What’s That Soph?

So, I hear you like demographics. Or, at least, the comments on the last post tell me you like demographics.

Describing the constituent species of the Empire can be a mite tricky, depending on exactly how you define things – leaving aside any nasty outworlder prejudices about the status of neogens or uplifts, some species – relevantly, the mezuar and chiril-{n,m}, don’t have identities which lend themselves to headcount, and thus various approximations must be used.

And complicating things further, of course, is that the Empire’s immigration procedures don’t give a lump of species-appropriate excretions what species you happen to be, which leads to, oh, just over 8% of the population being “other”.

But given that, here’s the rough breakdown in a nice, user-friendly pie chart:

And here is the same data in a table, giving you what those percentages translate to in terms of approximate population numbers out of the Empire’s roughly 2.57 trillion sophonts:

eldrae		12.54%	322,278,000,000
arthál	neogen	0.31%	7,967,000,000
chfsssc		2.48%	63,736,000,000
chiril-{n,m}	unconventional identity	0.36%	9,252,000,000
ciseflish		9.14%	234,898,000,000
dar-bandal	uplift	7.65%	196,605,000,000
dar-célmek	uplift	1.10%	28,270,000,000
dar-cúlnó	uplift	2.26%	58,082,000,000
dar-e’sevdra	uplift	1.83%	47,031,000,000
dar-ííche	uplift	3.36%	86,352,000,000
dar-vorac	uplift	2.15%	55,255,000,000
digisapience		14.56%	374,192,000,000
esseli		3.31%	85,067,000,000
galari		7.28%	187,096,000,000
kaeth		6.74%	173,218,000,000
mezuar	unconventional identity	1.39%	35,723,000,000
myneni		4.91%	126,187,000,000
selyéva		2.78%	71,446,000,000
sssc!haaaouú		3.92%	100,744,000,000
temísi	neogen	0.49%	12,593,000,000
verviani		2.69%	69,133,000,000
zal!en	neogen	0.43%	11,051,000,000
other		8.32%	213,824,000,000

You may note that even the arthál, with the smallest demographic footprint due to their relatively recent creation and source population of fandom enthusiastic enough to change species, still manage to outpopulate Earth.

And that with 173 billion kaeth around… well, let’s just say the Legions don’t have any trouble recruiting.

Nope, It’s A Bridge

Posted by Associated Worlds

Many of you, gentle readers, are also devotees of the Atomic Rockets web site. (As well you should be, if you are interested in matters rockety.) And, of course, you may have noted the Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval off in the right-hand column.

But today I’m going to talk about a place where I find myself, and the ‘verse, disagreeing with it. Specifically, with “It is a CIC Not a Bridge“. For convenience, I’m going to quote from it here:

That round room in the Starship Enterprise? The one they call the “Bridge?” Wrong term, that thing is a Combat Information Center (CIC). On a real wet-navy vessel, the bridge is a tiny two-station place used to control the the movement of the ship. It only had stations for the navigation and helm.
In other words, the “bridge” on the Starship Enterprise is that little console that Sulu and Chekov sit at.
The CIC is where all the data from the sensors, scoutships, intelligence agencies, central command, and other ships is gathered and evaluated. The important information is passed to the captain along with tactical suggestions. Exactly the way Uhura, Scotty, and Mr. Spock pass information and tactical suggestions to Captain Kirk.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php#id–It_is_a_CIC_not_a_Bridge

So, here’s the thing. It’s actually slightly more complicated than that. There are three places on a wet navy vessel all of which do things that people think of as functions of “the bridge”.

There is the CIC, as described above. It’s the information-gathering and decision-making center.

Then there is the wheelhouse, which is where the ship’s movement is controlled from. This, on ships that had a bridge, was usually buried down inside the hull or beneath the superstructure – for one simple reason. You don’t want it shot off. If you lose the wheelhouse, you can’t command the ship any more, so you don’t want it somewhere vulnerable.

And then there is the bridge, which is the place you conn the ship from. It’s up high at the front of the superstructure with generous wings, etc., because its requirement is that you be able to see what the ship’s doing in order to command it.

(On a merchant ship, you probably don’t need a protected CIC, and since you don’t expect anyone to shoot your bridge off, you may have the engine-room telegraphs and wheel up there in one place. On navy vessels, on the other hand, instead of passing engine orders and steering directly, you have a bridge talker yelling “Port 40! Half ahead both!” down voice tubes to the wheelhouse.

On the other hand, the bridge is also exposed to heavy weather, so merchies that expect to encounter the rough stuff may still have a separate wheelhouse. This was actually where they first came from.)

In a historical digression, incidentally, the original bridge is an evolution of what was originally the quarter deck, the raised deck at the stern, on sailing ships. When it became more important to avoid your own smoke than see what your sails were doing, which is to say, as we moved from sail to steam, the raised area moved for’ard and became the bridge as we know it today.

As for the wheelhouse, that came from sailing ship designs in which the poop deck (the highest deck at the stern, typically forming the roof of the stern cabin) was extended forward to cover the quarter deck and the ship’s wheel, on the entirely reasonable grounds that in a storm, it’s easier to steer without being out in the full blast of wind and wave, and in battle, it’s much easier to steer if you have some protection from being shot.

So let’s bring this back around to starships.

You don’t need a bridge in the above sense. As it says further up that page, Rockets Don’t Got Windows – given space ranges and instrumentation, you are never going to be trying to conn the ship with your Mark I Eyeball, which is essentially what a bridge up high is for. Your best view is going to come from sensors, but they can be read just as easily from the CIC, buried deep in the center of the hull for maximum protection.

(Why did the Enterprise designers perch the bridge right up at the top of the saucer, with about three feet between the back of the fancy digital sensor-feed-showing viewscreen and hard vacuum, right where any Tom, Dick, or Kang could shoot at it conveniently? Were they all Romulan spies?)

Do you need a separate wheelhouse? Well, given that starships are certainly going to have fancy electronic controls rather than the hydraulic/pneumatic/etc., systems that imposed constraints on the position of wet navy wheelhouses vis-a-vis the CIC – usually buried down in the bottom of the ship where the armor is thick – I’m going to say probably not. The CIC’s already in the safest place, per above.

(You may have a maneuvering room, as they call the place on submarines, where the engineers translate your requests into detailed instructions to the engines, and given that a starship ACS is probably also rocket engines of some sort, that may also be handled from there – but that’s a different function.)

