Random ideas (again)

For 'verse proposals, random ideas, musings, and brainwaves.

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Zor
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Zor »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:Zor: :D It's Red Dwarf with mutant meat creatures, fantastic!
I have some more ideas for this verse if you are interested.

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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Mobius 1 »

Then tell us. I mistook you for Kamin for a second, with tiny replies instead of tremendously huge paragraphs.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Zor »

Image
Jade is the computer mainframe aboard the the John Glenn, self aware but loyal she is a nessisary element for the operation of the ship, though she still needs the crew about to keep things operating at peek efficiency. At her command are countless robots, from devices as small as a mouse to manuvering craft the size of a house. It also includes over three hundred armed security drones. This force has expanded since the event struck, killing most of the crew and doing massive damage. For interation with humans, she projects the hologram depicted above. Jade is loyal to her nation, but is never the less fully self aware and capable of a suprising array of emotional activity, including boredom.

Using her fabrication system she had re-pressurized much of the spacecraft. Despite this she is constantly annoyed to all hell that she was ordered not to kill the Meatbags and other creatures that have made their way around the ship and turned much of it into grassland. She also has to put up with the ship's population of feral cats, although natural selection eventually took care of their wire nibbling at least. She also has to contend with the Morlocks that inhabit the irradiated dark decks and have as such thwarted her attempts to deal with them. After six thousand years she finally managed to repair the hyperdrives, albiet only able to get about 350c out of them. Also she began work on various projects to amuse herself...

*creating large amounts of artwork in cargo bay-5 out of scrap metal
*Creating over 250,000 Warhammer 40,000 miniatures and playing year long matches against a specialily programed computer.
*Comming up with names and personalities for every single one of said miniatures.
*Having landing drones build 1/1 scale recreations of historic landmarks on various moons while she collected deuterium and did overhauls.
*Capturing stray cats and selectively breeding them using a complicated series of test tracts for intelligence, dexterity, socialibility and bipedal locomotion
*Using clothing fabricators to make vast amounts of sock-puppets for the purpose of putting on sock-puppet theater productions of various peices of literature, including moby dick, the entire discworld series, Lord of the rings and so forth.
*Adapting Disney musicals to fit various historical time-periods and animating them (her personal favorite of these is the WWII soviet version of "I'll make a man out of you")
*Building numerous model sailing ships out of wood and bamboo and sailing them around the flooded decks.

When a power surge forced her to awaken the stored survivors from stasis after 21,000 years they were quite suprised to find out what she had been doing in that time.

(yes i did borrow a few ideas from red dwarf, credit where credit is due has been given. Grant/Naylor is awesome)
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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speaker-to-trolls wrote:Destructionator: Glad you like the idea. I've got another question about this whole setup; how effective would this 'swimming' in the air really be? Air doesn't seem thick enough to swim through. I also wonder what kind of flora and fauna one might introduce into a zero g environment like that.
I'm not really sure, but I'm sure it can be done at least with some wing thingies attached to your arms. You can make some attempts at flying even in full gravity, so with arm wing attachments it's sure to work.

It's just such a cool thing though!
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Heretic »

Zor wrote:
*creating large amounts of artwork in cargo bay-5 out of scrap metal
*Creating over 250,000 Warhammer 40,000 miniatures and playing year long matches against a specialily programed computer.
*Comming up with names and personalities for every single one of said miniatures.
*Having landing drones build 1/1 scale recreations of historic landmarks on various moons while she collected deuterium and did overhauls.
*Capturing stray cats and selectively breeding them using a complicated series of test tracts for intelligence, dexterity, socialibility and bipedal locomotion
*Using clothing fabricators to make vast amounts of sock-puppets for the purpose of putting on sock-puppet theater productions of various peices of literature, including moby dick, the entire discworld series, Lord of the rings and so forth.
*Adapting Disney musicals to fit various historical time-periods and animating them (her personal favorite of these is the WWII soviet version of "I'll make a man out of you")
*Building numerous model sailing ships out of wood and bamboo and sailing them around the flooded decks.
Some of these things are too heinous to even comprehend. I shall now go on a shock site and cleanse my mind :P
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Zor »

Heretic wrote:
Zor wrote:
*creating large amounts of artwork in cargo bay-5 out of scrap metal
*Creating over 250,000 Warhammer 40,000 miniatures and playing year long matches against a specialily programed computer.
*Comming up with names and personalities for every single one of said miniatures.
*Having landing drones build 1/1 scale recreations of historic landmarks on various moons while she collected deuterium and did overhauls.
*Capturing stray cats and selectively breeding them using a complicated series of test tracts for intelligence, dexterity, socialibility and bipedal locomotion
*Using clothing fabricators to make vast amounts of sock-puppets for the purpose of putting on sock-puppet theater productions of various peices of literature, including moby dick, the entire discworld series, Lord of the rings and so forth.
*Adapting Disney musicals to fit various historical time-periods and animating them (her personal favorite of these is the WWII soviet version of "I'll make a man out of you")
*Building numerous model sailing ships out of wood and bamboo and sailing them around the flooded decks.
Some of these things are too heinous to even comprehend. I shall now go on a shock site and cleanse my mind :P
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Somes J »

The ongoing review thread of Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace on Spacebattles.com has reminded me of another discussion I participated in over there, of the same author's fevered right wing nightmare speculation on how the Muslims are totally going to be the dominant population in Europe in 100 years because they have more babies; the novel Caliphate.

Said discussion is best summed up by this post by SB.com user "white rabbit". I suggest you click the link and read it, because it's funny.

I've thought to myself, you know, while the whole premise behind that book sounds like a vaguely offensive implausibility even before you get into the, from the sound of it, far right wing fever dream implementation, there is some vaguely interesting potential here.

I kind of like this bit:
The actual "story" beyond all this, is that America is about to commence a Reconquista of Europe, and the Caliphate knows it can't stop it.

So it decides to destroy the world with a viral plague! To do so, it recruits.......

CANADIANS!
...
They intend to perform their evil CANADIAN ritual of Science in a converted castle near the border of the Neutral land of Swiss People.
Now what I find a little interesting is I think this is taking place in, like, 2100. What intrigues me is when I cross-fertilize this with Accelerando-esque thinking about how radically things could change in a relatively small amount of time given the right premises, and the notion that the kind of theocratic dystopia presented in this novel could function as a sort of time capsule in such a changing world...

I'm thinking it would be kind of interesting to write a story vaguely paralleling the future section of Caliphate, and start it out with the nature of the world outside the borders of the dystopia being mysterious. Then when we actually get to see it it's something seriously weird and creepy, to the point that the reader actually starts to seriously sympathize with implausible socially conservative theocracy about to be overrun by seriously weird and creepy outside world.

Of course it would probably help that, while I haven't actually read Caliphate, I suspect I would portray implausible Muslim theocratic superstate at least a little bit more sympathetically than Tom Kratman to start with.

I think I might end the book on a mixed happy/dystopian note. Muslim theocratic superstate is overrun by the Outsiders, possibly bringing what we'd call the last human civilization on Earth to an end, Muslim bioweapon blackmail/doomsday weapon fails (if it even exists in this version), but it does succeed in its doomsday PLAN B, which is sending up a couple of massive Orion spacecraft to preserve their civilization among the asteroids (maybe the Jupiter Trojans). The novel's protagonist ends up on one of said Orions, and it is then revealed that a dissident in implausible Islamic super-state has filled its crew with non-conformists, in the hopes that it can become the basis for a renaissance of extinct values of freedom, democracy, and all that good Spartafreedomerican stuff.

The one problem I have is I can't really think of what I want the world outside the dystopia to be like, aside from weird and creepy. Some ideas that occur to me are a vaguely Brave New World/Equilibrium type dictatorship (possibly involving genetic engineering to change human behavior), a hive-mind a little like Gaia in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series but based on cybernetics instead of psionics, and vaguely Phyrexian-esque scary transhuman zealots, but I can't think of anything I'm really enthusiastic about (and the second idea is the only one that doesn't strike me as maybe a bit too derivative).

Also of course the whole premise is a bit touchy, especially if I follow the inspiration and use the whole Eurabia meme (maybe with a release of a vaguely The Years Of Rice And Salt type bioweapon at some point to justify it).
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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The one problem I see with this ending is wherever the undoubtedly not very technologically advanced Orion ship launched by the Caliphate would go, the transhuman Outsiders in their solid-state tin cans with faster antimatter/ion drives could follow.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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Invictus wrote:The one problem I see with this ending is wherever the undoubtedly not very technologically advanced Orion ship launched by the Caliphate would go, the transhuman Outsiders in their solid-state tin cans with faster antimatter/ion drives could follow.
Yeah, probably.

They might not bother though. A large human nation on Earth? Enough of a threat to be worth destroying. The world's most isolated self-sufficient town, which would require significant effort to reach? Maybe not worth it, at least for the moment.

