Trends in your own sci fi and/or preferences?

Destructionator XV · Post by **Destructionator XV** » Fri Dec 03, 2010 9:42 am

Yesterday, I was writing up another ship design for my sci-fi universe, and noticed something interesting: I've dropped yet another zero from my typical size numbers. (This time, in total ship mass. I used to assume 100,000 tons as my starting point. I'm down to 100 or 1000 as my starting point now!)

It is part of a trend I've been following for the last few years - everything is getting smaller and smaller. From ship size to weapon energy to populations and team numbers.

There's two reasons for this: one is my movement toward more conservative realism. This makes the technical numbers get smaller, for a variety of reasons.

The other thing I like about small sizes is I can detail a larger percentage of it. If the ship has a crew of 200, there's no way to get to know everyone. They'll always be those faceless background guys who seem like they should help on this adventure, but never actually are.

With a crew of 7 though, we can get to know all of them. The reason they are the ones we always see on the adventures? They are the only ones there!

You have a small fleet. The same handful of ships keep recurring.

A smaller cast means we can give more attention to each individual and it neatly explains recurring characters!

The downside is there are no redshirts to throw away, but I can live with that.

While these justifications are weak - we still focus on the same number of characters either way, since the background isn't that important - I still like the idea of having the large percentage of the total fleshed out!

Anyway, have you noticed any trends in your own styles or preferences over time?

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:51 am

Since no-one else has picked this up I thought I'd throw in my two cents.

To the question in the final line, yes I have noticed my preferences have changed quite considerably. I used to be a huge fan of the big, slow, ponderous Battlewagon style we see in lots of space opera, like Star Destroyers, EarthForce Destroyers from B5 and Galactica. Lately though I've wondered how cool would it be to show a semi-hard style fight where you're strapped into an acceleration couch and things are more or less handled by autopilot and computer control and humans are kind of along for the ride and are the ones who basically go 'ok computer, kill this'.

I mean really when you sit down and watch some sci-fi battles, a lot of the time it's just Kirk does something to outwit the Romulan or whatever. Which is cool, but at some point you just want to watch a battle where sometimes a quirk of the wind is what carries the day, like in the age of sail.

And I also want to see Red's Humanist Inheritance on the big screen or something. Holy shit that would be awesome.

~

I also like the idea of a huge fleet of small ships, where the ships are more like patrol boats with impressive hardware and powerful weapons but small crews because fights have a high chance of ending badly for people, so to keep things minimalised you spread the potential losses by having more ships with smaller crews. I mean if you lose the battleship with thousands of people onboard then you're in a worse position than if you lose a dozen patrol boats which only have maybe a couple dozen dudes on them.

It also depends on what your military forces are supposed to do anyway. Battlestar made me scratch my head because they had these huge million ton battleship carrier things only. This was before the Cylons became a threat. Why the fuck do you need that much hardware? That's why I more and more like the sort of set up we see in, say, Aliens, where the Sulaco is a basically glorified marine transport which can run on autopilot. Why do you need fleets of star destroyers when to quell a colonist uprising on Mars where there's like, only a couple hundred dudes stirring up trouble. Those patrol boats might also have a small contingent of marines onboard to be a little bit useful.

I guess you also have to wonder how space conflict evolved in the first place. Like you don't want to just go 'ok here's a setting where we have million-ton battleship/carrier things go nuts' because then you think why do they build a handful of those ships and not have combined arms in their fleets. (outside of the obvious answer that sometimes budget constraints will prevent you from depicting a lot of what could have been on the drawing board)

Like if we were to have a semi-hard or even viagra-hard setting that's one of the first things you need to work out when you do world building. Did space war start with nothing but killsats and shit like the Soviets on the moon refused a yank spaceship clearance for landing and someone at the White House went THIS WILL NOT STAND YAR and thus the Space Force was born? How did it start, how did astronauts graduate from peaceful explorers and scientists to RAR MY NAME IS JOHN SHEPARD SUPER SPACE MARINE. Does it even make sense for it to evolve that way?

Destructionator XV · Post by **Destructionator XV** » Sun Dec 05, 2010 1:01 pm

Stofsk wrote:Lately though I've wondered how cool would it be to show a semi-hard style fight where you're strapped into an acceleration couch and things are more or less handled by autopilot and computer control and humans are kind of along for the ride and are the ones who basically go 'ok computer, kill this'.

I love it.

One thing that might be weird, but way cool and unique, is the battle might be an almost dignified affair inside the ship. The crew section can be fairly deep inside, and the hits don't need to rock the ship or blow up consoles. The people aren't running around or frantically working controls - they just monitor the computer's progress, relatively helpless.

It'd be calm in there, but at the same time, everybody knows what is going on.

And I also want to see Red's Humanist Inheritance on the big screen or something. Holy shit that would be awesome.

Hell yeah.

I also like the idea of a huge fleet of small ships, where the ships are more like patrol boats with impressive hardware and powerful weapons but small crews because fights have a high chance of ending badly for people, so to keep things minimalised you spread the potential losses by having more ships with smaller crews.

This brings me to two other things:

A justification (or lack of one) for the big ships is the ship's mission. What the are you doing with such huge size? I've found the only time a big ship is really needed is for a long trip, like a 5 year mission kind of thing. I've been moving more and more to something like an Air Force kind of setup instead of a Navy, where bases are established (could be mobile ships - we are in space, after all), but the actual bulk of things are done on relatively short flights. Not fighter plane short though - small ship launched from a mothership.

The other is something people make fun of Gene Roddenberry for, but I like it - everybody on the ship is a highly trained officer. I guess that's actually kinda air force like too - the officers go out and the maintenance guys stay at the base.

I guess you also have to wonder how space conflict evolved in the first place.

A related question is what the map looks like - are planets all united? Are they many countries on each one? Is there an Earth-America and a Mars-America and also an Earth-Canada and a Mars-Canada?

If the planets are just whole vs whole, long range warships might be needed, but part vs part means you could just transport stuff to the remote area and work right out of there.

I don't think I've ever seen something like that, except for Red's HI, of course.

Does it even make sense for it to evolve that way?

There's so many possibilities. With the right accidents of history, almost anything can work. I've been liking more and more things that are just different - less today's military in spaaaace and more, just new stuff.
Back to Star Trek again, I rather like the Starfleet double duty thing.

I keep appreciating Star Trek TOS and TNG more and more. It's really something different in a lot of ways.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » Sun Dec 05, 2010 11:22 pm

Destructionator XV wrote:I love it.

One thing that might be weird, but way cool and unique, is the battle might be an almost dignified affair inside the ship. The crew section can be fairly deep inside, and the hits don't need to rock the ship or blow up consoles. The people aren't running around or frantically working controls - they just monitor the computer's progress, relatively helpless.

It'd be calm in there, but at the same time, everybody knows what is going on.

Actually I don't think it would be calm. Tensions ought to be so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw. In such a proposed setting, the human crew virtually do nothing more than designate targets for the computer and press 'ok'. They live or die based on a huge number of variables that they can't process quickly enough therefore its left up to the computer. Imagine doing high-burn manoeuvres while missiles are launched and approaching the enemy while their counter volley has launched to intercept and retaliate against you. You have lasers but with high-gee manoeuvres and at a fair distance away it's a bit like shooting in the dark. The closer you get the more useful lasers become, but lasers also burn out after prolonged use.

Maybe you don't need lasers but some kind of coilgun or railgun thing. Ok, fights become missile duels at long range with slugs getting thrown at short range. All the calculations and shit would be done by the computer, so ultimately the crew is almost like ballast. They're there to add the human element so that nobody fires a shot at something that nobody has identified (which would be a problem for drones, and perhaps also a problem for remote control if telemetry and shit can be fooled by electronic warfare).

I can see a battle being a tense thing where the most important things the human crew can do is do things to prepare for winning. Discuss the impending battle by going 'ok do we make a longer burn to give us more speed but potentially cut our ability to manoeuvre, how far do we spread ourselves so when we lose one ship we don't lose two or more at the same volley' etc. That's also where you can do some improvised tech tricks where the resident Scotty or LaForge goes 'we've jury-rigged these missiles to dumbfire and only approach the enemy fleet which we hope we can use to sneak past their counter volley.' That was in Red's book.