You are going to have a CIC, because you still need somewhere to coordinate information, make decisions. In my opinion, it will probably also be the wheelhouse (after all, as in the Enterprise example above, it’s just one console, and since the maneuvering orders are going to come from the officer on watch in the CIC anyway, why make him shout any further than he has to?).

The only question is whether it will be called the CIC. The above (combined CIC/wheelhouse) is essentially the arrangement they use on submarines today (where it is called the control room; the bridge is the place you can stand at the top of the conning tower when the boat’s on the surface).

That may be likely nomenclature for starships, too. (Nothing especially that civilian starships are unlikely to have a Combat Information Center.)

On the other hand, the Imperial Navy, and their merchant tradition, call it the bridge. Why? Well, unlike our submarines, there isn’t another bridge somewhere to clash with it – and you get your best view of what’s around from it – and in the meantime, it’s a name that’s got centuries, indeed millennia, of tradition behind it as The Place From Which Ships Are Commanded. It’s a word, in a nutshell, that’s got weight.

And since you’re combining all the functions back together, as they were in the beginning, that counts plenty.

The quarter deck, on the other hand, that’s somewhere else.

They Fear Neither Death Nor Pain

Posted by Associated Worlds

It has been asked in various places what scares Imperial sophonts the most. Herewith is the answer:

As a side-note, you will observed that the answers here are mostly existential, not physical. Physical fear never had much hold on the eldraeic psyche in the first place (none at all, for those with access to battletrance or other high-order counterphobotics), so it doesn’t rank high enough to make it onto the list.

In roughly ascending order, then:

Ignorance
Loss of control (minor)
Permadeath
Wilful ignorance (i.e., becoming the sort of person who would indulge that)
Loss of control (major); submission
An end to ambition
Loss or corruption of identity, or of will

Of course, in a very real sense, and speaking for the culture as a whole, the correct answer is not a damn thing. It’s year N of a long, long Golden Age for the Empire, great and glorious beyond all greatness and glory, the future is brighter still, and nothing seems beyond their grasp.

(This is not a culture, shall we say, lacking in self-confidence.)

Heavy Cavalry Redux

Posted by Associated Worlds

“Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!”
no-one with a tank, ever

This is a recreation/reformulation/retcon of the original description of the Empire’s heavy cavalry legions, in light of both criticism received – and assistance to resolve it – and rethinking of my own. It should be considered as a replacement for the original post here, et. seq.

Let us proceed.

Making up the remaining one of every sixteen legions (i.e., one per three light cavalry or heavy infantry, and one per nine light infantry), we have the heavy cavalry. Direct-fire death on very large treads, which is to say, main battle tanks. The biggest of all the big sticks. Putting the “brute” into “brute force”.

For additional flexibility, the majority of Imperial MBTs are built off a common base platform, with a selection of swappable modules to provide specific functionality for specific cases. (Unlike many modular vehicle systems in this ‘verse, however, these aren’t hot-swappable; the need to remove and replace and integrate large and complex chunks of armor plate, etc., when doing it means that this requires some pretty major machine-shop type facilities. It’s not something you can do in the field, and indeed something only seen at the most well-developed remote operating bases.) Due to these functionality differences, MBTs are usually classified by the module.

So first we’ll talk about the capabilities of the base platform, and then we’ll talk about some of the more commonly seen modules:

Base Platform

The base platform of the Imperial MBT is a low-slung vehicle with all-around glacis design, designed to minimize its target profile and give it a low center of gravity. In dimensions, it is approximately 12 m (39 ft) long, 4 m (13 ft) wide, and 3 m (10 ft) high; its total mass (varying, of course, by module), however, is of the order of 60 short tons, due to the extensive use of lightweight composites.

8 m of the length and 3.5 m of the width at the front is the module socket; height of modules varies, but none take it much above the basic 3 m height. At the rear of the platform, an externally-opening compartment can be used to hold resupply, infantry needing transport, or a “hot soup” fuel pod to increase vehicle endurance.

Armament

The armament of the base platform (effectively the secondary weapons systems common to all tank classes) is fitted in four altazimuth ball mounts, located on either side of the vehicle, towards the front and rear.

These mounts’ field of fire extends 180 degrees vertically, and approximately 160 degrees horizontally at zero vertical, i.e., limited only by the occlusion of that side’s other mount. In effect, they maintain full coverage to the side, front, and rear of the tank, with only a small gap in coverage to the front for the rear mounts, and to the rear for the front mounts.

The front mounts include coaxial ortillery target designators and heavy (72 mm) mass drivers/micromissile launchers; the rear mounts only include medium (36 mm) mass drivers.

(While the latter do spend much of their time firing forward and to the flank, their special purpose in being mounted where they are is to give you something to pop the drone lining up to shoot you in the ass with so you don’t have to stop engaging your main target while you do it. In their battlefield environment, micro-AKVs are cheap and plentiful, so this happens a lot. If you had to slew the main gun around every time, you’d be taking your eye off the ball way too much – even if you could get it to reliably track something that small and fast-moving.)

Worldbuilding: Sail Plans

Posted by Associated Worlds

Taking a brief moment to hand out a random factlet, let us turn from space navy to wet navy. Old school wet navy.

Did you know that the most widely used rig back in the days of sail, especially by the Alatian fleet, the largest both mercantile and military and which went on to form the core of the Imperial fleet, was a variation on what on Earth is called the junk rig?

(Well, no, you didn’t, because I’ve only just told you. It was a rhetorical question.)

Using bamboo battens and silk sailcloth, even, for a very Eastern flavor for the Earth reader.

The chief experimenters with alternate rigs and modifications to the standard junk rig were the actual Alatian Navy, principally because the major flaw in the junk rig is its difficulty in sailing close-hauled (i.e., close to into the wind), but in contrast, it’s exceedingly efficient at sailing with the wind, and requires – always a consideration – a rather smaller crew to manage it than a typical western rig.

With careful attention to hull design, too, the eventual junk-rigged clippers and windjammers of the Alatian merchant fleet ruled the ocean trade up to, and even into, the steam era: as their sailors would cheerfully point out, the trade winds were very reliable, and given that, that a good rig could deliver as much or more power than steam could, and also that it didn’t require all that fuel taking up space that could contain earning cargo kept the sailships in business, and in many cases those which carried steam engines used them as an auxiliary power source only, for when the wind failed.

(Why this digression into nautical history? I have no idea. But I found it an interesting piece of the universe, and so I wrote it down.)