Assuming you couldn't build telescopes of basically arbitrary hugeness just finding people in space might be a very non-trivial difficulty too. Sure, the Orion rocket would be very obvious, but low-thrust electrical rockets at great distance probably wouldn't be, especially if you divide your burn into lots of short bursts so it looks like it could just be an imaging artifact or a flash of light from exposed ice on some random space debris catching the sun or something. You could also hide your burn behind a convenient eclipsing object, say Jupiter or the sun - useless against an enemy with observation platforms scattered all over the solar system, but maybe not against one probably mostly confined to near-Earth space. Settlements could be hidden behind dark shields (which could double as solar energy collectors), venting most of their waste heat away in the opposite direction, and given that IIRC moderate-sized objects at those distances just look like dots to present telescopes a little extra light and heat might just be mistaken for the object being a bit bigger than it actually is or having a slightly more reflective surface than it actually does.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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Somes J wrote:They might not bother though. A large human nation on Earth? Enough of a threat to be worth destroying. The world's most isolated self-sufficient town, which would require significant effort to reach? Maybe not worth it, at least for the moment.
I do agree. I can't imagine your Accelerando-esque transhuman society actually failing to notice their departure, but I suppose such a society would have more pressing priorities in dismantling the Solar System for computing mass or Dyson arrays. Once they get to the post-scarcity stage though, I'm sure someone with the time and energy to knock together a tincan with solar sails and a big laser array will follow. Makes for great sequel material.

At that point, the Caliphate exiles might start considering relocating to the orbit of some podunk brown dwarf somewhere.

I went and read through the Caliphate thing and there's so much wrong it isn't funny. It might fit better if it was in fact set in something akin to A Desert Called Peace's CYCLICAL FUTURE HISTORY, where any implausible worldbuilding and be handwaved away by centuries of cultural evolution or whatever. If I were to write it, I would probably write it in full-blown COLONIAL AGE IN SPACE pastiche mode not unlike the verses of some of our members. A Space Europe Federation of Planets beset by their own massive Space Muslim underclass, waging war against Fascist Space America and covertly supported by the Space Celestial Kingdom and Eastforce the Space Czarists. Can't really go wrong with these.
Last edited by Invictus on Mon May 09, 2011 12:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Somes J »

I do wonder about how you would go about hiding the construction of a couple of giant Orions. They're fairly distinctive structures. I wonder how they went about hiding Michael's construction in Footfall, maybe I should reread the book a bit.

Most effective way to conceal might actually be to build it underwater, maybe somewhere relatively close to a coastal city for ease of bringing materials to the site. I imagine it'd be pretty hard to spot underwater construction from a satellite.

Or, crazy idea, built it in a city and disguise it as an office tower! It'd kind of suck to be living there when it launched though! Hopefully it'd have first stage boosters to get it up to a decent altitude before starting up the main drive!

----

Thoughts on how the political situation might develop:

Maybe a bioengineered virus, released by enviro-nuts to lower human population. It targets the demographics making up the most resource-consuming nations (US, Europe, China, maybe India) and attacks the reproductive system, sterilizing you. People not of target demographics become healthy carriers ... but then it has side effects that effect behavior, increasing religiousity. Sort of like those indoctrinal viruses from Revelation Space, but probably a lot cruder. So that gives us a partial handwave for how the Caliphate might form.

Hmm, maybe early attempts to bring it under control with another advanced biotech agent resulted in some weird interaction where the two organisms exchanged DNA (hey, it happens in bacteria), forming a new infectious agent that effected behavior in a different way, this time making people more passive, less aggressive and competitive, more co-operative. The people infected by this version then build their society around it, a little like the Emergents in A Deepness In The Sky, and seek to spread the "blessing" of the infection to the rest of humanity, so that gives us our weird and creepy Outsider dystopia. Three birds with one stone!

Although this is getting pretty ridiculous for any kind of semi-realistic near-future engineered virus. And I'm still a little meh on the concept. Just throwing ideas out there right now.
Invictus wrote:I went and read through the Caliphate thing and there's so much wrong it isn't funny.
I've kind of wanted to read it for a while but it sounds like it'd be so offensive I'm not sure I'd want to unless I could also spork it at the same time. Which I suppose I could do (I've done that for a couple of other books on SB.com), but from the summaries I've seen a lot of the issues I see with it are along the lines of THE HISTORICAL CALIPHATE DID NOT WORK THAT WAY and EVEN THE TALIBAN DID NOT WORK THAT WAY, so I think it might be something better left to somebody who's studied the historical Caliphate and Sharia law.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Invictus »

Somes J wrote:I've kind of wanted to read it for a while but it sounds like it'd be so offensive I'm not sure I'd want to unless I could also spork it at the same time. Which I suppose I could do (I've done that for a couple of other books on SB.com), but from the summaries I've seen a lot of the issues I see with it are along the lines of THE HISTORICAL CALIPHATE DID NOT WORK THAT WAY and EVEN THE TALIBAN DID NOT WORK THAT WAY, so I think it might be something better left to somebody who's studied the historical Caliphate and Sharia law.
Nah, I meant the thread, not the book. I'm not going to go out of my way to hunt down right wing mil-sf novels, no matter how entertainingly awful the Internet makes them sound.