All those things are really necessary to show the audience that the characters are serious and competent professionals and that the battles they're about to be in are dangerous and really vulnerable to vagaries of fortune. Take a flotilla of about half a dozen ships each, assume equal numbers of missiles and other defences. Who wins? Is it MAD? What if the defenders are protecting a asteroid habitat which is a strategic port in that sector? (it may be the only port of call, has a huge stockpile of fuel and things and maybe a lot of harbour whores as well) The defenders might very well fight to the death. What if in this drama, the attackers had started off with a dozen ships (giving them a 2-to-1 advantage over the defenders) but because they got surprised by something, maybe they got attacked by drones or mines or had another sortie with defenders, so they lost a few ships and others had been disabled or were trailing behind by a few days.

If you're the squadron commander of the attacking flotilla, do you abort? Well... what if you can't? What if you don't have enough delta-v to return to your nearest base, and so you need that fuel that's on the asteroid habitat? What if you really *have* to fight, and *have* to win, otherwise you're dead no matter what? The stakes can be really high in such a setting, I would think. And for the defenders? It is literally their home base they're protecting. They've got nowhere to go if they retreat. There are no brigs on these ships either so they can't surrender. And both sides realise that success or failure will depend on which side's computers make their calculations a nanosecond quicker than the other side. A quirk of the wind.

This brings me to two other things:

A justification (or lack of one) for the big ships is the ship's mission. What the are you doing with such huge size? I've found the only time a big ship is really needed is for a long trip, like a 5 year mission kind of thing.

I actually would love to see a show that's Star Trek-y but obviously not set in the Trek universe, but instead people use semi-hard or viagra-hard methods for exploring the galaxy. Lets say you have a FTL drive that, surprisingly, takes relativity into account. So just because you can go to Alpha Centauri in the blink of an eye doesn't mean you go there instantaneously as far as the universe is concerned. From your perspective, the trip was instant, from everyone else's perspective, you disappeared in orbit of Uranus and reappeared four years three months later in orbit of Alpha Centauri. (yeah I got that idea from Red's book, again)

Using this particular drive, one thing becomes utterly clear from the outset - you can't ever go home again. Earth will still be there but it won't be the same Earth as you remembered it or as you left it. Knowing full well the implications of this, you'd have a crew who would be all-volunteer, in all likelihood would have no family ties (or if they had they would be severed by necessity), and the show would never, ever return to earth except possibly at the end of it, at the end of the 'five decade' mission (maybe a mere five years have passed as far as the crew is concerned but to people back home, things are of course different).

Ships would be huge, would have everything you could think of, kind of like the Enterprise in that regard and though everyone would be officers or whatever you'd still at some point go 'holy shit ensign jane is preggers because she's been fucking ensign steve, what do we do???' What if she wants to have the baby because she left behind someone special on earth and realises just how much she was giving up when she did so but didn't realise it at the time? It turns out maybe you can have families in space. (although Trek probably didn't implement this idea in any competent form)

The drama this kind of story could have is you're characters are pushing out into the galaxy to see what's out there, but they would be truly alone. It would be like TOS but done viagra style.

I've been moving more and more to something like an Air Force kind of setup instead of a Navy, where bases are established (could be mobile ships - we are in space, after all), but the actual bulk of things are done on relatively short flights. Not fighter plane short though - small ship launched from a mothership.

I like that idea. You'd probably still have 'immobile' (perhaps not the correct term since everything in space is moving in orbit of something, whether it be a planet or the sun) assets like from asteroid or o'neill colonies where there would be a large amount of people and supplies and stuff. Spacemen still need R&R. But I like the idea of having huge 'battlewagon' style assets that actually don't move all that much. They'd be kind of like mobile battlestations. It might even be impossible to survive a frontal assault against them and if you send your own battlestation on an intercept orbit, the best you can probably hope for is a MAD situation where they just annihilate each other.

The other is something people make fun of Gene Roddenberry for, but I like it - everybody on the ship is a highly trained officer. I guess that's actually kinda air force like too - the officers go out and the maintenance guys stay at the base.

People make fun of it because Trek uses naval nomenclature but it doesn't appear to be a navy organisation as such (though they did have enlisted ranks onboard in some episodes, though in TOS virtually every speaking-part was from an officer). You have the infamous 'this is the flagship of the Federation!' which doesn't mean what naval flagships mean. People (milwankers) automatically assume that's done by accident or because they didn't understand what these terms mean. On the other hand, as I am fond of saying, why should the Trek universe be beholden to our C21 frame of reference? Why does it have to be 'the USN in SPAAAACE' all the time? And also I like the idea of the space force evolving out of the air force, which seems way more realistic to me than anything else. The whole 'starfleet is a wet navy analogue and space is just a really huge ocean and planets are islands in this ocean' analogy is done to death IMO.

A related question is what the map looks like - are planets all united? Are they many countries on each one? Is there an Earth-America and a Mars-America and also an Earth-Canada and a Mars-Canada?

If the planets are just whole vs whole, long range warships might be needed, but part vs part means you could just transport stuff to the remote area and work right out of there.

I don't think I've ever seen something like that, except for Red's HI, of course.

Yep. Also societies will change over time. Maybe the Chinese, Americans and fuck I dunno, Canadians as well colonised Mars. What if a war breaks out on Earth? Would the settlements on Mars go 'well shit, lets start making guns and bombs'? Or would they go well, we're so far away from 'home' that what does it even matter? Maybe the ironic thing is the three colonies will band together because they need to pool their resources in order for their colonies to become self-sufficient. Hell, maybe that was going on all the time even before some idiot back on earth pushed the button. Maybe they had colonised Mars decades ago but budget constraints kept cutting bits here and there for shit they needed, and you can only get resupplied once a year or so. So at some point the Martians began to cooperate with each other out of necessity and thus formed ties that way. And when shit hits the fan back home the people on mars went 'you know what, we're not earthers anymore but martians, deal with it'.

I'd imagine a lot of island-3 colonies orbiting earth might develop and evolve in a similar way, but they're a lot closer to earth so any rebellions that take place are easier to deal with. In the martian example, if you're the President of US or China, and you hear your far-flung mars colonists have decided to secede in protest of your war with the other side, what do you do? Do you begin plans to send in the marines? They're fairly far away, and at the moment you're battling with your chief strategic in WW3 (or who knows, maybe it's the fourth or fifth

). What can you do? I have a hard time accepting either China or US going 'that shit's not going to stand'.

What if the martians know this, so instead of going 'we're the United Polity of Mars Settlements now bitches!' they went 'shit Canada is neutral so how about we all pretend we joined Canada?' Because there are of course three colonies on Mars. Then Canada back on earth reacts by going 'WHAAAAT'

So we have space war which is totally unlike anything ever seen before on TV sci-fi. We have a viagra hard version of Star Trek that would make the characters completely cut off from resupply from earth for the entire duration of their mission, so they have to rely on each other in a way we take for granted when we watch actual episodes of Trek. And a political science fiction story where the 'war' is distant in relation to where the protagonists are, who have to make their own way in the universe because 'home' is where you are, not where you're form. Hell these are good ideas for novels or tv shows or even movies. (I would get a huge kick out of watching the space war on the big screen)

There's so many possibilities. With the right accidents of history, almost anything can work. I've been liking more and more things that are just different - less today's military in spaaaace and more, just new stuff.
Back to Star Trek again, I rather like the Starfleet double duty thing.

Double duty? You mean exploration as well as defence?

I keep appreciating Star Trek TOS and TNG more and more. It's really something different in a lot of ways.

Yeah. I really like TOS more though, TNG was good but also had some stupid episodes and silly ideas. I get a huge kick out of watching 'The Cage' actually. It is so different even from TOS. I love how the landing party beams down and they put on jackets, and they have packs of supplies. There was also little things like Mojave having been greened in the C23 and Pike getting punished by the Talosians conjuring up an image of him burning in hell, and calling it 'from a fable you once heard in childhood'. Rigel VII looks almost magical and certainly fantastic as far as matte paintings go of alien worlds. And the Talosians were villains who had actual motivations rather than being snidely whiplash.