On AKVs and Survivability

Posted by Associated Worlds

From the questions box:

Dear Gentlesoph,
Having been reading your posts, I have a question about AKVs such as the ‘Daggerfan’ and ‘Slasher’ classes. With high-powered lasers capable of doing damage at one light second, how do AKVs survive the 300,000km journey into single kilometer range? As stated in your ‘Nonstandard Starship Scuffles’ post, military vessels use armor woven through with thermal superconductors dumping heat into ‘thermal goo’. I assume this armor/thermal management system applies to AKVs as well, although you also state that point-defense lasers will shred a vessel unfortunate enough to get into very close range. How can an AKV survive at single kilometer ranges long enough to inflict damage on the target? Thank you for your time, I look forward to more posts!

Well, there are two parts to this: how do AKVs close to skin-dancing range, and how do they survive when they get there? I’ll take ’em one at a time.

On the first point: with great difficulty.

If you take a wing of AKVs and throw them at a fresh battleship, all you’re doing is providing its point-defense computers with skeet; they’ll be chaff and charnel before they get anywhere near the inside of the BB’s point-defense zone.

What you have to do is wear it down first. That’s is the job of the non-carriers on your side of the fight: throw a lot of kinetics at the enemy to make their PD work hard. That does three jobs: one, it keeps the PD grid busy in itself; two, any of it that gets through may just take out a chunk of the PD grid; but most importantly, three, by making them run their point-defenses, you’re building up heat in their ship. Your non-carriers also have the job of pumping heat into their ship directly with the big lasers.

That heat, in turn, is going to eat away at their PD efficiency in a variety of ways. Most simply, it’s going to have to cut back on its firing rate once the heat sinks start filling, because otherwise the crew will cook, but also the hardware becomes less efficient, processor error rates go up, and similar badness ensues.

That’s when you send in the AKVs, and you send in a lot of AKVs mingled with a lot of chaff and decoys, swamping the capabilities of the now-degraded PD grid. They won’t all get through – you plan for a lot of them not to – but once the grid’s sufficiently degraded, enough will to ruin the BB’s day.

As for when they’re there? Remember, they’re described as operating within the point-defense envelope, which is to say, inside its inner boundary, which is defined by the minimum effective range of the PD – set by a variety of factors, such as the range at which firing the PD will seriously damage your own ship, but of which probably the most important is the ability of the PD to track the target and slew to fire on it. At the sort of hug-the-hull sub-km range AKVs like to operate at, it doesn’t take much velocity to generate a huge traversal angle, and what you can’t track, you can’t reliably hit.

(And it’s hard for your screen to fire effectively at the AKVs ruining your day, ’cause even discounting the effects of the AKV exploding at point-blank range, every miss will hit you.)

All of which is to say: While there are some subtleties and complexities to the tactics (defense AKVs, screening vessels sharing PD, etc., etc.), the short answer is it takes a lot of work and losses to get an AKV force within range of a target, but once you do, that target is dead meat.

Heavy Cavalry: Fields of Fire

Posted by Associated Worlds

It seems there is a peck of confusion out there concerning exactly how the “base platform” weapons on Imperial heavy cavalry units actually function, and even are mounted (including at least one case of confusion so profound as to believe the rear/local defense guns were “sticking out the back of the turret”, in the style of anti-infantry defense MGs from early last century, despite the platform – without a module installed – not having a turret.).

Here is a diagram in my inimitably terrible style:

20181101_175819952_iOS

That’s your base platform, driving left to right. Green at the front are your cheek-mounted (i.e., in a three-axis gimbaled mount on the side of the vehicle) heavy mass drivers, target designators, and micromissile launchers. Purple at the rear are your cheek-mounted medium mass drivers for local defense. Both weapons are illustrated in their default rest position, i.e., forward-facing or rear-facing, respectively.

As can be seen from the shaded fields of fire, both can train sufficiently to hit anything on their side of the vehicle that doesn’t actually involve training through the platform body or the other weapon mount; i.e., the forward cheek-mounts can hit anything from directly forward (with a small blind spot directly in front of the vehicle) to not-quite-rear; and the rear cheek-mounts can hit anything from directly behind (with small blind spot directly behind the vehicle, likewise) to not-quite-directly forward.

In short, there are plenty of things for them all to shoot at.

Question: Useless Machines

Posted by Associated Worlds

Specialist290 asks:

So what do the eldrae make of the idea of “useless machines”?

The most famous example, of course, being the machine whose sole purpose, once turned on, is to turn itself back off. (Like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z86V_ICUCD4 )

Insert usual disclaimer about the reliability of capsule summaries of the opinions of over a trillion sophonts.

Well, for a start, they aren’t “useless machines”. Useless machines manifestly fail to work properly. These are “amusing mechanical follies”, like Rube Goldberg designs, which are… amusing. Also decorative.

(The ur-example of the class *there* is actually a Precursor artifact, nicknamed “The Uncrater”, a black-box widget whose sole function appears to be declining to be packaged up in the current local language, then quietly disintegrating any packaging material used to attempt to do so.

You’ll find it indexed under “Amusing Mechanical Follies”. Also under “Suspected Precursor Practical Jokes”, and “Seriously, Guys, What The Hell?”)

Question: Marlinspike

Posted by Associated Worlds

Phineas Imhoff asks:

I have heard mention of the “spacers marlinspike” several times, I am curious what exactly is it for? Does it serve the same role as a traditional marlinspike, just recycled in space. Or is it something else?

It’s essentially the same tool, albeit with some minor microgravity adaptations. While there isn’t quite so much rope involved in celestime sailing vis-à-vis maritime, there’s more than enough to make such a tool useful (especially in the cargo department, for lashing of breakbulk), and that’s before you get to its handy secondary uses for poking suspicious-looking objects and rapping miscreants soundly across the base of the skull.

You’ll Want Us High and Clear

Posted by Associated Worlds

ICED FIRE-CLASS ANTIMATTER TRANSPORT

Operated by: Extropa Energy, ICC
Type: Antimatter Transport
Construction: Islien Yards, ICC

Length: 1,600 km (overall)
Beam: 3,200 km
Dry mass: 39,200 tons (not including cryocels)

Gravity-well capable: No; not even low-orbit capable.
Atmosphere capable: No.

Personnel: 31

Flight Commander
3 x Flight Executive/Administrator
3 x Flight Director
3 x Flight Engineer
3 x Propulsion Engineer
3 x Cargomaster
3 x general technicians
2 x riggers/EVA specialists
Thinker-class AI

Drives:

3 x Nucleodyne Thrust Applications 1×1 “Sunheart V” fusion torch

Propellant: Deuterium/helium-3 blend
Cruising (sustainable) thrust: 3.5 standard gravities (3.3 Earth G) at nominal load
Maximum velocity: 0.3 c unloaded, 0.1 c loaded (based on particle shielding)

Drones:

3 x general-purpose maintenance drones
3 x tether-climbing rigger drones

Sensors:

1 x standard navigational sensor suite, Islien Yards

Other Systems:

2 x Islien Yards boosted commercial kinetic barrier system
Biogenesis Technologies Mark VII regenerative life support
2 x Bright Shadow EC-780 information furnace data system
Islien Yards custom dual vector-control core and associated technologies
Systemic Integrated Technologies dual-mode radiator system

Small craft:

1 x Élyn-class microcutter
1 x Adhaïc-class workpod

The standard vehicle for ferrying antimatter from the Cirys bubble at Esilmúr to its various places of use, the Iced Fire-class is a starship designed around one core principle, commonly adhered to when dealing with antimatter:

Don’t get any on you.

The core hull itself is much smaller than the dimensions above suggest; a blunted cylinder a mere 252 m in length, including bunkerage. This houses the entire livable volume of the starship, including a dock for the Élyn-class microcutter at the bow, and a bay housing for the workpod. Rather than the typical stern mounting, the three Sunheart V fusion torches are located in nacelles set off from the hull on radiator pylons amidships, located 120 degrees apart; these nacelles are fully vectorable for maximum maneuverability.

The stern of the core hull instead contains the attachment points and winches for a 1,600 km tether, at whose fully extended end is in turn attached the spinhub. This is a simple unit containing monitoring equipment and a centrifugal ring, to which in turn are mounted eight further attachment points and associated tethers, terminating in heavy couplings. It is to these couplings that antimatter cryocels are mounted during loading, and dismounted upon arrival. In flight, the action of the centrifugal ring maintains appropriate safe distance between the core hull and the cryocels, and between the cryocels themselves, while also ensuring that jettisoned cryocels will move away from the main body of the starship in the event of containment failure.

Rank Structure

Posted by Associated Worlds

Since I needed to type up an exportable version anyway for a comment response, I thought I might as well share the Table of Ranks of the Imperial Service and Imperial Military Service with everyone.

It’s in this spreadsheet, since WordPress doesn’t give me a good way to do tables.

Covered In Bees

Posted by Associated Worlds

HURRICANE-CLASS DRONE BATTLESHIP (CARRIER)

Operated by: Empire of the Star
Type: Drone Battleship, General Operations
Construction: Palaxias Fleet Yards

Length: 2.3 km
Beam (avg.): 0.8 km
Dry mass: 2,900,000 tons

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

Personnel: 1,294

396 crewers
514 flight operations
384 espatiers
Thinker-class AI

Drives:

Imperial Navy 3×3 “Neutrino Dawn” antimatter pion drive
Nucleodyne Thrust Applications 4×4 “Nova Pulse” fusion torch

Propellant:

Deuterium slush/metallic antideuterium
Deuterium/helium-3 slush blend

Cruising (sustainable) thrust: 5.6 standard gravities (5.2 Earth G)
Peak (unsustainable) thrust: 6.6 standard gravities (6.1 Earth G)
Maximum velocity: 0.3 c (rated, based on particle shielding, with flight deck doors closed)

Drones:

43,200 x AKVs (loadout varies by mission, typically Daggerfan-class)
Associated thrust packs and modular swapout payloads, by mission
64 x “Buckler VI” point-defense supplementary drones, Artifice Armaments, ICC
32 x “Rook” tactical observation platforms, Sy Astronautic Engineering Collective (with supplementary IN hardware)
64 x general-duty modular drones (not counting flight operations hardware)

Sensors:

3 x independent standard navigational sensor suite, Cilmínar Spaceworks
6 x [classified] enhanced active/passive tactical sensory suite, Sy Astronautic Engineering Collective
Imperial Navy tactically-enhanced longscan

Weapons (Auxiliary):

96 x “Slammer III” dual turreted mass drivers (local-space defense)
Artifice Armaments, ICC “Popcorn” point defense/CQB laser grid

Other systems:

3 x Artifice Armaments, ICC cyclic kinetic barrier system
Biogenesis Technologies, ICC Mark VII regenerative life support (multiple independent systems)
3 x Bright Shadow, ICC custom-build megaframe data system, plus multiple EC-1140 information furnaces for sectoral control
AKV repair facilities
3 x Extropa Energy, ICC “Calviata” second-phase fusion reactors
6 x Imperial Navy AKV tactical management suite
3 x Imperial Navy DN-class vector-control core and associated technologies
3 x Nanodynamics, ICC “Phage-a-Phage” immunity
6 x modular swapout regions (large)
Systemic Integrated Technologies, ICC high-capacity thermal sinks and dual-mode radiative striping; 3 x deployable droplet heat radiators
Tactical bridge

Small craft:

4 x Nelyn-class modular cutters
2 x Ékalaman-class pinnace/shuttle (atmosphere capable)
16 x Élyn-class microcutter
32 x Adhaïc-class workpod

(You’ll notice the obvious similarities to the Leviathan-class dreadnought in systems installed, which should come as no surprise; these two came off the drawing board at roughly the same time. And if you’re wondering why a BB-sized carrier has a DN-sized vector-control core – well, you’ll note that the much more tightly packed supplies of, for example, bunkerage plus AKV bunkerage, plus the need to propel all those AKVs, make it mass significantly more than a Leviathan in practice. Carriers tend to be thus.)

The core hull of the Hurricane-class drone battleship (carrier) is divided into five segments: from bow to stern, the flight operations section, the AKV bunkerage, the command section, the bunkerage, and the propulsion bus, laid out tail-lander style. The flight operations section, by design, is a hexagonal prism, flat faces to dorsal and ventral, and the other ship segments follow this pattern.

Attached to this on the starboard side, extending to dorsal and ventral of the core hull, and running from 100 m ahead of the flight operations section (to give AKVs exit and entrance cover) back to cover the first 100 m of the bunkerage, is the starship’s “buckler”. The core hull of the Hurricane-class is relatively lightly armored for an IN vessel, since carriers are intended, doctrinally, to stay out of CQB and mass conservation supervenes. However, to provide protection against long-distance fire in the outer engagement envelope, as a less maneuverable ship class, the buckler – heavy armor plate connected to the core hull by shock-absorbing trusses – covers and extends slightly beyond the two starboard facets, providing additional protection for as long as the vessel maintains the proper attitude.

The flight operations section at the bow, taking up the first half-kilometer of the ship, is effectively a single large flight deck, opened to space by an armored spacetight door in the for’ard hull. (Unlike smaller flight decks, this region cannot be pressurized.) The 43,200 carried AKVs occupy hexagonal cells clustered on the inner hull to port, starboard, dorsal, and ventral from which they launch themselves, while a small conventional flight deck at the aft end of the section provides space for the Hurricane‘s small craft. The after hull of the flight operations sections is heavily armored, to provide what protection it can against a lucky shot penetrating the flight deck.

Immediately behind the flight operations section is the AKV bunkerage section, which houses fuel and propellant, along with ammunition and other consumables, for the carried AKVs, permitting refueling and rearming. This is the most protected area of the ship, as AKV fuel and ammunition tends to be highly volatile.

The command section, the primary habitable area of the starship, is a relatively small area sandwiched between the AKV bunkerage and the carrier’s own bunkerage, also protected behind the buckler, and housing both the starship’s own operations and the majority of the outsize flight operations department. From dorsal and ventral, sensor towers extend beyond the buckler, allowing line-of-sight sensing and communications with the battlespace without exposing the core hull.

(As a side note, the Hurricane-class, like most large carriers, is an example of the IN’s dual command system. The starship itself is commanded by a Flight Commander, ranked Captain [O-7], from the line branch, while the AKV wings are commanded by a Group Captain, an equivalent rank. Overall command of both is held by a Mission Commander, ranked Commodore [O-8].)

Aft of these, a conventional bunkerage section and propulsion bus, equipped with droplet radiators for primary cooling, fills out the remaining length of the vessel.

Scattered about the length of the vessel is the same heavy-duty (“Popcorn”) point-defense grid used on the Leviathan-class dreadnought, along with 96 small turreted mass drivers – similar to those used on lighter IN classes – for heavier local-space defense.

(They are not intended as offensive weapons; the carrier has 43,200 of those in its AKVs, and would-be Flight Commanders who can’t resist the urge to take their ships into close-quarters battle are redirected towards frigates, destroyers, and other roles where such is (a) tactically useful and (b) much less likely to get one either cashiered for gross incompetence or relieved of command by an XO for whom it is not a good day to die.)

On the Role of the Dreadnought

Posted by Associated Worlds

Just to clear up a few misconceptions that may have crept in:

David Weber, alas, has done me no favors by convincing much of the SF-reading world that the standard interstellar badass is the dreadnought.

And, yes, you may remember me saying “it sure would be nice to build nothing except dreadnoughts [for ships-of-the-plane]” back when we discussed ship types, but what I did not say is that if they did, they wouldn’t be dreadnoughts. They’d be battleships, because the modal ship classes for engaging in big set-piece space battles are always designated as battleships. Says so right in the name. Battle. Ship.

Or, to put it another way, there are a lot fewer dreadnoughts than there are battleships. (And a lot more cruisers than there are battleships, for that matter, because most missions don’t have any major fleet engagements in them. But that’s another story, already told.) This is principally for economic reasons: when you examine the requirements for a ship of the plane, the battleship sits right at the bang/buck sweet spot, so that’s what you build.

A dreadnought (and to an even greater extent, a superdreadnought) has four virtues, which is why they’re built at all:

It benefits in internal space from volume increasing faster than surface area, which makes it a convenient class to carry extra stuff, from complete flagship suites through shipyard-class repair facilities for its cohorts and prisoner-of-war blocks to all that is required for the many, many specialized variants on the books.
It can afford a hell of a lot of extra armoring, so you are significantly less likely to get your admiral shot off and your fleet coordination suffering if you give him a DN to ride around in.
It can mount a Really Big Gun of the kind you’ll rarely need to use, but you might miss if you didn’t have any of in your plane of battle.
It’s bloody terrifying. When naval architects are told to draw up plans for a DN or SD, the unspoken requirement is that it dominate the battlespace like Conan the Barbarian at a convention of preadolescent pacifists: it dreads nothing, and everything dreads it.

So there aren’t all that many in service, relatively speaking. There don’t have to be – say, speaking non-canonically and off the back of the envelope, eight squadrons in the Capital Fleet (mostly in the Sixth Flotilla, which is the IN’s heavy-hitting force), four squadrons in Home Fleet, two for Field Fleet Spinward (which borders on the Seam), and one for each of the other field fleets: say, 228 in total, not counting specialist classes and the reserve.

You can assume at least four times that in BBs.

Some Leviathan Numbers

Posted by Associated Worlds

I am removing this post.

Why am I removing this post?

Because apparently no matter how many disclaimers I stick on some numbers I came up with on the back of an envelope before my morning coffee, concerning both those factors and how they represent a hypothetical extreme case that no-one would actually use even if it were possible, people insist on taking them as canonical in-regular-use figures.

The ensuing arguments based on increasingly nonsensical extrapolations of my original ass-pulls bore me, and degrade the quality of the universe.

As such, my new policy is that people who can’t use figures responsibly don’t get figures, savvy?

Leviathan, Awake

Posted by Associated Worlds

LEVIATHAN-CLASS DREADNOUGHT

Operated by: Empire of the Star
Type: Dreadnought, General Operations
Construction: Palaxias Fleet Yards

Length: 3 km
Beam (avg.): 0.8 km
Z-Beam (avg.): 0.6 km

Dry mass: 2,500,000 tons

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

Personnel: 6,736

4,968 crewers
1,768 espatiers
Thinker-class AI

Drives:

Imperial Navy 4×2 “Neutrino Dawn” antimatter pion drive
Nucleodyne Thrust Applications 4×4 “Nova Pulse” fusion torch

Propellant:

Deuterium slush/metallic antideuterium
Deuterium/helium-3 slush blend

Cruising (sustainable) thrust: 7.2 standard gravities (6.7 Earth G)
Peak (unsustainable) thrust: 8.4 standard gravities (7.8 Earth G)
Maximum velocity: 0.3 c (rated, based on particle shielding)

Drones:

144 x AKVs (loadout varies by mission, typically Daggerfan-class)
144 x add-on thrust packs for AKVs
72 x “Buckler VI” point-defense supplementary drones, Artifice Armaments, ICC
72 x “Rook” tactical observation platforms, Sy Astronautic Engineering Collective (with supplementary IN hardware)
72 x general-duty modular drones

Sensors:

