Random ideas (again)

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

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Destructionator
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Destructionator »

Yeah, that makes sense. BTW speaking of reactors, another thing that occurred to me a while ago is, unless you are using solar panels, the temperature of the reactor can be visible from the outside and give a hint as to your alert readiness.

If you are just coasting, you probably don't need a great deal of power. So you'd turn the generator down. Less energy means less heat, so it will look colder on the outside.

If you are expecting combat though, you'll want it ready to power the weapons. Since reactors can be pretty slow in getting ramped up to full output, you can't do it on a moment's notice; you can't just turn up the reactor immediately before firing.

So when you go to red alert you'd warm up the reactor so it is ready to fire at any time. You literally warm it up, so that's visible to other ships too.



Here's the biggest danger I see though... the other ship doesn't know for sure *why* you are warming up your reactor. Is it to fire phasers? Are you planning to jump to warp speed? Or is it simply dinner time and the laundry is running at the same time, so the reactor warmed up to run both the hot water heater and the ovens at the same time? (If you are doing super high power weapons, this probably wouldn't run close enough for confusion, but lower power weapons are more fun anyway I say!)

The danger of misunderstanding between your sensor operators could lead to a violent escalation, especially if tensions are already high for other reasons.



Anyway I'm rambling again. I guess that's all I have to say though since everything you said sounds good to me.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Booted Vulture »

That's also a good concept. Of course in low tech settings. Radiating away generated can also be a problem. So they may be some kind of latency involved in making that kind of judgement. A ship can be hot because its using its reactor. Or because its recently used its reactor.

Say a ship appears in orbit above you, with a really hot reactor. You might assume its running hot because its about to blast you and trigger your planetary defences. When really they fucked up their navigation and are running hot because they had to do an emergency stop and haven't flushed the heat off yet.

---

Only half related but is there some kind of plausible system that you can use to recycle waste heat from your reactor somehow? That wouldn't violate thermodynamics right?? Just make it much more efficient.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Destructionator »

Booted Vulture wrote:Or because its recently used its reactor.
Brilliant. There's a lot of fun to be had with minor tech details combined with human error :)
Only half related but is there some kind of plausible system that you can use to recycle waste heat from your reactor somehow? That wouldn't violate thermodynamics right?? Just make it much more efficient.
A little bit, as long as there's a heat difference between two sections, you can make use of it. But there's only so much you can do because not all the heat that passes through your thingy will be converted. As it becomes more dissipated it becomes harder to harness, so the best place to improve efficiency is inside the reactor itself.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Magister Militum »

Destructionator wrote:Yeah, that makes sense. BTW speaking of reactors, another thing that occurred to me a while ago is, unless you are using solar panels, the temperature of the reactor can be visible from the outside and give a hint as to your alert readiness.

If you are just coasting, you probably don't need a great deal of power. So you'd turn the generator down. Less energy means less heat, so it will look colder on the outside.

If you are expecting combat though, you'll want it ready to power the weapons. Since reactors can be pretty slow in getting ramped up to full output, you can't do it on a moment's notice; you can't just turn up the reactor immediately before firing.

So when you go to red alert you'd warm up the reactor so it is ready to fire at any time. You literally warm it up, so that's visible to other ships too.



Here's the biggest danger I see though... the other ship doesn't know for sure *why* you are warming up your reactor. Is it to fire phasers? Are you planning to jump to warp speed? Or is it simply dinner time and the laundry is running at the same time, so the reactor warmed up to run both the hot water heater and the ovens at the same time? (If you are doing super high power weapons, this probably wouldn't run close enough for confusion, but lower power weapons are more fun anyway I say!)

The danger of misunderstanding between your sensor operators could lead to a violent escalation, especially if tensions are already high for other reasons.

This is an awesome idea. Somehow, I feel like this can give a sort of personality to a ship depending the on the circumstances.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Booted Vulture »

Another thing i've wondered about. not necassrily in relation to the previous thoughts but not really seperate either.

Certain Star Trek things, (I think more the eu stuff) have tried to make the point that in the future rank is not a big factor. Jsut being a captain doesn't mean s/he's better than anyone else. It's just that they've been around longer have more experience.

I used the word tried there because what with its obsession with being the captain = awesometimes, Star trek itself doesn't much follow through on this.

But what if it did? What if demotion was not seen as a punishment or a disgrace and promotion wasn't seen as laudable. So instead you're rank i based on merit and your current average effectiveness. Say it was all run by some sort of Admiralty AI programmed for strict meritocracy.

Or at least in theory.

In practise, humans are still humans and care about status and rank and shit. So when they get promoted they get super nervous about their performance because thye don' want to foul up and get bumped straight back down a grade again.

Going back to the 'even more heavily hornblower-in-space' thing. This would create a good analogue reason to Hornblower's often performance anxiety which was based around the fact that the Royal Navy had a lot more commanders and captains than it ever had ships. So when you screw up, they have no reason to give you another ship. Screw-ups end up on shore, languishing in Half-pay.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Destructionator »

I was thinking just yesterday: wouldn't be fun to have a ship where the captain is just a first among equals; that the ship is run democratically?

Some communists actually tried to do away with rank altogether in their militaries. Enver Hoxha did fairly successfully.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Siege »

Like 17th century pirate ships, you mean?
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Booted Vulture »

Destructionator wrote:I was thinking just yesterday: wouldn't be fun to have a ship where the captain is just a first among equals; that the ship is run democratically?
How would that work? I mean would you have an election cycle. And between elections the captain would be the undisputed master of the vessel, making staff appointments and descisions and so on? Would you run on a captain/XO ticket? Or would all the command staff/senior officers be elected seperately?

Or would the captain technically be in charge but most of the desicions would be taken democratically?

Sounds like bad system in reality but one you could spin a lot of stories out of.

Like 17th century pirate ships, you mean?
How the heck did that work? I mean i get pirates only following charamatic/sucessful captains. But they can't exactly have been democratic. You certainly can't just elect anyone to be captain in those days. they had to be decent seamen/navigators at least.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Destructionator »

idk anything abotut 17th century pirates so I can't say anything about that.... but here's what my butt has in mind...
Booted Vulture wrote:How would that work?
It depends on how the crew wants it to work :) The important thing would be that mutiny isn't a crime - if the crew decides they don't want to do something, they don't have to. (An individual might need to obey orders; mutiny needs a group, and so does a democratic decision.)

From there, all decisions could be made through consensus, a kind of direct democracy. You could have elected captains with recall possible at any time. Or something else that I'm not thinking of. Each ship department might do their own strategy - the captain is picked by the crew and the lieutenants picked by the departments.



Limits on the practicality would come from a lot of external factors. Staff positions is probably dictated by training. I guess you could democratically do that too, but surely they'd decide to put qualified people at the posts. So this is a question of crew selection which happens outside the ship itself.

There's also a question of fleet actions. Suppose the admiral says "go to planet X", but the crew doesn't want to. Could the rest of the fleet punish them for not joining the group? I think it would only have any importance if the whole fleet was democratic.



So, you join starfleet. You then automatically get to sit in on meetings and participate in the decision making process - listen to the arguments, make your own, have a vote in the end.

When you get an assignment, you then are eligible to do the same on issues relating to your job. So suppose you're assigned to cleaning the poop deck on the USS Shitty Ass. Now you can make decisions relating to the Shitty Ass itself, taking part in the captain level elections, you get to make decisions with the local poop cleaners union - choosing the poop lieutenant, for instance, deciding on if you should go on strike, and also, you'd be a part of the fleet wide committee of poop cleaners who might make decisions on things like investing in new mops, making sure there's enough replacement buckets at the various bases, etc.


Direct democracy might be a pain on the fleet level... but might not, using an internet. Each individual is entitled to take part in all the meetings that affect him. Easy enough on a ship, you can all get physically together.