I often wonder what if 'The Cage' had become the model for TOS rather than 'Where No Man Has Gone Before'. Although as I understand it Jeffrey Hunter was convinced by his wife not to return to the role when the call for a second pilot was made. So we would have gotten Kirk regardless I would think. Nevertheless I really liked Captain Pike, Number One, and Spock as a junior officer.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » Sun Dec 05, 2010 11:31 pm

man i can't believe i mistook prozac for viagra

Destructionator XV · Post by **Destructionator XV** » Mon Dec 06, 2010 10:07 am

Stofsk wrote:Actually I don't think it would be calm. Tensions ought to be so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw.

Sure, what I'm thinking though is from the outside looking in - the visuals, the sounds. You'd sell the tension and action through something not like a typical battle scene in most sci fi, which is defined by the flashy things and frantic action.

You know, there is one big screen example that might sell this: the end of Star Wars, with the characters in the base. There was nothing Leia and the others could do - it was completely out of their hands, but the scenes still sold the situation dramatically. (That's certainly among my favorite space battles of television and movies. None of the other Star Wars fights come close to selling the human aspect I got from the original. The shots of the base and the radio chatter (and the build up) just worked far better than all the fancy models and computer graphics of the rest of the series.)

And Red's book worked pretty well like this too in the battles. They are one of the bigger influences on how my own dramatic battle scenes go now too.

I can see a battle being a tense thing where the most important things the human crew can do is do things to prepare for winning. Discuss the impending battle by going 'ok do we make a longer burn to give us more speed but potentially cut our ability to manoeuvre, how far do we spread ourselves so when we lose one ship we don't lose two or more at the same volley' etc. That's also where you can do some improvised tech tricks where the resident Scotty or LaForge goes 'we've jury-rigged these missiles to dumbfire and only approach the enemy fleet which we hope we can use to sneak past their counter volley.' That was in Red's book.

Yea, it's pure awesome. I generally find the lead-up into a fight to be more exciting than the fight itself. You have that stuff, you might have attempts to get an edge elsewhere (like in TNG "The Defector" with Picard secretly putting Klingons in play - him and Tomalak talking about dying together was way cooler than any shooting could actually be), and of course any negotiations, trying to talk their way out of the actual fight, or having the characters make their hopeful decisions and maybe it doesn't turn out so good.

If you're the squadron commander of the attacking flotilla, do you abort? Well... what if you can't? What if you don't have enough delta-v to return to your nearest base, and so you need that fuel that's on the asteroid habitat? What if you really *have* to fight, and *have* to win, otherwise you're dead no matter what?

I'd imagine surrender is still an option, even without brigs on the ship, since you do have that base. It might be a bit dicy for the attackers to use it, but the defenders should certainly be able to, so capturing surrendering attackers seems like it should be an option.

Though, in general, I agree this is good stuff. Let me quote myself from another forum last week:

Destructionator wrote:One last thing, on launch windows: what you call a limit, I call an opportunity. It's a classic race against the clock, in space.

Launch windows are one of the things that make alien invasions of Earth workable.

"we have two weeks left before it closes better work fast and take chances"

"can't launch yet. since we're stuck here for a while, up for some character development?"

"uhh we dont have 2 years worth of shit. wanna invade earth?"

I wrote some of this up on sdn and testingstan too. Limitations are quite the amazing enablers!

And both sides realise that success or failure will depend on which side's computers make their calculations a nanosecond quicker than the other side. A quirk of the wind.

I almost think Red worked this into his book too, but the biggest heroes might be the computer scientists!

"I analyzed the data from our last battle and think I've found a bug in their threat ranking algorithm...."

(Some would say this can't happen because the military is omfg perfect, but thankfully, reality disagrees!)

I actually would love to see a show that's Star Trek-y but obviously not set in the Trek universe, but instead people use semi-hard or viagra-hard methods for exploring the galaxy. Lets say you have a FTL drive that, surprisingly, takes relativity into account. So just because you can go to Alpha Centauri in the blink of an eye doesn't mean you go there instantaneously as far as the universe is concerned. From your perspective, the trip was instant, from everyone else's perspective, you disappeared in orbit of Uranus and reappeared four years three months later in orbit of Alpha Centauri. (yeah I got that idea from Red's book, again)

Relativity actually works like that too - you can accelerate forever from your own perspective, but never break lightspeed from anyone else's perspective. The time and length changes in relativity allow that. Of course, getting a rocket to allow that isn't so easy..

But if you waved your hands to allow that kind of thing*, and then again to get some aliens of the week to play with, it'd totally work. Not only do we get what you're saying, but it could also really explore things like city in space. They are going far away, best to take a slice of home with them.

Then when they return, it isn't just with knowledge of the galaxy, but also with knowledge of Earth's own past: some of their cargo might be a kind of time capsule thing, stuff people wanted preserved into the future to show to their grandkids and whatnot.

* Mike Combs wrote a short about this in his series. http://writings.mike-combs.com/riteques.htm

They have a wormhole but it is too small to fit a ship through. They ask a famous engineer to look into making it bigger. But he concludes they are asking the wrong question. Spoiler: [h]Open a wormhole to the sun instead of to the destination and let solar plasma jet out the other end, at the back of your ship - virtually infinite fuel for your rocket![/h]

Ships would be huge, would have everything you could think of, kind of like the Enterprise in that regard and though everyone would be officers or whatever you'd still at some point go 'holy shit ensign jane is preggers because she's been fucking ensign steve, what do we do???'

On the other hand, this might be expected and accounted for. It probably depends on if it was a 5 year (subjective) mission or more - short trips might be expected to have people more under control than long ones. A longer one would be a kind of mobile colony with a mission, and internally treated like that.

The drama this kind of story could have is you're characters are pushing out into the galaxy to see what's out there, but they would be truly alone. It would be like TOS but done viagra style.

I wonder if there'd be Federation colonies for the ship to visit too. Maybe and older, slower ship launched along time ago and the Erecterprise goes to check up on them too. TOS did that one or two times I believe, it'd be fun to see.

I like that idea. You'd probably still have 'immobile' (perhaps not the correct term since everything in space is moving in orbit of something, whether it be a planet or the sun) assets like from asteroid or o'neill colonies where there would be a large amount of people and supplies and stuff. Spacemen still need R&R.

Those don't need to be military though, just regular civilian ports could work in a lot of situations. (I guess that's like an aircraft carrier coming in) Or it might be built into the mobile base, though that's dangerous. Still, back in the old days, civilians would follow armies around, so maybe something that is officially discouraged but unofficially relied on by the grunts.

But I like the idea of having huge 'battlewagon' style assets that actually don't move all that much. They'd be kind of like mobile battlestations. It might even be impossible to survive a frontal assault against them and if you send your own battlestation on an intercept orbit, the best you can probably hope for is a MAD situation where they just annihilate each other.

On the other hand, they might not be armed, after all, they're supporting have a fleet to do that stuff!

Though, I also support space fortresses, barely movable at all, almost impossible to kill conventionally, but nevertheless something you can't ignore if you attack.

Take a medium size asteroid and hollow it out. That's your long term base. Now add long range lasers and telescopes and such to the surface with shutters to protect them... use the large size to support constant laser fire of a magnitude greater than half the starfleet at incredible range. (That is, the individual shots don't need to be strong, but it is in such large volume and long range that you'll just be whittled down before getting into your goal! You leave with a polished ship and arrive looking like a golf ball..)

On the other hand, as I am fond of saying, why should the Trek universe be beholden to our C21 frame of reference?

Amen.

*snip awesome colony stuff*

Awesome.

I have a hard time accepting either China or US going 'that shit's not going to stand'.

But, what if there's loyalists our there who ask for help? Is the home country still going to abandon them? Maybe yes, though that wouldn't be a very friendly message for people in the future; loyalty has to go both ways.

I can just see a variety of things coming out of it. Either decision can work, and both have their things to go down.

What if the martians know this, so instead of going 'we're the United Polity of Mars Settlements now bitches!' they went 'shit Canada is neutral so how about we all pretend we joined Canada?' Because there are of course three colonies on Mars. Then Canada back on earth reacts by going 'WHAAAAT'

Now that's something hilariously win.

All good stuff anyway!

Double duty? You mean exploration as well as defence?

Yes. In that trek fleet counts thread over there, I speculated that a starship might be assigned to defend/generally help out a populated sector, but since they aren't needed most the time, they spend most the time exploring to keep from doing nothing.

Those specifics aren't needed, but having the ships to multiple jobs is cool stuff.

I get a huge kick out of watching 'The Cage' actually. It is so different even from TOS.

I haven't seen it for a long time... I should watch it again, I don't remember most the little details you mentioned.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » Wed Dec 08, 2010 12:04 pm

Destructionator XV wrote:
Stofsk wrote:Actually I don't think it would be calm. Tensions ought to be so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw.
Sure, what I'm thinking though is from the outside looking in - the visuals, the sounds. You'd sell the tension and action through something not like a typical battle scene in most sci fi, which is defined by the flashy things and frantic action.

Yeah. Most people will be strapped down on acceleration couches. You can use sounds like the deafening roar of missile launches and shake the camera for high gee manoeuvres and show close ups of people withstanding the strain of those manoeuvres which shows just how fast they're going and how much of an effect it has on them.

Most action scenes would have the characters standing or sitting upright looking at a console. The idea you're flat as a pancake because high gee manoeuvres are no joke isn't something I've seen in a show before.

You know, there is one big screen example that might sell this: the end of Star Wars, with the characters in the base. There was nothing Leia and the others could do - it was completely out of their hands, but the scenes still sold the situation dramatically. (That's certainly among my favorite space battles of television and movies. None of the other Star Wars fights come close to selling the human aspect I got from the original. The shots of the base and the radio chatter (and the build up) just worked far better than all the fancy models and computer graphics of the rest of the series.)

Agreed. I love it how Luke turns off his targeting computer and you see the concerned reactions people have in the Rebel HQ. It's the ultimate leap of faith because the Rebellion would literally be doomed if he misses.

Yea, it's pure awesome. I generally find the lead-up into a fight to be more exciting than the fight itself. You have that stuff, you might have attempts to get an edge elsewhere (like in TNG "The Defector" with Picard secretly putting Klingons in play - him and Tomalak talking about dying together was way cooler than any shooting could actually be), and of course any negotiations, trying to talk their way out of the actual fight, or having the characters make their hopeful decisions and maybe it doesn't turn out so good.

When you think about it, it's because the characters are being proactive towards achieving an objective. The fight is the pay-off to all the prep work the characters do.

I'd imagine surrender is still an option, even without brigs on the ship, since you do have that base. It might be a bit dicy for the attackers to use it, but the defenders should certainly be able to, so capturing surrendering attackers seems like it should be an option.

Well that might depend on the individual squadron commander or ship commander. If you're attacking a base in ships which allow for no quarter (and would probably be difficult to even do SAR stuff for a destroyed ship - do you have escape pods? Is there even a point? If your spaceship gets hit by a single missile, is it simply 'mission killed' or is everyone onboard chillin' with a lethal dose of x-rays or gamma-rays or what? There may well not be a point at all given the lethality of combat.

Though, in general, I agree this is good stuff. Let me quote myself from another forum last week:

Destructionator wrote:One last thing, on launch windows: what you call a limit, I call an opportunity. It's a classic race against the clock, in space.

Launch windows are one of the things that make alien invasions of Earth workable.

"we have two weeks left before it closes better work fast and take chances"

"can't launch yet. since we're stuck here for a while, up for some character development?"

"uhh we dont have 2 years worth of shit. wanna invade earth?"

I wrote some of this up on sdn and testingstan too. Limitations are quite the amazing enablers!

But but but but invasions being carried out by people who don't know what they're doing? That's never happened before!

And both sides realise that success or failure will depend on which side's computers make their calculations a nanosecond quicker than the other side. A quirk of the wind.
I almost think Red worked this into his book too, but the biggest heroes might be the computer scientists!

"I analyzed the data from our last battle and think I've found a bug in their threat ranking algorithm...."

Yeah Red's my primary inspiration for all this. I think his book has really changed my perceptions of what semi-hard or viagra-hard sf can look like.

Another was 'The Night's Dawn' trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton (but that's comfortably jelly-soft sf) which showed space combat depends on high-gee manoeuvres and missile spam, and the missiles themselves have numerous types and subtypes and include bomb-pumped lasers, e-war, kinetic-kill, submunitions etc.

(Some would say this can't happen because the military is omfg perfect, but thankfully, reality disagrees!)

Relativity actually works like that too - you can accelerate forever from your own perspective, but never break lightspeed from anyone else's perspective. The time and length changes in relativity allow that. Of course, getting a rocket to allow that isn't so easy..

Supposedly the humans in Avatar used a very interesting method for accelerating their interstellar spaceship - most of it is done by lasers aimed at deployable sails which gives a constant acceleration over a period of half a year which then allows the ship to traverse the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri in a few years (from the outside perspective) but I imagine time would be quicker onboard. (I got all this from Atomic Rockets btw, what's his name, Nyrath, seems to really like the film's onscreen depiction of the spaceship)

But if you waved your hands to allow that kind of thing*, and then again to get some aliens of the week to play with, it'd totally work. Not only do we get what you're saying, but it could also really explore things like city in space. They are going far away, best to take a slice of home with them.

Aircraft carriers have set this precedent for being a mobile city at sea, so it's not a huge stretch I would think. Carriers have thousands of crew onboard and need so much shit to cater to everyone.

Then when they return, it isn't just with knowledge of the galaxy, but also with knowledge of Earth's own past: some of their cargo might be a kind of time capsule thing, stuff people wanted preserved into the future to show to their grandkids and whatnot.

Epic idea. Another idea is that these star cruisers might also be colonisation projects. Or would that dilute the purpose too much? I got this idea from a Heinlein novel where torchships went from star to star looking for potential sites for habitation. The amusing thing is that they used a drive system that had to take relativity into account but they used telepaths for 'real time communication' (yeah this was one of his juvenile novels) between twins. So the brother onboard this particular ship keeps earth updated by talking to his twin who stayed behind. As the novel progresses and the ships gets farther and farther away, the 'lag' becomes more and more noticeable as the brother onboard the ship notes his brother getting older and older and eventually disinterested in the whole affair as he becomes a grandfather and so on (and the telepathy gene is apparently passed on to subsequent generations). Then after a disastrous landing where the natives attack the landing party and kill off quite a number of them, the crew vote to return to earth because the attrition rate had become too much (there was a plague that took place at some point earlier in the story, and the landing on the final planet which caused a number of deaths was the straw that broke the camel's back essentially).

Then a new ship from earth comes into the system complete with brand new FTL which makes relativity its bitch. :) The all go home that day to a world unlike the one they left. Then the hero of the story marries his great-grandniece because... uh, Heinlein is like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars

* Mike Combs wrote a short about this in his series. http://writings.mike-combs.com/riteques.htm

neat

Ships would be huge, would have everything you could think of, kind of like the Enterprise in that regard and though everyone would be officers or whatever you'd still at some point go 'holy shit ensign jane is preggers because she's been fucking ensign steve, what do we do???'
On the other hand, this might be expected and accounted for. It probably depends on if it was a 5 year (subjective) mission or more - short trips might be expected to have people more under control than long ones. A longer one would be a kind of mobile colony with a mission, and internally treated like that.

It also depends on how mature the space civilisation is. Not just on attitudes relating to sex between workers and stuff, but also child-rearing in space. If Earth is still where most people live (and it will be regardless I guess) then there might be a reluctance to treat it with the due weight it requires. If you sign on for a 5 year (subjective) mission, you might be like 'eh, I will have a kid when I get back at the end of it.' On the other hand, if you already have numerous island-3 habitats orbiting earth and most of the population for the ship's crew come from that kind of background anyway, there might be a different perspective from the outset.

When you are born in space, live and work in space, and die in space, the cycle of life becomes natural. If you come from a planet, lol I was born on Iowa I only work in outer space lol - you might feel like you won't start a family until you return to that planet.

It would be interesting actually to show divisions in the crew about this issue. Perhaps such a venture would necessitate the crew be made up of spacers, to operate the ship and conduct repairs and EVA stuff (and if we're being semi-hard or viagra hard, then those spacers might not have the physique to land on a planet - even if you assume artificial gravity can be made, it will almost certainly still be less than earth-standard), as well as people from the O'Neill habitats and perhaps even earth to come along and be the 'landing party'. The spacers would have grown up with the notion that you can take your family with you into space, while the earthers will have the opposite attitude. Also you can mine a lot of tension out of the idea that the earthers would be the ones most at risk when exploring planets if there are any hostile flora and fauna there or even intelligent aliens.