3 x independent standard navigational sensor suite, Cilmínar Spaceworks
18 x [classified] enhanced active/passive tactical sensory suite, Sy Astronautic Engineering Collective
Imperial Navy tactically-enhanced longscan

Weapons (Primary):

4800/2400 mm custom axial heavy mass driver, Artifice Armaments, ICC

Weapons (Secondary):

4 x 4800/2400 mm custom heavy mass drivers, Artifice Armaments, ICC
4 x “Black Lightning” axial grasers, Artifice Armaments, ICC

Weapons (Tertiary):

64 x 2400/1200 mm turreted mass drivers (32 capable of broadside use), Artifice Armaments, ICC
8 x 2400/1200 mm turreted mass drivers (rear-firing for kilt defense), Artifice Armaments, ICC
32 x “Flashburn” turreted heavy lasers, Artifice Armaments, ICC
Artifice Armaments, ICC “Popcorn” point defense/CQB laser grid

Other systems:

3 x Artifice Armaments, ICC cyclic kinetic barrier system
Biogenesis Technologies, ICC Mark VII regenerative life support (multiple independent systems)
3 x Bright Shadow, ICC custom-build megaframe data system, plus multiple EC-1140 information furnaces for sectoral control
Class IV starship repair facilities
8 x Extropa Energy, ICC “Calviata” second-phase fusion reactors
Flag bridge
4 x Imperial Navy command communications/tactical networking suite
4 x Imperial Navy DN-class vector-control core and associated technologies
3 x Metric Engineering, ICC “Gloaming” ray shielding system
3 x Nanodynamics, ICC “Phage-a-Phage” immunity
32 x modular swapout regions (large)
Systemic Integrated Technologies, ICC high-capacity thermal sinks and dual-mode radiative striping

Small craft:

8 x Reaver-class starfighters, with own AKVs
8 x Nelyn-class modular cutters
4 x Ékalaman-class pinnace/shuttle (atmosphere capable)
16 x Élyn-class microcutter
16 x Traest Sargas-class troop transport
32 x Adhaïc-class workpod
32 x Marlinspike-class boarding torpedo
32 x Sledgehammer-class drop shuttle

From without, the Leviathan-class dreadnought resembles a slender wedge, a dagger-blade without a hilt. It is, of course, rather larger than virtually all equivalent dreadnought classes and even some superdreadnought classes seen elsewhere, in keeping with the Empire’s naval construction policy of “shock and awesome”.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, since the realities of armoring such a vessel mandate such a glacis, and as such virtually all ships of the plane, of whatever origin, share this common feature. The Leviathan mixes this up slightly, having a change in ratio along its length that gives the hull a subtle curve and the ship entire a forward-leaning, sleek and hungry look.

(Although those who serve aboard Leviathans, especially back in the maneuvering sector, tend to describe their workplace as the ship’s “fat ass”.)

As is also usual, the apparent outer hull of the vessel is entirely composed of armor plating, which in the case of the Leviathan is a little over 30m thick, comprised of multiple layers of heavy plate, Whipple foam, radiation-absorbent material, thermal superconductors, dilatant shock gel, flexible spreader trusses, and other necessities for survivability in the modern high-energy battlespace, many of which remain classified.

(The important thing to remember about this armor plating is that it is not there to protect against a direct hit from an opposing capital ship. No practicable material will do that. It’s there to protect against the spallation debris left behind after your point-defense grid sweeps the sky like the hand of an angry laser-spewing god.)

This armor serves as a backup to the triple-layered cyclic kinetic barrier system with which the Leviathan is equipped, along with the likewise triple-layered ray shielding to protect against photonic attack.

The majority of the space within this outer hull is unpressurized volume, occupied by machinery space, bunkerage, stores (tanks and unpressurized cargo holds), accessways, robot hotels, and magazines. The habitable volume is represented by a relatively small (roughly equivalent to a 232-storey building, laid out tail-lander style) cylinder buried deep within this, above the axial passage for the primary mass driver, with two attendant counter-rotating gravity rings providing space for gravity-requiring special facilities. Below and to port and starboard of this passage can be found the eight fusion reactors providing non-thrust power to the Leviathan.

In addition to the primary (axial) heavy mass driver, the Leviathan mounts four secondary heavy mass drivers of only slightly lower power along its dorsal-ventral centerline, spread out at 15 and 30 degrees off-axis (although with off-bore firing capability), along with four heavy grasers clustered around, and aligned to, the axial primary.

Tertiary weapons systems consist of 64 turreted mass drivers and 32 turreted heavy lasers, of which half can slew far enough to be capable of broadside firing. An additional eight turreted mass drivers are mounted on the stern for kilt defense, should the prospect of attacking through, or at best in close proximity to, the emissions plume of the Leviathan‘s 24 torch drives not be sufficient deterrent. Finally, the Leviathan is equipped with the Artifice Armaments “Popcorn” laser grid for point-defense and CQB purposes, ensuring that anyone foolish enough to close to point-defense range will have mere microseconds to contemplate their folly before vaporizing in one of the most spectacular coruscations known to sophontkind.

Also pressurized are portions of the “docks and locks” sections to port and starboard, 500 meters for’ard of the drives, which house the Leviathan‘s small craft complement. These are buried beneath the starship’s outer hull armor, which is designed to retract under non-combat conditions to provide ingress. In light of this, the multiple AKV wings and drones are launched via dog-leg tubes through the dorsal and ventral armor, and recovered – if this is necessary during an engagement – when circumstances permit turning broadside to the enemy and recovering through the far-side landing bay.

As a dreadnought, the Leviathan is equipped with a flag bridge and communications/tactical mesh suite for task force command; with the capability to effect repairs on smaller vessels of its task force; with the ability to deploy starfighters for patrol or remote operations missions; and with a substantial espatier force and the means to deploy them, whether in boarding operations or for groundside raids.

A Proposal For Every Century

Posted by Associated Worlds

For various reasons, I was rereading Meditations on Moloch today, and this leapt out at me:

14. Congress. Only 9% of Americans like it, suggesting a lower approval rating than cockroaches, head lice, or traffic jams. However, 62% of people who know who their own Congressional representative is approve of them. In theory, it should be really hard to have a democratically elected body that maintains a 9% approval rating for more than one election cycle. In practice, every representative’s incentive is to appeal to his or her constituency while throwing the rest of the country under the bus – something at which they apparently succeed.

From a god’s-eye-view, every Congressperson ought to think only of the good of the nation. From within the system, you do what gets you elected.

