Random ideas (again)

[Siege]

I'm honestly not sure. First of all, it sorta reminds me of 40K. I'm a fan of 40K, and you're obviously not emulating it wholesale, but I kinda feel the whole "send fleets to bring the light of civilization to distant stars" thing has been done before. More importantly however, this doesn't sound that different from TEG. It's different in its dynamic of power, sure, but if 'historical empires duke it out beyond the stars' as a concept is boring you, do you really think it would be wise to focus on what sounds like The Roman Empire In Space? I'm obviously paraphrasing here, but that's kinda what it sounds like, and I frankly ain't sure that'll manage to keep you interested for very long.

[Magister Militum]

I'm honestly not sure. First of all, it sorta reminds me of 40K. I'm a fan of 40K, and you're obviously not emulating it wholesale, but I kinda feel the whole "send fleets to bring the light of civilization to distant stars" thing has been done before.

I'm familiar with 40K, but, honestly, that was the last thing on my mind. I can see where you getting at, but the connection is pretty weak in my mind, though I guess they both share that similar trait.

More importantly however, this doesn't sound that different from TEG. It's different in its dynamic of power, sure, but if 'historical empires duke it out beyond the stars' as a concept is boring you, do you really think it would be wise to focus on what sounds like The Roman Empire In Space?

Yeah, that was the thing that struck me the moment I finished writing that intro. I would also argue that passing similarity to the widespread conquest aspect of Rome and a Romanesque name do not a reborn Roman Empire make, but it's not really the point anymore. Nah, I think I just need to start working on TEG again after so many months of inactivity, which can really put a crimp into my inspiration. After all, there's so much stuff I've wanted to cover and add (that famed Third Edition that I've coined) that I've been ignoring for some time due to lack of, well, time. So, yeah, forget I brought up this concept; I'd rather give TEG another go and start getting back into the swing of things.

[speaker-to-trolls]

The biggest one I can think of is it may be easier to engineer, simply because evolution has already done much of the hard work for you. We know there are natural brains capable of complex decision-making, whereas IIRC most of our robots still cogitate on roughly the level of insects. Realistically I would expect this to change by the time we can seriously start thinking about building starships, but you never know.

Hmm, again I like the idea, though it would require me to go "we can't/won't make computers that can do that. Why? Because it's my bloody story and I say we don't, how's that for a technical analysis?" No real problem with that, I suppose.
I imagine these brain-ships could have not only their brains made of meat, but whole systems inside themselves, like the Cylon ships in Battlestar Galactica (or new Galactica for anyone who prefers the old one) they could be designed this way so that they could kick start, from this internal biomass, the creation of viable ecosystems on inhospitable worlds. The people of Earth might send these living ships out to Jupiter, give them instructions to convert themselves into a base and start feeding its biomass on organic molecules, letting a good chunk of the biomass decay within the sealed environment it's created to act as a springboard for the various generations of organisms which it will let loose into the body to make it habitable for the human settlers who will come later. You need not rely entirely on genes and meat brains to do all this either, you could easily have a complex meat brain linked up to a much more efficiently stored computer database of instructions, so that it simply looks into its computer memory to work out how to build extensions to itself or more colonisers, mining craft, etc.

Imagine this kind of semi conscious colonisation going on for decades, centuries, even, before humans start arriving in any real numbers. Why? I don't know, maybe there's a war, or maybe they lose interest in colonising the outer system since they've programmed some of the ship variants to tow asteroids with valuable metals back to Earth and the inner systems. In any case, imagine this huge, space based ecosystem growing, developing and evolving and spreading farther and farther out into the far solar system, while the Earth and the inner system goes about its business. And perhaps, after a long while, some of the minds of the base coordinators start to change, and in time there is not just an ecosystem but a culture out there, constantly spreading out, while the Earth and its halo of orbital cities remains looking in at itself.

It might also be a sneaky way around Dune-style regulations against advanced computers, which strikes me as a better rationalization.

How so? Do you mean it is a better rationalisation as a way of explaining why there aren't any superhuman AI's making the characters superfluous and the story pointless, or that it's a better way of explaining why the restriction is there?

[Somes J]

How so? Do you mean it is a better rationalisation as a way of explaining why there aren't any superhuman AI's making the characters superfluous and the story pointless, or that it's a better way of explaining why the restriction is there?

I mean it strikes me as a better rationalization for why one would use organic brains as a control system instead of regular computers.

[speaker-to-trolls]

It occurs to me that a planet colonised initially by a spacecraft running on organic brain cells might end up creating something similar to Pandora, especially if it was charged with cloning and raising a generation of colonists (as some ideas for interstellar colonisation suggest). I imagine that this ship mind might create some sort of neural link between itself and the children so that it could quickly and efficiently educate them, and then, later on in the colonies development, as an ecosystem grew up around the landing site, it might want remote uplink points, and why not grow them into the trees? Seems fairly efficient. It would also make a lot of sense to put an uplink into the animals as well, not so the ship could micromanage them, that would be counterproductive, just so it could try to change their behaviour if it wanted to use them to seed particular areas or use them to manage certain bits of the ecology.
The end result could be Pandora with humans instead of extremely humanoid aliens, or it could end up with a technological society which had this artificial ecosystem grafted into a large proportion of itself.

Or the ship may have decided to let most of the planet become primitive because it was most sustainable, but to keep some technology to itself just in case (since it might need to repair its electronics/deflect an asteroid/whatever). I like this idea for the possibility of a troop of RDA space marine types barging into the primitives sacred space and facing a battallion of automated missile launchers.

[Destructionator]

FTL is one of those things that I'd just assume avoid, but if you do need it, I say play with it. Make it work for you and get out of the way.

But, there can be some fun in making the mechanism and running with it too. Consider this:

What if switching to another star system and going back happened in almost no time? Say you start on Earth. You go on a 10 month trip to planet X. But you get back to Earth right after you left!

This comes from daydream adventures. A nice trait is you can go off on these wild journeys but still be back home in time for dinner. It serves its purpose to allow the plot to happen, so you can just leave it at that.

(If you want to try to explain it, you might say "time dilation" or "ftl = time travel", but explaining plot enablers really isn't necessary.)


But now, let's run with it. What else happens with this assumption? Let's say it goes both ways: a traveler from planet X taking a 6 month vacation to Earth will get home in time for dinner, too.


1) You can't escape into hyperspace to get away from heat. If you decide to go home, they'll be right there, exactly as they were when you left.

2) You /can/ use it to catch up on back work. The due date is tomorrow but you haven't started? Just take a vacation in hyperspace. It'll still be due tomorrow when you get back, no matter how long you take to do it!

3) Having crazy adventures, of course, becomes easy without missing dinner/school/work. You can live a normal life while still doing all the fun fantasy stuff.


That's all good. Now, since we're not totally handwaving, we need to look at the weird cases.

a) What if you go to planet X, then someone else follows you? Impossible - you get back right after he leaves, so if you don't go together, by the time he passes into hyperspace, you'll be home.

aa) Does this apply to parts of a big ship? No, because it would be silly if it did! But it probably does apply to a convoy, unless they all jumped perfectly at once which may or may not be impossible depending on what your story wants. The bright side here is it gives an excuse to be the only ship in the quadrent!


b) Here's something weird: what if during your trip to Planet X, an Xian decides to visit Earth?

With a one-way time dilation, this is easily explained. Your 6 months feel like a second on Earth, and a second on Earth feels like 6 months on Planet X.

But, with the two-way compression, this just gets weird.

You leave Earth at 6:00 PM
You arrive at Planet X on May 1st
You leave Planet X on July 15th
You arrive at Earth at 6:01 PM

Xian leaves Planet X on June 1
When does he arrive at Earth? To be in your timeline, it must be 6:00 PM.
He leaves Earth three months later.
He arrives on Planet X on Jun 1.

Step 3 is the problem. If you arrive at 6:01, he should be there to say hello to you. But, you were also on Planet X to say hello to him when he returns on Jun 1!


To make it work, I think we have to use either uniqueness (you are the only traveler, so your timeline is all that matters. Works well enough for lots of things.) or some kind of parallel universe setup, like you might use in any kind of time travel world.


It hurts my brain

There might be one other way: a global timeline. The second *anyone* travels between worlds, the clock must advance.


You leave Earth at 6:00 PM
You arrive at Planet X on May 1st
You leave Planet X on July 15th
You arrive at Earth at (unknown so far)

That works if you are the only one going between the two worlds.

Xian leaves Planet X on June 1
When does he arrive at Earth? 6:01 PM.
He leaves Earth three months later.
He arrives on Planet X on Jun 1.

Since he was on Earth for three months, and he left before you, when you return to Earth, it must be three months later. You arrive right after *he* left.

This has a lot of potential to fuck shit up. What if he never leaves? Are you locked out of Earth forever?

What if someone made a trip that you didn't know about? Will you get back to find the Planet of the Apes seemingly at random?


You could probably run with this to make a weird universe. Though it ruins the beautiful simplicity of the fantasy idea in the first place...

Bringing in multiple planets goes back to hurting my brain.

[Siege]

What if I take ship A from planet X to Y, and then take ship B back?

[Destructionator]

Yes, that's another problem. There isn't a good, consistent result. Things get messed up too quickly.

Though, if it kept the instant return timeline, you might be able to use that to get out of the chasing death fleet scenario: leave in an escape pod, return in a war fortress.

[speaker-to-trolls]

a) What if you go to planet X, then someone else follows you? Impossible - you get back right after he leaves, so if you don't go together, by the time he passes into hyperspace, you'll be home.

aa) Does this apply to parts of a big ship? No, because it would be silly if it did! But it probably does apply to a convoy, unless they all jumped perfectly at once which may or may not be impossible depending on what your story wants. The bright side here is it gives an excuse to be the only ship in the quadrent!

Actually, assuming that there is a universal time running in both systems, you'll leave at 6pm, he'll follow you at 6:01 PM, and arrive at planet X just after you get there. So you'll both be there at the same time, it's just that another version of you may arrive back home before he leaves, it would be confusing but as long as he doesn't talk to future you it'll be cool.

Step 3 is the problem. If you arrive at 6:01, he should be there to say hello to you. But, you were also on Planet X to say hello to him when he returns on Jun 1!


To make it work, I think we have to use either uniqueness (you are the only traveler, so your timeline is all that matters. Works well enough for lots of things.) or some kind of parallel universe setup, like you might use in any kind of time travel world.


It hurts my brain

I don't really see how any of these are problems if one is using time travel at all. Essentially you would just meet different versions of each other, the version of you he meets when he arrives on Earth would be you from your and his future, and when he gets back to X to meet you on 601 June 1st he'll be from your future and will have met future you. Granted this is a bit confusing, and possibly paradoxical, but it isn't logically impossible if you have time travel at all.

What if I take ship A from planet X to Y, and then take ship B back?

See, I would have thought that surely this would result in you keeping the original timeline, since it must be something about the ship and the engine it uses which causes the time travel effect. I imagine using the engine creates some kind of causal link between Place A at time B and Place C from time D+E (whereD is time of arrival and E is time passed at C) so however long E is you always end up back at AB if you use the same ship.

I'd also expect that the same kind of link is created whenever you travel. So If you leave Earth at 6pm to go to planet X, then leave planet X at 12 am the next day you get back to Earth at 601pm. However, the link is now set up between X and Earth, so if you go back to X at 11am the day after that you get to X at 12am the day before.

This would be a very confusing universe.

Basically I would imagine each traveller would have its own timeline. Two locations both advance along the same timeline at the same speed, but from the perspective of a traveller any place they travel from now has the point at which they left as the last point in history. Like you said, if you leave at the wrong time and someone else left before you you could end up with many planets of the apes.

"You maniacs! You blew it all up! AGAIN!"

[Somes J]

So while I was getting Chinese food tonight I started thinking about the care and packaging of astronauts in the multi-century journeys between the stars in my hard SF uni.

It was easier when it was a full-on transhumanist universe, and I could just postulate ridiculously miniaturized ships with uploaded crews. But now, with the Restrictors in play, supposing they'd probably ban uploading in this context ... you need a much bigger ship. Which is a problem, because the most plausible way I see being able to reach high fractions of c is some sort of beamed power set-up, and that's very energy-intensive, so you really want a tiny ship.

I'm thinking heads. Seriously, carting the body around adds tons of excess mass. As long as you can recreate it, the brain is the only thing you need to transport. Just scooping out the brain would be ideal, but it would require sophisticated cybernetic interfaces to interact with the ship, which the Restrictors would probably ban too. So go with the head, with display goggles and earphones and eye movement based control systems. The surgery's probably easier too.

So I'm envisioning a starship maybe the mass of a car or a van, a few tons, and inside it there's a storage locker full of dozens or hundreds of decapitated heads stacked together in the most compact shape possible. I was initially envisioning a classic "head in jar" thing, but that's silly. Why waste mass on carrying fluid, when air is lighter, and vacuum is lighter still? The optimal solution is to stuff the heads in a radiation bunker, attached to life support systems like weird creepy fruit, and each one covered with a pressure membrane.

I imagine most of the trip they'd be frozen, or perhaps sedated and pumped full of medication to keep them from perishing in the centuries-long storage as the ships fall endlessly through the dark light years. But the wake-up and landing procedures would be interesting.

Imagine the previous image, only the heads are all alive and conscious, and you can see them moving and talking silently under their pressure membranes.

Oh man, imagine if on one of these ships somebody sabotaged the automated systems, so the crew would have to run everything on manual. So they'd be stuck as severed heads for, like a hundred years as the ship fell through the void, and they'd have to stay awake the whole time! They couldn't turn around, because their ship was propelled in the first place by mass pellets launched from a giant laser back at Sol. The only manueverability they have is some manuevering thrusters and a magsail brake. They just have to keep going to the destination. Oh man, that would suck. And then when they finally arrived they'd see this beautiful looking blue and green world in their ship's cameras and be all really happy. Only it would turn out to be some place like Blue Moon, so now that they're not severed heads anymore they've still got to try to survive with inadequate resources on a horribly hostile world with unbreathable air covered by horrible death forests full of giant spider-octopuses and evil sentient hornet-birds that can eat giant whale-birds for lunch.

Nah, the idea's probably too hokey to use. But I'm totally going to have a Blue Moon tribute in this universe. I like the way it's a lusher world than Earth, a paradise for life - but for human colonists it'd be totally horrible! The air is wrong. You go out without a filter and you get rapture of the deep from all the nitrogen. Maybe carbon dioxide poisoning too. It's wiltingly hot. Fires are an extreme hazard because of the high oxygen. The entire land area is covered in creepy horrible death forests so high that the only solid ground is some kind of horrible fetid perpetually pitch-black swamp and you're probably better off living in the treetops. And the whole forest is full off horrible predators like giant octopus-spiders and evil hornet-birds. And it's a panspermia universe, so they actually can eat you and find you tasty. I have totally got to do a story about a human expedition on a horrible world like that, trying to survive decades from the nearest possible help, with no possibility of returning home.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Heads in jars/bags would be cool, I'm not sure how you would get life support for bagheads though. I think you could expand on the idea of transporting intrepid interstellar voyagers in brain form, though, or of genetically engineering them so as to minimise their body size for the trip. Maybe they could be tiny, hyper efficient bundles of neurons supported by automated life support, running the expedition through cybernetic attachments for a while until the onboard growth systems can be used to grow larger colonists who can survive on their own.

Of course this all begs the question of how the Restrictors are supposed know that a ship is carrying uploads rather than brains or something. I mean are they going to be able to see something the size of a car launched any more effectively than a swarm of things the size of fists? Are they going to start a war over the difference? It seems to me that unless they have observers in the system launching the ships they are going to find it very difficult to determine when someone breaks this injunction.

[Somes J]

It seems to me that unless they have observers in the system launching the ships they are going to find it very difficult to determine when someone breaks this injunction.

They claim to have exactly such capabilities. They don't actually, but I imagine people wouldn't be in a big hurry to test this if the consequences for violating their rules were sufficiently dire...

--------

On to something else:

I was browsing some "how humanity is awesome" threads on the internet, and I found what I consider a remarkable idea. In a fantasy universe context, humanity's big advantage could be breeding rate. Humans as the Swarm.

I totally want to build a universe around this idea now. Other races are longer lived, stronger, better, and generally more awesome than humans. An individual human is a weak, pathetic creature. Except that immortality or long lifespans comes at the cost of a slow breeding rate, so relative to other races humans breed like cockroaches, and quickly overwhelm the land and drown their otherwise drastically superior opponents under sheer weight of numbers. The Brown Tide!

Going with this idea some more, humans would be maybe sort of like Orcs in more classic fantasy. A despised race pushed into marginal lands, where they live in overcrowded misery and squalor, warring amongst themselves for the inadequate resources. To the inhabitants of the "civilized" lands humans would be the immensely numerous horribly savage barbarians beyond the borders that are always raiding and invading the civilized world, seeking to grab some of its wealth. The lands of the civilized races would be heavily fortified against the constant raiding and invasions, and every once in while the Brown Tide breaks through and rampages through the land, plundering and destroying. Within the civilized lands humans would frequently be found as mercenaries, and maybe slaves and bandits. Their immense numbers and fast breeding rate would make them attractive as mercenaries, soldiers, and buffers between the civilized people and the really savage other humans. Ironically, in this position humans might often come to weild considerable power in civilized societies. Also, every once in a while an invasion is successful enough that they actually take over some decent place, setting up states somewhat analagous to the Chinese Jin and Yuan dynasties.

