 K.

Economics
Fingernails-on-blackboard time for me. (See also: Neptune’s Brood)

New Colonies may be either agricultural or mining colonies; rarely, resort colonies

New colonies (as in, intended to grow up and become a real world some day) are all general-purpose colonies. While interstellar shipping hasn’t remained obstructive-naysayer expensive, it’s still more so than local shipping, and only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots bases their shiny new planetary economy on extractive-industry exports or importing basic necessities.

Everyone uses Money to mediate exchanges of value

See here.

Money is common, because money has many desirable features. But it’s far from the only means ever used.

Money is always denominated in uniform ratios divisible by 10

Six, 12 and 24, for the esteyn. Factors of two for the exval. Then you start considering more exotic currencies, and things gets complicated.

Money is made out of shiny bits of metal, OR pieces of green paper, OR credit stored in a computer network

Mostly the last, again because it’s convenient. As for the former: well, yes, these are clichés, but they’re clichés because they are strong local optima. Coin-alloy is hard-wearing and physical currency is useful if you’re away from the clearing network; the bills are likewise useful hard-wearing plastic silk (although in many colors for your convenience; only the Es. 24 is green). It’s the internal v-tag that actually represents the value of the money, though – no intrinsic value here! – and that’s something that has been attached to all sorts of different objects, including examples of historical currency from cowrie shells to silver pine-cones to droplets of mercury.

There is only one kind of Money on any given planet, or one credit network

The same kind of Money is accepted everywhere as payment for all debts

Despite the best efforts of restrictive governments everywhere, no. There are certain local legal tender rules (even in the Empire, if you take a dispute to a Curial court and for whatever legal reason can’t get specific performance for the original payment agreement, you’re going to have to take esteyn, and the exval is generally accepted by agreement due to, again, the utility of an agreed-upon exchange currency/money of account for interstellar trade), but there are lots of currencies around and people who use many of ’em.

Likewise, while there isn’t one credit network, the many credit networks tend to interoperate, so basic functionality is available everywhere except utter backwaters. Visa, anyone?

(And, on this note, wasn’t it you, sir, who pointed out down below the advantages of EDI/EDIFACT standards for commerce? Well, in a few thousand years, turns out people have also noticed the advantages of not having to tote letters of credit around via chains of correspondent banks. And you can’t have it both ways.)

Visitors are always equipped to interface with the planet-wide credit network

Mostly, yes. See above, see Visa, see things that happen because commerce works better that way.

(That the answer is only mostly is why you can convert money into physical currencies, letters of credit, the equivalent of hawala tokens, even the venerable and vaguely ridiculous gAu, and so forth. Usually at the starport.)

Barter is a sign of primitive people who haven’t invented money

At most, you might say that barter – in an economy that has nothing but barter, and no multilateral trade exchanges, etc., to grease the wheels – is a sign of economic inefficiency. Having barter as a segment of your economy, on the other hand, isn’t a sign of much other than a laudable willingness not to throw away tools just because you got a new one. And sometimes it’s the best tool for the job.

(Side note: the Empire is one of the few modern polities that still lets you pay your ~~taxes~~ service fee in goods or services, rather than money. Because (a) why not, and (b) people who are richer in goods or services than in liquid cash can be equally deserving of citizen-shareholdership, too.)

People who rely on Barter are simple, trusting folks (and a bit stupid on the side)

Primitive is not and never has been cognate to stupid, except in the minds of the stupid.

Inflation? What is this, I don’t even …

Deflation? What will they think of next?

Well, if you ask the Imperial Board of Money and Values, they’re both ways to lie to yourself about the state of your economy and hope that they become more or less true before the bottom falls out.

(Inflation, in particular, is all too common in the Emerging and even Second Tier markets as a way of delivering an illusion of prosperity while – given who usually ends up with the seigniorage – acting as a form of stealth asset tax.)

Sales tax? What’s that?

Income tax? What’s that?

Import duty? What’s … (rinse, spin, repeat)

Robbery, robbery, and robbery, but they do tend to exist in various less civilized places. Emerging markets, one might say.

(If the Culture’s meme is “money is a symptom of poverty”, the relevant meme here is “taxation is a symptom of incompetence”. If you’re a sovereign service provider that’s bad enough at its job that it can’t persuade people that its services are worth purchasing, then you suck as an SSP.)

If you fail to repay a bank loan you may be arrested and held in debtor’s prison

Depends on the polity, but in the Empire, there’re no prisons period, so…

(Also, imprisoning people so they can’t generate any income to pay back their debts is, to put it kindly, kinda dumb even for most of the galaxy’s awowed mustache-twirlers.)

… Or sold into slavery

No, obviously, but you may voluntarily accept an indenture. This usually means that you’re trying to preserve your reputational capital by making a good-faith effort to repay your otherwise unrepayable debts, or that you wish to avoid bankruptcy on the grounds that while inalienable property is still inalienable, the liquidator is likely to give the reasons you went into unrepayable debt about five kinds of side-eye.

(They are known for being considerably gentler with “I attempted something and fucked up, or circumstances happened” than with “I’m a spendthrift deadbeat”.)

… Or your organs can be seized

… Because your body is just one of your fungible assets, right?

As per inalienable property above, only your second and subsequent bodies that don’t qualify as tools of the trade are liable for seizure (y’know, luxury goods). Again, turning bankrupts into the perpetually-impoverished-due-to-inability-to-earn is not good policy. Just good assholery.

People on planets have not heard of Ponzi Schemes

People on planets have not heard of Credit Default Swaps or the Black-Scholes equation

Most of the common kinds of financial skullduggery are fairly well-know. If you want to try and rip off people this way, you may want something more exotic and a world that’s still trying to catch up shortly post-contact. Like a negative-frequency trading scam.

If money is made of shiny bits of metal or green paper, banks have vaults where they store lots of money

Money sitting in a bank vault is worth something

Well, you’ve got to keep the physical tokens somewhere, but really, it’s more of a cupboard than a vault, specifically because money sitting in a bank vault isn’t worth anything, even its face value.

(When the bank takes it in, beyond the cashier’s float, it’s transferred to a digital account and the v-tag in the coin or bill is blanked. When they give it out, the reverse process happens. If you steal the physical tokens sitting in the bank’s storage cupboard, what you have is a pile of scrap metal/plastic that isn’t even worth scrap value, since even if you melt them down you can’t take a lump of highly distinctive coin-alloy to a recycler without it being very obvious what you did.)

In any case: banks aren’t money-stores, unless you go to a very specialist outfit indeed. That’s not how banking works, despite the ignorance most everyone has on the topic. You’re loaning them your money to do useful things with.

Vaults are for safe-deposit boxes, et al.

Visitors to a Colony can leave their money with a bank between infrequent visits without fear of consequences

If it’s connected to the clearing network, you don’t need to. If it’s not… yeah, that’s probably a bad idea. Convert it to something generally convertible, and take it with you.

Banks are stable, because …

… The planetary government will never let a bank go bust, because …

… The galactic emperor will never let a planetary government go bust, because …

This, again, is somewhat policy and therefore polity-dependent, but Imperial banks are mostly stable because its governance will let a bank go bust. The lack of a lender of last resort or any legal powers to otherwise bail out a failing bank encourages what one might describe as a more healthy attitude towards taking on risk and hedging it than that of banks in polities which declare them too big, or too necessary, to fail.

It helps that its citizen-shareholders are educated in how fractional-reserve banking actually works and advised to pick the risk levels they wish to accept, and thus the reserve ratio they want out of their bank (etc.), accordingly.

Traders on starships land on planets to load and unload cargo

… Or they carry their own orbit-to-surface shuttle

In high-volume trade and/or around developed worlds, no: that’s very inefficient compared to transshipping at orbital ports and letting the local cargo lighters and longshorebots do the next step in delivery.

On the other hand, tramp traders hauling low volumes to undeveloped worlds that don’t have all that developed orbital infrastructure? Well, how else are they going to get it groundside?

… Which is as easy and safe to operate as a fork-lift truck

In an absolute sense, no. In a relative sense, for people with good technical educations appropriate to their society, a shuttle-operator’s ticket and when it’s been a mature technology for multiple generations? Yes.

Cargo is bought and sold in starports

It seems a mite cruel to point out that the right to buy and sell speculative cargo at dockside from your little tramp trading ship is still a thing, right now, today, in this 21st century of ours. It makes up a very, very small part of the market, certainly, compared to mighty container ships and their fancy supply-chain systems, but it’s certainly still there . Shit, I’ve personally watched goods being bought and sold at dockside off a wooden-hulled sailing dhow working the Pacific routes. In Dubai, even, which is obviously not at all a city known for its massive investment in modern shipping and trading technologies…

(I mean, yes, there’s obviously something of a bias in what we see in space operas, but that’s because people tend to prefer reading about The Exciting Life of the Free Trader, not Yet More Days Doing Exactly As The Shipping Company’s Head Office Tells Us To, While Bored Out Of Our Collective Skulls.)

It is profitable to ship crude break-bulk cargo like timber or foodstuffs between star systems because starships are cheap and easy to repair and operate

They are (again, by the relative standards of a society that is wealthy and educated and in which they are well-established mature tech), but it’s still not for, say, trash pine and generic wheat.

If you’re talking about a particular planet’s exotic hardwood-analogs or its local versions of Kobe beef or Tokaj eszencia, on the other hand, super-premium products all, that can be profitable.

Break-bulk shipping in open cargo holds has never been improved upon

Multimodal freight containers, EDI/EDIFACT standards for commerce, bar codes, bourses, and RFID technologies are just inferior and unnecessarily complicated alternatives to a bazaar or indoor market

Well, I just talked about freight containers… which includes mention of their v-tags, the modern alternative to bar codes and RFIDs. As for EDI/EDIFACT, the folks behind the Accord on Trade, the Imperial Banking & Credit Weave, the Hundred Precise Protocols of the Integral Accountant/Galactic Financial Documentation Standards, and so on and so forth have been pushing that forward and outward for millennia, at this point.

That being said, the nit I have to pick here is mostly that this makes no distinction between large trade and small trade which will still continue to exist in the shadow of large trade, as I point out above – and the tools of one are not the tools of the other. All these things coexist quite happily with bazaars and floating markets, because it’s a case of the right tool for the right job, not one-size-fits-all.

Insurance underwriting? Arbitrage? What’s that? (rinse, spin, repeat)

Necessary? Inevitable?

All cargo starships need plenty of unskilled deck hands to help load and unload cargo

Large freighters working for freight lines don’t: they run from highport to highport, and the highports have plenty of longshoresophs and their longshorebots for hire. There’s no point in carrying them from place to place with you when you won’t need them in the middle of the trip.

Small free traders working backwater routes and hicksworlds, on the other hand, do need cargo handlers and handling equipment, because there’s no guarantee the place they’re arriving at will have the necessary. But those aren’t unskilled deckhands – you want a certified loadmaster and some spacehands with cargo handling certificates (probably cross-trained to do other jobs while under way), since screwing up your cargo loading can cost time, money, and Not Going To Space Today. Unskilled labor it ain’t.

Piracy is a huge problem for space traders

All cargo starships need gun turrets to fight off swarms of space pirates

For the most part, no, in most regions. It’s virtually impossible to get away with piracy in developed systems stuffed full of sensors (there ain’t no stealth in space!), traffic, and patrol craft, and most star nations patrol their space. Some patrol well beyond their space; the IN runs a lot of extraterritorial patrols as part of their stargate plexus security mission.

But where there is heavy political instability (“Warwilds”), especially the kind that leads to ex-navy crews with ex-navy ships, rogue star nations who openly or covertly sponsor piracy, or a power vacuum waiting to be filled (such as in the Shadow Systems, where no-one really wants to have fun down in the tarpit), there is piracy along with other local problems. Civilization’s navies and privateers (a lot of privateering is “buy a Q-ship, go to the bad part of town, wait for trouble to come to you, then shoot it”) can keep it down, but they can’t make it impossible.

(As a side note, most pirates are at least as big a threat to poorly defended colonies and drifts as they are to merchies, probably more. It’s not like they care what they raid, and those places have the advantage of not being able to flee.)

… Cargo starships with guns can fight off space pirates

Depends on a number of factors.

As a general rule, you can get away with this under two circumstances –

When your merchie isn’t really a merchie; it’s a Q-ship, naval auxiliary, or euphemistically named “frontier trader”, with a military-grade hull, drives, weapons, etc.; or
When the pirates aren’t the successful pirates mentioned below using ex-naval starships themselves, and you’re basically blasting away at the spacegoing equivalent of Somalis in skiffs.

When this isn’t the case, you can’t go up against a ship of war with a merchant hull and expect to win. Recommended procedure is to dump cargo and run like hell, screaming on the distress channels, and hope like hell that the pirates are more interested in seizing it than in killing you.

(There are certain odd exceptions depending on what qualifies as “fighting off”. Some merchies from civilizations with the Greater Immortality prefer to let pirates close as far as is possible, close the remaining distance themselves, and then detonate a fairly large bomb pour decourager les autres. Imperial captains are particularly notorious for this sort of thing, on the grounds of “fuck you, slaver”, deterrence, and having insurance carriers who support this policy.

Even some merchies who don’t have access to backup tech will do this on the grounds that a fairly large subset of pirates are psychopathic motherfuckers who torture and kill those they capture, and if you blow yourself up, at least you and your crew will die clean.)

Cargo starship crews can fix battle damage

Minor battle damage, yes, insofar as it tends to be indistinguishable from oops damage. The hole in your ship and the wrecked equipment inside it neither knows nor cares whether it was caused by a k-slug or a “golden pebble” meteoroid.

… All it takes is enough duct tape and determination

And a highly-trained engineer or two, and an adequate supply of spare parts.