…if you were wondering, this is exactly why the Charter specifies that Senators should be chosen from the centuries, rather than from geographic areas, where the centuries are themselves filled by random assignment and as such contain roughly equal numbers of every clade, race, and other characteristic, roughly equally spread across all 234 worlds and innumerable subdivisions. Even if a Senator had a motivation for it (not being up for reelection), try figuring out how to serve the approximately 1.5 billion randomly distributed sophonts of the 714th Century specially relative to everyone else.

Response: The Path of the Righteous Man…

Posted by Associated Worlds

…is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.

– Ezekiel 25:17, the Quentin Tarantino Version

In which I address some recent comments e-mailed to me which, I believe, for the most part represent a profound misreading of the corpus at hand, but which nonetheless raise some points I might as well answer.

I suppose it’s slightly unfair of me to go off on you without giving you some background on where I’m coming from, but that comment chain touched a little on an issue that I’ve been turning over in my head for a long while, both in my worldbuilding as a core theme of the storyline within the setting (one of these days I’ll actually write it down instead of building “castles in the air” in my imagination…) and in my own life: What is the nature of violence? What is the proper role of force in relations between two rational creatures? Is it possible for a “reasonable person” to desire the death of another — even if they would never act on that desire outside of certain “acceptable” boundaries? In cases where retaliatory force is justified, where does the boundary lie between “acceptable” and “overkill”?

I wouldn’t exactly call myself a pacifist (although certain strains of pacifism have probably influenced my thought in the course of my investigation),

As I’ve implied before, say, here for example, pacifism is very poorly thought of in Imperial culture, because in their opinion it’s a self-justifying morally supine position; which is to say, it’s the position of “First they came for the $VICTIM, and I did not a single gorram useful thing because it was more important to me not to get my hands wet.” Shrugging at evil to its face, and saying, “Well, at least I didn’t…”.

Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness.

And accursed is he who leaves the weak to suffer what they must.

but I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to the use of force by one being capable of reason against another, where are essentially two elements, each of which is a morally and ethically independent consideration from the other: The external *means and circumstances of application*, and the internal *motivation of the applicator*; or, in short, the “use of force” vs. the “will to kill.”

The “use of force” consideration is essentially what people talk about when debating the merits of “coercion” vs. “self-defense.” In that sense, I consider myself a conventional believer in the Non-Aggression Principle: Initiating force — even non-lethal force — without cause is always wrong; using retaliatory force — even lethal force, and even *wittingly* lethal force — is right when done in an appropriately proportional manner to deflect, oppose, or counteract an illegitimate act of force.

(Note that, above, I’m drawing a distinction between a *witting* — performing an action with foreknowledge of a certain or highly probable consequence; the desirability of that particular consequence being, for the moment, irrelevant — and *willing* — that is, acting with the intention of causing a specific consequence.)

However, that seems to be only half the battle.

Violence against another living thing is, in a fundamental sense, an inherently entropic act: The violent actor is expending energy by applying force against an ordered system (the living target) with the aim of causing that system to break down and expend its energy chaotically. It would seem to me that acting with the specific intention of causing that sort of outcome is, essentially, acting with the desire for entropy to win, however limited the scope of that particular “victory” may be.

If entropy is a thing that should rationally be avoided, then it stands to reason that a reasoning sophont is no more capable of willing the death of one of its peers and remaining rational at the same time, than it is that one can desire the destruction of the Universe Entire and remain rational. This is a consideration entirely independent of the *external* context of the use of force.

Here is the obvious question they would ask at this point:

Is it moral to cure cancer?

Obviously it is when you can use sophisticated medicine to retrain the cancer cells into being honest, upstanding members of their tissue.

But what if you’re using carcinophages, or chemotherapy, or radiotherapy, or old-fashioned surgery to cut the tumor out? That’s entropic in the exact same way: you are forcibly destroying an ordered, living system, and you are, in fact, hoping for your tightly-focused entropy to win this small victory. Is that wrong?

No, says the Healer’s Code, because what the above argument fails to recognize is that the tumor is an entropy generator which is itself destroying a more complex ordered system, and the position you are in is having to apply this focused entropy in order to preserve that greater system.

(There is more on this here from the point of view of the Stratarchy of Indirection and Subtlety, and this should also illuminate just how far Imperial doctrine goes to use minimal force for necessary effect. As residents of a planet that bans quiet assassination in favor of mass warfare, I don’t think they’d be willing to accept correction from us on this point.)

I have, in the past, described the Imperial justice system as surgical in its approach. This is the underlying truth: some cancers have to be cut out, in order to save the patient. It is an unfortunate circumstance that such things exist at all in the first place, but since they do, this is the choice with which one is presented.

(At this point, usually someone complains that you can’t compare a sophont being to cancer.

Indeed you can’t, they say. The cancer is merely programmed tissue acting out its programming; its destructiveness is entirely unintentional, no more willful than a mosquito, a virus or a falling rock. The sophont, on the other hand, has the power of choice, and willingly chose against the good; it is thus far worse and merits destruction substantially more than, say, the unfortunate bacteria we poison with vancomycin to save sophont lives.)

In short, I believe that it’s possible to act in a way that any third-party observer with knowledge of both the cause and effect would consider to be justifiable self-defense, while also being guilty of murder because you acted with *murderous intent* independently of whether the action itself was the correct thing to do at the time. Even if you balk at calling it “murder” and ascribing to it the culpability thereof, I still consider it a species of viciousness that should be neither tolerated nor encouraged.

Or, still more briefly: While *wittingly* causing someone’s death may be justifiable if one does so for the right reasons, *willingly* causing someone’s death is always wrong — even if the circumstances and the actual actions taken are exactly the same in both situations.

(Or, perhaps more pointedly: “While lethal force may be unfortunately necessary to deal with the worst sorts of scum, anyone who both claims to be rational and *willfully* kills or causes the death of another soph — or endorses such an action — is either deluding themselves or committing the most dangerous and fundamental sort of fraud possible.”)

To which the obvious follow-up question would be:

Is it immoral to be happy that you’ve cured cancer, even if you had to kill the cancer to do it?

…no.

And while the ignorant can be educated, the primitive uplifted, and the sick-in-mind cured, likewise, it’s not immoral to be happy that you have killed a walking sophont cancer whose very existence made the world around them worse. The doctor has repaired the future life of her patient and those around him; the sentinel has repaired the lives of everyone who would otherwise have been harmed, directly or indirectly, by the ex-soph in question.

This is, so far as their ethical calculus is concerned, an inarguably good act of entropy-minimization.