I wonder if there'd be Federation colonies for the ship to visit too. Maybe and older, slower ship launched along time ago and the Erecterprise goes to check up on them too. TOS did that one or two times I believe, it'd be fun to see.

Perhaps. Or maybe they're the first batch of starships to go out and explore the local cluster of stars for suitable habitable planets and systems. In which case there might even be a colonisation aspect to these expeditions.

Those don't need to be military though, just regular civilian ports could work in a lot of situations. (I guess that's like an aircraft carrier coming in) Or it might be built into the mobile base, though that's dangerous. Still, back in the old days, civilians would follow armies around, so maybe something that is officially discouraged but unofficially relied on by the grunts.

lol you mean 'camp followers' and 'camp whores'?

On the other hand, they might not be armed, after all, they're supporting have a fleet to do that stuff!

That's a point. It's possible to account for this in the form of treaties between space nations who seek to limit the number of 'battlestations' at all. It might become a kind of interplanetary arms race.

But, what if there's loyalists our there who ask for help? Is the home country still going to abandon them? Maybe yes, though that wouldn't be a very friendly message for people in the future; loyalty has to go both ways.

Well any colonisation effort is going to be resource-intensive to get up and running. Getting people there, getting them resupplied etc. What about terraforming a place like Mars? Not going to be cheap redirecting all those icy comets to hit the planet and to deploy solar mirrors to redirect the sun's light as well as seeding the surface with geneered lichen to help increase oxygenation of the atmosphere. Somebody has to pay for them.

Actually I already referred to it, but Hamilton's 'Night's Dawn' setting noted how the settlers of the Moon were the ones who pushed to terraform Mars where everyone else decided to opt for an O'Neil Halo of habitats orbiting earth. The reason being that the Moon has a similar gravity to Mars (similar in the sense that a Lunaran is able to acclimatise to Martian gravity a whole hell of a lot easier than to earth gravity). If you assume fusion power has become the norm, the expense could be paid for by the copious amounts of he3 deposits on the Moon, making it the energy capital of the solar system or one of them (the other would be the solar power stations).

Wait I don't think I answered your question. I don't think the home countries would abandon them. At least I hope they wouldn't. Obviously if you go through the effort to colonise and terraform another planet, you're in it for the long haul especially when dividends aren't going to come for decades or perhaps even centuries (any sort of realistic terraforming of Mars won't really be completed in any short span of time).

What if the martians know this, so instead of going 'we're the United Polity of Mars Settlements now bitches!' they went 'shit Canada is neutral so how about we all pretend we joined Canada?' Because there are of course three colonies on Mars. Then Canada back on earth reacts by going 'WHAAAAT'
Now that's something hilariously win.

All good stuff anyway!

Thanks! I just wanted to illustrate how politics is often times silly and irrational and this won't change in the future even if we have fusion rockets and space people.

Yes. In that trek fleet counts thread over there, I speculated that a starship might be assigned to defend/generally help out a populated sector, but since they aren't needed most the time, they spend most the time exploring to keep from doing nothing.

Those specifics aren't needed, but having the ships to multiple jobs is cool stuff.

Generally speaking that's what militaries do anyway, although with the proviso that there are obviously different aims and methods. But generally, when in peace time, a third of your guys are sitting in port doing onshore training, a third are being refitted for deployment, and the final third is actually on deployment. Missions are also varied as well. Obviously in war time you're in it to win it, so defence is prioritised. But in peace time there's a wide range of shit that you can do, wargames being a comparatively minor part of it (because it would be expensive to deploy everything for an exercise and because there are heaps of other jobs that you need to do). Stuff like patrolling one's territory looking (mainly) for illegal fishers (this is one of the Australian Navy's primary duties), people smuggling and other kinds of smuggling, as well as search and rescue operations and disaster relief (Lonestar over on TOB once related how his ship responded to the Tsunami that devasted Indonesia five years ago or was it six? I keep forgetting whether it was Xmas 2004 or 2005).

A lot of milwankers assume the military's only purpose in life is to defeat the Enemy and that you either Go Hard or you Go Home. We have been blessed that since the end of WW2 there hasn't been many naval engagements and what wars have occurred since 1945 hasn't been on the scale that required huge battles between fleets of warships. In light of that many ships have multi-role requirements in the face of strategic concerns since 'The Next Jutland' isn't likely to happen. While Trek gets a lot of flak for showing pyjama-wearing softcocks doing nancy-boy stuff like exploring the galaxy in their 'dress shoes' and other ludicrous strawmen, it's not even that far divorced from reality. Hell many navies have non-combat ships, and some research is even employed by the military using survey craft (submarines are especially well-suited for mapping the ocean floor). Oh noes suspension of disbelief ruined!!!

I get a huge kick out of watching 'The Cage' actually. It is so different even from TOS.
I haven't seen it for a long time... I should watch it again, I don't remember most the little details you mentioned.

The story is also one of my favourite Trek ideas. The whole premise of the Talosians were that they fucked themselves up due to their awesome power of illusion acting as a narcotic. When dreams become more important than reality you give up building, working, creating. You become more interested in living and reliving other lives.

Plus I loved the character of Pike. A man who was self-tortured and infinitely hard on himself and very introspective who had some dark impulses too - like his fantasy at the start of the episode about resigning and becoming a merchant in the Regulus or Orion colonies (which Doctor Boyce noted dealt in green animal women), which was picked up on by the Talosians later in the episode when they made Vina into an Orion slave girl. (Vina's line was very telling - 'A person's strongest dreams... are about what he can't do. Yes. A ship 's captain-- always having to be so formal, so decent and honest and proper.')

For that matter I loved the character of Vina, so tragic. It actually was nice to see the conclusion to 'The Menagerie' had Pike be reunited with her.

I liked how Kirk kept many of those character traits as well, though he was less prone to introspection. In TOS the prevailing theme is that humans are flawed creatures, but we're striving to better ourselves. I think this changed by TNG, where it seemed like the Federation was better than everyone. Richard Matheson wrote an episode of TOS where Kirk was split in half by the transporter - a 'good' Kirk who was kind and decent and intelligent but limp-wristed and indecisive, and a 'bad' Kirk who was aggressive and violent and tried to rape Yeoman Rand, but whose qualities are still necessary for Kirk to function as a commander of men. That sort of commentary is missing from TNG really. In effect TOS was saying how we as a species have an ugly nature that we can't and shouldn't hide from, but should try to understand instead. I mean wow, Kirk nearly had Scotty commit planetcide on the Eminarans in 'A Taste of Armageddon'. What a badass.

Destructionator XV · Post by **Destructionator XV** » Wed Dec 08, 2010 1:08 pm

At work but a quick note: I'm reminded of an educational coloring book thing from like 12 years ago on the various mundane, but community friendly jobs soldiers do.

The cover had a soldier planting a garden - keeping the bases looking nice and helping the Earth. Inside it had things like offices explaining how many military jobs aren't really terribly different than a day in civilian life.

I know I still have this book, and I know right where it is too. I'll have to get it out when I get home.

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Wed Dec 08, 2010 2:23 pm

Time to jump in...

It also depends on how mature the space civilisation is. Not just on attitudes relating to sex between workers and stuff, but also child-rearing in space. If Earth is still where most people live (and it will be regardless I guess) then there might be a reluctance to treat it with the due weight it requires.

I don't think it depends on some "maturity" but on the work environment. Space is after all a dangerous place. Plus there are discipline and relationship issues to consider. The reason the military adopts fraternization policy isn't some puritanical attitude towards sex but a realistic understanding on it's impact on relationships within the unit and the hardwired reactions towards sex by the individuals. That would apply on a cramped and small ship far away from any help. Can you afford to have the efficiency of the crew reduced by relationship squabbles? Can we afford to have the XO not talking to the helmsmen because they're on the outs? Military or non-military doesn't even enter into it, because even a civilian ship can expect to find itself in dangerous situations out in the beyond.

On the flip side this isn't an issue with a ship that as a crew that numbers in the thousands like an aircraft carrier as you can simply demand that they limit their sexual relations to people outside of their immediate unit. Nor is an issue on a small ship making short runs in "civilized space" if there such a thing.

If you sign on for a 5 year (subjective) mission, you might be like 'eh, I will have a kid when I get back at the end of it.' On the other hand, if you already have numerous island-3 habitats orbiting earth and most of the population for the ship's crew come from that kind of background anyway, there might be a different perspective from the outset.