… Because space pirate weapons are as deadly as shotguns, not H-bombs

It’s generally considered appropriate not to nuke, irradiate, or vaporize the cargo you’re trying to steal. This is similar to the reason that modern-day pirates don’t use mines and torpedoes. That particular type of pirate optimizes their weapons mix to disable without doing too much collateral damage because otherwise their business isn’t going to be profitable.

And you know that, ’cause you said “Space pirates will happily open fire on a cargo ship to damage it before boarding” like two lines further down.

… And starships cost no more to build and operate than a 1920s tramp steamer

Absolutely? No, of course not. Relatively? Yeah, pretty much, because the economy has moved on and everyone’s correspondingly richer.

Space pirates will happily open fire on a cargo ship to damage it before boarding

See above.

Space pirates need to board cargo ships in order to steal their cargo

Not usually, because as mentioned above, merchies tend to dump cargo and run when at risk of pirate intercept, and if the pirates have them under your guns at point-blank range, they could just order them to open up the cargo bay and transfer without boarding.

But, if that’s the case…

… And impress/conscript/enslave their crew

…they’re probably going to want to steal the ship, as well. Starships are expensive, even given the above, and can be sold on, or back to the owners. And then there’s ransom of the crew.

In any case, the pirates aren’t carrying a whole spare crew aboard, and in any case, taking only one ship per expedition (and then your hold is full) is wasteful. Thus, if they want to steal the ship, they’re not going to put a full crew on her; their prize crew is going to consist of one, maybe two, technically trained officers and a small brute squad to make the merchie crew work the ship for them until they get to Space Tortuga.

You can tell the difference between a pirate and a space trader with a glance

Actually, yes, for the most part. Three reasons: one, successful pirates are usually running about in ex-naval vessels or at least ex-naval auxiliaries, and a military ship really doesn’t look that much like a merchie – especially to recognition software.

Two, people dumb enough to try to use a merchie as a pirate ship are usually also dumb enough to stick spikes and guns all over it, because they’re not exactly representing the deep end of the gene pool, know what I mean? That stuff shows up nicely when you order your lidar to get you a hull map.

And three, there aren’t fixed shipping lanes in space. Courses diverge radically with thrust and departure window. You can be very suspicious of any not-positively-identified starship that’s on a course to intercept you outside the start and end of your voyage, because in the ordinary course of events that should never happen.

(A note on piracy in planetary orbit: in developed systems, this never happens. Why? Because being in planetary orbit means being within range of the orbital defense grid, and while the Orbit Guard may not be able to be everywhere in orbit, the grid can reach out and touch you anywhere with a gigawatt of sustained, high-energy nope.)

A cargo captain in a hole might easily turn to smuggling to improve their bottom line

…oh, yeah, that never happens at sea. Or in the air, for that matter. Ever heard the one about the pilot who ran an entire chain of seafood restaurants based on shipping unmanifested lobsters on his regular route? Or the one importing cheap fruit from East Africa, only caught when the fuel consumption was analyzed?

Navies are a lesser threat to smugglers than random encounters with pirates

Navies aren’t much of a threat to smugglers at all. Intercepting ships in naval craft is expensive in time and delta-v. What smugglers need to watch out for is the Orbit Guard and the Imperial Customs Service (in their orbital cutters and waiting dockside), or their local equivalents – often including the local revenuers – which loom much larger than pirates in the average smuggler’s eyes.

Nobody has ever heard of end-user certificates or bonded cargo

Oh, plenty of people have heard of them in places that care about such things, even if the average Imperial thinks about them in terms of “that annoying bureaucracy that the chaps down in Sovereign Liability Management should have dealt with already”.

Nobody ever thinks to ship their high-tax cargo via a free port or use complex financial arrangements to avoid customs duty without having to hire a dodgy armed ship with a poor credit rating

The smugglers in particular think of that, who are probably its greatest professional practitioners. Why take risks you don’t have to when you can law-fu your way to the same result? All part of the profession.

(Side note: smugglers generally use regular merchies, not armed craft. Protective coloration, and doesn’t attract the unwanted attention of everyone who can get a hull map off you.

Even custom-designed blockade runners tend not to be armed, on the grounds that getting into pissing contests with local security forces is (a) undesirable, and (b) detracts from the core mission of getting in and out quickly, quietly, and profitably. If it looks like that sort of thing is about to happen, you’re already so off-plan that you should already have started running.)

Politics

Planets have a single unitary government (or none at all)

While many planets don’t have a single unitary government –

(Although most of those have a supranational body to deal with space affairs, or a superpower in whose territory the primary starport is located and that’s more or less treated as the planetary government by offworlders. That’s because:

Okay. Look at Earth. It has 194 nations. Dozens of them are significant and rather more think that they are. Now consider that from the perspective of a decent-sized interstellar polity, and dealing with them individually starts looking like appointing an ambassador to the US per state. Now multiply that by the number of non-unitary governances in the Worlds, and it’s like appointing one to every county in the US.

By and large, star nations severally and the Conclave of Galactic Polities generally prefer not to deal with fribbling small change. On the rare occasions that an individual planetary nation comes to the attention of the big boys, it’s usually for as long as it takes a gunboat to deliver a kinetic explanation of why you don’t want to come to the attention of the big boys.)

– a lot of them do. Because most planets are colonies, and most colonies started out with one colonial administration that has the rights to the whole damn planet. There are freesoil worlds and multiply-colonized worlds, but they’re the minority, and usually have a similar “for planetary-level issues” body worked out that homeworlds do.

All planetary natives everywhere speak Galactic Standard English, or Trade Pidgin

Again, not all, but most developed or semi-developed worlds that aren’t also xenophobes have added an appropriate dialect of Trade to their local education system. Useful for commerce, interstellar amity, reading the extranet, instruction manuals…

It’s probably about as hard to find a Trade-speaker somewhere in the known galaxy as it is to find an English-speaker somewhere on Earth, which is to say, there may not be one right there, but the locals can usually dig up someone who’ll mostly understand you.

New Colonies can’t afford police, detectives, customs inspectors, or the FBI

Sure they can. I mean, New Colonies are more or less defined by being really small, so what you may have in these roles is one soph titled “Prefect of Security” who’s been seconded to the Watch Constabulary, the Office of Investigation and Pursuit, the Fourth Directorate, and the Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes, while contracted to the colonial corporation and actually direct-reporting to the Office of Conlegial Relations, and still not being overworked…

…but they have them. They just have to change hats a lot.

New Colonies don’t require visiting spacers to conform to local dress codes or laws

That’s what startown is for, even on old worlds indeed. Not absolutely, of course, but since there are a lot of worlds and cultures with radically different ideas on such things, it helps to have a, shall we say, relaxed zone – be it official or unofficial – for visitors in the interests of your local commerce.

No-one is all that fond of visiting the Planet of People with Sticks Up Their Butts, especially if fines, fees, and bailing out half their crew for not wearing a purple flannel codpiece on Cheese Flushing Day is cutting into the voyage’s profit. Just see no evil, hear no evil, lie back, and think of the import duties.

New Colonies don’t have gun control laws

They mostly don’t, it’s true. In the case of some garden-world colonies that’s because there are usually things outside that might kill you, as far as anyone knows, but mostly it’s because it takes a certain degree of spare capacity in your governance to start enforcing a passel of mala prohibita. Law has costs, and new colonies usually have more important things to worry about.

New Colonies don’t have laws, or if they do they were written by a mad libertarian

Technically all laws in this universe were written by a mad libertarian. Even the natural ones. ;D

There is no unemployment because happy smiley frontier needs cowboys or something

On new colonies, there is no unemployment because a colonial corporation isn’t going to spend money to ship your ass to its colony outpost without having the job or two or three you’re going to be doing all planned out first.

Now, once it’s developed to the point that regular people start moving there, it’ll rapidly develop – assuming here a colony of one of the Core Markets civilizations – the same ~~bloated~~ delightfully plump leisure class that all Core Markets have.

If the planet is a colony of the Galactic Empire, the new Planetary Governor will be appointed by the local Sector Governor

If it’s an Imperial colony, what the central governance gets to appoint is a rector (or rectrix), whose job is to liaise between the nascent local governance and the Ministry of Colonization, et. al., until such time as the colony grows enough to be a full self-governing world. But they aren’t “the governor”; they’re just there to provide help and guidance during the initial, difficult stages of materializing an economy, governance, local culture, etc., etc., ex nihilo.

… It’s Governors all the way up (until you hit the Emperor)

Since one size doesn’t fit all, levels both above and below (and including) the planetary tend to vary considerably in governance form depending on local needs and tastes and traditions. All the Charter actually requires of them is that they have an individual-to-small-group to serve as an executive and some form of popular input (which does allow some Athenian democracies, even). But variety is definitely the spice of life.

Monarchy is the natural and perfectly ideal form of government

The latter would be a civilized constitutional diarchy that does as little governing as it can get away with, for all that representations of this system are few and far between.

Which I suppose makes it a highly unnatural form of government.

Only an Imperial Monarchy can ensure the good local governance of a myriad of inhabited planets scattered across the vast reaches of deep space

Mostly, what ensures the good local governance of a myriad of inhabited planets scattered across the vast reaches of deep space is a central governance that understands that local issues vary, therefore local solutions vary, therefore it should trust the local governances enough not to try and micromanage things by fiat from a hundred light-years away.

Well, not strictly ensures. But it’s a good start.

Monarchies are never a Single Point Of [Galactic] Failure

Monarchs are never stupid, mad, ill, or distracted by a secret ambition to be a house painter instead

Well, they certainly could be, which is why sensible monarchies – and diarchies – are not strictly hereditarian, but rather make the choosing of the Heir something that examines qualifications and ambitions carefully and stringently to ensure a lack of stupidity, madness, corruptibility, and unwillingness to do the damn job.

(In a nice formalized way that requires minimal resorting to tragic hunting accidents, or in the modern era, tragic airlock accidents.)

Democracies are always corrupt

A conclusion one could not possibly reach by studying Earth, circa 2018.

The standard punishments for a crime range from a small fine, to slavery in the uranium mines for life (about 18 months), to an excruciating death

Which, as we know, is not the case on Earth…

Of course, the bigger problem here is the notion of “standard punishments”, which brings up a big ol’ [citation needed]. For the most part, there aren’t standard punishments, except for a few designated by the Accords which run along the lines of “if we catch you in piracy or slave-trading, you can be summarily blown out of space”.

Meanwhile, in the Empire, punishments range from small fines, to larger fines with accompanying meme rehab, to euthanasia. The Meridianites tend to prefer (reasonably humane, as such things go) prison, with variably-effective indirect rehabilitative programs. The Consolidated Waserai Echelons apply shaming, military discipline, and if necessary the offer of a pistol with a single shot. The D!grith Association uses publicity, shunning, and exile. The Photonic Network renices you, in the nice(1) sense, and applies compulsory debugging. The Iltine Union has gulags and forced labor. Most codramaju associations will sentence you to consumption, which yes, does mean eating you and excreting the non-useful bits. The Hope Hegemony reduces your meritocratic karma, which may or may not result in ending up in the protein banks. The Under-Blue-Star League will do something that begins as cryptic and ends up as ironic. The Theomachy of Galia, now, they’re the ones who’ll send you to the uranium mines, with a side option on “have her stripped and sent to my torture chamber…”.

Trials are swift and punishments are simple and easy to understand

Justice is always punitive/retributive/exemplary, never compensatory/preventative/rehabilitative, much less poetic/cryptic/incomprehensible

Oh, that so depends on where you are.

(For myself, I would classify the Empire’s justice as compensatory / medical-rehabilitative / surgical.)

Culture

There is usually only one culture per planet

Sometimes. Colonies which start out with an integrated communications grid, or from a single source of expansion, tend not to build up much of an internal cultural delta. But absolutely no homeworlds behave this way, short of Something Very Nasty in their history.

… Pay no attention to the blank spots on the map

… And especially don’t go looking for the unmarked mass graves

Or in some cases, the marked mass graves. Some cultures are sufficiently far from the human baseline to build the We’re Glad We Killed These People Monument right next to the Mass Extinction Museum and the School of Why Other Cultures Are Below Us.

Planetary natives are either Colonists or Indigenous

…so, if they didn’t start out there, and they didn’t move (or were moved) there, where did they come from? Although, really, after a while, who goes around pointing it out? Everyone’s just folk now.

Lost Colonies may resemble Primitive Indigines but never Advanced

Lost colonies that are small enough to noticeably be colonies rather than developed worlds have a nasty tendency to resemble “dead”, due to lack of extremely vital resupply.

But it is perhaps worth noticing that each of the Empire’s original Thirteen Colonies – which are about as close as it has to “lost”, given that they were founded sublight – had developed advancements over their starting tech in ways that the homeworld had not, come Reunification. (Hence the resulting boom when people started sharing those ideas and developing synergies.)

New Colonies resemble Tombstone, AZ, circa 1880

New colonies resemble the aftermath of a collision between a freight yard, a science lab, an industrial park, and a particularly boring suburb of bungalows, with a couple of inflatable domes thrown in for flavor.

(They get more interesting once people stop using prefabs and start building for themselves, but it still isn’t going to look much like Tombstone.)

New Colonists live in log cabins, ride mules/horses and carry ~six-guns~ blasters

… You can find logs (cabins, for the construction of) everywhere on planets

… They’re like abandoned crates in first-person shooters

New colonists live in prefabs, ride skimmers, and carry gauss pistols. You can’t build with logs until you figure out what the local wood-analog is and if there even is one; even if you have a garden world you don’t want your transportation to risk poisoning or anaphylaxing itself on the local unknown vegetation; and everyone carries those anyway. Although on said garden world, where you can’t yet recognize and avoid everything that might want to snack on you, the need is considerably greater.