If this is a "hard" universe the easiest way to explain it might be to have the other races be the deliberate products of advanced bioengineering (presumably abandoned at some point), but going with the idea of it being classic fantasy with magic, I'm getting some cross-pollination with ideas I had for how something like the Abrahamic God might work in a world where gods actually exist and are powered by the worship of their believers...

I'm thinking the other races are polytheists and the humans are monotheists. The human god is a renegade, he had a big fight with the other gods at the beginning of the world and got kicked out of the pantheon or something. But he came up with a plan to destroy all of them, even though he was only one against many. While the other gods were making their chosen client races all awesome, he used what little scraps of power he had to create an utterly pathetic shitpiece of a creature, but he made it fast breeding. The idea being that over time this creature would breed a lot and eventually come to make up the majority of the population, and all those fast-breeding shitpieces would be powering him up with their worship, and eventually a point would be reached where he'd have so much of that sweet, sweet worship going into him he'd get powerful enough to kick the rest of the pantheon's ass. Or maybe his followers would eventually kill or convert everyone else and the other gods would just starve to death without any worshippers or something.

Humans, having such short lifespans and living such horrible shit lives, would place much more importance on life after death than other races. To other races their culture would appear creepy, obssessed with death and living for death rather than for life. With more of an emphasis on the afterlife and less on mortal life, humans would also be freakily willing to get themselves killed, winning against technologically, physically, and magically superior foes by simply throwing vast numbers of men at them, accepting that dozens or hundreds of their own fall for each enemy slain but they have the numbers to take those kinds of losses and still win. This would come as no surprise to other races, who think if they were going to die in a few decades anyway they probably wouldn't value their lives that much, and that the average human's life is so shit anyway the fact that they haven't all decided they're better off committing mass suicide long ago just shows how insane their race must be.

Edit: also in another nod to cheesy fantasy, humans would be interfertile and willing to get it on with damn near every other race, so that their swarm might take on something of a Zerg/Borg-like aspect over time, assimilating useful features from other races. Like, they might have absolutely no magical ability themselves - or actually I'm thinking just weak magic based on asking favors of their god - but in practice they'd have access to some via half-breeds, quarter-breeds etc. from races that did have magical abilities.

[Somes J]

Another random idea.

I was reading Failed Utopia 4-2 and the discussion that inspired it; interpersonal entanglement.

Basically it's an exploration of two ideas; the golemic Devil's Contract Problem in regards to Friendly AI, and a point about sex differences, namely this:

Anyone the least bit familiar with evolutionary psychology knows that the complexity of human relationships, directly reflects the incredible complexity of the interlocking selection pressures involved. Males and females do need each other to reproduce, but there are huge conflicts of reproductive interest between the sexes. <snip> And as the upshot of all these huge conflicts of reproductive interest...
<snip>
But men are not optimized to make women happy, and women are not optimized to make men happy. The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don't know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles... yep, looks like it.)

The story has the AI come to the conclusion that the best thing to do is to dump each sex on seperate planets, and give them artificial opposite-sex companions crafted toward their preferences.

The story itself is pretty meh IMO, but I thought of an interesting variation on the idea. If the idea works, the AI can do this a lot more subtly. Just introduce a bunch of these optimized ... let's call them Companions (Homo Sapiens Socius?) into the population, and let what I suppose you could call market forces do the rest of the work. If they're more attractive, more personal, and more optimal mates for baselines than opposite sex baselines, and they're engineered to get along best with opposite sex baselines, then over time you could probably end up with baseline-Companion relationships being the norm just by the aggregate decisions of individual people. There would be no need to forcibly segregate the sexes for the set-up to be accomplished; over time the humans would do it to themselves, ideally without ever realizing what was happening.

Of course, there would be trade-offs. Optimizing Companions for individuals might be tricky without humans realizing relatively quickly what was happening ... maybe let's just use a more general version of the idea. The Companions just have their brains rewired a bit so that, generally, their preferences mesh better with opposite sex baselines. Also, sheer statistics would mean some baselines would inevitably end up with other baselines, and some Companions would end up with other Companions, assuming they weren't consciously choosing each other. Although that might be reduced by making the Companions more attractive (both physically and in personality), making it so baselines would prefer to mate with them, while of course the Companions would be wired to find baselines more attractive.