Better question, can the ship afford to supply additional non-productive crewmembers aka offspring? Having children means the resource consummation of the ship goes up in the middle of the voyage. Remember this ship has to provide everything from air to food to water to clothes for everyone on it from storage or material already on board most of the time. Also, who watches the kids? Who cares for them when parents are on duty. Do we bring doctors that specialize in child bearing and child care? How do you protect a pregent women from the various hazards of space (Anne McCaffrey discussed this a bit in the Ship that Sang, her solution was to accept that a long range career in space on ships would result in damage to your sperm/ova and to have spacers store ova and sperm donations planet side so they could be assured non-damaged children). Remember it'll be easier to shield and protect an habitat then a moving ship. Mass is always an issue with star ships. It may be more economical to require some form of birth control and it may be realistic for career spacers to have their reproductive material in storage in a safer place.

Basically kids are resource sinks that will not be able to do any jobs on the ships for years, so I think a big question is can the ship afford such a drain?

I think it's gonna have more to do with the nature of the ship and it's mission then anything else. If you're on a ship of thousands that can regularly replenish it resources then yeah, sure why not? Some simple rules keep the efficiency of the ship's company from degrading and there should be built in room. If it's a colonist ship then certainly although I think some strict population controls would be in place until land fall.

Hell one question that Heinlein asked was a simple but I thought profound one. If a child is born on a starship, what planet/nation/culture is s/he a citizen of? Especially if the parents are from two different ones.

Consider this, there are thousands of stateless children due to being born to traveling professionals who work in foreign nations, because not every nation gives automatic citizenship to the children of their citizens. (This isn't an issue for children of Americans, British or as far as I know Australians having a citizen parent makes you a citizen).

Moving on...

you mean 'camp followers' and 'camp whores'?

In pre-medieval armies these people were professional contractors that were part of the army and expected to partake in military discipline despite having no combat role. In the medieval era up to the 1600s it was different due to the sheer lack of control over military units (in the later medieval ages up til the 1700s most militaries in Europe were mostly professional mercenaries after all). Many of those "camp whores" were actually common law wives or concubines. Sad to say a good number of them were also captives or de-facto slaves taken as loot. I'm willing to bet any human civilization that retains western values would be against that. Hell, I doubt one based on the Chinese or the Indains would condone it either.

One way to do it I suppose would be to have professionals hired for the voyage as a morale and wellness issue. They would work on a contract basis and be part of the crew although outside the command chain. Although that brings up different issues. Certainly puts Troi in a whole new light doesn't it? Inara from Serenity can be an example of this although she wouldn't service the crew.

Well any colonisation effort is going to be resource-intensive to get up and running. Getting people there, getting them resupplied etc. What about terraforming a place like Mars? Not going to be cheap redirecting all those icy comets to hit the planet and to deploy solar mirrors to redirect the sun's light as well as seeding the surface with geneered lichen to help increase oxygenation of the atmosphere. Somebody has to pay for them.

I think for intensive colonial effort there has to be a very good driving reason. A cooperation won't do it, no profit for to long. A nation state or a group of them might for control of resources or needed position. Hell a group of nation states might start setting up on Mars simply to have industrial resources and factories closer to the outer system reducing the turn around time. This assumes there is competition for the outer system for some reason though.

A large private group might have the reason. Consider the first settlers of the New World, the Puritans were a private concern not a government one. They were coming to separate themselves from everyone else. Can't get more separate then on another planet right?

These groups would have to be very patience and wealthy though...

As for the home countries... Well if the colonies are profitable and the nation stands to lose something, then no they won't abandon them. Remember what drove imperialism and colonialism here on earth was profit. Jamestown in the new world was a cooperate venture for money, India was about the money, the conquest of Mexico, Peru... It's not til the cost of holding them outweighs the profit that colonies gain independence (consider how after WWII most of the colonies can walk away simply because the Euros are broke or how America's fighting made it simply to expensive to hold especially when it's European allies were weighed in).

Generally speaking that's what militaries do anyway, although with the proviso that there are obviously different aims and methods. But generally, when in peace time, a third of your guys are sitting in port doing onshore training, a third are being refitted for deployment, and the final third is actually on deployment. Missions are also varied as well. Obviously in war time you're in it to win it, so defence is prioritised. But in peace time there's a wide range of shit that you can do, wargames being a comparatively minor part of it (because it would be expensive to deploy everything for an exercise and because there are heaps of other jobs that you need to do). Stuff like patrolling one's territory looking (mainly) for illegal fishers (this is one of the Australian Navy's primary duties), people smuggling and other kinds of smuggling, as well as search and rescue operations and disaster relief (Lonestar over on TOB once related how his ship responded to the Tsunami that devasted Indonesia five years ago or was it six? I keep forgetting whether it was Xmas 2004 or 2005).

All things considered military missions may look more like the 1800s then the 2000s. That means scientific research (Darwin was on a military ship for example), survey missions, diplomacy (Commodore Perry, paging Commodore Perry) or even long range exploration (Captain Cook reporting). That doesn't mean said scientists are part of the military however, Darwin was not a member of the RN when he traveled on the HMS Beagle. Civilian contractors would be a better description I think. I think in system policing (how could you police deep space?!?) would be best done by non-FTL ships.

As a Marine I will say anyone who says wargames are minor will get the military they deserve. After all if you're not gonna fight a war, why have a military, everything else can be done by a police organization or coast guard style set up. So the military should still have it's war oriented edge (I highly doubt most RN officers would have called war a minor part of their profession even in the age of exploration).

A lot of milwankers assume the military's only purpose in life is to defeat the Enemy and that you either Go Hard or you Go Home. We have been blessed that since the end of WW2 there hasn't been many naval engagements and what wars have occurred since 1945 hasn't been on the scale that required huge battles between fleets of warships.

What alot of "milwankers" miss or simply don't want to consider is you almost never beat the enemy and go home (that happened in WWI and look how that turned out). Even in WWII beating the Nazis and Imperials was simply Part I of the story. Consider that the US is still in Germany and Japan! Not to mention the major reconstruction of both societies. Even looking back the British, French and Russians didn't just beat the enemy and go home. After the Opium Wars British wedged itself into China with a vengeance. Russia tore parts off of China. France waged war in North Africa and settled. After all how do you enforce a peace between planets if you're not on the other planet?

Hell many navies have non-combat ships, and some research is even employed by the military using survey craft (submarines are especially well-suited for mapping the ocean floor). Oh noes suspension of disbelief ruined!!!

The vast majority of our non-combat ships are there to support the combat ships however and many of the survey ships are armed. Hell in the cold war we used boomers and other armed subs to map the sea floor. So yeah I can see non-combat ships but they're there mostly to support and supply the combatant ships.

Here's a thought, anyone remember this? Perhaps starships are mostly used as platforms for specialized drones (aka probes) that preformed in depth missions. You can swap out drones for different mission specs thus increasing the flexibility of the ship. Think of the ship as a center of a network/unit as opposed to a single entity.

Endnote: There is no Starship Captain but Kirk and Sisko is his understudy.

That is all.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » Wed Dec 08, 2010 3:09 pm

frigidmagi wrote:I don't think it depends on some "maturity" but on the work environment.

I meant maturity as a civilisation that has grown and adapted to being based in space. I don't take issue with anything else you've written.

On the flip side this isn't an issue with a ship that as a crew that numbers in the thousands like an aircraft carrier as you can simply demand that they limit their sexual relations to people outside of their immediate unit. Nor is an issue on a small ship making short runs in "civilized space" if there such a thing.

Agreed.

*snip*

Again, you make a lot of sense and I don't think I can offer anything else to what you've said.

One way to do it I suppose would be to have professionals hired for the voyage as a morale and wellness issue. They would work on a contract basis and be part of the crew although outside the command chain. Although that brings up different issues. Certainly puts Troi in a whole new light doesn't it? Inara from Serenity can be an example of this although she wouldn't service the crew.

Yeah, I don't have a problem with Troi nearly as much as a lot of other people seem to. The idea is sound - you do want someone along for the ride who can look out for the crew's mental well being because that sort of thing is just as important as their physical well being. Who cares if you're in perfect health if you go nuts and jeopardise the mission? Or go depressed and morale is low and then productivity declines, and maybe mistakes start to happen.