Psychologically speaking, everybody is either WEIRD or Primitive

Primitive (non-WEIRD) people are stupid and unimaginative

WEIRD people accept and embrace change and innovation; non-WEIRD people reject both

Oh, no, the galaxy isn’t dominated by the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). It’s dominated by the CUTER, who are Consensual, Urbane, Transsophont, even more Educated, and Rich(er). And who would probably not think all that much of the merely WEIRD.

(As for those who aren’t CUTER – well, in earlier articles I’ve already covered the very extensive taxonomy of terms for those poor sods. Primitive is included, but that one’s not a value judgment, nor does it imply stupid and unimaginative. There are plenty that are and do, though, no worries there.)

Colonies are usually modelled on WEIRD 1950s cultural norms

Colony People come in two genders

The Women on New Colonies are either:

… Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen (because colonies need babies)

… Dungaree-wearing two-fisted starship-engineering-obsessed lesbians desperate to get off-world

The Men on New Colonies are either:

… Manly plaid-shirt-wearing heterosexual farmers breaking sod in the ~west~ new world

… Dastardly drunken muggers waiting behind the spaceport saloon for an unwary spacer

I asked the Ministry of Colonization about this. They told me the modal colonist is between 300 and 400 years old, has 2-3 degrees, and is extensively cross-trained for flexibility and redundancy in a truly remarkable number of disciplines. Because it turns out what brand-new colonies need is scientists and engineers to build all that infrastructure and figure out how to make it compatible with the planet.

While there are agronomists and farmers in the first wave, incidentally, the initial farming is done in artisoil in greenhouse domes, vertical hydroponic farms, and carniculture vats, because you don’t want to rush out planting your crops in alien soil until you’ve done science to it, at least enough to confirm what the Exploratory Service said and probably in more detail.

(Assuming your new colony world even has soil. Maybe it just has regolith and you can’t plant anything outside until you do a lot of dirt farming and make some soil. Maybe it has regolith and isn’t an ecopoesis candidate so you’ll never be able to farm outside. Lots of other possibilities.)

QUILTBAG: huh? Who are those people and why doesn’t somebody cure them?

… (Alternatively: everybody is QUILTBAG, pale patriarchal heterosexual penis people are extinct)

All these terms are meaningless: orientation is a choice in the era of mental editing. (Which I suppose is a variation on everyone being QUILTBAG, except that everyone’s just as QUILTBAG as they want to be. That’s the civilized way to do things – people shouldn’t have to be stuck with choices they didn’t make.)

You can recognize someone’s gender on any planet because:

… Women wear dresses or skirts with make-up and long hair

… Men wear pants (or occasionally suits of armor)

Yes, but not exclusively by a long shot (especially the hair, which is generally long for all). Even leaving out all the species which don’t wear such clothing or have different sets of genders or otherwise aren’t hominins.

… Hijra? Hermaphrodites? Transgender? Asexual? What are those?

Clades, mostly.

I will, however, take a moment to note that my universe has a transgender problem, or rather a specific transsexual problem, which amounts to their complete and utter invisibility on the page. (Yes, there have been some.)

See, the thing is, the logical locals hold pretty firmly to the principle that your ontology isn’t your ontogeny, and since changing sex is done by a full-body gender-flipped clone and mind-state swap, there is literally no physiological difference between the cis and the trans. It’s a historical datum, not a current state.

So, y’know, no-one invented the term transsexual on the grounds that it would make about as much sense as describing a caterpillar that became a butterfly as a transmorphal, or some such coinage. You are now what you are now.

On some planets people go naked, except for body paint

… This causes no problems, whether social or practical

That’s usually just the sophs with fur, which serves as body coverage and is oft annoying, when thick, to wear clothing on top of.

Otherwise, there are, well, social and practical problems, which lead to most nudity being situational. Like, say, the public baths.

The only place worse than a Colony World is Old Earth

Old Earth is

… An over-crowded overpopulated hell-hole

… An over-regulated bureaucratic hell-hole

… A poverty-stricken backwater and hell-hole

… Destroyed

… Lost (because everyone in the galaxy somehow forgot the way home)

… Mythical (and many people think it never existed)

… Somewhere to run away from

… (Rarely) Somewhere to run to

Old Eliéra, by contrast, is wild, rich, spotlessly clean, and largely tax-free, with crystal spires and optional togas. The only thing you risk on a visit there is catching a terminal case of cultural smugness.

Slavery is

… Ubiquitous

… No big deal

… Illegal but all the bad guys do it

Illegal and several of the bad guys do it. Not, I note, for economic reasons which mostly don’t make sense, but specifically for the evulz.

Technology – space travel

On the whole category of cheap and easy-to-operate spacecraft: impossible because –

(a) technology never becomes cheaper and/or easier to operate over time; and
(b) people’s ability to do things is also utterly invariant; and
(c) education and things included in it is also utterly invariant over time.

Or, y’know, not.

Rocket motors are simple to maintain and operate, too—they never break

Not never, but reliability has increased a bit over the, ooh, several millennia of engineering advancements that they have on us.

Reaction mass is incredibly dense, cheap, and easy to stash away in a spare corner

Cheap, yes (hydrogen is everywhere). Not so much the other two.

Oxygen is freely available in space

Well… it’s not available at most points in space, granted. But if we’re talking about space as a whole, there’s an awful lot of ice in it, which is just two simple operations away from being oxygen.

Spaceships are:

… bilaterally symmetrical

Radially symmetrical, for the most part, lest you be unbalanced about your thrust axis, fall off your tail, and not go to space today. Or not go to the part of space you intended to go today, at least. The bilaterally symmetrical ones tend to be aeronef interface vehicles that have to care about aerodynamic issues.

But also, I am assuming here that future people do not lose all sense of aesthetics, and while they may not go so far as to go out of their way to make ’em pretty, people are not just going to weld together arbitrarily asymmetrical junkpile craft just to say “look, I’m in space, and need give no shits about aerodynamics”. People care about what their stuff looks like.

… easily maintained by semi-skilled labour/shade tree mechanics

Only in places where the shade tree mechanics have a couple of degrees or degree-equivalents each.

… available second-hand in good working order from scrapyards

More like “available in order that will almost certainly kill you fairly rapidly” from scrapyards, although something that starts out as a junker, like this, might be salvageable with love, care, and lots of solid engineering. Mostly the latter.

Generating electricity aboard a spaceship without solar panels is easy

It gets easier if you can avoid a case of galloping nucleophobia.

… So is getting rid of waste heat

Probably the hardest problem in starship design, but not an insoluble one. Just one with very large and visible solutions, usually.

Faster than light travel is easy

Depends. Faster than light travel via stargates is easy for the starships. Inventing it and building the massive gate system, that’s really, really hard and expensive. But you only have to do the really, really hard bit once, then sell the service on.

Causality violation: what’s that?

Locally (i.e., an effect precedes a cause, but all effects still have causes)? A fun day out for all the family, provided that your family consists entirely of physics students.

Globally? Impossible, fortunately for those of us who enjoy living in a stable cosmos. Consistency protection says no.

There are no regulatory frameworks or licensing regimes for starships

Indeed not. On the other hand, there are those insurance underwriters we mentioned up above, who have some very firm ideas about what they’d like to see in terms of safety features and qualifications before you go charging about anywhere that might pose a hazard.

Nobody would ever think to run a starship up to 50% of light-speed and ram a planet

Oh, lots of people have thought of it.

But there is a very strong consensus in the Worlds against causing gigadeaths and destroying valuable worlds and their ecologies, which is what Chapter I of the Ley Accords is all about.

It’s happened exactly once, mostly because no-one ever believes in consequences until they happen to someone. Since those consequences amount to “We, for values of we equal to everyone else in the known galaxy, will hunt you down and kill you, along with your entire organization, your military forces, your government, and anyone else involved in the operation – which may, if we think it was done with popular support, involve bombing your entire civilization back into the stone age and possibly further down the evolutionary ladder,” everyone is highly incentivized to (a) not do this sort of thing, and (b) police their own crazies to make sure they won’t, either.

(This means that most asymmetrism in the ‘verse tends to have a sponsor with a tight grip on the throats of the actual asymmetrists, because no-one wants to inherit the thermonuclear responsibility for the local cave-dwelling whackjob.)

There’s no regulatory framework for shuttlecraft, either

… Because nobody has heard of Kessler syndrome

See above. The junk cleanup crews might also disagree on that one.

… Also, a space shuttle in-falling from low earth orbit totally doesn’t arrive at ground level with kinetic energy equal to about ten times its own mass in TNT, because if it did it would be a field-expedient weapon of mass destruction

See also: orbital defense grid, things it is good for apart from zapping military targets.

Flying a spaceship is not only easy, it’s easier than flying a Cessna

Well, obviously. There’s no weather, and piloting errors don’t make you immediately fall out of the sky and die. It’s less intuitive than flying an aircraft, but that ain’t the same thing by half.

…and, of course, from a spacer point of view, they are intuitive. Space is where physics works in a nice obvious manner. It’s planets that bend it all out of shape.

Spaceships communicate across interplanetary or interstellar distances by radio

… Interplanetary radio works instantaneously

Radio’s for local, broadcast comms. Long-range point-to-point comms are a whisker laser thing. And yes, laser light is as slow as light.

GPS works in space beyond low earth orbit: who needs navigation skills these days?

No, but OPS does. Societies that colonize space are going to build designed-for-space navigation systems. (Sensible ones will also teach celestial navigation and ship backup equipment that uses it, because sometimes things break and its preferable if those times don’t kill everyone.)

Technology – Pew! Pew! Pew!

Missiles, with a constrained (small) propulsion system, can overhaul a much bigger/less constrained spaceship at great range

…occasionally at a few times and places, which mostly has to do with those being the times and places when people were willing to use drives on missiles (NWSR, anyone?) that they wouldn’t dream of attaching to a starship. But in general, no, they don’t.

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties don’t bother to count Free Trader Beowulf’s point-defense nuclear missile battery for treaty purposes—only naval nukes count

Tactical nukes don’t count no matter who owns ’em. Too dinky. (Also, nuclear missiles make terrible point-defense weapons.)

Boarding actions have mysteriously made a come-back from the 1850s.

What, the boarding actions that specialized ships were built for during the First World War, that continued right through the Second World War, that the Marines in both the US and UK continue to train for today, that are widely used by modern-day pirates, that the Coast Guard commonly engages in while interdicting smugglers – something that you mentioned in the space navy context up above – and that are growing in importance in a wet naval context too, per Wikipedia? Those boarding actions?

The limited nature of boarding actions is because they’re very hard, not because they’re not useful.

Guns are still bang-sticks that require a human to point them at a target

That kind does exist, although with some flex on “point”, but autonomous weapons systems are much more combat-relevant on the battlefield.

Stun-guns have no unpleasant after-effects

The most common stun-guns have all the unpleasant after-effects of severe electric shock, since they’re electrolasers which work by, well, inflicting severe electric shock. Turns out there isn’t usually an easy, convenient, safe way to knock out even one species, never mind one that will work across multiple species.

Bullets are brainless

Flechettes are brainless. Gyroc micromissiles are anything but brainless.

You can dodge laser beams

Nope. You can, however, no longer be where the person firing the laser thinks you are, if that laser beam is in the hands of the average biosapience with electrochemical nerves. You can demonstrate this phenomenon with a laser pointer and a cooperative cat.

(If you’re facing down an electrophotonic opponent at close range, though, be it sophont or just someone’s guardian drone, you’re screwed.)

All starships need to carry armed guards, or at least a gun locker full of blasters for the crew when they’re visiting a Colony planet

Depends on the colony planet, but if you don’t have your own on most of the more hostile ones, a small army of starport concessionaires will sell or rent you one.

Aliens

Aliens are multicellular organisms with nervous systems and musculoskeletal systems

Only if you generalize sufficiently (these are not your Earth cells, these are not your Earth nerves, and these are definitely not your Earth muscles); but they do generally have building blocks, something to think with, and a way to move, yes.

Aliens communicate in language

For the very broad definition of “a means of encoding information for transmission between entities”, trivially true for everyone except obligate solipsists. The Exploratory Service has had to expand their preconceptions about what constitutes a language a few times, certainly.

… Using noises

… Emitted by their mouths

… At frequency ranges we can perceive

…now those, those are not universals, which is why Eldraeic comes in something like fifteen differently encoded isomorphic versions.

Aliens are individuals

Aliens are eusocial hive organisms

…and everything in between.

Aliens want to trade with us

There’s this principle called comparative advantage, see…

(Which is not to say that some aliens can’t be as moronic on trade policy as, say, the average major political party, but certainly not all of them.)

Aliens want to exchange bodily fluids with us (ewww …)

Seriously?

Aliens are incomprehensible

As a general point relating to aliens in general, I’d point out that we all live in the same universe and are subject to the exact same natural laws, which includes things like the laws of economics. A degree of common ground is therefore damn near inevitable; incomprehensible or ineffable aliens are only so because you haven’t effed hard enough.

Aliens have been extinct for millions of years, but:

… have left treasures behind in their death-trap-riddled tombs

Usually, they’ve left relics or relics of relics behind in their junkyards, ruins, and miscellaneous storage places. (At least half of which are instantly mislabeled as ritual objects.)

… their ephemeral technologies still work flawlessly

Paleotechnology doesn’t work that way, unless you’re lucky enough to stumble upon something that happens to be unusually rugged, self-repairing, and extremely lucky. At this point, alarm bells should be going off in your head.

… they’re extinct because they Sublimed

… they’re extinct because they became Decadent

… they’re extinct because they suicided

… (robot-alien remix): they’re extinct because they tripped over the Halting Problem

… they’re extinct because (insert dodgy social darwinist argument here)

Does it count as a dodgy social Darwinist argument if most of them canonically died out either due to some massive fuck-up of one kind or another, or due to being swatted like a fly by the indifferent forces of the universe (gamma-ray burst, supernova, climate change, ecosystem collapse, asteroid strike…)?