I can see a scenario something like this. Everybody on the Earth suffers some kind of memory black-out. Everybody just wakes up and finds that 12 hours or something has passed while they've apparently been asleep. In this period something has kept power going to hospitals and other sensitive facilities, landed airplanes, and generally prevented the massive mess that everyone falling unconscious at once would otherwise result in. And then, when they start counting up the people, the human population has mysteriously doubled. About half the people have no identification, no record of their existence, no memory of any past existence, and have a generic knowledge of geography, culture etc. and a variety of job skills. Maybe they find that certain ... adjustments have somehow been made during the black-out, to allow the world to support the increased population somehow. Upon examination these people appear superficially normal and in generally excellent health. Some interesting things: none of them have any scars or signs of past injuries or surgery, and their digestive tracts are all totally empty. Genetic tests show that, interestingly, they seem to have no genetic diseases whatsoever, and there's something else interesting. It's noted they all seem unusually physically attractive and personable.

Years pass. The new arrivals are assimilated into human society. They generally seem to do well. Observers note that they seem to have much lower rates of mental illness than the rest of the population, and are unusually physically healthy, with low incidences of heart disease, diabetes, cancer etc.

Then, somebody thinks to take a look at marriage and relationship patterns, and they notice something interesting. Increasingly, there's a significant statistical skew toward Originals marrying New People. And these marriages seem to be healthier, showing lower divorce rates, rates of domestic violence, civil and criminal suits etc. It could have to do with the lower rates of mental illness and apparent "personableness" ... but then somebody notices something really interesting. He takes a look at statistics for New People-New People marriages, which are sharply statistically underrepresented, and ... they have more problems than New People-Original ones.

Then he takes a look at what sort of problems the different groups tend to have in their marriages and relationships, and this is where it gets really juicy. New People-New People and Original-Original often have similar problems ... but gender inverted. A lot of the things that Original men married to Original women tend to complain about in their wives New People women married to New People men tend to complain about in their husbands, and visa versa. Then when you look at psychological studies...

... He takes a survey on prefered frequency of sexual intercourse and makes standard deviation graphs for both genders and both groups. He starts with comparing the graph for Original males and females, they don't quite match. He takes the graph for New People females, and they match the graph for Original males. He takes the graph for New People males, and it matches the graph for Original females. He looks at other studies, and everywhere he gets similar results.

I think that'd be a pretty cool idea to put in a story.

Only big problem I can think of with the scenario is what to do about children. This is a huge fridge logic problem for the original story too. I suppose the best way to work it would be that if a female Companion gets knocked up by a baseline if the child is male it will be baseline and if the child is female it will be Companion, and visa versa if a Companion male knocks up a baseline female a male child will be a Companion and a female child will be a baseline. It'd be pretty tricky to make that work past the first generation so. The most straightforward way I can think of to do it would be to make Companion-baseline hybrids sex-dismorphically hybridogenic. Segregation distorters shunt the human and Companion DNA in a Companion female into different ova, and the ova with the human DNA then dies. Then, if it's fertilized by a baseline X-carrying sperm it develops into a Companion, and if it's fertilized by a baseline Y-carrying sperm the male hormones supress the Companion genes and you get a male baseline. It's a little trickier with male Companions because that would leave them unable to sire female children ... although there's an easy modification. Instead of being destroyed the sperm that get the human DNA remain, and they're the sperm that will carry the male's X chromosome, producing a female baseline if they fertilize a baseline ova. Companion-Companion matings presumably would produce more Companions.

I think I am really going to actually use this somewhere.

[Magister Militum]

As I have mentioned at least once, I am in the process of creating a new setting to play with. It's still in the pressure cooker, so I won't go into too much detail about it, but, in a nutshell, after tens of millennia of prosperity and relative stability, the seven great powers of the galaxy lose their collective shit and proceed to fight for some 2000 years before the whole political landscape collapses and nothing is left. It's not the type of collapse where you see massive technological regression, but you pretty much see the end of any significant central authority and a ridiculous amount of balkanization, along with plenty of warlordism, pirate kingdoms, regressive barbarian empires, and petty factional strife. Needless to say, a lot of people are now thoroughly fucked. Eventually, a group of provinces of a late great power in the Perseus Arm, led by the Marathon Province, pick up the pieces and try to rebuild and survive, and later take up the challenge of building a New Galactic Order. The only problem is that there are plenty of people who have gained plenty of power in the interregnum and are not about to bow down to some wannabe galactic empire. Essentially, the story would follow the struggle of this polity to unite the galaxy. I'm considering making this 'verse a living universe of sorts that would flow with the story and cover specific eras, but now I'm getting off topic.