I think for intensive colonial effort there has to be a very good driving reason. A cooperation won't do it, no profit for to long. A nation state or a group of them might for control of resources or needed position. Hell a group of nation states might start setting up on Mars simply to have industrial resources and factories closer to the outer system reducing the turn around time. This assumes there is competition for the outer system for some reason though.

I agree the most likely backers of a colonisation effort would come from nation states. Competition might come from trying to extract helium-3 from the gas giants but that would be a very difficult task to accomplish and may not be necessary if the moon holds more than enough he3 resources. Also assumes fusion is a reality.

I supposed you might want to colonise Mars to get closer to the asteroid belt and make use of some of the big ones for habitats as well as various minerals. I find it easier to accept nation states devoting resources to it rather than private concerns, because I agree the latter would need to be wealthy and extremely patient in order to undertake such a task.

All things considered military missions may look more like the 1800s then the 2000s. That means scientific research (Darwin was on a military ship for example), survey missions, diplomacy (Commodore Perry, paging Commodore Perry) or even long range exploration (Captain Cook reporting). That doesn't mean said scientists are part of the military however, Darwin was not a member of the RN when he traveled on the HMS Beagle. Civilian contractors would be a better description I think. I think in system policing (how could you police deep space?!?) would be best done by non-FTL ships.

Well yeah, I dont see how you can police deep space nor why would you be out there anyway. I imagine you'd have local systems which are populated - Mars would have colonies on it as well as asteroid habitats and so on, and you'd refer to it as the 'Martian system' and same deal goes for Earth and maybe Jupiter or beyond if you want to go further out than that. You'd have fairly dense systems of habitats and colonies on moons and what not but very few things in-between. So most of the patrol malarky goes on between the habitats and the traffic that would be between them.

As a Marine I will say anyone who says wargames are minor will get the military they deserve. After all if you're not gonna fight a war, why have a military, everything else can be done by a police organization or coast guard style set up. So the military should still have it's war oriented edge (I highly doubt most RN officers would have called war a minor part of their profession even in the age of exploration).

When I said minor I meant in comparison to their day-to-day jobs. Wargames exercises are big things, with a lot of ships organised for them. But you don't do them every week. Wargames are different from standard drills as well. Basically I was referring to big picture stuff like USN vs RAN joint wargames exercise which happens once in a blue moon. Most weeks a ship does more 'mundane' activities. That's all I meant by that.

Hell many navies have non-combat ships, and some research is even employed by the military using survey craft (submarines are especially well-suited for mapping the ocean floor). Oh noes suspension of disbelief ruined!!!
The vast majority of our non-combat ships are there to support the combat ships however and many of the survey ships are armed. Hell in the cold war we used boomers and other armed subs to map the sea floor. So yeah I can see non-combat ships but they're there mostly to support and supply the combatant ships.

I know. I don't have a problem with that at all.

Here's a thought, anyone remember this? Perhaps starships are mostly used as platforms for specialized drones (aka probes) that preformed in depth missions. You can swap out drones for different mission specs thus increasing the flexibility of the ship. Think of the ship as a center of a network/unit as opposed to a single entity.

That's a neat idea.

Endnote: There is no Starship Captain but Kirk and Sisko is his understudy.

i like picard tho better than sisko, though Sisko had his moments.

but kirk is Great

Destructionator XV · Post by **Destructionator XV** » Wed Dec 08, 2010 3:18 pm

I wonder if the people who bitch about Troi also bitch about chaplains in the real military.

Probably yes..

edit: this isn't pointed at either of you, just more of an observation that her job isn't completely made up bullshit.

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Wed Dec 08, 2010 5:18 pm

I think part of the problem with Troi had to do with how she was presented not with what she was suppose to do. Let's face it do we actually see Troi doing her job alot or just kinda hanging out on the bridge telling Picard stuff he should already know? As a character she could be a bit annoying from time to time to.

I meant maturity as a civilisation that has grown and adapted to being based in space. I don't take issue with anything else you've written.

I misunderstood you then and apologize. To much time on other boards I guess.

Destructionator XV · Post by **Destructionator XV** » Wed Dec 08, 2010 5:21 pm

Yeah, I'll agree with that. She tended to be either under used by the writers or over-emoting on the other hand.

There's a few counter examples, but not nearly as many as there should have been.

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Wed Dec 08, 2010 5:43 pm

Here's a question about colony ships. You need colonists and a crew. Being a crewmember is a specialization, so would being a 1st wave colonist. Does the crew outrank the colonists? Do they mix? What happens after the colony is set up?

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » Thu Dec 09, 2010 5:42 am

frigidmagi wrote:I think part of the problem with Troi had to do with how she was presented not with what she was suppose to do. Let's face it do we actually see Troi doing her job alot or just kinda hanging out on the bridge telling Picard stuff he should already know? As a character she could be a bit annoying from time to time to.

Yeah. One of the problems with having an ensemble show like TNG is that you need to devote an episode for individual characters. This can be awesome for the House of Worf Saga episodes, which were in the main devoted entirely to Worf. Or episodes that focus on Picard, or Data. But when you get to second-rung characters like Troi, LaForge, Crusher, even Riker (which is surprising since he's the XO but his character just isn't as strong as Picard or Data or even Worf from a story telling perspective), you really have to work hard to make those characters shine.

About the best Riker episode was that one in the sixth season where he meets his transporter duplicate who had spent the better part of the last decade alone on a planet. The original idea for that episode was to shake up the show by killing off the Commander Riker but keeping the Lieutenant Riker, which would have resulted in Data becoming XO and Riker getting Ops. That was such an awesome idea and a brave one that it pisses me off that they chickened out on it. (actually I would have had Riker take over from Worf as security and tactical and Worf get Ops, because that's what happened in 'The Most Toys' when Data was presumed killed, Worf took over from Data at Ops)

Similarly the best Troi episode was ironically the one where her skills as a counselor were superfluous to the plot - 'Face of the Enemy' which had her masquerading as a ranking officer of the Romulan secret police. It was probably her best moment on the show, because it showed how useful she could be in those sort of scenarios. It pains me that they never followed up on it. Though there's a huge plot hole in it which you could fit a Warbird through: the writers didn't explain how she could speak fluent Romulanese enough to act as an infiltrator.

Contrast this with TOS where you had 2-3 principal characters and everyone else is a supporting regular (which sad to say, usually means they didn't say much - Uhura is a pretty but glorified telephone operator, Sulu just steers the ship and occasionally pipes up with some observation relating to their Meance of the Week; Chekov and Scotty were probably the most fleshed out of the regular supporting cast). Yet I guess that minimalist approach works a bit better. I mean, who wouldn't have wanted Paramount to make their fourth show one about Captain Sulu of the USS Excelsior? To cover that time between the end of Star Trek 6 and before the start of TNG. I know I would.

frigidmagi wrote:Here's a question about colony ships. You need colonists and a crew. Being a crewmember is a specialization, so would being a 1st wave colonist. Does the crew outrank the colonists? Do they mix? What happens after the colony is set up?

Well here's a rebuttal question: should we even be thinking of colonisation of other solar systems? And if we are, then is it actually worthwhile to consider colonising a planet in that solar system? A mature space civilisation will be getting by just fine with asteroid habitats and island-3 habitats. I mean we probably don't even need to travel to distant solar systems for any other reason than curiosity. We've got plenty of resources in our own solar system and solar power would be cheap and unbelievably efficient to make use of in space so energy is not a problem either; space to expand is virtually infinite given the amount of material wealth we can make use of in just our asteroid belt.

If we go viagra hard for a sf setting there probably wouldn't be much to be gained from travelling to another solar system; simply terraforming Mars would be easier in comparison the energy demands alone to go from here to Alpha Centauri. If we do go interstellar, I imagine the most plausible method would be to have generation ships - at which point, is it even necessary to colonise a planet at your destination when your arc ship is already your home and has been so for generations?

Destructionator XV · Post by **Destructionator XV** » Thu Dec 09, 2010 10:38 am

Stofsk wrote:Well that might depend on the individual squadron commander or ship commander. If you're attacking a base in ships which allow for no quarter (and would probably be difficult to even do SAR stuff for a destroyed ship - do you have escape pods? Is there even a point? If your spaceship gets hit by a single missile, is it simply 'mission killed' or is everyone onboard chillin' with a lethal dose of x-rays or gamma-rays or what? There may well not be a point at all given the lethality of combat.

I tend to work with some different setting assumptions: it actually isn't incredibly lethal in most cases. The crew is small and as far deep inside as you get, with jucier targets being somewhat big and on the outside.

A ship is more likely to be mission killed by cumulative damage to its external surfaces than destroyed in a catastrophic way. Its solar panels get enough holes punched in them that its laser barely gets enough power to act as a big flashlight. Its radiators get a hole and just spew fluids into space instead of cycling them - forcing a shut down of the laser lest it melt. The telescopes are sandblasted by debris and can no longer make anything out, etc, etc etc.

All the while, the crew, strapped inside are probably unhurt. They can get by for a long time with energy locked inside, or the solar panel operating at 2% might still be enough for them to last for a while. They can sit back and wait for rescue, or maybe even limp back to base on their own. Just gotta hope the engine didn't misfire and strand them on a one way trip to nowhere.

of course, I didn't mention nukes there... but they are overkill anyway.

Supposedly the humans in Avatar used a very interesting method for accelerating their interstellar spaceship - most of it is done by lasers aimed at deployable sails which gives a constant acceleration over a period of half a year which then allows the ship to traverse the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri in a few years

This is my preferred method for ultra-fast travel. It sidesteps the exponential difficulties of regular rockets (leave the fuel at home means you don't have to accelerate it with you) and keeps the indiviual ships from being uberpowerful while keeping some of the fast travel. Yes, you can do fast stuff, but only with massive infrastructure support, which isn't usually available and can only be used in a few ways anyway.

Epic idea. Another idea is that these star cruisers might also be colonisation projects. Or would that dilute the purpose too much?

I think it could work, but it probably isn't ideal. A colony ship would want to bring lots of stuff that a regular mission wouldn't need. The colony might want to set up farms, or bring local plants for fun, tons of stuff that would likely be heavy. (They might bring just seeds to drop and develop but they take time to grow.... hey that's it! The ship finds a suitable place and puts down a seed colony, literally. Maybe a small group of colonists but mostly seeds and some animal life, so when the main colony arrives, they have a little slice of Earth already growing there.)

It might be a prime directive violation though - PD of science! It'd contaminate the local area making future surveys of its history a lot harder. But if you are planning to colonize in the first place, you'd have to be ok with that.

the 'lag' becomes more and more noticeable as the brother onboard the ship notes his brother getting older and older and eventually disinterested in the whole affair as he becomes a grandfather and so on (and the telepathy gene is apparently passed on to subsequent generations).

Beamed laser power is potentially vulnerable to this kind of thing too. What if home decides they want to do something else with that energy now? After a few decades, people move on. Though with power, it isn't so bad, since there's a lot more where that came from. Not so with people's lives.

Then a new ship from earth comes into the system complete with brand new FTL which makes relativity its bitch.

I'll discuss something along these lines in my next post (omfg worldbuilding)...

snipping some stuff since I don't have much to add from what you and frigid already said.

The spacers would have grown up with the notion that you can take your family with you into space, while the earthers will have the opposite attitude. Also you can mine a lot of tension out of the idea that the earthers would be the ones most at risk when exploring planets if there are any hostile flora and fauna there or even intelligent aliens.

This sounds like awesome potential.

snipping more agreement

In TOS the prevailing theme is that humans are flawed creatures, but we're striving to better ourselves. I think this changed by TNG, where it seemed like the Federation was better than everyone.

I think I said this to you on sdn before but I like this shift in a way: TOS said we're not there yet but we're trying. TNG, by saying "we're here" validates the old show's message - if we try, we can do this!

That's probably not really shown well or what they had in mind but it's how I read into to.

I mean wow, Kirk nearly had Scotty commit planetcide on the Eminarans in 'A Taste of Armageddon'. What a badass.

Yeah he is.

Destructionator XV · Post by **Destructionator XV** » Thu Dec 09, 2010 11:20 am

Thanks for jumping in everyone, this thread is outstanding!

frigidmagi wrote:Consider this, there are thousands of stateless children due to being born to traveling professionals who work in foreign nations, because not every nation gives automatic citizenship to the children of their citizens.

I can't help but think of a megacorporation getting some kind of start this way.

"My baby was born on the ship so no country covers them."

"That's ok, as a valued employee, we'll extend your company insurance to your family..."

Where company insurance could mean all kinds of things from health care to protection. Maybe a bit of a stretch but I think I can actually see that happening.

One way to do it I suppose would be to have professionals hired for the voyage as a morale and wellness issue.

This might extend to a lot of things. What if the guys out there want Burger King? Maybe a franchise decides to set up shop in the base, or in a ship that follows the base around.

Consider the first settlers of the New World, the Puritans were a private concern not a government one. They were coming to separate themselves from everyone else. Can't get more separate then on another planet right?

This is what I used in my own setting. Some people didn't want to be a part all the crazy shit sweeping the solar system and wanted full isolation. So they saved up their money and then spent it all launching out of the system.

The whole solar system was swarming with all this new wave of nonsense so they fled it basically for religious freedom. It's an oldie, but a goodie.

The thing that gets fun in my setup is some time later, someone else wanted to do the same thing, but didn't know (or care?) about the first batch. And they were much richer, so they could get a faster ship.

So colony #1 leaves but can only afford about 1% speed of light. It takes them some 10,000 years to arrive at the destination, *handwaves* but they slept through most the trip so subjectively they were just there.

Colony #2 leaves like 100 years after #1, and from a different part of the solar system. They have huge resources and make it at 20% the speed of light. They arrive in a mere (lol) 1000 years.

So while colony #1 is still sleeping in space, with 8900 years left in their journy, colony #2 is there. But, stuff goes wrong and they lose their technological and historical heritage; the survivors regress and now believe they were just made there, not colonists from some far away world.

Then colony #1 finally shows up after all this time and finds remarkably human like aliens living there already and all kinds of fun goes down.

Best of all, not all the failed colonists from #2 actually lived on the planet - some stayed in space, but their colony failed too. Still, you've got shitloads of ancient habitats with strange groups of backward people in them, to be discovered quite a bit later.

Boom, my diamond hard viagra infusion gave me "aliens" of the week!

I'm quite excited about it. The only real handwave is the 10k year cryosleep to set it up, and everything after that can stay low tech - colony #2 failed so no high tech there and colony #1 was relatively poor, from the past, and socially conservative (like Space Amish kinda sorta) too, so they didn't bring much with them. Everything I love!

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Sun Jan 23, 2011 8:35 pm

Extra, extra magi dabbles in necromancy!

[quote="Stofsk]Well here's a rebuttal question: should we even be thinking of colonisation of other solar systems?[/quote]

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer: I admit that given our current levels and situation it's not something we personally should be thinking of. As far has I know no one can even get to the Moon anymore. Sure the US should be able to given some serious effort and so should a number of other powers, but as it stands no one has the capability. This... Hampers our ambitions. So our focus should be more on keeping manned space travel alive and spreading out across the Solar System.

Eventually in the future? Yes. There is a whole galaxy out there and not spreading out to it seems criminal. Even if an individual can only experience a single system, the overall catalogue of human knowledge, experience and more is served. Futhermore it is the ultimate means of ensuring our own survival. If humanity spreads out among the local galactic group we become the most successful species... well ever. Even if our species disappears in the process and is replaced by a successor species (or a bunch of them), they are still our descents. Also why the hell not? Why should we lock ourselves on a single planet and orbital habitats when there is an entire universe out their? Huddling around a single environment seems a waste to me. Spreading out pushes the boundaries of human thought, experience and knowledge, increases our chances of long term survival and let's us interact with so more then we could if we stayed in one gravity well. So why the hell shouldn't we go?

Is it expensive, yes. Is it dangerous, yes. But all the worthwhile ventures in human history have been, if we let those two reasons stop us from doing, we turn our back on the greatest traditions that define us.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 11:03 pm

Ok, but the only issue I have with it is the technical and energy requirements which would tend to preclude it as a possibility for even the long term. It would be great but we would need to see some pretty fantastic developments in rockets and power generation.

Arc ships might be a viable alternative. In those cases you're just visiting a solar system, you probably don't even need to colonise it. Once you're set up in space is colonising an alien planet worth it?

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 11:20 pm

I think so, but that's really a question for the grandkids.

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