I mean, if you haven’t the necessary precursor techs to redirect asteroids yet, that’s not a social-Darwinism type problem if one wipes you out. If you have and were just too lazy to develop the capability – well, jury’s still out on that.

And a few more seen in the comments:

Everyone’s fully-trained and knows how the ship and equipment work to a high degree of detail, just like everyone today is a great driver and finds it trivially easy to, say, change a spark plug

Hey, some civilizations have higher standards than others.

Oh and another serious bugbear of mine: The biggest sources of problems with a spaceship are engines and life support, not plumbing and fluids. Slosh doesn’t exist (despite your artificial gravity!), the toilet pumps never get the wrong thing flushed down them, and the various sweet, grey and black water tanks (which I’m betting your ship doesn’t have the volume to hold anyway) never have any flaws, busted welds, weak connections or blocked ports.

Oh, no, you definitely need space plumbers. Lots of space plumbers.

(Although you might want to consider just how much plumbing there is in life support. Almost all of it, in fact.)

Everybody is crazy about having sex in space.

… Especially in micro-gravity…

… Because you just float and don’t push away from your partner(s) or start to spin…

There’s equipment for that. The ingenuity of sophontkind in this area truly passeth all understanding.

Despite interacting for thousands of years together, humans and AIs stumble over idioms and the AI’s inability to understand emotion or human cognition limits

I want to know how an AI (digisapience) without emotion and therefore emotional understanding could even work. What’s its motivation?

Interspecies sex is wildly kinky and / or addictive

Well, some cultures certainly think of it as wildly kinky, but that’s because they’re not very cosmopolitan.

Humanity could survive first contact with a more technologically advanced species without the culture shock and negative effects that colonized people have experienced in Earth history.

This is probably true for humanity. Anyone care to take a guess as to why it’s not a problem in the ‘verse’s general case?

Aliens sleep, and don’t think it at all weird that humans have to spend a third of their lives dormant.

Sleep is a common attractor, but certainly not a universal.

Corollary: Aliens require bedrooms, and are accustomed to providing same for travelers.

On the other hand, exodochia (i.e., those hotels specializing in the outworld trade) do tend to be run by people who have at least thumbed through a guide to Other Sophont Species And Their Wacky Habits.

When ships meet in space

As a first rule of thumb, ships don’t meet in space. Ships usually whip right past each other in space at high velocity. If you want to meet in space (a zero-zero intercept), you have to match velocity and position, burning a hell of a lot of delta-v to do so. Which means:

– Ships will always come to a relative stop at a distance sufficiently close they can cover a good portion of the human visual field to the naked eye.

This is actually true, because you aren’t going to expend all that delta-v unless you have some compelling need for actual physical interaction that can’t be done, for example, over communications channels or with projectiles of some sort. And since you need said interaction, parking any farther away than you have to is only making your own life more difficult.

The future banking system uses biometrics (retina scans, fingerprints) to verify identity, because of course those never change

Sophisticated authentication systems tend to use cognometrics, because biometrics do change quite easily. And they still need regular updating to account for drift.

Colonized planets never have annoying mild endemic diseases that travellers have to deal with

s/never/always/ . Although they usually have vaccinations or artificial immune system patches to “deal with” them.

Local businesses will always treat offworlders just like any other customers

Surprisingly the case on most civilized worlds, because of the unofficial rule of economics that says “if you screw them over, they won’t come back”. Not all worlds are civilized worlds, of course, so there are plenty of exceptions, but by and large this is a clue that has sunk in.

– Technology transfer between alien races will be very limited. Of course a primitive government couldn’t just ask a tramp freighter captain to download the Wikipedia of the more advanced polity when he drops off his ore delivery. Because reasons.

Technological information transfer like that is, well, easy and ubiquitous, as is buying handy high-tech goodies like a field cornucopia. Having the infrastructure to do anything useful with your new learnings, on the other hand, that’s not.

Computers never run out of storage space

Flash-drive equivalents are always able to hold all your data in one unit

Have you checked the Bekenstein Bound, recently? We are nowhere near the ceiling on data storage density, and it’s expanding rather faster than our need for data storage.

The Universal Internet always has the data you’re looking for replicated locally

The Universal Internet never has latency or capacity issues

I wrote that whole article on caching systems and bandwidth allocation on the extranet just for you.

Skin/hair/eye color modification is quick and easy, yet is somehow not subject to the whims of fashion

No, it’s totally subject to the whims of fashion. What do you think provided the incentive to make it quick and easy?

Nobody doing maintenance ever needs to consult a tech manual.

Only because the tech manual is build into the thing being maintained.

…and I’m done. (Only took me six months of filling in little bits here and there.)

RLwtP: How A Bill Becomes A Law II

Posted by Associated Worlds

So, remember back last December I made this quick post, pointing out how the baroque formality of the Imperial Senate served as an effective Schelling fence against certain kinds of bullshittery?

Well, given the fun that is the current 2,300 page-plus, two-hours-to-print omnibus spending bill, I feel the urge to point out that there’s a Schelling fence against that too, there, both the bullshittery and the micromanagement inherent in the system.

Namely, the reason that the President of the Imperial Senate has to read out all Harmonious Proposals of Unquestionable Justice and Incontrovertible Benignity in full to a quorate Senate (i.e., none of that speechifying to an empty room one sees on C-SPAN) before anyone can even open debate on them, and again – if they’ve been amended – before the final vote is taken.

Concision. Not just a virtue, it’s the only way to get anything passed at all.

Sportsball

Posted by Associated Worlds

So, it occurred to me that in my comments on sports here I missed one very large elephant in the room that makes competitive sports… difficult.

Namely, the number of species, and then the number of clades of those species, and that’s before we start getting into individual-level modifications, which leads to truly astonishing levels of ability divergence in various areas, many of them qualifying as “special abilities”.

To some degree, as we do, you can try and level that with rules, but that’s limited in the first place unless you go for a blanket “only baselines, or at least only alphas, of one single species, can play” – which very much limits the number of players and amount of interest you’ll get – you’re dealing with an entire culture of people whose natural inclination is to exploit the hell out of loopholes in anything that seems “unfairly restrictive”.

And it’s not as if this “ain’t no rule” attitude wasn’t giving referees plenty of headaches long before there were any other species around. “Yes, the rulebook says that the ball must be in a player’s possession when it enters the scoring zone, but there Ain’t No Rule that says another player can’t PK-throw the possessing player into said zone, right?”

(Minor plot point from the Contact Novel That Shall Never Be Written: the first football team to come up with the notion of hiring a kaeth fullback. After the ensuing (mostly metaphorical) carnage, it didn’t take the NFL long to come up with the “must weigh under 400 lbs.” rule.)

As such, those attempts at competitive sports leagues which do exist tend to have rulebooks the approximate size of the unabridged Encylopaedia Britannica, and add about a chapter to their length every game as people find new, obscure abilities or new, not-yet-forbidden synergies of abilities to exploit.

Or they go the free-for-all route, but that’s less “competitive sport” and more “exhibition grand meleé, specializing in deviousness”.

Freight Containers

Posted by Associated Worlds

Since the contract I’m working at the moment has gone into crunch mode, in the interest of keeping up some content this month, have an extra question answer:

I have a question…

As you say: a Hariven’s hold is sometimes cobbled together from eight standard shipping containers.

Are we talkin’ about eight 4m by 4m by 15m units, or eight 8m by 8m by 3.75m units?

Well, it’s not like they use metric. But while the Imperial “foot”-equivalent unit isn’t quite the same length as an Earthling foot, you can assume it’s not too far off when I tell you that they’re – or at least the most commonly seen 4B08 variant are – 12′ x 12′ x 48′ units.

While I’m at it, here are some more fun facts about the standard Imperial intermodal shipping container:

They’re designed to be light structures (typically made from glassboard, which is a sandwich of foam quartz in aluminum, easy to manufacture from regolith and an excellent insulator) with a thin protective coating of hardened steel, and are hermetically sealed (so they can be shipped without needing a pressurized cargo hold). The corners are slightly rounded to better hold pressure; and as a convenient side-effect, if they’re washed overboard on a wet ship during a storm, they tend to float.

Since this is long past the age of the Internet of Damn Well Everything, each one comes with a built-in microcomputer and WDMRP-compliant transponder, which tracks everything inside the container using their v-tags, controls entry, broadcasts a manifest tag indicating what’s in there, and keeps a write-only audit log of all this information. It also controls digital-ink stripes along the side of the container displaying its current routing code, proper orientation, handling instructions both ordinary and special, hazard markings, and so on and so forth.

And finally, there are some little inspection ports on them (which link together when the containers are stacked) designed to allow microbot swarms to enter and exit the container for performing inspections, for the convenience of customs, transport security, and transshippers routinely checking the contents against records and manifest to look for worrying discrepancies.

Also useful if there’s a fire or some other cargo emergency in the middle of a big stack.

Questions and Answer Time Again

Posted by Associated Worlds

Yes, it’s that time again.

Before I get started on the actual Qs and As, though, I said to myself that I was going to link to this: Current Affairs’ “Some Puzzles For Libertarians”, Treated As Writing Prompts For Short Stories, over on Slate Star Codex, in which Scott Alexander takes the usual collection of weak-man arguments and beats them to death with a rather witty shovel. I approve, and so do the people in my head.

A random thought that occurred to me: Given that the eldraeic lifespan is such that such matters could theoretically come into play, does Imperial property law account for continental drift and other such tectonic activities?

To an extent. Certainly it includes guidelines for resolving issues brought up by more common and minor tectonic activities – earthquakes, volcanism, fault-slip, erosion, and so forth. (One presumes, although I haven’t looked into it, they have some procedure for resurveying property lines in California when the San Andreas jiggles its way along another foot of displacement, and it’s probably like that. If they don’t, please don’t disabuse me of the notion; I’m enjoying the delusion of competence.)

Not so much for continental drift, mostly because it’s really, really slow, and so far hasn’t proven to be much of an issue on the ten-thousand year time scale that the Empire’s existed for (using Earth as an example, we’re talking sub-kilometer adjustments over that span, almost all at sea), or rather less on planets that have continental drift.

And it’s probable that well before it becomes a bigger issue, someone will want to fix the whole continental drift issue, anyway. While an active interior is good for a living planet, like so many things in nature, it’s consequences also bloody inconvenient and need to be taken in hand by somesoph who knows what they’re doing.

I was reading somebodies blog, and thought, literally

“this person is a Plutarch for people”

(in that they see a web of debts and transactions and operations, and seek to optimize in a way that generates value)

Is that facilitator or not-politician caste behavior?

That’s mostly an executor darëssef function (although hardly limited to them; see also, say, plutarch arbitrageurs and hearthmistress symposiarchs, et. al.), and specifically the profession of the path-pointers, who specialize in optimal go-betweening and xicésésef, which latter is very similar to the Chinese guanxixue, although without the negative implications.

Something that could serve as either a question or a “plot bunny,” at your discretion:

It is often said that “You cannot fool an alethiometer” — but that presumes that the alethiometer itself is functioning as intended.

So what happens when one is tampered with and / or breaks?

The self-test, anti-tamper, and external verification (as in, a physically separate verification system that you plug the thing into) systems all light up a pleasantly bloody shade of crimson, and go “eeeeeeeee”. These things are used, after all, to verify matters of great importance, and are designed, built, and audited appropriately.

Also, if you’re using it in any sort of formal proceedings and have an operator even half awake, the results will be off as you walk through the test question series. It doesn’t just give you a true/false indication, after all – it’s doing dynamic mind-state analysis in real time. If you’re going to tamper with it, you’ve got to do so in a way that generates a plausible alternative readout that matches all your observable actions and reactions, otherwise you’ve got the mental equivalent of bad lip-syncing going on.

(And if the questioner can smack your ass or insult your mother without generating the appropriate characteristic spike in the readouts, that’s all kinds of probable cause right there.)

Now, there are ways to fool basic alethiometric verification, especially when it comes to past events. (Sophont memory, in many cases, is fallible – look at human memory, which rewrites itself every time it’s remembered, and that aside, this is a universe in which memories can be edited, deleted, spliced, folded, spindled, and mutilated; or you can come up with some memory-duplication trick such as the one seen in Minority Report, or some other such device.) This is why the Curial courts don’t treat it as a sure thing and gather confirmatory evidence from forensics, alibi archives, Oversight’s public monitors, data trails left behind, etc., etc., and why sophisticated alethiometers will pull in some of that themselves to perform second-layer truth-checking: “Subject is telling the truth as he recalls it, but the public record actively contradicts this. Recommend deep scan for redactive signatures.”

But the weak spot to attack is pretty much never the alethiometer itself. It’s actually much easier – ironically enough – to fool yourself into not knowing that you’re lying, or knowing that you ever fooled yourself into not knowing that you’re lying, or…

(And leaving no traces behind in physical or data evidence, too, but if you can pull off the former, that should be easy!)

Segueing from the specific to the general: Do Imperial law and eldraeic ethics acknowledge anything approximating “non-contractual duties of commission” and “privileges of necessity” as expounded upon here: http://www.friesian.com/moral-1.htm#commission ? Particularly, do they have formal necessity defenses or anything like them in either tort law or criminal law?

On the former: no. There’s no such thing as a non-contractual duty of commission, because that would imply that you could be obligated by something other than your own power of contract, which we know is not the case; and everything not obligatory is supererogatory.

(There are certain things that might look similar – say, the Responsibility of Common Defense et. al. from the Charter – but those are actually contractual duties of commission which you obligated yourself to on signing up to join the community of civilized folk. A self-sovereign autonomous soph doesn’t have any of those.)

