(Not) Eldraeic Word of the Day: Oolkor Voäin

oolkor voäin: A gutterspeak corruption of the Low Eldraeic, and Trade, phrase ulquor vohaïnár, literally “no brawl (is present herenow)”. (From ulquor, zero degree quantifier + vo, second size prefix + haïn, battle + ár, predication affix, in this case creating an observative.)

Unlike the original phrase, which is not used in this sense by civilized speakers, the gutter form is often heard grunted as a greeting and farewell by the less reputable sort of mercenary, pirates, slavers, street gangs, and other assorted lowlives and scum of the galaxy, indicating a lack of desire to fight at the present time and place and a hope for its reciprocation.

It reflects a surprisingly sophisticated sense of irony that the traditional response, “ankan voäin”, is a likewise corrupt form of anqan vohaïnár, meaning “just a little brawl”.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary

Tempus Fugit

So, here we are at the end of September, and I’ve written all of one thing in the past month. Depression, unseemly heat, and a server deciding to take up an exciting new career as a brick have combined to do a real number on my creativity.

Thank you all for bearing with me through these times of crisis and literary drought. Hopefully October will suck slightly less. Or maybe COVID will come back strong and kill us all. Either way.

In the meantime, here’s one of those little fine distinctions that creeps its way into spacer slang:

topside: In a starship context, on the hull. (An EVA topside is thus distinguished from an EVA outside, which implies leaving the immediate vicinity of the ship.)

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary

I Can See Your House From Here

Anywhere Killer (n.): hypothetical weapons system using an arbitrarily-targetable wormhole generator to deliver ordnance – or convenient non-ordnance, such as stellar cores – to any target location in the galaxy whose coordinates are known or can be inferred, bypassing all defense systems in the intervening space-time.

Naturally, as a strategic first-strike weapon nonpareil, the development, deployment, and/or use of this technology has been banned by every respectable galactic polity.

Naturally, every respectable galactic polity has a research team or twelve squirreled away in secret working on it.

May their theoretical and practical difficulties long continue.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary


(Yes, this is the local version of Schlock Mercenary’s “Long Gun” – since people kept asking me about such a thing in the ‘verse.

And to clarify further: those research teams may not know it yet, but those theoretical difficulties are actually, genuinely insurmountable. The only way to inflate a distant wormhole end at a targeted location is the ER=EPR method used by stargates, and so Anywhere Killers are impossible.)

Social Diseases

cognitive osmosis: The process, according to rumor, by which farspeech or other telepathic or techlepathic contact, especially the forms based in the exchange of neural gestalts, with the stupid causes one, oneself, to become less intelligent.

(Curiously, none of these stories ever suggests that this process makes the stupid themselves more intelligent.)

While having no basis whatsoever in sophontology, noetics, cerebroergetics, neuroscience, or indeed anything else but the unpleasant psychic odor of ill-formed thoughtforms, it remains an occasional phobia, a common urban legend, and a popular insult among everyone who has ever felt the urge to demand to know why they are surrounded by these incompetent fools.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary

Ping

spotter (n.): An ancient spacer’s tool, dating back almost as far as the navigator’s sextant, the engineer’s multi, or the medtech’s hand effector, used for locating and profiling distant objects in space: a boon to anyone who has to manage a docking bay, shift cargo in microgravity, perform extravehicular activities in crowded neighborhoods, or engage in the smallest of small-craft operations, which is to say, riding a candle.

The original spotters were no more than handheld radar transceivers with direct audio feedback into the user’s helmet interface. Wave it around, and when you hear beeping, it’s pointing at something. The faster the beeping, the closer that something is to you. Learning what a particular rate meant in terms of range, and keeping an ear on the change of beep rate, were left as skills for the user to develop.

The modern spotter is a rather more sophisticated device, thanks to miniaturization and commercial development. HUD feedback now monitors its position relative to your body to provide a more accurate sense of direction, and even the most basic models provide precise range and closing rate information. More advanced models use a phased-array antenna to sweep the beam across a target once detected, providing a profile for target recognition purposes and an estimate of spin.

Of course, there is in theory very little use for a spotter in the current age of space, since all spacecraft from the largest to the smallest include a transponder, and are further constructed from LOP-compliant hardware which will obligingly disclose its location upon receiving a network request. The Grand Survey has detailed charts of every object in space larger than a child’s ball. All objects within range should therefore, says theory, already be highlighted on your HUD.

It is a sign of the tremendous respect that spacer culture has for theory that there are at least a brace of spotters stored in every airlock and docking bay from the Core to the Rim.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary