LibriumArcana.Games

As you might know, for a very long time, I've had a fictional setting in my brain. Every so often I contribute something to it. Much of this stuff can hopefully be applied to other things too; I'll try to keep it at least somewhat interesting. Many times, I'll just blab on about something political.

Over the last four years or so, it has shifted from soft to hard science in terms of technology. Currently, there's almost nothing about the setup or the tech that I find particularly unbelievable, but the shift isn't completely done. Nothing is set in stone.

Anyway libarc was my first public outing of this stuff, and now I'm bringing it back here.

This thread will be whatever random stuff is on my mind as I type it up. Might be tech, might be setup, might be people, stories, or places.

And today it is going to be a brief society and financial thing on loans. It might be a little wild, and I'm open to reality checks :)

I generally don't care much for debt. I use a revolving credit account myself, but if and only if I can pay it off immediately.

Debt serves a number of roles in our real world society. It ruins individual's lives, it enslaves the poor to the rich, and it enables a lot of bad decisions. Thanks to debt, most Americans live well above their means, and as such, really have no hope of accumulating wealth. But, those who make the loans use debt - again, well above their means - to accumulate vast amounts in a big house of cards that can come crashing down for what seem like absurd reasons.


But, there's good stuff it does too. Those loans provide a reactive way for the money supply to respond to changes in the economy. They enable investment in future growth. Debt can smooth over rough patches or get a business ahead in it's formative years.


Is there a way to keep some of the good while discouraging the bad?



What I try to do with this fictional country, in part, is to take things about me and expand it to more people, hopefully without making it into a mary-sue-topia; a world that only works if everyone is an idealized version of myself.

But, since I know myself, this is something I can think about in detail to provide a starting point that isn't just AMERICA IN SPAAAACE or what have you. (I do something similar with characters. Most obviously, the self-insert, but keeping that consistent is harder than it might seem, since he's in a very different environment. But I'll talk about that later.)


With me, I don't only see debt as being generally a bad financial decision for individual end users (my opinion differs for businesses and governments), I see the process of collecting debt as being unvirtuous. Indeed, I pretty much reject personal debt.

This has a few implications:

1) No matter what I do for you, you don't owe me anything. If you want to return a favor later, of course that's your decision, but it's never required.

A little consequence of this is I have no expectation of thanks; a "thank you" isn't the same as being indebted, but to me, it still feels like an unnecessary payback.

A bigger one is if it isn't required, that means failing to do so shouldn't tie to any consequences, not even refusing to help you in the future. This has the potential to enable exploitation - perhaps acceptable on a personal level, but probably not on a business one.

2) A private, anonymous contribution is better than a public one. The reason is there's no threat of unnecessary payback if the recipient never knows whom to pay back.

I find it really interesting to read religious philosophies from the real world - a similar end result is suggested in works like the Bible and the Quran, though from what I know, that's more about not having pride than to do with debt like this.

(I find this doubly interesting, since as you again might remember, I went through a militant anti-religious period a few years ago. I let sdn influence me way too much for a time.)

3) People who want up front contracts get less respect than one who makes an implicit agreement. If I know you'll need the money back, I should be willing to give it to you without you having to ask. If you demand it in writing, you're saying I have no virtue.

Another bad thing is when someone demands money back by use of force, especially when it would hurt the borrower. Use of force includes lawsuits. This shows without a doubt that the lender feels entitled to it, that you actually do owe him, and getting his money back is more important to him than your well being.

And, finally, worst of all is charging interest or fees. Usury, as I like to call it. (Again, interesting to see how major religions can agree!) At this point, you've gone beyond just feeling entitled to a debt. At this point, you've crossed the line into avarice.


That said, interest serves a number of useful economic roles, so I'd stop well short of banning it on the government level.



Let's now talk about applying this to a banking system. Much of it is incompatible with the idea of a commercial bank, but since they serve such a useful economic role, is there any way we can meet in the middle? I think there is.

• The government does not enforce contracts, as a general rule. They are agreements between two people, not two people and their buddies with black robes and guns.
• However, this brings in a lot of risk of exploitation. Is there a way to help mitigate this? Yes, I think there is: credit reports.
  
  We'd want the credit reporting system to be fair and accurate, so it'd probably need some tough regulation. Through regulation of the credit reports, the government may extend it's reach to loans themselves, despite not recognizing them any other way. (This is similar to how things like the commerce clause in the US Constitution and grant money can be used as a way to extend Federal power much further than the founders probably meant.)
  
  Through credit reports, a bank can make an informed decision about lending to a particular individual. If he has a history of taking the money and never paying it back, they can choose to deny him the loan.
  
  This will hopefully encourage bankers to make only conservative, reasonable loans in the first place.
• The credit rating can help protect lenders, by giving them the information to make an up front decision and a tool to retaliate against someone who breaks a contract. While giving someone a bad reputation isn't as vicious as garnishing their wages, it's still pretty powerful. This credit report can be shared across banks, so if you wrong one, it's quite likely that you will have a hard time getting loans anywhere in the country.
  
  But, how do we protect borrowers from an abusive bank? While they can stop paying the loan back and live off their own cash for the rest of their lives, that's still a big price to pay if the other guy was screwing you over, especially if you don't have a lot of cash - you never know when an emergency will come up, and you need some money.
  
  This is where the regulation comes in:
  
  1. Anything that can negatively impact a credit rating must be filed ahead of time, with clear terms. If someone files a bad report against you without up front honesty about the cause, you can bring this to a judge and have the report (and what's left on the loan) thrown out. What does clear terms mean?
     
     It means the amount of money or work expected and the timescale should be simple. No mountains of fine print about random variable interest rates and bullshit fees. Or rather, those things can be there, but a simple bottom line must be too - the total amount of principle, and the total interest for the timescales.
     
     If a person is going to take out $10,000 24% APR with a 1% minimum payment, tell him right up front that you expect him to pay you $60,000 (or whatever the math actually works out to).
     
     Just as the banks need the credit report to make an informed decision about the borrowers, the borrowers need clear, simple terms to make an informed decision about the lender.
     
     The idea here is by keeping it simple, it can help enable competition among banks to keep rates reasonable.
  2. The exact reason of a bad report must be filed. Did you make a late payment? Insufficient payment? Not finish a promised task on time?
  3. Both sides are allowed to file circumstances with the report. If you didn't make a late payment because of a medical emergency, this should be reported.
  4. If the borrower tries to make it right, this must also be reported. Say you just got out of the hospital and sent them a payment. A report should show good as well as bad, so future lenders get the whole picture when making their decision.
  5. Anyone can look up a report at any time, and dispute negative claims.
  6. Any negative claim can be thrown out if the payments were not voluntary. The only threat a bank can use is an honest assessment of what a bad credit report means for the borrower. If they try to pressure him any other way, no bad report can be filed, meaning the loan money is forfeit. (And, depending on the circumstances, the lender may be indicted on criminal charges for trying to steal from or threaten the borrower.)
  7. Fraud can be used against a borrower. If it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he lied and engineered a situation where he takes a loan then gets the bank to forfeit it, he can be brought up on criminal charges. A fraud conviction is fair game to put on a credit report, since a bank has a right to know if a borrower has a history of lying for personal financial gain.

I think this reputation system lets us have a functioning banking system, without resorting to acknowledging debts like we do (in America, at least) today. If a person is in a bad debt, he has the option of simply stopping payment. Of course, he'll have a reputation of doing this, but it's a get out of jail free card, if you will, without something as messy as a legal bankruptcy.


I'm out of time for now, but the next questions will be:

How do banks make money?

Can they make loans without deposits; is a fractional reserve system allowed? If yes, how can we mitigate the risk of bank runs and cascading collapses?

What do people get from using banks?



And, to get more into the science fiction aspect (lol finally), I'll talk about a concept for electronic cash - a secure, but anonymous system for money transfer without paper money, but portable too so you don't need to bring your laptop nor a credit card machine (which would leave a nasty paper trail anyway).




Other things I've been things I've been thinking about again recently:

local government revenue
schools and certifications
the economics of the guaranteed income and increased automation in industry (includes discussion on regulation)
the government budget
the cost of a personal space ship (includes some tech discussion)

and the super rich. One thing I've been pondering for a year or two now is how some rich private individuals may own their own space habitats - they could potentially make royalty look poor!


I'll see about getting to all of this in good time. Something interesting about the regulation thing. As you can see in this post, a lot of it might be even more hands off than even most American libertarians argue for! I find this to be an interesting result, since it's all built on a pretty socialist base - the guaranteed income. What's cool here is it has a lot familiar with today's political factions.... but doesn't quite match any of them either.

Something just came to mind that disappoints me about my recent tendency to shrink the ships...

Is there a real need for an awesome RED ALERT when you have a crew of like seven and they are all right there?


It's bad enough that the whole hard science thing finally made me give up on SHIELDS UP!, but I want to keep red alert!

Here's another question: how do you fire warning shots from a laserstar?

There's no explosion of water off your bow, and now pretty beams going past you. If the laser doesn't actually hit, or you aren't looking at it, you'll never know it was fired!


If they have a window and you have the equipment, perhaps you could fire a very, very low power beam in the visual frequency, and dazzle their eyeballs. But that seems unlikely.


I think the old standby of warning shots might have to go too. I guess you'll have to find some other way to be threatening!

I've always wondered about this too. Maybe ping the other craft with active sensors, that shows you have weapons armed and ready but not firing? Or get a target lock onto them but then hold your fire?

Is the power output of the laser set or can it be dialed down so to speak?

That could be the LADAR idea I had, paint a target with your targeting systems but hold your fire. But I am pretty sure that is considered a hostile act by most reasonable people, which could escalate a situation. But if it's in the context of a pursuit then you're already in a hostile situation. The idea of a warning shot is to get the other person's attention and show you mean business. But a warning shot also means 'we will fire on you for realz next time if you don't cut your engines and allow us to board you'. You don't need a visual method of delivery, and with lasers in a vacuum that would be impossible (also spaceships will be instrument driven anyway, so no windows - unless you're talking about space ships that are designed to re-enter atmospheres). But you could do it in alternative ways, like the sensor lock idea.

Some of my ships have windows because they're cool. But, not all do. Some might not even realize they are being locked on to..

The thing about active sensors is that you WILL know you have been pinged. Even basic civilian craft will need some kind of navigational radar in order to get from A to B.

One thing about windows. I can see a use for them, say observation decks (crew lounges, Ten Forward sort of places) and maybe some kind of star navigation chamber in the event of catastrophic navigational sensor failure. Having something like that can help you figure out where you are, where you need to go and so on. Also, if a ship is going to land on a planet then having windows in a cockpit arrangement can be useful.

I see windows on a spaceship as being undesireable because they're an obvious point of failure and structural weakness, but you know this. Unless you have Star Trek style transparent aluminum. Even Star Trek's viewscreen isn't a real window; everything is instrument driven. This is why I like a lot of the classic Trek ships more than any of the TNG ships (while the Galaxy is pretty it still has all those goddamn windows).

Hmm, I hadn't considered their basic setup being good to see the lock, but that makes sense.

That's similar to turning down the laser, except the wavelength might be better. I figure most weapon lasers won't be rigged to fire visible light, so even if you did turn them down and shoot right at their eyes, it might not be visible anyway.

But the radar sounds workable, though not as scary if you ask me; the threat is more abstract, since it is coming out of your instruments instead of right in your face like an explosion or light would be.


Of course another threatening use of radio waves is just calling them and telling them to back down.


On windows: yeah, they have some weaknesses.... but I love them a lot, and have gone so far as to have transparent globes people can play inside! It just seems like a pity to me to be out there in the sea of stars... but not be able to see any of it. I guess you could do viewscreens, but that's more machine than man, twisted and evil.

The biggest danger is prolly looking directly at the sun through your window - the structural problem isn't too big, since you probably aren't going to be hitting anything anyway, and if you are, you can always reinforce them with metal wires, expanding foam to seal breaks, stuff like that.

Though odds are military ships won't have the windows, since it's just so much more likely they actually will be hit!



But on the sun, I have a few solutions to mitigate that:

a) use some kind of tinting to block the sun, or at least scatter the light around. Might ruin the view though.

b) use a thick layer of a transparent substance that can still absorb nastier radiation. Plain water is a good candidate for this, though it might distort the view a little too. Water can stop space radiation and absorb some of the sun's nastier rays, but it probably won't help much if you accidentally look at the sun. (It will scatter the light a little, giving you some warning, but it's still mostly transparent.)

c) use a curtain of some sort that tracks the sun and automatically closes when it's in view.


I like a combination of b and c for space stations. It's easy to load down on some heavier protection and track the sun when you aren't moving.

For space ships, I lean more toward a and c. It's harder to block the sun if your ship can move.... but most the time, it won't be. If you're actively maneuvering, you can close the shield, and then open it back up when you're safely pointed away from the sun and inertial.

Then the tinting is just a second layer of protection, just in case. The window room might have a water tank on top of it too, so it'd be all of the above, or it might just be a part of the ship where you don't spend much time if you are worried about radiation.

Types of spaceships

First, we need to look at the kind of things people might do with a ship. Why do they want it?

military use: meh, everybody talks about this. I have some stuff to say but I'll do it later.

personal use: moving people and/or stuff. playing.

There's three kinds of moving you might want to do. Moving around a colony cluster's ring, moving up and down the axis, and going to other, distant locations.

I should quickly explain the colony clusters. Suppose you have a group of several rotating habitats. How can you arrange them so you can just let go of the hull of one and land on the hull of another?

The answer I came up with is a ring. The idea is you use the rotational motion the hab already has to launch you off in a straight line, then attach to a rotating hab in the other direction at the destination.

But, that's 2d. Can we expand this in other directions? Well, you can have a ring of rings to use those two dimensions, but what about behind the others?

If you are directly behind a ring of habs, you'll be in their shadow. You need sun, so that's no good.

But, what if each successive ring has a smaller radius? Then you have a cone of habitats, each ring working for free motion around the circle, and you can launch off the back of one to move along the axis. You can also put other zero g stations along the axis - out of the way of any rotational movement travelers.


My vision of a habitat cluster is one of these cones, with the point aimed at the sun. You can then have a cluster of clusters by making a ring of cones.

I figure these cones would be like 1000km wide (diameter) and maybe like 500 km long. The cones may be separated by as little as 1000 km too.

O'Neill cylinders arranged this way get.... oh I haven't done the math for a while.... but I think it was about 40 pairs per cone. At 20,000,000 people per cone, this means you have almost one billion people within only a couple hours ride! Multiply that by how many cones you put in the whole group...

And the best part? It's all virtually free travel. You already have the rotational speed, so no need for a rocket.

If you are going up and down the axis, that does need speed somehow, but it doesn't need very much at all, because the distance isn't very big. And you can potentially get this for free too, by using stationary launching and receiving stations - something like a coilgun.




With that image in mind, you have

1) moving around the ring. This is completely inertial. Your ship doesn't actually need engines at all. It's pretty insensitive to mass too, so size more or less doesn't matter. But, the destinations are limited by inertia too, so not much need for huge size since you won't be there for long.

2) moving up and down the cone. Mostly inertial, but needs a kick to start and stop. This kick requirement probably limits the size. This is ideally done by a low powered, simple spacecraft.

#1 and #2 are the space car, or pod concept you might have seen me talk about on x-ray blues. Probably just a box with a small engine on it.

3) Moving to different cones or getting to planets. You can do this inertially in a lot of cases too, but not all.

Getting from a habitat cluster to a planet might be a long trip, and you're going to need engines for it.

This is a real spacecraft, and probably a pretty expensive beast.

and finally 4) if you just want to joy ride around the cone. A smallish spaceship is good for this; you definitely want it under its own power, but you want it big enough to have some fun too.

This is like the space RV - it shares some characteristics with the real ships from #3, but is still pretty underpowered like the craft from #2.


You might also park one of these out of the way, and take a pod to dock with it. LOL SPACE TRAILER PARK!!!!!!!!!


other use: I've thought up three other uses for space ships too:

1) Rescues. Above, I talked about underpowered and inertial ships. Well, what if something goes wrong? Do they have the power to save themselves?

Maybe, but even if they do, shit goes wrong. The best thing to do if you spacecraft has a mishap? Secure the immediate situation. Cut your engines. Wait for help.

Do not attempt to power your way back, since that might make things worse.



What do the rescue ships look like? They are bigger than a standard pod, and pack a good amount of fuel. These little ships can power their way out somewhere, and tow a ship back to safety.

How do they tow? Probably magnet cables. It's not a massive force when towing, just a gently pull. All ships might be built with areas for this attachment for public safety.


You might also need to dock with the other ship, if there's someone who needs medical attention (for example) and just can't wait to get back.

You'd want them to have a compatible hatch with a regular docking kit, and enough high precision thrusters to make it happen.


All in all, the rescue pods are nice little spaceships.


2) Repairs. Suppose something actually hits a habitat; something too big to just tow back. You'll want to take a repair pod out there.

Often, you can use a remote controlled robot for this. They might roll across the hull. But when that's not possible, you want a ship that can get out there.

Repairing a habitat is complicated by the fact that it's spinning. But you can use a trick to simplify this - launch from the twin! (most habitats come in pairs)

Just like the rotational travel, if you time it just right, you can reach the destination when it's hull is not moving relative to you. Then, you can simply grab on gently and get to work.



This is something I've found is useful a lot btw: if there's somebody else around, everything is easier. A rescue pod greatly simplifies civilian travel. A twin habitat helps with repairs and other things (angular momentum, evacuation, travel, lots of stuff). And, with military ships, one ship is vulnerable to various angles. But if you have two ships who protect each other, they get much better coverage than if they took care of themselves. I'll talk more about this when I do military spaceships.


These repair ships would be like big, strong tents. They want to quickly patch the hole, and attaching right over it seems like the easiest way. Once that's in place, you can start work on a proper fix from both inside and outside.


If there's a pod crashed on the hull, such action can let you quickly get to the people using something similar. Attach, pick up the people and get them to safety.


Military ships might use this same principle for an invasion. Cut into the hull without actually making a wind storm. Your guys can just go right up and in, and your ship can even fix the hole as it leaves as a courtesy.

3) Retrieval. Well, police work, but I was on a roll with the 'r's. You'll want to pick up stuff as well, and probably examine it as unchanged as possible to get a good look at a crime scene.

For this, I think a big, open ship is the right thing. It's shaped fairly round, with a big hatch that opens to a cargo bay.

You then let the stuff fly in there, and you match speed. Now you can photograph it from all sides, examine it on site, and eventually, light up your engine and let it all fall to the floor to be transported.

This is different than towing - the ship is probably a lot bigger, but needs less power.


scientific use: This is actually less than you might think. You can do a lot of great science without much in the way of generic spacecraft, or even spaceships at all. Most space science can probably be done with telescopes at home, and the rest are probably can be done by special build probes for a job launched on some generic booster.

NASA is doing a great job on science with very little in the way of manned spaceships, and not even all that many probes.


That said, I want my USS Enterprise. Supposing you have advanced remote control technology and robots. What would a human do on the ship that they couldn't do from mission control?


A few things come to mind: 1) going inside something. Robots can do this too, but I betcha people can do it better. and 2) something very far away, so far out that remote control doesn't really work. (and even then, probes have done an excellent job in real life... so it's perhaps more rule of cool than necessity)

#1 shares enough with the military that I figure they can share stuff. They might need other kinds of landing ships, but nothing really fancy.

#2 is an interesting beast. There's really no other reason to send people so far out than science, so they'd have to break new ground to make it happen.

You might be talking about a multi-decade mission, which is also incredibly difficult to do on a ship. But, they already have space habs, so can they share knowledge with all of that? If yes... space habs are huge. How do you make something so big able to make these long journeys?



Well, you want this ship to be big, and then you want stages. Some stages might be launched ahead of time, so the manned ship can use it to refuel later in the mission.


These manned science ships are almost certainly the biggest and most complex spacecraft out there.


I'm out of time, but I'll probably talk more about this later.

Another thing just come to mind about laser ships.

You don't so much "fire" a laser as you "shine" one. You can have one that charges and fires, but my preference is one that is steady state - it's like a light bulb. Can run it for as long as you want. No need to charge, no need to cool down.

(well, more accurately, it is charging and cooling as it fires. It might even be pulsing, but it is faster than the human eye can see and can do it for as long as it wants.)



What this means is you might give an order to fire more like you would the engines than torpedoes.

"one megawatt, eight second shine... begin."

Lock on is kinda limited and only going to be used if you're firing missiles that are seekers of some kind (smart missiles like cruise missiles or dumber ones like heat seekers certainly make sense in the void of space, but you can only carry so many right?). A laser system is going to operate more like the gun system on a navy ship I think, they don't "lock on" for their guns as far as I am aware, they ping the target with radar and other systems and once they have your location they can blast you when they feel like.

I'm assuming this is a stealth free setting?

I don't believe in the stealth-free setting :P


If you're running with your reactor hot in the middle of nowhere, and the other guy has some telescopes pointed at you, you'll probably be seen.

But, that's already some variables, and we haven't gotten into identification or precision targetting yet.


So, it's not stealth free, but it's not super effective either. Falls somewhere in the middle depending on the circumstances.

That's fair. Given your comments however, I would venture that one would not in your universe see a cloaking device? Perhaps some ECM or other style of sensor defense?

No cloaking device. I'm probably so conservative on the tech to be unrealistically stagnant - if it hasn't been test fired today, I'm hesitant to run with it.

ECM is a possibility. One simple kind may be blinding light - shine your laser at their telescopes. Even if it doesn't hurt it, I betcha picking details out of the bright noise won't be easy.

The big one though is controlling your emissions. The Atomic Rockets site makes a big mistake on this - it asserts that having life support turned on means you'll stick out like a sore thumb.

But, that's not true. Consider an oven. It can be 400 degrees inside, but you can put your hand on the outside and feel very little heat. The insulation means most the heat stays inside.


If you aren't using much energy and aren't absorbing much energy (such as from the sun), you can put out very little too, making you that much harder to see on the passive sensors.

I posted this in SDN's starship crew thread. It's an adaptation based on CANON!!111!! events in my 'verse, so what the hell might as well do it here too.

The short version: I think starship crews will have a lot of down time.



Astrophysicists Log
just another starfleet weblog

Stardate 2421.1

We're going on a real life starship! If you haven't heard about the mission to the outer system and our companion star, you can learn more here: rsea.sci.gov.ase/missions/manned/companion-grand-tour.

tl;dr: the planets and the beta star are aligned such that we can take a grand tour - an opportunity that only comes once in several centuries. The companion star, for the next decade, will be about thirty times as far from the sun as our home. As a result, there would be several hours of light speed lag on remote control, making any real time operation impossible.

Since preprogramming has several limitations, to make the most of this unique opportunity, the space agency decided to send people.

My dear friend, Leila, and I, have been among the forty-two specialists selected for the starship's crew. I'm on as a computer/star physics guy, and she's there mainly as geologist and medicine, though we all can do a bunch of side things too.

Training starts next month, and I'll keep you appraised of the mission, through this blog, from start to finish!

Stardate 2451.4

Our mission training started today, in the RCA Space Flight Center on the ground. From the syllabus, most of it looks pretty boring; the same old stuff we've done on every other formal space mission. It covers it all though, from teleoperating various robots, to even some basic laboratory stuff, to solving every problem the engineers could dream up that might arise.

To be honest, sometimes, I think it's kinda ridiculous. We've all been in space before, especially for this mission: every one of us have Starfleet experience, but hell, a lot of people privately own spacecraft nowadays too, with very little training at all!

But, on the other hand, this is what separates astronauts from simple space commuters: we know all our shit, and we have to: there's no rescue tows where we're going.

Stardate 2580.5

Something of more interest to Leila than I... but the mission had a launch today. A robot ship is going ahead to set up a couple laboratories on the fifth planet. As we pass by, we'll be taking control of it via telepresence link (the latency will be low enough as we pass - something lightspeed lag makes impossible from here) and performing geological surveys.

Stardate 2973.2

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but it's just been rote repetition of the same procedures for a while now. Nothing interesting to talk about! But, finally.... almost two god damned years, but the training is complete! We launch in a little under thirty days.

Stardate 3003.8

I'm posting this from the starship! And wow, that was one hell of a burn. This is a big fucking ship, over ten thousand tons, and we'd like this mission to be done sometime this decade, so we needed a *lot* of speed.

Using giant staged boosters from low planetary orbit, we dumped tens of thousands of tons of propellant into the planet's gravity well. We actually felt over acceleration rising for over ten minutes that peaked at well over 1g! That's a feat for any spacecraft, but one this size, incredible. The engineers really outdid themselves this time.

I knew the mission profile, but wow, actually feeling that.... we're screaming through space now motherfuckers!

Stardate 3030.4

Watching ST:TNG again. Most the team is in on it; we all gather around the main situation monitor (our own viewscreen! :-P) for two episodes a day.

It seems a little early to start into TNG, but we just wanted it. See, we copied metric shitloads of tv, movies, and games to the ship's harddrive in anticipation of the long periods with nothing else to do, but we still have to ration it a little or we'll be seeing repeats before we even arrive at the other star!

Stardate 3110.2

We just passed the outer habitats' orbit, and the sun is starting to look small. We're going so far away from home....

I know this is irrational of me, but I feel.... cold.

Stardate 3245.6

The air in here fucking sticks today. Jesus H. Christ. Maybe I'll just clean the fucking filters myself.

You know, God damn it, why am I even on this mission? Aside from this trivial horseshit - which wouldn't even be an issue if it was a motherfucking probe - there's nothing I'm doing here that I couldn't have done from home... with a stationary telescope, no less.

Ugh.


Stardate 3290.9

Yay, good Star Trek time again! We figured we'd give Voyager and Enterprise another go, just to burn time, and there's some good stuff in there... but now that's over, and boy, I'm happy to see Captain Kirk again!

Yeah, baby!

Stardate 3320.3

I know you guys come to this blog for talk about science, not science fiction.... but, really, that's what we do on this ship. We bitch, we write, and we watch science fiction. I'm not kidding, that's just about it. Newton guides the ship, and aside from a few janitorial tasks, the ship otherwise just takes care of itself.

But, I've been thinking, Kirk and Picard have a lot more exciting lives than we do... but maybe that's a curse. Look how many times they've almost lost their ships.

By the time Kirk was a year into his mission, he had already lost several people! I'm happy to report that all forty-two of us are still alive and in good health.


Stardate 3401.7

It's time to actually do some work! Unbelievable, I know! Actually, not for me... I'm sitting out, again, but Leila's excited; she's having some fun with it already.

We're coming up on the fifth planet, where one of the robot ships was launched ahead of us. This planet is a kind of super-earth; I'm sure you've heard of it in school. This isn't the first time a robot has visited it, but it is the first time people actually have.


It's actually kinda cool. We've already been able to follow up on more stuff, right here on day one, than the last probe did in a week. Leila says the latency is still pretty annoying - a lot of it is doing the action in a semi-simulated environment, transmitting the commands as a batch down there, and getting it back a few seconds later, but hey, at least it's seconds and not minutes or hours.

... or years... come to think of it, that's what training was, lol. Are all of us astronauts just teleoperated robots in long term batch mode?

Stardate 3403.1

I take it back! There is some work for me to do! Leila wants me to tweak the program on one of the autonomous robots to seize some new discovery. This is fairly minor change, but it's going to take me a little while to make sure it's right. We might be able to re-flash the software remotely - the telerobots can even pick them up physically if needed - but that's the kind of unscripted cowboying we're supposed to be avoiding through training.

Just have to carefully follow the procedure to tweak the program... seriously, astronauts are just meaty robots, I tell you.

Stardate 3410.7

The toilet broke. Fucking lovely. The smell is back. Yeah yeah, it's getting fixed. Poop.

Stardate 3421.4

Leila just beamed down to the planet! Actually, she got to use one of the full immersion telerobots for a couple hours, but yeah, that's what we're calling it. We'll take what real life Trek action we can get.

The downside to scream through the solar system like we're doing though is we don't get to stick around for all that long. Real time robot operation requires very little latency. Software can fake it to some degree, using the kind of prediction algorithms you see in online video games, but the limit is amazingly small in astronomical terms.

The ideal teleoperation condition is when you are (more or less) stationary relative to the robot, are physically pretty close, and have a direct connection of all high quality, high bandwidth cabling and components.

That's why we don't use them very often for ground to space operations - if you are stationary, you're too far away, and if you are close enough, your orbit means the conditions cycle.

They're great for working on the outside of your ship from the inside. They're even great for some varieties of working from home.

But, for a flyby space mission, they aren't perfect, but (I'm told!) it really was fucking cool when we got close enough for the predictive algorithms to make it work in real time. She said it was like she was actually on that alien world, doing science.

I probably won't get to try it though :-( There's just not enough time to screw around with it here.

Still, that's fucking awesome. She's happy she got to do that.

Stardate 3445.2

Aaaand we're out of range for the teleoperated laboratory again. My tweaked program is doing good work though. Maybe the folks on the ground can get more stuff out of this, and I think Leila is going to be analyzing data and writing up papers during the day for a while now.


Stardate 3452.9

The Goa'uld have so much style! SG-1 isn't quite the same to me, not since I went on that mission to the lost habitat cluster, but holy shit this is good television.

Stardate 3454.2

The Internet is brutally slow now. I tried to post in some forums, but by the time I read the post and my reply arrived, there were already two hundred new posts in the thread, and my posting token expired. Fucking light lag.

I'll have to write up a little bot to automatically renew my post token and maybe handle those replies too....

Stardate 3470.5

It's my birthday again... my second one aboard this ship. Y'know, people asked me, "you're practically immortal, so what do you care about a ten year mission?".

Let me tell you this: whether you're immortal or a fruit fly, a year is a pretty long time to be away from home. Ten years is a really fucking long time.

I'm keeping up on changes at home through the internet connection I post this from. The lag isn't so bad for seeing batched updates, and we still have plenty of bandwidth for text and the occasional picture, even as the comm laser signal weakens with distance.

But still, I'm not actually there, and I can't visit... not even with video chat. It's making me feel cold again :-(




=====

eh I think that's enough for now.

I have my shields!

Rotating armor might help spread laser fire around, prolonging it's lifespan. A steady shot, instead of drilling a hole, now carves a little groove.

If there's multiple layers of rotating, it makes even following the rotation hard to penetrate.


This will be fairly new technology, in the later part of the timeline. The characters, being Star Trek fans (who cares if it's 20,000 years into the future or whatever. The day Star Trek stops having fans is the day the world ends.), will of course call it by the most awesomeist name evar.

Shields up!

BTW if you want to make your life a lot more awesomesauce, grab the soundtracks to Star Trek II and The Best of Both Worlds. Play them.

Whoa.


And grab the kick ass fight song from Amok Time too. And The Doomsday Machine had some awesome shit too. I need to get that one.

IMO Jerry Goldsmith's scores for TMP and FC feel more 'Star Trekky' than anything else save the music from TOS. Alexander Courage, Fred Steiner, Sol Kaplan, and Gerald Fried gave Star Trek it's sound.

That's not to say TWoK's score wasn't good. But I tend to view it as a departure from what had been previously established (and it's no coincidence that the movie, story, and look and feel of TWoK carried a militaristic style to it).

I'd agree with that.