On the latter: there is a necessity defense, and also its close cousin the justification defense. With the exception of “necessity in the heat” cases (say, grabbing someone else’s shotgun in a life-or-death scenario, and giving it straight back to them), which in any case have the tendency of being settled non est over a beer, the courts look with a very jaundiced eye on necessity pleas, and you’d better be able to show that you exhausted essentially all your legal options first. If you plead necessity when you stole to feed your starving children, you’re going to need to be able to show that (a) your children are starving, and (b) that the local community is entirely devoid of employment opportunities, eleemosynary organizations, and people willing to help you when you asked. You did ask, right?

The legal principle *there* is not Necessity does not have a law, it’s Ill means poison all good ends, and if you argue that you’re the exception, you’ll need to hit legal standards of proof for that.

(Justification is even harder to get away with, since a plea of justification amounts to “I was right, and the law is wrong, and it should be changed by precedent in my favor”. It’s arguing “well, he needed killing” and having the court rewrite the rules on preemptive self-defense to include your reasoning. It has happened, but if you’re going to try out this one, have a really good argument ready.)

First off what would the Empire think of the Yeerks either as a fictional construct if a culture where to independently invent basically the Animorphs books or a real group if they were to encounter an actual species like that? If you haven’t read Animorphs or just don’t want to touch the copyright issues involved in mentioning them by name I want to know how they would react to a sophont species that is a sophont parasite and semi-obligate slaver. One that is basically a slug with the ability to take over a sophont host body. Most of them are fine with this set up, but a small minority will only infect willing hosts (they can act as muses/live in psycodesigners instead of living control collars) and a much larger group strongly want the ability to have bodies without slavery but are willing to infect unwilling hosts when that is what is available. Hope thats an acceptable question, will have more in the morning.

I’m not, alas, familiar with that ‘verse in particular, but as it happens, this is something I’ve thought about given another very similar species in functional respects, Stargate SG-1‘s goa’uld.

The thing is that semi-obligate is functionally equivalent to not obligate. (I mean, sure, being a sophont without much ability to do anything without a host body to possess means the universe has kind of handed you a shit sandwich, and yet.) Which is good, because that means you aren’t actually anathematic.

Since the rule is consensuality, they have no issues with those who go the Tok’ra route (of mutually willing symbiosis), and would be more than happy to sell non-sophont empty bodies by the gross to those looking for them. But if you go around possessing the unwilling, it’s not going to go very well for you. Best to leap on that first opportunity to get a non-slave body and throw yourself on the mercy of the court, belike.

Given the importance of consent and free will in the Eldraeverse, how are age-of-consent/ maturity test issues handled, when a self requires a development period before it can be fully autonomous?

Tort insurance; more here. Basically, when a tort insurer is willing – by virtue of your demonstrated competence and responsible nature – to let you self-sign a note large enough to meet the Insurance Quota for Independence, you are no longer a minor in the sight of the law. Not all things are directly tied to the IQI – for some activities your counterparties will want to know that you have rather more cover, if you didn’t figure out that it would be a good idea to have it yourself – but it’s the figure that the Empire wants to see before they let you become a citizen-shareholder, so it’s commonly used as the definition of “majority”.

(Specifically as regards age of consent, see the comments on the IQSC, here.)

So, question about Eldrae entertainment of the do they have something like this variety. In the Amenta setting that has eaten rationalist tumblr they have cleaning based entertainment as a distinct genre both as something that is added to other types of shows https://that-book-yellow.tumblr.com/post/170156399171/sparkler-trail-blackoutlandish and as a standalone thing https://that-book-yellow.tumblr.com/post/169986145399/sparkler-trail-sparkler-trail-theres-this. Given the Eldrae’s aesthetics about cleanliness do they have something similar? If not why not?

Damned if I know. Maybe?

(On one hand, I can’t think of any reason why it specifically couldn’t exist. On the other hand, cleaning is the sort of tedious and mundane activity best left to non-sophont robots; while it’s important work that has to be done, Lubricating and Checking Tolerances of Turbine Shaft Bearings: The Movie is not what you might call a potential blockbuster hit, either. On the gripping hand, a culture with high weirdness-support and a large population can support all manner of weird niche media. So.)

I gather that Imperial guns have more penetration ability than modern firearms, but how much more? In particular can military longarms like the IL-15i punch through enough things to meaningfully change infantry tactics by making it impractical to find cover in many environments? Really more compare and contrast of legionary tactics vs modern ground warfare would be interesting, but the cover thing jumps to mind as a potential major change.

To some extent: while penetration ability has increased, materials science has also made a lot of objects tougher than they used to be. So there’s less cover around, given that former light cover now isn’t useful as any kind of cover, but it’s not as drastic as it might be.

Another side of this is that there’s a limit to how much you want to dial up the penetration (although this varies a lot between weapons); the problem being that if you make an ultra-penetrant weapon it has a nasty habit of passing right through its target and expending most of its energy on the distant landscape, whereas you might prefer that it did more damage to the target and less to the collateral. (Similar to the superiority of soft-nose or hollowpoint rounds to full metal jacket for killing vs. wounding.)

(As a side note: the most immediate thing I suspect we’d notice that affects legionary tactics – well, apart from the clouds of drones and semi-autonomous mechagrunts doing the heavy lifting – is the death of most camouflage. Given the signature of even light infantry power armor, there’s not a whole lot of point in visual stealth, except for specialized units, and so there has been something of a return to the age of military bling and dressing to ~~intimidate~~ impress.)

The charter posts give some info on how the cost of citizenship is set, but doesn’t say how much it is. Do you have an approximate number for the setting’s present/a feel for how qualitatively expensive it is for the average new shareholder?

This is an area where I try to avoid presenting hard numbers, mostly because that’s likely to come back and bite me on the ass, but feel-wise —

It’s not particularly cheap. You’re basically providing the investment capital whose resulting revenue stream is going to pay for your Citizen’s Dividend and most basic services for the rest of ever (although at least there’s not inflation), so in that respect, it’s like saving up enough money that you can live off the interest/dividends/etc. without depleting your capital. On the other hand, that’s less than it might be, because post-common-material-scarcity has brought the cost of living (in monetary terms, that is; in prosperity terms it means the living is exceedingly rich) down quite a lot.

To come up with a decent comparison – and I reserve the right to change this if I think I was wrong – it’s probably something of the order of buying a nice house in a good neighborhood, in some suitably average city *here*. Fortunately, it’s an investment that will more than repay itself over time.

(Most poorer immigrants either find a sponsor, or take advantage of the Empire’s laissez-faire immigration policy by spending some time as a non-citizen resident earning the money to buy their citizen-shareholdership. The Imperials like this option, because this helps select for people likely to prosper in their society.)

I was reading up on the Core War and had a passing thought: what kind of threat would be necessary to cause the Republic and the Empire to team up with one another (however reluctantly) and what would be the Imperial reponse should the Republic start getting eaten by say, a pissed-off God-sophont? Vice versa?

You’ve got an example right there in the form of the Leviathan Consciousness. Existential threats tend to focus the attention wonderfully.

On the latter: offer to help, ’cause ex-threat. As for what happens if they don’t want the help and yet obviously need it, both sides have plans for what amounts to “invade these idiots to help them out before they get themselves killed and us along with them”. The Admiralty calls theirs CASE LAMENTING OVERLORD; the Exception Management Group probably has something similar.

Addendum to my last missive: precisely what in the nine hells was the thing the Republic was making use of for their stargates? And has the Empire got plans to deal with such things aside from just buggering off into unknown space as quickly as relativity allows?

An archaeotech wormhole-maker someone working for the early days of the Propulsion Group mined from a dead weakly-godlike’s brain.

And most of those things don’t need dealing with at that level. Vulture archaeologists dig up archaeotech relics all the time, and most of them are relatively harmless, and even most of the ones that aren’t only cause localized annihilation.

Otherwise, though, of course. The responsible parties try to have response cases around for everything: CASE DEMIURGE EMBALMED deals with resurrection seeds, just as CASE DEMIURGE WILDFIRE handles active perversions, and that’s before we get into the exotica like CASE SCISSOR REVISION (hypothetical time travel that breaks the laws of time travel), OPERATION VACUUM AVALANCHE (oops, physicists accidentally the universe), OPERATION EPOCH SHATTER (hacking the simulation to see if it is a simulation, with timing-channel attacks on quantum physics), or get as far off the map as OPERATION BLACKWATER BISHOP (Outside Context Problems, bearing in mind that all of the above are Inside the Context).

How does the empire treat sportsmanship? how much exultation in victory is considered appropriate before it becomes offensive to other competitors? Likewise are competitors expected to be stoic in defeat or does exceptionalism encourage declarations that you intend to come back and win next year?

Ah, well, to answer this one, I should start by dropping a reminder of the Imperial attitude towards relative measures of status/achievement (basically, it’s irrelevant) versus absolute ones, and for that matter identity-based status (even less relevant), and how that affects the sporting world.

Specifically, spectator sports are significantly less popular *there* than *here* (unlike participatory sports), and also most sports place much less emphasis, if any, on interpersonal competition. It’s not absent – inasmuch as you can’t have, say, a martial arts tournament without pitting people against opponents – but it’s not really the point.

Underlying this is that the eldrae find it very difficult to care about relative ability. Being faster, higher, and stronger than Joe, here, might mean that you’re awesomely excellent, or it might just be that you’re the least sucky schmuck on the schmuck-pile. They care about their absolute awesomeness, which means your modal athlete isn’t competing against other sophs, they’re competing against their past selves and the constraints of the universe.

So to bring this back around to the original question, you can exult all you want in victory, because you’re not exulting in defeating other competitors. The exultation is that in the past, you wished to become stronger/better (tsuyoku naritai!, a concept which I badly need to translate into Eldraeic), and now you have succeeded in that endeavor. Had you failed to improve or declined in performance, even if you still surpassed that of all other competitors, you would not see it as a victory. And absolute measures, unlike relative measures, aren’t zero-sum: one’s gain isn’t another loss. You don’t take anything away from anyone else by becoming more yourself.

(Indeed, thinking again of martial arts tournaments, it is far from unheard of for the victor from our perspective, having defeated all of his opponents, to acclaim one of those he defeated for having become most, while deeming his own improvement lesser, even though he might be stronger in an absolute sense.)

Thought you might enjoy this article here. And might as well ask: How did the eldrae eventually resolve *their* analog to the “adblocking arms race,” if indeed it isn’t still ongoing?

Heh. Well, blocking would be much easier *there* anyway, inasmuch as IIP is not an anonymous system: since all traffic requires user/device certificates from the sender, and while not all but many documents come with their very own digital imprimatur, rejecting all traffic from a given identity is downright trivial.

But in any case: it wasn’t much of a race, because as you may have noticed, heh, the locals *there* are rather better when it comes to failing to fail at coordination problems. The consumers of ad-supported media understood the relevant mélith, which is to say that you are paying for these goods with polite attention (these are the people who didn’t even skip ads in the days of video recorders because, y’know, we have an understanding here); and in return, the advertisers (see also notes here) felt little need to violate the implicit terms of this arrangement by upping the intrusiveness to asshatly levels, which in any case would not have been to their advantage. Such conflict as there was ended with a whimper, not a bang.

And, of course, the cultural expectations with regard to privacy are also different. Imperials consider commercial organizations working hard to figure out what they want, like, or might consider interesting to be a positive good.

Spending as much time as we do to block information-collecting used for these ends comes across as putting a comical amount of effort into making your own life less convenient by making it harder for the desire-satisfaction sector to satisfy your desires, and why the heck would anyone want that?

(Outworld, of course, your mileage will vary. In the Rim Free Zone, for one, the v-fog is often more than thick enough to obscure vision, and visitors are advised to make use of some truly vicious network and memetic firewalls.)

The Sapphire Coloratura: Revealed!

Posted by Associated Worlds

Inspired by a passing comment on the Eldraeverse Discord, we now present a galari starship, the Sapphire Coloratura-class polis yacht; the favored interplanetary and interstellar transport of all sophont rocks of wealth and taste.

SAPPHIRE COLORATURA-CLASS POLIS YACHT

Operated by: Galari groups requiring luxurious private transit.
Type: Executive polis yacht.
Construction: Barycenter Yards, Galáré System

Length: 96 m (not including spinnaker)
Beam: 12 m (not including radiators)

Gravity-well capable: No.
Atmosphere-capable: No.

Personnel: None required (craft is self-sophont). Can carry an effectively arbitrary number of infomorph passengers.

Main Drive: Custom “dangle drive”; inertially-confined fusion pellets are detonated behind a leading spinnaker, the resulting thrust being transferred to the starship via a tether.
Maneuvering Drive: High-thrust ACS powered by direct venting of fusion plasma from power reactors; auxiliary cold-gas thrusters.
Propellant: Deuterium/helium-3 blend (pelletized aboard for main drive).
Cruising (sustainable) thrust: 7.2 standard gravities
Peak (unsustainable) thrust: 7.5 standard gravities
Maximum velocity: 0.12 c (based on particle shielding)

Drones:

4 x galari body-crystals; since the galari are ergovores, any galari passenger or AI system may use these for EVA purposes.

Sensors:

1 x standard navigational sensor suite, Barycenter Yards
1 x lidar grid and high-sensitivity communications laser grid, Barycenter Yards

Weapons:

Laser point-defense grid.

Other Systems:

Cilmínár Spaceworks navigational kinetic barrier system
4 x Bright Shadow secondary flight control systems
Kaloré Gravity Products type 1MP vector-control core
Systemic Integrated Technologies flux-pinned superthermal radiator system

Small craft:

5 x minipoleis (no independent drive systems; local accumulators only)

DESIGN

The Sapphire Coloratura was intended to be a shining jewel in the crown of galari starship design, so it is perhaps fitting that it indeed resembles a shining jewel, the translucent crystal of its main body throwing sparkles of rainbow light everywhere when it chooses to fly close to stars, or when it is illuminated by the fiery blasts of its main drive.