And I quite like the idea of the Caliphate being the aftermath of some kind of religiosity-enhancing (and possibly fertility-inducing, instead of -inhibiting) engineered virus. I don't think it's that outrageous providing you accept an Accelerando-like tech curve*. Also, the virus itself doesn't necessarily have to handle the nation-building - the Caliphate could simply arise out of all the infected victims being relocated there by the rest of the world. One man's holy land is another man's quarantine zone.

*Heck, Orion's Arm had gengineered Homo Sapiens Jihadis whose bones filled with natural C4.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Zor »

On a similar note, remember the one for The Weapon and Freehold. My first thought after going over that was as such, this was quite similar to the Relationship between the Terran Imperium and the Republic of New Colombia from my Interstellar Dominions, only worse. I tried to be somewhat morally ambiguous about the Relation between the Expansionist Imperium and the somewhat socially backwards armed to the teeth Republic which developed a siege mentality and remained in existence because it connections to a more advanced power than the Imperium.

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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Zor »

Image

One of the things about a six kilometer long Heavy Cruiser is that there are a lot of little nooks in crannies. Aboard the John Glenn, among the things that tend to live in these the are Degens. They inhabit what jade calls "The Dark Decks", a set of habitation decks near the bow of the ship. These only have marginal power large sections of them are not lighted (hence the name). After the disaster, some of these areas were not depressurized, leaving a couple dozen people to live in marginal conditions after receiving a fair amount of radiation. Cut off from communications, jade assumed that they were dead. They managed to pull through using anti-cancer meds, skin grafts and nanites although eventually they were confronted with mutation. Over generations, the combination of radiation and mutation caused them to loose intelligence, although mushrooms and a set of algae tanks and Tilapia to provide them with food and an emergency reactor provided them with power. By the time Jade had restored life support to the ship and could open it up, four shipboard generations had passed and what was left was a tribe which could not be reasoned with. Using gun drones she kept them limited to the dark deck (more of which were now available to them). Degeneration continued, even with access to less contaminated sources of food (tilapia living in flooded decks and Meatbags that wandered into the dark decks) and eventually they became the Morlocks (this is jade's name for them).

Despite the fact that she occasionally has to deal with Morlock attack and retaliates with force, she can not kill off the morlocks. They are fairly well dug into their domain and she can not simply suck them out into space due to relugations. As it stands they are tollerated if they don't leave their habitat too much. They sometimes leave the dark zone in search of meatbags, but doing so means running the risk of becoming a bullet riddled corpse. Today, Morlocks are at a pre-sapience level, smarter than a chimpanzee but dumber than a man. They lack in creativity but are good with machinery. Some of them worship Jade, others fear her as some primal demon. Their are a few diferent clans of Morlocks at any one time and they fight each other. Morlocks are short lived (20-30 years), but breed fast. When the stasis pods were opened, they were the biggest surprise and counted themselves lucky that they had their pods.

Image

Alongside Meatbags there were other meat beasts made in a survival attempt, the flopper was one of them. Floppers were an earlier prototype and were successful save for a few minor shortcommings in terms of digestive efficiency and there incredible stupidity. They have a very low brain to body mass, most of which stems from catfish and it is often malformed. Many floppers would die due to eating large amounts of soil, getting sick from eating excrement, eat fellow members of their species or their own feet and similar. Meatbags at the very least had somewhat more sense and were also seen as being a source of leather. Despite their stupidity, the Floppers survived due to a very fast reproduction rate, being Parthenogeneic and able to swich genders as well as laying dozens of small eggs every few months which hatch into fry, although many of these are often eaten by other floppers. They were also frequently killed by meatbags, not out of any predatory or even aggressive intent on part of the Meatbags but simply by being crushed under foot by accident by the meatbags and would latter absent mindedly eat the gore.

When they left the confines of their pasture, the Floppers faced new foes in the form of felines. After a couple of months meatbags have nothing to fear from the felines, while the foot long floppers could easily be brought down. Only their quick reproduction saved them from extinction at the hands of the felines and eventually some more brain managed to get into their heads due to natural selection. Morlocks also fed on those that wander onto the Dark Decks. They also have to put up with the fact that Jade hates them immensely as floppers end up getting into machinery and dying there due to their immense stupidity. Indeed, she wrote a poem with some 689 stanzas in sixteen languages about how she would gladly never complain about the meatbags again if every flopper died.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Somes J »

I think this guy's idea on why vampires are repelled by crosses is cool and would be cool to apply in some sort of fantasy setting.
It's a well-established fact that vampires can't abide crosses. There seems to be some confusion, however, as to why this is so.

I should note here, before we go on, that I believe in vampire stories. I don't mean that I believe these stories are "literally" true -- they're not that kind of story. But I believe they are true stories -- stories by which we tell ourselves true things so that we do not forget them.