What worries me when I read things like the excerpt from this post ( https://eldraeverse.com/2016/12/04/a-question-grab-bag/ ) below:

But once you have cold-mindedly ensured that you have the right target and have done the proper strategic and tactical planning, then go ahead and strike down upon those who attempt to poison and destroy your brothers with great vengeance and furious anger, and other colorful metaphors. It is… appropriate. Empowering one for such unpleasant necessities is what wrath is for.

I refer you here to the empowering paradox of passion and reason.

Or from here ( https://eldraeverse.com/2014/05/31/the-bear-necessities-historical-trivia/ ):

After hearing the testimony of the children and bystanders, the Near Orbit District Court ruled that ‘***they needed killing***; jolly well done’.

The people in question were child kidnappers. If that’s not an example of people whose existence poisons the world and who need killing both individually and as a class, who in all the world is?

And slogans like:

> Civilization has enemies; kill the bastards.

ObReference in canon, from here:

The official motto of the Imperial Military Service is “Between the Flame and the Fire”. Unofficially, the paraphrase “civilization has enemies; we kill the bastards” has been usually tolerated.

Which is to say: it’s an unofficial military motto. (I’ll leave it to any actual veterans reading this to supply examples of the real thing, by which standard this is kinda milquetoast.) This is the self-summary and mutual reminder of the rough men who stand guard on the walls mentioned below. If you want a good reference for actual sentinel attitudes, it’s here. (Scroll down.)

I should like to draw your attention to this part:

We live in Utopia. We have no war, no crime. No disease, barely any injury, and certainly no death that can’t be easily reversed. Thanks to the autofac, we’ve never known poverty, and we live on worlds where no-one for generations ever has. In societies where, by the Contract and the Code and the tireless efforts of archai like Unification, we can always trust, people always care, and happy endings always happen for good people, which is to say, everyone. We go through our lives without experiencing more than the briefest moments of the mildest pain, or even inconvenience, and few but the eldest of us remember the true taste of suffering, or injustice, or fear, or loss.

That’s right, folks. Remember, the Empire was founded by people who, essentially, read through some trope pages for things like Mary Suetopia, and Sugar Bowl, and said: Yes. This is right, this is true and beautiful, this is how the universe ought to work. And then made both it (locally) and themselves that way. They have the sort of rates of crime, social dysfunction, anomie and alienation otherwise best seen “once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria”. (At least if you discount the monster attacks.)

So let’s just look at our world though today’s twitter, as an example.

The “Leader of the Free World” is an orange fascist who would lose an intellect contest with a bowl of jello.
At least two of our supposedly-civilized, advanced, etc. countries run concentration camps specifically for children.
Then there’s the ongoing #MeToo scandal, in which it seems increasingly clear that much of Hollywood and more than a few other places are stuffed with people now suffering social sanctions for things that, *there*, would unquestionably count as rape, straight up.
Not to mention all those places in the world where such things and even worse variants on them don’t even go remarked upon.
And at this point, I’ve stuck to things that even the average human finds offensive. I haven’t even started touching on things that are specifically offensive to Imperial sensibilities…

And there are lots of places in the galaxy that are just like us, though the details differ, and I’m not talking about the Iltine Union or the Theomachy of Galia. I’m talking about places whose self-image is at least as smug as that of the average First World country.

There are certainly, all praise to Rúnel, plenty of more civilized places than Earth around – hell, even the Vonnies do somewhat better – but nonetheless, if the hainadar appear sometimes to be channeling the attitude of the Roman legionary watching the dark forests across the Rhine, or the guards posted along the Great Wall – well, that’s because they do see themselves as the thin indigo line between the warmly-lit, gentle garden of civilization and a never-ending parade of savages and atrocities, and have perfectly legitimate reasons for so doing.

They want them on that wall. They need them on that wall.

You want to explain to them how they’re wrong about that, Earthling? Maybe tell them how the barbarians haven’t earned the name a dozen or two times over?

Myself, I think it’s a bloody miracle and possibly a tribute to self-control and respect for freedom of choice that what you get is attitude, overt and covert manipulation towards improvement, and a few Renegades – and not, say, The Ultimate Crusade of Ultimate Destiny…

Is that — and I hope you interpret this as coming from a friend expressing concern, and not an enemy seeking to condemn — something of this distinction is being either lost or glossed over without serious examination, and that all this talk of “barbarians” tacitly divides the Universe into an “elect” chosen few and a vast mass of “damned” whom it is alright to want to kill provided you can find the right opportunity to do so — even if the eldrae themselves might find such a view abhorrent if presented that way, I worry that that’s what their philosophy towards force and violence adds up to when all the pieces are put together.

…which would be justified, if it came to that, not by some sense of the elect, but by the things that its carefully selected targets have actually done and continue to do.

If you see a murder, a rape, a kidnapping, a robbery, etc., then by ethics and the Contract and the Charter, you are obliged to intervene to stop it, and if stopping it and preventing it from happening again and again and again requires it, then in the absence of proper formal process, whether or not you want to, you are obliged to do so with lethal force.

But more, if you see people who fit that latter definition, you should want to, because you should want to do the right thing, and when faced with cancer, the right thing is to cure it.

This argument does not lose any of its force when you scale it up; an organization, or a culture, that institutionalizes these things is no less guilty than an individual that does so. The problems with the Ultimate Crusade of Ultimate Destiny are (a) its impracticability – as demonstrated in the small by our various failed efforts at nation-building – and (b) difficulty in appropriately handling the majority – the ignorant, the primitive, and the mind-sick. These make the slow extension of cultural spheres, educational efforts, and the aforementioned overt and covert the optimal path in the long run, Renegades and proscribed groups notwithstanding. But there’s nothing wrong with its ethical justification.

Because, as it turns out, the wild universe is dark and full of horrors.

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.)

The Associated Worlds

…building civilizations with my space elves in space.

worldbuilding

What’s That Soph?

Nope, It’s A Bridge

They Fear Neither Death Nor Pain

Heavy Cavalry Redux

Worldbuilding: Sail Plans

On AKVs and Survivability

Heavy Cavalry: Fields of Fire

Question: Useless Machines

Question: Marlinspike

You’ll Want Us High and Clear

Rank Structure

Covered In Bees

On the Role of the Dreadnought

Some Leviathan Numbers

Leviathan, Awake

A Proposal For Every Century

Response: The Path of the Righteous Man…

Question Update

The Guardians of Our Harmony

Worldbuilding: Space Opera Clichés