The main body of the ship is similar to, in many ways, the galari themselves; a sixteen-faceted crystal, with eight long facets facing forward to the bow tip, and short, blunter facets facing aft towards the mechanical section, a gleaming metal cylinder with a rounded-off end taking up the remaining two-thirds of the starship’s length.

To proceed from fore to aft, the bow tip of the ship is capped with metal, housing the core mechanisms of the dangle drive; the sail deployment system, tether terminus, pellet launcher, and ignition lasers.

From our Earth perspective, this drive is very similar to the Medusa-type Orion; thrust is delivered to the starship via a 216 m diameter spinnaker “sail” on a tether ahead of the craft. Rather than dedicated pulse units, the drive projects pelletized D-3He charges ahead of the craft to the focal point of the spinnaker, where inertially-confined fusion is initiated by the ignition lasers, reflected to surround the pellet by the inner surface of the spinnaker. The resulting nuclear-pulse detonation accelerates the craft, smoothed out by the stroke cycle of the tether (see above link).

The main crystal body of the craft is essentially a solid-state piece – save for cooling labyrinths and the axial passage required by the drive – of galari thought-crystal: a substrate which holds the ship’s own intelligence, those of all passengers and any crew needed, along with whatever virtual realms, simulation spaces, or other computational matrices they may require. As such, there is little that can be described by way of an internal layout; most polis-yachts are unique in this respect.

The “waist” – broadest point – of the body is girdled by a machinery ring, containing within it the four fusion power reactors (multiple small reactors were preferred for extra redundancy by the designer) with the associated ACS, and at points between them, the backup flight control systems, navigational sensor suite, and other small auxiliary machinery.

At the aftmost point of the main body, where the blunter end of the crystal joins the mechanical section, eight crystal spikes project, symmetrically, from the point of junction. These are left hollow by the manufacturer and equipped with tip airlocks to provide a small amount of volume for cargo space and aftermarket customization; if non-ergovore passengers are expected, two of these are typically converted into quarters and life-support. A central chamber where the spikes meet serves as a body and robot hotel.

Entering the mechanical section, an accessible chamber at the forward end of the cylinder provides accommodation for the vector-control core and larger auxiliary machinery, including the thermal control system. The remainder of the section is entirely made up of bunkerage for the reactors and main drive.

The galari have never, it should be noted, shied away from making maximal use of vector control technology. This is particularly notable in the Sapphire Coloratura‘s design in two areas:

First, its radiators, which cloak the center of the mechanical section with a divided cylinder of gridwork, individual carbon-foam emitting elements held together and in place away from the hull by vector-magnetic couples, linked back to the ship itself only by the ribbons of thermal superconductor transmitting waste heat to them; and

Second, by the minipoleis that the Coloratura uses as small craft. Resembling nothing so much as miniature duplicates of the starship’s main body, these auxiliary blocks of thought-crystal are held in place orbiting the main body of the ship – often in complex patterns, even under full acceleration – connected only by vector-magnetic couples and whisker-laser communication.

That is pure ostentation.

The World is a Mess, and I Just Need To Rule It

Posted by Associated Worlds

I ran across this excerpt of a post on one of the Fimfiction blogs I follow this morning, and while I’m using it out of context and off-topic – it’s actually talking about the Lex Luthor of DC’s Earth-3, the morally inverted one, in the context of their own work – it works perfectly to explain the Vinav Amaranyr phenomenon, for those of you who were around in 2012, and for those of you who weren’t, why the Fourth Directorate keeps a weather eye on the philanthropic just in case:

Imagine a philanthropist.

He started as an inventor, one who managed to hang onto his own patents. In time, his intelligence created one of the most successful corporations in the world — one which truly tries to do good, although it’s gotten large enough that he has trouble keeping an eye on the whole thing. He still spends time in the lab. Until recently, he was working on clean energy sources. […]

He tries to do good. He has more money than he will ever need, at least for the needs of one man. He donates to charities. Sometimes he gives directly to the recipients because he’s learned that charities can take more than operating costs. He brings forth his clean energy and runs directly into the thorns of the coal lobby, gets told he’s only trying to deprive people of their livelihood. When he points out that he offered retraining and employment, they say he’s destroying a culture. His attempts to distribute medicine are fought by insurance companies. Famine relief shipments get stolen by terrorists, and the army marches on the hunger of someone else’s stomach.

He knows he can help the world — if only the world would let him. But he’s getting frustrated. No matter how good his actions are, how much he’s truly trying to help, there’s always something in the way. He wishes there was something else he could do. Focusing his efforts on a single city, creating a model for others… even that creates trouble. There’s a new personality in the media, one who seemingly only exists to berate him. A so-called reporter who invents his own facts and preaches them to an unquestioning audience while his glasses steam with rage.

…okay. So you’re an Imperial, and you want to help the galaxy. You’re a philanthropist, and genuinely want to help all the suffering sophs who aren’t lucky enough to live in a functional near-utopia.

And you’re stymied in all these ways. This happens almost every time you do something, to the point that you, ridiculously, have to spend more time fighting pointless obstacles and generalized stupidity than you do on solving the actual, underlying problems.

And all the while there’s that little voice in the back of your head whispering, saying “You’re a gorram postsophont. Eldrae kirsunar. These… people… can only stop you by your consent, your willingness to accept their petty, nonsensical rules. You can make things better and all you have to do is sweep aside these trivial little problems. Dammit, man, you’re a god among insects!”

And then one morning you wake up to realize you’ve become the villain of the piece, if the Fourth Directorate hasn’t delivered the most serious censure to you yet.

There are those who go Renegade because of dark-side ambition or greed, or some obscure philosophical commitment to something like Dark Kantianism or the Balanced-Universe Heresy.

But they’re a bunch of pikers compared to the ones powered by compassion.

Worldbuilding: Conflict & Mistake

Posted by Associated Worlds

Those of you who read Slate Star Codex will probably have already seen this article; and those of you who don’t probably should read it, because I think it might be helpful in explaining the differences between Imperial “politics” and Earth politics as we know them, including – to pick up some recent threads on the Discord – local attitudes *there* to protest and suchlike.

Text continues now using terms from the article in question.

While it’s not a perfect analogy, one can see how an awful lot of differences come to pass by considering that while politics *here* , especially performative politics, tends to be heavily conflict-theory-driven, the Empire’s governance – and including here such not-governmental organizations as the Shadow Ministries and the Plurality and its COGs – to be almost entirely dominated by one strand or another of mistake theorist.

…who, admittedly, take the view that conflict theorists are mistaken to a degree that qualifies as dangerously, probably diagnosably, insane.

On Lasers

Posted by Associated Worlds

So, I gather more’n a few laser fans are coming to visit these days, so just to save time, here’s the canonical reason that lasers are the ‘verse’s secondary weapons system, not its primary one:

(It turns out that this is really a recapitulation of points raised in Non-Standard Starship Scuffles, so if you’re already nodding along to that, you can more or less skip the rest. I’ll just hit a few high points.)

Lasers, for the most part, are useful weapons systems under many circumstances. (Obviously they have to be, given their use as point-defense; if you couldn’t get effective results from lasing a k-rod, they wouldn’t be used.) As mentioned elsewhere, you can get an effective result out of a laser weapon, due to collimation, up to around a light-second, which is the entirety of the inner engagement envelope, and as such every military starship mounts a passel of phased-array plasma lasers for point-defense, and larger classes cram in some broadside offensive lasers too.

You can actually collimate reasonably effective beams at rather longer distances than that, as the existence of starwisp tenders demonstrates – although they themselves are of little use for military purposes despite the incidents mentioned in that article, seeing as they shift angular vector and alter their focus with all the grace and speed of apatosauruses mating. One would, however, make a dandy generator for a laser web.

(Yes, they exist in the ‘verse, and have done ever since the Admiralty paid the Spaceflight Initiative to launch Sky-Shield, the homeworld’s first orbital defense grid, back in the day. Orbital defense grids remain their main military use, along with civilian beamed power.)

It’s just that the IN sees no particular point in paying in either cashy money or mass/volume budget for collimation to make them effective beyond the inner engagement envelope, because you aren’t going to hit any actively evading targets at that range anyway, golden BBs and spies having gotten you a copy of their drunkwalk algorithms aside, and kinetics/AKVs work better for the geometry games played in the outer envelope.

Here, though, is the spoiler in the deck where military lasers are concerned:

Thermal Superconductors.

(The laws of physics do permit them, I am assured, and local materials science is more than up to producing them.)

In up-to-date designs, starship armor is woven through with a dense mesh of the stuff, with wicking into big heat-sink tanks of thermal goo. This causes something of a problem for weaponized lasers, because it makes it ridiculously hard to create a hot spot that’ll vaporize – instead, you just add heat to the whole starship. Which is not useless by any means, if you can manage lots of repeated hits or keep a beam on target, because if you can pump enough heat into a starship, either it, the crew, or both, will go into thermal shutdown; but this is what lasers are for in ‘verse starship combat. If you want to blast things apart, you go for kinetics, because you can’t tank (sic) big lumps of baryons.

Of course, this defense has its limitations: a laser grid at short range can hit its target with enough power to overcome the armor and, indeed, to chop its target neatly into a pile of small cubes. But that’s for definitions of short range meaning “inside knife-fight range”, and any Flight Commander who let the range close that much without having his entire propulsion bus shot off first would be summarily cashiered for incompetence.

And that’s why lasers aren’t the primary or only weapons system around these parts.

Size, and a Patron Offer

Posted by Associated Worlds

For those mildly bothered by the ambiguity in the size of the Empire heretofore present, I’m here to relieve you of that ambiguity. It is precisely 243 systems in size, of which 226 can be found in the list below, the other 17 being ecumenical colonies whose name and location shall remain obscure so that I can place ’em when I need ’em.

(This also doesn’t count the six naval bases, four naval depots, scientific research stations – like those at Eye of Night (Last Darkness), Leytra (Ringstars), or Serehn (Glimmerstars) – or trade stations – such as Uílel (Csell Buffer) over which no permanent sovereign claim is made, or for that matter the scattering of Imperial exclaves. So its presence is found in rather more systems, but it only claims 243 as sovereign territory.)

The patron offer? Well, here’s the deal and the point in posting this rather lengthy list of systems; pick one, and I’ll tell you something about/set at/etc. it. In some cases you already know something about them, in others you don’t, but either way, give me one of those creativity-stimulating constraints, why don’t you? Open to any Patreon level.