The real question that has come to mind is the military of the Empire (or Republic) of Marathon. Since they started out small, their military forces would obviously be limited (what they acquired from the now gone Solar Republic, essentially). They were blessed, however, with great manufacturing capabilities via megaconstructs and forge worlds and excellent infrastructure due to being a major center of power. In the grand scheme of things, though, they only had access to a pathetic fraction of the resources of the long dead Solar Republic. Since they were originally surrounded by warlords, archaic but powerful barbarian empires, and, later, a revanchist Second Republic, they were forced to take a militant stance early on for survival, even though they lacked the raw numbers of other fiefdoms. In response, their military evolved into one that is heavy on automation (especially for the space navy), force multiplication and quality to counter the enemy hordes thrown at them. However, a part of me wonders if they couldn't just pump out hordes of war robots instead. After all, they have a near post-scarcity economy in place and a great manufacturing base, and producing waves of high-quality war robots of all types would certainty be possible. However, a part of me doesn't find this all that appealing, at least in regards to an all robot military, but I don't see that many options left. Essentially, my question is what type of military would such a polity produce that allows them to compensate for their smaller numbers?

[Invictus]

The real question that has come to mind is the military of the Empire (or Republic) of Marathon. Since they started out small, their military forces would obviously be limited (what they acquired from the now gone Solar Republic, essentially). They were blessed, however, with great manufacturing capabilities via megaconstructs and forge worlds and excellent infrastructure due to being a major center of power. In the grand scheme of things, though, they only had access to a pathetic fraction of the resources of the long dead Solar Republic. Since they were originally surrounded by warlords, archaic but powerful barbarian empires, and, later, a revanchist Second Republic, they were forced to take a militant stance early on for survival, even though they lacked the raw numbers of other fiefdoms. In response, their military evolved into one that is heavy on automation (especially for the space navy), force multiplication and quality to counter the enemy hordes thrown at them. However, a part of me wonders if they couldn't just pump out hordes of war robots instead. After all, they have a near post-scarcity economy in place and a great manufacturing base, and producing waves of high-quality war robots of all types would certainty be possible. However, a part of me doesn't find this all that appealing, at least in regards to an all robot military, but I don't see that many options left. Essentially, my question is what type of military would such a polity produce that allows them to compensate for their smaller numbers?

It's an interesting question, because the situation isn't dissimilar to the one in my very first universe here. But it seems that Marathon's main advantage is its access to ridiculous amounts of galactic-level production capacity that utterly dwarfs the needs of its population and size? You've already listed the main solutions I would think of of - build more force multipliers and bigger battleships than everyone else, give every infantryman a giant robot, that kind of thing.

So, what were the recruitment policies of the old Republic like? My old Intersolar Empire recruited humans into the military even though it had no need to for command and morale purposes - seeing that this is a democracy of sorts, it may have valued participation in war purely for societal reasons? Maybe your new guys can waive that. It reabsorbs warlords and breakaway systems with its warbot hordes and demands very few responsibilities from them, while the revanchists perhaps demand loyalty demonstrated in more old-fashioned and less popular ways?

[Magister Militum]

But it seems that Marathon's main advantage is its access to ridiculous amounts of galactic-level production capacity that utterly dwarfs the needs of its population and size?

That's the general idea, yeah. Marathon was set up to be the political and industrial base for the colonies and protectorates under its jurisdiction, which explains things like why they have ringworlds devoted entirely to manufacturing. The other colonies can outnumber them, but no one can outproduce them, at least in their local sphere.

So, what were the recruitment policies of the old Republic like? My old Intersolar Empire recruited humans into the military even though it had no need to for command and morale purposes - seeing that this is a democracy of sorts, it may have valued participation in war purely for societal reasons? Maybe your new guys can waive that. It reabsorbs warlords and breakaway systems with its warbot hordes and demands very few responsibilities from them, while the revanchists perhaps demand loyalty demonstrated in more old-fashioned and less popular ways?

I like that idea a lot. Service in the Old Republic was needed not because they needed the troops, but because of civic virtue and instilling loyalty. Marathon doesn't really have that luxury, so instead they take the automated route and scorn the idea of massive organic armies as primitive and barbaric. Still, I'd like for it to have some organics in the military. Hmm, perhaps the warbots acts as the logical conclusion for the concept of force multiplication? Essentially a core of extremely powerful organic troops are supplemented by overwhelming fire support and hordes of high-quality warbots under their supervision and control. The space navy could also work the same way, with a fleet of warmoons and super-powerful and durable crewed titans supported by swarms of robotic warcraft. And if I figure in transhumanism, the possibilities for this setup are legion!

[Zor]

Howabout something built around this idea?



Biotank: A series of several living creatures genetically engineered as part of a social experiment conducted by a series of robots, relics of a species of advanced aliens involving abducted humans collected between 1000 and 1300 (Including Vikings, Crusader era europeans, Abbasids, Byzantines, Seljuks, Fuedal Japanese, Chinese, Aztecs and Inca) in a specially made artificial habitat in the sagittarius arm of the Galaxy. Said experiment involved establishing communities of said groups (protected from disease by nanites) at the same time (releasing them from cryo stasis at 15:37 (greenwich mean time) June 25th, 1307) and giving them access to a set of biological creatures and the means to genetically engineer new creatures using devices called protowombs scattered across the million square kilometers of the habitat. Said beasts ranged from more efficient lifestock to warbeasts such as this biotank.

Biotanks are actually composed of several symbiotic organisms. On is the legs and mouth of the beast, the other is the turret and holds the digestive system. Both have a neural link and are instinctively programmed to obey commands given from an operater inside. The weapons of biotanks include a cannon made out of high density carapace firing stone spheres, a bio-missile launcher, which fires off living missiles which have what amounts to a natural jet engine inside of them and carry an explosive payload (It can grow new missiles internally, but generally they really on externally grown missiles) and a flamethrower. Their arms and mouths are also useful for dealing with infantry in close quarters. Biotanks have a thick and highly durable carapace. For communication, they have the ability to detect radio waves using an Electroreceptive organ and broadcast over short distances.

There are many diferent types of creatures like biotanks about as well as other living war machines such as airborne war creatures (The habitation has a somewhat thicker atmosphere than earth), fast running beasts, transports and naval creatures that inhabit the seas. The habitat itself has over a million square kilometers of territory, which are constantly being fought over by the inhabitants over territory, theology, cultural reasons, longstanding grudges and as part of a complex arangement of alliances and hatreds.

[Heretic]

Hmm...that's an interesting idea. Mercenary alien soldiers fighting in castle sieges and stuff!

[speaker-to-trolls]

I'm still kind of struggling to see the point of this experiment. Is it something to do with the connection between technological development and the demands of warfare or something more general?

[Zor]

The experiment is about how would societies develop if given a form of fairly advanced technology which does not need much in the line of infastructure and how their cultures adapt to it.

Zor

[speaker-to-trolls]

The thinking behind it had better be more general than that, like the impact of self sustaining high technology on primitive cultures so that they know the long term effects of Outside Context Problems on primitives, or something. Otherwise it seems like a huge effort essentially for shits and giggles, it'd be like gelling up the feathers of lots of birds of prey to test the effect of fairly cool hair(feather)styles on falcon aerodynamics .

Oh, in my last conversation with Shroom we had a wonderful idea, we think we should revive these ungodly things!
For those of you who didn't witness this magnificent thread; it was an attempt to create a universe by piling idea upon idea, no poster was allowed to post after themselves or contradict a previous poster's addition and everyone built on each other. The result was a fantastical and bizarre far future solar system dominated by a grinning sun, inhabited by living planets, chocoholic Martians, the planet Dirty ruled by a Great Bastard, the life-hating mechanical men of Pluto and various other weird things. I think it was great fun and would welcome its glorious return.
All shall bow before the standard of the Grinning Sun!

[Zor]

The thinking behind it had better be more general than that, like the impact of self sustaining high technology on primitive cultures so that they know the long term effects of Outside Context Problems on primitives, or something.

You know that is a rather nice idea.

Zor

[Heretic]

For those of you who didn't witness this magnificent thread; it was an attempt to create a universe by piling idea upon idea, no poster was allowed to post after themselves or contradict a previous poster's addition and everyone built on each other.

So if I wrote a story in that setting, it would be considered canon?

Edit: Zor, the more I think about biological spider tanks in the middle ages, the more awesome it sounds. Is it ok, in the sometime far/near future, I play with that idea?

[Invictus]

Oh, in my last conversation with Shroom we had a wonderful idea, we think we should revive these ungodly things!
For those of you who didn't witness this magnificent thread; it was an attempt to create a universe by piling idea upon idea, no poster was allowed to post after themselves or contradict a previous poster's addition and everyone built on each other. The result was a fantastical and bizarre far future solar system dominated by a grinning sun, inhabited by living planets, chocoholic Martians, the planet Dirty ruled by a Great Bastard, the life-hating mechanical men of Pluto and various other weird things. I think it was great fun and would welcome its glorious return.
All shall bow before the standard of the Grinning Sun!

Are you thinking of a continuation of that thread, or a whole new one?

[speaker-to-trolls]

^It'd probably save space to resurrect the original thread with a new name and format, I would think.