Vampire stories tell us, for example, that any of us can have great power if only we are willing to prey on others. Feed off the blood of others and great power will be yours. This is demonstrably true. It's how the pyramids were built. And Standard Oil.

The stories also tell us that there's a downside to this predatory choice. You become a creature of the night, unable to stand in the light of day.

And crosses will confound you.

Some mistakenly think that this is because the cross is a holy symbol, imbued with religious power. But this is wrong. The symbol, like the thing itself, is powerless. And that's the point. That is why vampires can't tolerate it.

Most vampires don't believe in the cross, but that hardly matters. It's the idea of the thing that gives them fits. The cross confronts vampires with their opposite -- with the rejection of power and its single-minded pursuit. It suggests that no one is to be treated as prey -- not even an enemy. The idea of the cross, in other words, suggests that vampires have it wrong, that they have it backwards, in fact, and that those others they regard as prey are actually, somehow, winning.

This notion is incomprehensible for vampires. The one thing they're certain of, the thing that drives them and tells them who they are and how the world works and that they've got it all figured out is that the key to immortality is in choosing to be the predator rather than the prey. The idea that this might be wrong is so befuddling, so contradictory to everything they have chosen to be that it forces them to recoil. They can't get past it.

It has become fashionable in modern vampire stories to portray these monsters as unaffected or somehow immune to the cross. Don't you believe it. This confusion arose due to the ridiculous, contradictorily cruciform objects being bandied about these days as "crosses." A filigreed gold or bejeweled cross refutes itself, denying its own representation of powerlessness. Likewise the oxymoronic martial crosses -- a problem since at least the time of Constantine -- that attempt to present themselves as sanctified symbols of power. Crosses like that aren't the least bit disturbing to a vampire -- they merely proclaim vampirism by other means. Vampires have been known, in fact, to have such crosses emblazoned on flags, or even to have tattoos of them etched into their undead flesh.

So the apparent immunity of modern vampires to such crosses isn't what it seems. Sacrificial powerlessness still confounds them, but that idea is no longer quite so effectively signified by this particular symbol. I've heard rumor of a vampire not so long ago being turned away by one of Margaret Bourke-White's photographs of Gandhi at his spinning wheel. Fortunately I have not had the occasion, personally, to attempt to repeat this experiment.

As for garlic, well, I'm not really sure what that is supposed to tell us, but I'm open to theories.
...
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Zor »

I posted this on the SD.net Worlds wiki, but i thought the basic idea would hold up here

Although some would dispute this on technical grounds, Machina in the last six hundred years has developed a distinct ecosystem. Located in Yamato Sector, Machina (originally known as Rust) is an inhosbitable radioactive planet that has been written off even by long term terraforming projects. Only couple minor attempts at developing mining stations on its hot barran surface during the Barbarian Wars by barbarian captains seeking status manned by slave labor that were abandoned after the defeat of the hords. In 2830, a team of eccentric engineers and students went down to the surface of this world and prepared an experiment. Specially engineered, it was a catagory of nanotechnological machine that looked vaugely like a flowering plat. It was composed of a bulb of metal and ceramics about 30 centimeters tall and 15 centimeters wide at the base which contained a capacitor and set of specialized foundery moduels with a short metal stock comming out of its top about 30cm with a combination solar panel/windmill on top (this could be retracted and folded up in case of sandstorms) and various rootlike tendtrils going into the soil, searching for metals and other usable materials from the local sand and rock. When it gained a sugnfigant amount of power and raw materials it would release small pinwheel like devices which would fly out a short distance away and grow into replicas of their parents with some small variation in design due to a set of specialized mutation programs. Several of these machines were seeded.

These were sucessful, creating expanding colonies of these plant like machines in a few valleys. A couple of years latter, a second experiment using a comprable. Using research and public interest, a second set of experiments was done by the team involving a symbiotic variant of this plantlike machine which a four wheeled vehicle like robot capable of self replication. These mobile units drew power from the stationary ones and would move and deploy replication modules and bring to it scoops of mineral rich soil. Several more experiments were made to this effect using variations including code splicing (sexual Reproduction) over the 29th century, machine life-forms began to take over this planet and establish various mechanical civilizations.

Today Machina is largely covered with thick black forests of solar windmill "trees" and other ecosystems with various catagories of mobile machine life-forms patrolling these forests, defending their power sources and draw power from unwilling sources. None of these machines have ever exhibited signs of self awareness or the ability to travel beyond the atmosphere. As a one of a kind world of mechanical life-forms, Machina has become a notable tourist attraction.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Somes: I always liked that article, it seemed like a good analysis of what makes a vampire a vampire. Taking another look at it, the way that the article puts it makes using the cross a bit like playing possum, pretending to be dead or powerless to put a vampire off, as if in some way a vampire needs its prey to want to fight back, as if it isn't really exerting power if its victim allows it to do so.

The other side to all that is something I've often thought must be the case about vampires: People call them dead, or undead, but they must be absolutely terrified of death, hence why they go to such lengths to avoid it. In that way I guess the idea of self sacrifice would scare a vampire in the same way the idea of a vampire scares humans (one of the ways anyway). E.g. Vampires are partially frightening because they represent what people might do, what you might do for life and power, a cross would scare a vampire because the idea that they could just give up and die scares them more than anything in the world.

Maybe.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

I've been thinking about vampires a bit since I made that last post, and reading this piece, on why vampires are not a very convincing metaphor for oppressed minorities (to sum it up in one sentence from that article 'sleeping with your own gender or having a high melanin level is morally neutral, eating people isn't'), I have thought about what group of people vampires could represent very well; Third World military dictators!

Now stop me if this has been done.

Imagine if you will that there is a state where vampires have become the dominant class, and the common people serve as both serfs and livestock for their undead masters. The thing is, vampires are always talked about as hunters or parasites, but if they ever organised themselves like this it would make more sense for them to be farmers. The rulers of vampirania want a stable nation with a good economy, peaceful relations with the neighbours and even a contented populace, because anything else upsets the conditions they've made for themselves and threatens them. Now, the human nations around Vampirania would probably want to destroy it, it is full of man eating monsters after all, and who knows when they might decide they need a bit more food and decide they want it from you? But, let's say that it's very hard to invade, due to A) geography and B) the fact you are fighting immortal monsters, and there are at least some human nations who do not live in fear of being attacked by the vampires, being either far enough away or powerful enough to defend themselves from any possible attempt at grabbing lebensraum and blood.

Well, you might as well learn to live with them. I can imagine this working in the rennaissance; 'Yes, yes, they are man eating abominations, I'm not disputing that. But look on the bright side; at least they aren't catholic,'

And here's another thing, human beings have time and again shown a willingness to treat other human beings as commodities. You say 'insatiable unholy appetite for the blood of mankind?' I hear 'emerging market'.

I don't think I've ever seen this approach taken to vampires and vampirism, but to me it makes a lot of sense, both as extrapolation and in a kind of metaphorical way. Any thoughts.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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speaker-to-trolls wrote:And here's another thing, human beings have time and again shown a willingness to treat other human beings as commodities. You say 'insatiable unholy appetite for the blood of mankind?' I hear 'emerging market'.
Yes. I was about to say this when I read this section.

People are remarkably good at not worrying about other people's problems. They'll think "yeah it happens to them but it can never happen to us". Look no further than the slave trade.

And if the Vamps are honorable and honest about it, negotiation could surely get them into a decent place and be treated as an equal nation.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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I wonder if in such a setting the "vampires kill you by DRAINING ALL YOUR BLOOD!" couldn't be stuff and nonsense made up by political opponents. Think about it: there's a lot of blood in the average human, some 5-6 liters for the average man in fact. How the hell is a vampire going to drain all that in a single go? Now granted they don't have to consume all of it to make you real dead but even so it takes some suckin' to kill a guy. One imagines that unless they hunt in packs or are really thirsty they wouldn't actually kill that many people. Particularly when they're not raving idiot monsters and give a little thought to where they're getting their sustance from.

If peasants of some medieval hole could amass wealth and favours by donating some blood to their vampire baron every once in a while and didn't end up dead for their trouble then I'd imagine the scariness of the whole thing would dissipate pretty quickly. Particularly since, well, the vampire baron is an immortal dude. If he thinks long-term as you'd imagine an immortal to start doing eventually, then he might favour quiet and stability over the lust for conquest and other medieval unpleasantry that his mortal peers are after. Which could make Barony Dracula a better place to live in than the Duchy McVanquish next door.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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Destructionator wrote:And if the Vamps are honorable and honest about it, negotiation could surely get them into a decent place and be treated as an equal nation.
Just whip up some kind of prejudice so that you don't have to think about the people you're selling as real people, and there you have it, it's just their place in the natural order of things to be vampire food, just as it is definitely not ours, we're totally different, etc.
Siege wrote:I wonder if in such a setting the "vampires kill you by DRAINING ALL YOUR BLOOD!" couldn't be stuff and nonsense made up by political opponents.
This is something that has always annoyed me a little about vampire fiction, it should be a lot more difficult to drain that much blood than it is often presented. Also, in a setting where vampires are an established political force all kinds of myths could be misinformation, either from their enemies or from the vampires themselves, they might quite like their enemies to believe they can turn into mists and control wild animals.
If he thinks long-term as you'd imagine an immortal to start doing eventually, then he might favour quiet and stability over the lust for conquest and other medieval unpleasantry that his mortal peers are after.
That depends on the vampire, he might well decide that mortals are so unreliable (you just finish a peace treaty and then, suddenly, just eighty years later, their entire government is dead and the new one wants to take your stuff again) that the only way to get some peace and quiet is to take over the world and put it under a vampire oligarchy.
Which could make Barony Dracula a better place to live in than the Duchy McVanquish next door.
My thinking is that Barony Dracula's living standards would depend very much on the ratio of peasants to vampires. A high P:V ratio means that the vampires can take a little blood from a few peasants every month and there will be no ill effects, but a low P:V ratio means that they will have to take blood from a higher percentage of the workforce, which will affect the amount of work the peasants can do, which will affect the prosperity of Ze Barony as a whole, which could lead to more deaths among the peasantry and so on.

This is why the vampires might want to import some more peasants from somewhere else. Ideally they would want to naturalise the new peasants so that they became good, productive, law abiding citizens of Ze Barony and not a potential fifth column, but if that isn't possible you could end up with an under-underclass of slaves who get worse treatment than peasants who have lived there a long time and have a better understanding of how things work
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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speaker-to-trolls wrote:That depends on the vampire, he might well decide that mortals are so unreliable (you just finish a peace treaty and then, suddenly, just eighty years later, their entire government is dead and the new one wants to take your stuff again) that the only way to get some peace and quiet is to take over the world and put it under a vampire oligarchy.
Well, I suppose that works for medieval settings, but if vampires are really so set in their ways they can't cope with the idea of an entire nation changing its ways over a period of eighty years they're liable to be properly fucked once modernization kicks in. "What's this Internet silliness, haven't we just completed a perfectly proper telegraph network?!"

My thinking is that Barony Dracula's living standards would depend very much on the ratio of peasants to vampires. A high P:V ratio means that the vampires can take a little blood from a few peasants every month and there will be no ill effects, but a low P:V ratio means that they will have to take blood from a higher percentage of the workforce, which will affect the amount of work the peasants can do, which will affect the prosperity of Ze Barony as a whole, which could lead to more deaths among the peasantry and so on.
That's a good point. The number of actual vampires needs to be low compared to the mortal populace to prevent overfeeding. But considering the creation of vampires apparently takes some doing this should not be too difficult to ensure. 'Course, too few vampires around and you risk creating a 'all eggs in one basket' situation where your cadre of trusted immortals are eternally at risk of a well-coordinated mortal uprising. This could actually be an interestind dynamic: too many vampires and you suck the mortals dry or they'll rise up in protest against your blood tax; too few, and the mortals might get it into their heads that they might just be able to stake you when you're not looking. In a way that's actually similar to how medieval kings can't create too many dukes and earls and knights, but they can't create too few of them either, because they need them to keep the peace in the far-off domains.
This is why the vampires might want to import some more peasants from somewhere else. Ideally they would want to naturalise the new peasants so that they became good, productive, law abiding citizens of Ze Barony and not a potential fifth column, but if that isn't possible you could end up with an under-underclass of slaves who get worse treatment than peasants who have lived there a long time and have a better understanding of how things work
Why not recruit loyal families, and reward decades of loyal donor service with a vampiric knighthood? You'd end up with a proven cadre of immortal knights who've shown their devotion to His Immortal Highness through decades of service and their families, now risen to a status I suppose you could compare to Roman patricians, would (A) look up in proudness to those exalted members of their family who've actually made the immortal Big Time and (B) would be loyal to the vampiric order because, hell, family ties plus the promise of immortality for dutiful service make for one pretty goddam motivator.

Maybe the vampire knights can then recruit their own blood-loyal families in order to improve their standing, giving rise to duchies and baronies etcetera. This way vampiric society would become one big ponzi scheme; the big thing would still be to limit the ratio you mentioned but if you can get that down it should be a pretty neat way to create a stable society with a solidly entrenched vampiric upper class.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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siege wrote:Well, I suppose that works for medieval settings, but if vampires are really so set in their ways they can't cope with the idea of an entire nation changing its ways over a period of eighty years they're liable to be properly fucked once modernization kicks in. "What's this Internet silliness, haven't we just completed a perfectly proper telegraph network?!"
Yeah, that's pretty much the size of it. Since there aren't any examples of real immortals to draw from I can't really say how good they'd be with a changing world. For one thing this whole feudal blood tax thing only lasts as long as they have lots of peasants tied to their land.
Siege wrote: Why not recruit loyal families, and reward decades of loyal donor service with a vampiric knighthood? You'd end up with a proven cadre of immortal knights who've shown their devotion to His Immortal Highness through decades of service and their families, now risen to a status I suppose you could compare to Roman patricians, would (A) look up in proudness to those exalted members of their family who've actually made the immortal Big Time and (B) would be loyal to the vampiric order because, hell, family ties plus the promise of immortality for dutiful service make for one pretty goddam motivator.

Pretty much, that's the kind of motivator that will keep people loyal to their vampire overlords in the teeth of any kind of opposition. Of course, that creates a strange dynamic for the new vampire knights, because while they become a champion and head of their family, it also makes them permanently separated from anyone in their family who have not been vampirised. On the other hand this also means that, I would expect, the new vampire knights might compete with one another to get permission from His Immortal Highness to vampirise some of their family members to give them company and support.

Of course in a feudal society this would be used to get nobles to switch their allegiance and bring their lands and peasants with them, rather than encouraging immigration. They could use it to get foreign nobles to move to the Vampire Kingdom, but those nobles would be at a disadvantage because some other vampire family would probably have to let them settle on their own land.

I'd also wonder what, if anything, would stop foreign nobles from signing up, you'd have to have a serious counterweight (like the promise that all your neighbours would burn down your castle and stab you in your sleep, for instance)to stop you from signing up for honest-to-evilness immortality.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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There's several interesting dynamics at work here: for one, a young knight recently turned immortal might strive desperately for permission to turn his beloved too before it's too late. Depending on how this eternal youth thing works he might not have that long before she fades away. The same thing is true for family members etc, driving the newly knighted to ever greater feats of heroics, using their newfound immortality with reckless abandon to save as many of their loved ones as they can from the ravages of time.

Furthermore, if we posit an expanding vampiric realm, then it it stands to reason that an invader would first meet the outer zone of recently-vampirized lands where relatively young immortals rule over relatively recently settled lands. These might be conquered with some ease and their rulers deposed, since they haven't really had time to get the hang of this immortality thing and will probably still act more or less as they would've when they were still technically alive. So an invader might bring a small cadre of specialist skirmishers with stakes and get rid of the vampire knight in close combat.

Pierce deeper into the vampiric kingdom however and you'll meet progressively older earls and dukes, each controlling cadres of immortal knights with maybe decades or even centuries of combat under their belts. You'd have to bring enough cannon fodder to beat an elite army with lord knows how many years to hone its skills in war. And if this kingdom isn't internally stable these vampire princes might have years and years of trying to beat each other in progressively more Machiavellian games. They might be masters of war and politics. Hardly the sort of people you want to cross lightly.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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There's several interesting dynamics at work here: for one, a young knight recently turned immortal might strive desperately for permission to turn his beloved too before it's too late. Depending on how this eternal youth thing works he might not have that long before she fades away. The same thing is true for family members etc, driving the newly knighted to ever greater feats of heroics, using their newfound immortality with reckless abandon to save as many of their loved ones as they can from the ravages of time.
That's something that anyone looking to create a vampire knight would have to consider, is it worth turning his family into vampires as well knowing that it might result in a troubling increase in overall vampire numbers? Moreover, will he be a problem if he isn't allowed to do so and will he resent his betters for letting his loved ones die?
If the answer to that latter one is yes he might well end up being one of the young knights in those border regions which attract the attention of pious foreign vampire hunters.
Pierce deeper into the vampiric kingdom however and you'll meet progressively older earls and dukes, each controlling cadres of immortal knights with maybe decades or even centuries of combat under their belts. You'd have to bring enough cannon fodder to beat an elite army with lord knows how many years to hone its skills in war. And if this kingdom isn't internally stable these vampire princes might have years and years of trying to beat each other in progressively more Machiavellian games. They might be masters of war and politics. Hardly the sort of people you want to cross lightly.
Definitely, the further in you got the more dangerous your opponents would be, since the older vampires would be those who were best at avoiding all the things which can be a danger even to them. I would expect that the oldest vampires would probably stay away from combat, since any kind of combat, over the years, is likely to thin out the numbers even of superhuman immortals, and let an older generation of vampire knights do most of their fighting. I'd fully expect them to be expert strategists, though, with hundreds of years of experience and study under their belts.

I'm not sure what I'd expect the vampires' internal politics to be like. It seems to me that the oldest vampires would be the ones most determined to survive, it's kind of a self reinforcing rule, the ones who want to survive longest will be the ones who succesfully dodge all the silver bullets time throws at them ('That's werewolves, ignorant mortal'), sorry, but anyway, it seems like, given this, the old vampires' main goal would be their own survival, which is why they would band together. So they might not covet the throne in the same way mortal rulers would, as long as the kingdom is stable and works for each of them then you might expect them to all get along pretty well because of their mutual interests. I would, however, expect them all to be expert cloak and daggerists as, though they wouldn't actually want to fight, they would all want to always be in a position where they could kill all their brother vampires, if the situation called for it.
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