Acheva (Methizar Traverse); ecumenical colony
Aevarae (Principalities)
Aiö (Imperial Core)
Alanene (Principalities)
Almalex (Flaming Skies Complex); ecumenical colony
Almeä (Thirteen Colonies)
Amerál (Talie Marches)
Anjeä (High Verge)
Annabar (Talie Marches)
Anniax (Imperial Core)
Aperyte (Loroi Quarter); ecumenical colony
Arála (Banners)
Arathis (Talie Marches)
Argyran Depository (Imperial Core); privately held storage facility
Asamis (Imperial Core)
Asthé (Principalities)
Athallar (Imperial Core)
Aurel (Imperial Core)
Belynar (Principalities)
Berrésis (Talie Marches)
Brennar (Imperial Core)
Brevia (Admigon Corridor); ecumenical colony
Bríänth (Principalities)
Caliar (Imperial Core)
Calíäthé (First Expanses)
Caliss (Imperial Core)
Calríäkay (First Expanses)
Camaríä (Principalities)
Cathchal (Principalities)
Cepten (Turathi Expanse); ecumenical colony
Cerise (Banners)
Chenachale (High Verge)
Chereth (High Verge)
Chessene (First Expanses)
Chiríästé (Talie Marches)
Cilmínár (Thirteen Colonies)
Cinnaré (Imperial Core)
Cinté (Thirteen Colonies)
Clajdíä (Thirteen Colonies)
Coentis (Banners)
Conclave (Imperial Core); home of the Conclave of Galactic Polities
Corabar (Talie Marches)
Corámus (Banners)
Coricál Ailék (Imperial Core); Cirys swarm housing the Eldraeic Transcend’s core
Corse Eth (Banners)
Cortanth (Imperial Core)
Corundar (Banners)
Culúlic (Talie Marches); mezuar homeworld
Daliethé (Principalities)
Delphys (Imperial Core)
Delthiax (Principalities)
Démis (Imperial Core)
Desníär (First Expanses)
Díärisár (Banners)
Dímae (Imperial Core)
Dumevoi (Aris Delphi); ecumenical colony; arterial intersection
Dvetrameir (Talie Marches)
Ecanthé (High Verge)
Eilisset (High Verge)
Éorre (High Verge)
Eldersthine (Imperial Core)
Ellisar (Imperial Core)
Elúeléä (First Expanses)
Esilmúr (Imperial Core); Cirys bubble for energy generation
Eskay (First Expanses)
Estramír (First Expanses)
Estrevess (High Verge)
Ethíölár (First Expanses)
Fentiríäs (Talie Marches)
Fíäcál (Principalities)
Fithral (Principalities)
Galáré (Thirteen Colonies/Galari Trinary); galari homeworld
Gáling (Ring Nebula); ecumenical colony
Galiríäl (Principalities)
Gíänaxíäs (First Expanses)
Golden Groves (Principalities)
Hacíäl (High Verge)
Harmonious Chorus Eternal (High Verge); conlegial colony
Helymene (Principalities)
Iliriléä (First Expanses)
Intainár (Principalities)
Intais (Ley Nebula); ecumenical colony
Ionaï (First Expanses)
Irétectep (Talie Marches)
Irimiril (Principalities)
Isefang (Talie Marches)
Isilmír (Banners)
Isonár (Principalities)
Istelrith (High Verge)
Jandine (Imperial Core); corporate conlegial colony
Janiris (Imperial Core)
Jiradar (Imperial Core)
Jiraltae (First Expanses)
Kaeris (Talie Marches)
Kalacha Eth (Banners)
Kalanár (Banners)
Kalmár (First Expanses)
Kanatar (Imperial Core)
Kordaray (First Expanses)
Kythera (Thirteen Colonies)
Lantoctectep (Talie Marches)
Leiralan (High Verge)
Lestíne (High Verge)
Lincál (High Verge)
Lintis (Banners)
Lírakay (First Expanses)
Listel (Principalities)
Lociltectep (Talie Marches)
Loeth (Banners)
Losen (Imperial Core)
Lostranene (Principalities)
Luciverine (Eponian Cluster); ecumenical colony
Lumenna-Súnáris (Imperial Core); eldrae homeworld
Lunisae (Imperial Core)
Madréä (High Verge)
Mahalloris (Principalities)
Mazir (Imperial Core)
Méklish (High Verge)
Melancthé (First Expanses)
Meliaedár (Principalities)
Menéä (Banners)
Meridia (Imperial Core)
Merísse (Talie Marches)
Merrion (Imperial Core)
Meryn (Imperial Core)
Minisír (First Expanses)
Minnemír (First Expanses)
Mírlan (Imperial Core)
Mishníär (Principalities)
Mmrdene (Principalities); esseli homeworld
Moníär (First Expanses)
Moradímae (High Verge)
Muiríbar (Talie Marches)
Mynár (Imperial Core); myneni homeworld
Natahish (High Verge)
Nepenene (Principalities)
Neríällár (First Expanses)
Níäca (First Expanses)
Nivalta Eth (Banners)
Ocella (Imperial Core)
Ólish (High Verge); ciseflish homeworld
Ondrameir (Banners)
Opteros (Iesa Drifts); ecumenical colony; arterial intersection
Orotai (Talie Marches)
Othalbar (Talie Marches)
Palaxias (Imperial Core); Capital Fleet naval base
Palíbar (High Verge)
Paltraeth (Banners); kaeth homeworld
Pentameir (Talie Marches)
Pentár (High Verge)
Perathilár (High Verge)
Peréä (Thirteen Colonies)
Períäléä (First Expanses)
Períëstal (Talie Marches)
Phílae (Thirteen Colonies)
Pikirímír (First Expanses)
Polassár (First Expanses)
Ponratectep (Talie Marches)
Qaradár (High Verge)
Qechra (Imperial Core); Transcend manufacturing world
Qeraq (Galari Trinary)
Qindár (High Verge)
Qoríär (Principalities)
Ramír (High Verge)
Resplendent Exponential Vector (Imperial Core); private conlegial research colony
Revallá (Imperial Core)
Rhovan (High Verge)
Ríäjdíä (High Verge)
Ríällebar (Talie Marches)
Rílár (Banners)
Rosimír (High Verge)
Runiax (First Expanses)
Sahal (Cinti Xi); ecumenical colony; arterial intersection
Samtabar (Talie Marches)
Saradene (Banners)
Sarpé (Banners)
Sechale (High Verge)
Senadár (Thirteen Colonies)
Senris (Talie Marches)
Seqalla (Principalities)
Seranth (Imperial Core); major tradeworld
Serenníär (Banners)
Sevára (Thirteen Colonies)
Sidar (Principalities)
Síëntra (Banners)
Silariar (Imperial Core)
Siríäleth (Talie Marches)
Solminae (Azure Fade); ecumenical colony; arterial intersection
Ssssuuuuusssicc/Eversky (Principalities); sssc!haaaouú homeworld
Sulíäd (Imperial Core)
Sy (Imperial Core)
Synalish (High Verge)
Synergy (High Verge); conlegial colony
Talaton (Imperial Core)
Tanja (Talie Marches)
Taríäkar (High Verge)
Taris (Thirteen Colonies)
Tarvaray (First Expanses)
Temisdár (Banners)
Tessil (Galari Trinary)
Tevene (Banners)
Thalíär (Principalities); shell world
Tinf (Nesthin Abyss); ecumenical colony
Tireth (Talie Marches)
Tisérai (Talie Marches)
Torachal (Talie Marches)
Toralish (High Verge)
Toríänai (Talie Marches)
Traxíäs (First Expanses)
Uldarimír (First Expanses)
Ulsish (High Verge)
Valiár (Thirteen Colonies)
Vanarál (Talie Marches)
Vervian (Imperial Core)
Vevial (Starry Lane); ecumenical colony
Víëlle (Thirteen Colonies)
Vintranár (Principalities)
Víöresa (High Verge)
Vordon (Lis Corridor); conlegial and ecumenical colony of Ultimate Argument Risk Control, ICC; also known as “Merchome”
Votíra Eth (Banners)
Vyliar (Banners)
Wynérias (Imperial Core); corporate conlegial research colony
Wynfang (Imperial Core)
Xanthé (Banners)
Xirameir (Talie Marches)
Zaltéca (Banners)

Liquids Can’t Melt Down

Posted by Associated Worlds

So I’ve been playing around a bit with nuclear reactor design, as one does. Thinking about the gap in the portfolio between the high-performance and high-unfriendliness molten-salt designs mentioned for use in power armor, and the low-power pebble-bed designs used for distributed medium-power applications, and wondering what exactly the sort of fission reactors the Empire used back in the old pre-fusion days for civil power.

Herein is the not-yet-canonical result, and I invite physicists, nuclear engineers, and so forth, to tell me all the places I’ve gone horribly wrong. Behold the LCGCR: the liquid-core gas-cooled reactor!

Basically, it’s a liquid fuel design (I’m considering here solutions of uranium and/or thorium salts, rather than molten salts; probably in water, unless there’s a more convenient solvent available.) to take advantage of their self-adjusting reactor dynamics. The formulation of the fuel solution is such that it only achieves criticality when inside the calandria containing the deuterium oxide (heavy water – ignore the D₂ on the diagram, that’s a writo) moderator; elsewhere in the fuel loop it doesn’t have that. (The details of the calandria – such as the precise arrangement of moderator around fuel – and the control systems for tuning the reaction are omitted in this diagram.)

20171218_070147975_iOS

The fuel loop itself is how we keep the reactor running continuously and maximize fuel use. The liquid fuel continuously circulates through the reactor and the fuel regenerator (heat exchangers omitted for clarity). The fuel regenerator is where we filter neutron poisons and stable fission products that won’t burn any more out of the fuel, and top it up with fresh salts as required, ensuring that we can use all of the U/Th we put in and all their useful decay products too.

(As a safety feature, we have the core dump valve located right at the bottom of the fuel loop. In the event of something going horribly wrong with the plan, opening this valve empties the whole fuel loop into a safe-storage system split across multiple tanks, set up so that none of them can possibly achieve criticality and all can handle the decay heat of however much of the core they get.)

We get the heat out for use by bubbling an inert gas (helium seems to be a good choice, given its low neutron cross-section and susceptibility to neutron activation, meaning the primary coolant loop is probably clean enough to run the turbines off directly) through the salt solution in the calandria. After running the turbines, we feed it through a gas cooler and a gas cleaner, which latter removes neutron poisons such as xenon, and other gaseous products of the nuclear reaction, before returning to the reactor.

This is of course a very brief sketch of a design which I haven’t spent all that much time thinking about, but it seems to me to be roughly plausible and to have a few interesting advantages. Your thoughts, sirs?

RLwtP: How A Bill Becomes A Law

Posted by Associated Worlds

On this day in which we here in the US observe the attempt to make law a 497-page document issued too late to read before the vote, in the form of a non-searchable PDF with handwritten, barely-legible marginal annotations…

…an observer from a far distant land might turn to another, one who has mocked the baroque formality of the Imperial Senate – and in particular the requirement that all Harmonious Proposals of Unquestionable Justice and Incontrovertible Benignity be submitted in the proper formal register of language, poetic form, and exquisite calligraphy with accompanying testimonials likewise, lest they be discarded by the President of the Senate into the Brazier of Insufficiency to the Mandate (and Other Poor Form) at his left hand – and say unto him:

“This, my dear skeptic, is what it is for.”

(It’s not the only Schelling fence against attempted last-minute Senatorial bullshittery, but it is undoubtedly the most beautiful.)

Some Commentaries on Property Issues

Posted by Associated Worlds

A reader sent in a trio of interesting articles discussing the nature of property and wealth in a stateless society – and while the Empire isn’t one, obviously, being a joint-stock diarchy, it draws from a lot of the same memeplexes. And so it seems that a discussion of these ideas in its context might be an interesting thing to have.

The articles are these, for context:

So, let’s discuss.

On property rights and self-ownership (with a brief digression into sanctity of contracts):

The first opens with the claim that you can’t derive property ownership from self-ownership, because to do so would be to alienate one’s self-ownership: “But if “Trespassers Will Be Shot On Sight” is a valid assertion of property rights by the owner, then it is clear that self-ownership has become alienable and inferior to property rights. Yes, of course, I might shoot someone because they are a credible threat to my life, but this is true whether they’ve threatened me in the home I own, the apartment I rent, the hotel where I’m staying, or the restaurant where I’m eating: it has nothing to do with my being the owner of the property.”

Of course, the immediate response of an Imperial to this is that property ownership isn’t derived from self-ownership, it’s merely indistinguishable from self-ownership, because property is self. el daráv valté eloé có-sa dal, a sophont is equivalent to all that he possesses. All that is mine is me – my memories, my ideas, my name and frame, my reputation, my body, my terminal, my flitter, my home, my private luxury moonlet, my corporation, my forty acres of swampland in the Nine Dominions, wherever my worthsense extends – and all that is me is mine. That’s what coválír means.

Which, incidentally, is why an actual Imperial (one not experienced with dealing with barbarian outworlders) would be quite puzzled at the above notion that you are somehow less entitled to defend your property than your person against violation. In either case, you are defending your self.

In trying to explain this to said barbarian outworlders, they might also go so far as to point out that no kind of property simply comes into existence ex nihilo. It must either be created (“that which you create is yours“), which includes land that is homesteaded or otherwise put to use, or traded for against, ultimately, something that a soph did create. Appropriation of property, therefore, is appropriation of effort, of time, of chunks out of the owner’s life, and therefore is tantamount to slavery, and counterarguments can thus be submitted to Messrs. Stabby and Shooty, Esq.

But to come right to the greater point of self-ownership and its alienation, both in this context and the one brought up later in this piece arguing that the sanctity of contracts alienates self-ownership, they’d point out that no, neither property rights nor the obligation of contracts alienates self-ownership, they’re recognition and acts of self-ownership.

Ownership, in its simplest form – i.e., the one in which one holds all of the bundle of property rights we talk about below – is control. It is that my will commands here; and contrariwise, none may act upon what is mine/me without my consent. That includes the ability to transfer rights in it or bind its future actions – if it did not, it wouldn’t be ownership at all.

The unalienable part is that only your consent can enable actions on you/yours, and you can’t alienate that. You can bind your future self or alienate parts of you/yours just fine if you consent so to do, and it’s your (self-)ownership that lets you do that, but there’s no way for you or anybody else to bind you or alienate parts of you without your consenting to it.

On proprietary communities:

Proprietary communities are another extraordinary application of extreme propertarianism. Defenders of these sometimes assert that ANY rules can be set and enforced, so long as the property was legitimately homesteaded or transferred. Again, anybody who believes that self-ownership is unalienable needs to explain why they are so casual in permitting its alienation. I can say for certain they’ve never had to deal with the management of a co-op or condo association.

In its unlimited form, that’s traditionally called “sovereignty”. Although in the civilized parts of the galaxy – by which we of course mean Societies of Consent – they’d point out that you explicitly consent to those particular contractual rules up front when you enter the property, just like you explicitly consented to the law of the polity when you entered that. That’s not alienation: that’s binding yourself, which is a function of self-ownership.

(In less civilized parts of the galaxy they may enforce them without your explicit consent – which is, per above, alienatory – or bothering to tell you what they are, but hey, I’m talking about civilization here.)

The Empire is polite enough to acquire sovereign rights over the volume it holds from their original owners, and thus is entitled to require consent to polity law. As for private law, the applicable private legislative privileges are referred to as “conlegial rights” which let you charter your own property-specific laws so long as they don’t contradict Imperial law, the Charter, or the Contract, and includes certain other provisions for permissible enforcement, documentation and notification – made much easier by the tradition of announcing yourself when you cross a property line, and “without the word of acceptance, you are nothing” – and required disinvitation (which formally defines someone as a trespasser and notifies them of that) as a first resort.

As a side note to that, I’d add that it’s particularly essential in some areas: it’s bloody hard to run an odocorp without conlegial rights, because at the very least you need to be able to set rules about which side of the skyway to drive on. Or, y’know, you have something of a dying-in-fiery-twisted-hunks-of-molten-metal-falling-right-out-of-the-sky problem to deal with.

I have nothing in particular to say about easements (which, yes, exist) – especially since that particular example leads directly to the Most Annoying Straw Man On The Internet – on volumetric rather than areal property, or on the lengthy series of rulings and fine legal nuances when it comes to dealing with light and air and water and other such motile things. Solutions have been found aplenty.

(Except to point out that contra our system, this hotel:

CxRr9xTWEAA-mQj

…which is, I am given to understand, not best pleased to have some jackass turn it into a billboard, absolutely can exclude that light from going on to its property. The difference? Intentionality.

If within-the-threshold-of-normality light wandering around doing its own thing crosses a property line, that’s not a cause of action ’cause there’s no ethical actor. If you choose to light up someone else’s property, or casually emit very abnormal amounts of light… that most certainly can be.)

Not a whole lot to say on the concept of property as a bundle of distinct rights, which is obviously true – the more so because Imperial law is much more comfortable applying that principle to personalty as well as realty than ours is. But –

Okay, before I move on, here’s a quick digression on how land ownership works *there*. If you don’t know how it works here, you may want to consult these Wikipedia articles for a quick refresher.

Back?

Okay. Now, in the ‘verse – and from the Imperial legal point of view – the fundamental holding of property is in allodium. Somewhat different from the modern use of it here, an allodial title there is one which encompasses all the possible rights one might have over one’s property, including what are traditionally called the sovereign rights: legislation and enforcement. It is completely independent of any superior landlord or polity, and upon the owner’s demise without being transferred to an heir or agent it reverts to terra nullius, and is thus available for homesteading.

This is the province, primarily, of polities and self-sovereign individuals.

Most land in the Empire is held sub Mandamus, “under the Mandate”. What that means is that the Empire has acquired certain of the property rights of that land: legislation, qualified enforcement, qualified eminent domain, and qualified exclusion, all as laid down in the Imperial Charter, while leaving the remainder to the purchaser. It also reverts via escheat, instead of abandonment, to keep the title clear.

(This is distinct from fee simple, as it is here, because in that the Crown or People are considered the “owner” of the land and you merely own an estate in it; whereas in sub Mandamus you own the land in truth, with certain powers merely reserved to the Throne. This distinction makes very little practical difference, but people insist that it is nonetheless of great importance and significance. So it goes.

It’s not that there isn’t land held in fee simple in the Empire, either. Leaving aside the demesnes of runér, the freewheeling contract environment there means that anyone who has the necessary rights in land can subinfeudinate it just as easily as they can lease it, rent it, sell it, or whatever. But it’s not the norm.

Likewise, there are plenty of variants – sub Mandamus conditional, sub Mandamus tail, etc., analogous to their counterparts.)

But, anyway, no-one there is going to be surprised by the notion that an allodial title – to realty or personalty – can be split fractally and more or less arbitrarily into bundles of more specific rights, because it happens all the time. If you bought some realty there recently, you possess the majority of the rights, but the Empire possesses the sub Mandamus rights and your bank has (the rights implicit in) a mortgage lien until you finish paying them, and that’s assuming that there are no easements, entailments, covenants, or anything else.

And, hell, technically you split the allodial title to your lawnmower or other chattel, say, any time you lend it to someone by slicing off a right to use and assigning it to them on a temporary basis, which is what stops them using it being misdemeanor meddlement. This is How Shit Works 101, *there*.

The reason, however, that homesteading doesn’t work the way it’s suggested it might in the article, “to the extent we are using it and in the manner we are using it” – although numerous explicitly-different varieties do exist for various purposes (homesteads, mining claims, travel routes, etc.) – is an outgrowth of the notion that people can’t be expected to obey the law if they don’t understand it, and it leaves all manner of things up to cloudy implicit expectations; also, not starting with exclusivity and exclusion opens up all sorts of horrible questions about liability the day someone decides to homestead himself a hiking trail across your obviously-not-used-in-that-way emergency landing site and gets smacked upside the head by 300,000 tons of plutonium freighter flying with his comms out.

On “possession is nine points of the law”, and adverse possession:

“No, it bloody isn’t.”

Title is the whole of the law, and possession means precisely bugger-all where ownership of anything is concerned, or even the right to use it (see meddlement in the law books, for example). Adverse possession is a fancy term for legalized theft, and abandonment doctrine (for reasons other than, y’know, explicit disclaim of rights and/or ceasing to exist) isn’t much better.

So it’s not that the anarcho-communists are spewing pure drivel, from the Imperial point of view. Merely pure evil.

(See also property-self equivalence, and exactly what adverse possession looks like when applied to sophonts. Creepy.)

A minor sidenote here, but one which also applies to the second essay and the ancom social decision process over how an object should be used:

I especially like the idea of goodwill as the ultimate currency, as William Gillis wrote recently on his site, Human Iterations. In an anarchist society, the rich never forget that they cease to be rich if the rest of society chooses not to recognize their property claims: the moment you claim the right to more than what you can personally control, you are relying on other people to honor your claim. So be nice to people.

This is one of the primary reason why I tend to think of the ancom-autonomist habitats described in Eclipse Phase as complete hellholes for the non-EXFX set. If you’re dependent upon goodwill, that works great for the charismatic extroverts. As a non-charismatic mostly-asocial introvert, I’d be absolutely fucked.

(Sometime I should write about the various methods of structuring various ‘verse rep-nets use to ensure that they don’t devolve into proxies for generalized goodwill. Once I figure out what they are.)

The great virtue of money is that money doesn’t stink.

The great vice of social allocation processes (whose whole point is that they do, metaphorically, stink) is… well, basically, imagine every purchase you make, from homes to groceries, being mediated and possibly vetoed by your least favorite enraged Twitter-mob. What you get to eat for dinner is whatever survives a committee made up of Gamergate, SJWs, dogmatic Rothbardians, and neo-monarchists, moderated by neo-Nazis and antifa, and conducted on 4chan.

(From the second, by the way, I did like

But this is incomprehensible for Libertarians because they see respect for property titles as entirely stemming from a respect for personal agency. In practical, everyday terms respect for another person’s agency often comes down to a respect for the inviolability of their body. Do not shoot them, do not rape them, do not torture them. Because humans are tool using creatures like hermit crabs there is often no clear line between our biomass and our possessions (we use clothes instead of fur, retain dead mass excreted as hair follicles, etc.), and so a respect for another’s person seems to extend in some ways to a respect for things that they use. Begin to talk of Rights and these associations must be drawn more absolutely. And sure enough we already have a common sense proscription often enforced in absolutist terms that matches this intuition; do not steal.

Which is both accurate, I believe, and sort of the weaksauce version of coválír. As for the follow-up concerning metrics and singlemindedness – well, there’s a reason why the conflation of value and exchange-value is the greatest heresy of their economics.)

On contracts:

Quoting:

Moreover, the limits on property rights have already been acknowledged in common law, and ancaps need to abandon the cartoon version of contract law, and learn about duress, undue influence, and adhesions: established common law concepts that go beyond the “well, he agreed to it” view of contractual obligations. We’ve modified contract law enough in the US to recognize that employees have the right to quit their job even if they signed a multi-year contract (except for those who join the government military), and debtors can have their obligations cancelled in bankruptcy and never end up in prison if they don’t pay (except for those who owe the government taxes). In short, the sanctity of contract is already recognized as an intolerable concept under law, because it violates self-ownership. Self-ownership is inalienable. Period.

Well, we’ve talked before about duress, undue influence, etc., so I won’t repeat myself here. Likewise, I talked up above about how the right to bind yourself isn’t a violation of self-ownership, but an exercise of it, and I won’t repeat that, either.

But the obvious point to make here is that if the sanctity of, or the obligation of, contracts violates self-ownership, it doesn’t do so under only those particular circumstances you might find unjust or convenient. It does it all the time, for all contracts and agreements.

There are places in the Rim Free Zone that try to live by this interpretation. You can recognize them by the loincloths and pointy sticks, because it turns out that if anyone can walk away from their promises any time it pleases them to do so, you can’t build a functioning society at all. They’ve broken the entire basis of functioning interdependency, and the entirely predictable just happened to them.

With regard to the second’s fear-based theory:

For that is how I would characterize –

However, if property is a second-order good derived from market institutions based in reputation/goodwill/credit, then if one class systematically fucked over their credit with all of another class the underclass would no longer have any incentive to respect their title claims because no individual within it would fear even marginal sanction or loss of goodwill for occupying and appropriating their wealth.

and the later comments on the high cost of security against theft, along with some similar suggestions in #3.

I’d merely point out that we’ve run a few experiments on “you (A) get to keep your stuff and/or living only so long as you keep us (B) happy” systems. They don’t tend to end well. “Bread and circuses” is the good outcome. The bad outcome is what happens when (A) figures that they don’t really need the lumpen (B) for anything, and that they won’t be threatening anyone when they’re dead. And someone’s bound to have read Danegeld.

It is not, as a rule, a good idea in constructing a stable society to give any one class incentive to exterminate another.

On to the third. On “corporate personhood”, or more accurately, what they would call coadunate rights:

There, these derive extremely simply from the subsidiarity principle. The most common formulation of this is the maxim “The power which is derived cannot be greater than that from which it is derived,” typically used to rebuke enthusiasts for our style of governance by pointing out that sophs can’t empower a coadunation to do anything they can’t do in and of themselves, but the reverse interpretation is equally true and binding.

Namely, that since all coadunations – be they branches, circles, corporations, Houses, etc. whatever – are merely groups of sophonts from whom they derive their powers, they share in their rights, and they cannot be deprived of those rights since to do so is implicitly to alienate those rights from the sophonts making them up and to whom the rights actually belong. Coadunate rights are just a convenient legal fiction to simplify the paperwork.

(Likewise, the virtual rights which apply to proxies, partials, agents, and smart-contracts, which are no more than a legal fiction wrapped around the derivation of their principal’s rights.)

The local viewpoint is very much that people coming up with additional rights, or restrictions on rights, for sophs-in-groups are trying to write themselves ethical indulgences for one kind of dodgy shit or another.

(This is the underlying reason why, for example, you can hand an Imperial an elegant essay on democratic theory and they’ll look at it as a 300 page rationalization on the theme of the strong, in the form of sufficiently large groups, being able to do as they will and the weak being obliged to suffer what they must.)

On limited liability:

While the author of #3 seems to characterize limited liability as nothing but a subsidy to investors, I’d just make a quick couple of points. One of which is that it’s necessary for any business large enough to need investors who aren’t all close personal friends and/or in control of it. If they operated under standard “joint and several” liability, you’d be in a world where a process server’s going to go calling on your grandmother in Pennsylvania to explain that not only is her pension fund bankrupt, she’s also personally liable for $1.73 million of corporate debt, and if it’s not paid in a month, they’ll be taking her house. Have a nice day.

This is, I ween, problematic.

You can get around this problem by simply not having any businesses that large, at which point you realize that there are some desirable things that plain can’t be delivered without concentration of capital, and you don’t get to have them. Which is fine, if you swing Luddite, but I suspect the majority doesn’t.

They certainly don’t in the Empire, which is why the privilege of limited liability exists there – on the same voluntarist basis as favorable bankruptcy and their UBI, which is to say, it optimizes certain highly desirable outcomes, and the modal citizen-shareholder isn’t a damn fool.

Limited liability and corporate personhood make possible a way of doing business in a far riskier way than normal people would.

Given that normal people demonstrate cognitive bias towards excessive and self-disadvantaging risk aversion, this would be a good thing.

In a final, general comment on #3, I’d point out that the Empire and the other Core Markets do have a much stronger presence of small entrepreneurs than ours for some of the reasons there identified: there is more risk (but also more opportunity) due to the lack of much regulation, and the complete absence of subsidy and government monopolies and regulatory capture, not to mention mucking around with monetary policy: it’s a much more freewheeling and chaotic business environment.

(On the other hand, our way of grooming and regulating things makes individual excursions much worse: we have markets dominated by few large monolithic corporations and “too big to fail” banking institutions, so everything goes up and down together from bubble to depression and back. In a world where there are lots more smaller businesses and even the starcorporations are a cloud of loosely-coupled units, there are local failures and recoveries all the time, but the market as a whole cruises on just fine.

As a final note:

An attack on one is an attack on all;
an attack on all is an attack on each.
To defend another is to defend yourself;
when all are defended, justice is done.

Trope: Names to Run Away From Really Fast

Posted by Associated Worlds

(Okay, so I found one more…)

Names to Run Away From Really Fast: In the Imperial context alone, Imperial Hand, Fifth Directorate, and any Imperial military officer, agent, or private contractor whose House name is “Sargas” are the chief contenders. In the Worlds as a whole, Operatives of the Conclave are also not to be trifled with.

The Photonic Network‘s OPSEC, the Voniensa Republic‘s Exception Management Group, and the Eilish High Guard are also notable in this field, and while most people wouldn’t rate them against first-rank regulars, Kestal’s Raiders have achieved a certain bloody success in the unbonded mercenary business, operating out of the Rim Free Zone.

At least some of these can also be Names to Trust Immediately. All depends on who you are, and who they are.

Also, as was mentioned under Overly Long Name, one of the traditional components of eldraeic names is the attributive name, based on your personal attributes and/or accomplishments, which grow increasingly significant as your reputation grows, up until you reach the people with really towering reputations who can introduce themselves only by attributive name, Exalted-style, such as Exquisite Engineer of Worlds, or Manyfold Propagator of Celestial Wealth. Of course, those aren’t terribly intimidating in this trope’s sense, but should you encounter, say, Bloody-Handed Avenger of Iniquities… start running.

(Curiously enough, despite their taste for lush verbosity, this effect only increases as the attributive name dwindles towards Gallifreyan sparseness. Anyone who could pull off simply introducing himself as “the Warrior”, for example, would surely be someone able to win a major fleet action armed only with a cheese knife.)

The Associated Worlds

…building civilizations with my space elves in space.

Worldbuilding

Eldraeic Phrase of the Day: Tramézashíël Eslévár

April Questions

Eldraeic Word of the Day: Serev

Yes, It Does

Question Update

The Guardians of Our Harmony

Worldbuilding: Space Opera Clichés

RLwtP: How A Bill Becomes A Law II

Sportsball

Freight Containers

The Sapphire Coloratura: Revealed!

The World is a Mess, and I Just Need To Rule It

Worldbuilding: Conflict & Mistake

On Lasers

Size, and a Patron Offer

Liquids Can’t Melt Down

RLwtP: How A Bill Becomes A Law

Some Commentaries on Property Issues

Trope: Names to Run Away From Really Fast