For the higher level, suppose you elect representatives. What you do is let them vote and speak on your behalf.... but to keep direct democracy, you can take this back at any time.

Suppose 100 people all decide to vote for Rep. Y. Rep. Y's vote now counts as 100 votes. But, if you're watching C-SPAN and don't like how he voted, you can just still place your own vote online and change one of those representative votes.



Huh, I like this in general.
Sounds like bad system in reality but one you could spin a lot of stories out of.
Maybe, but that's the fun anyway :)
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Siege »

Far as I recall quite a few pirate ships in the 17th centuries were run democratically, i.e. the captain and quartermaster were elected by the crew, and could get deposed if they proposed things the crew couldn't get behind. I'm assuming these crews probably knew enough not to elect the ship's cook's mate as captain, but instead went for charismatic dudes who knew a thing or two about fighting and where to get some plundering done. So, not unlike American Presidents ;).
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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For some reason I've been wondering about Vic's hard-partying King of the Vampires, what it might mean to be a vampire and what the history of vampires might look like assuming a world broadly similar to our own (except with a hard-partying King of the Vampires in it).

Because it seems to me that when you get right down to it, your typical fictional Dracula Lite vampire count isn't actually all that much worse than what actual factual medieval nobles got up to. Sure they may not have drank their peasants' blood, but compared to all the crap they did subject their peasants to tapping them for blood every once in a while is distinctly underwhelming as far as terribleness is concerned. The vampire count just sits in his castle most of the time; I'm admittedly not an expert on vampire fiction but they very rarely seem interested in launching crusades or burning and pillaging the villages of rival lords.

That got me to thinking, assuming there were a bunch of vampire lords around in medieval times and they weren't all that much worse than the other nobles of their time... How might vampire society have developed from there? Let's assume that, barring the occasional awesome magic trick these vampires are broadly mortal in the sense that lopping off their head will do them in, that there's a Church that might not like them per se but also isn't intent on burning them all at the stake (as long as they pay their dues anyway), and that at some point the enlightenment rolls around and nobility isn't what it's cracked up to be anymore... What happens? Do they go underground? Do they go legit?

Because I like the idea of the hard-partying King of the Vampires as a coke fiend mob boss in a pin stripe suit.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Invictus »

Haha, my initial idea of the hard-partying King of the Vampires was of a coke-fiend rock star in a leather jacket. Minus the actual singing of course, but he still threw all the best parties that everyone went to.

Of course, I also envisioned the hard-partying King of the Vampires as having ridiculous superpowers beyond the ken of regular vampires, so your history of the Vampires might not work out that well.

But then, a vision of modern Vampires as a slightly more predatory social elite is a lovely thing to contrast against the antics of the hard-partying King of the Vampires, who as I originally envisioned him, is engaged in a very deliberate campaign to cast his office into such disrepute that no self-respecting vampire bigwig would want to wrest his throne away from him...
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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Hmm, I was wondering if vampirism could be a mutation via viral RNA sort of a thing, but I fancy the idea of ridiculous superpowers as well. Would they be something exclusive to the hard-partying King of Vampires, or would he just be that more awesome than everybody else?

It would be pretty fun to build a world where the vampire counts lost their position in the Enlightenment because they really strongly dislike direct violence. Newbie vampires are sometimes violent, but the smarter ones know they can live forever as long as nobody chops off their head or stakes their heart, so they tend to dislike physical conflict. So most of them transitioned from land-owning nobility to mercantile robber barons to CEOs.

Except the hard-partying King of the Vampires, who doesn't give a shit about titles or power: he just wants to have a good time, and he has the fortune of a thousand years to waste on his outrageous habits. Which deeply annoys the Vampire CEOs who are so used to trying to bring about each other's social downfall through evil boardroom backstabbery that they don't really know how to deal with someone who just doesn't give a hoot about reputation, doesn't have a company to ruinate, and has so much money all the scheming in the world wouldn't be able to dent his fiscal wellbeing.

Plus all the antics of the hard-partying King of Vampires end up in the tabloids all the time, and that's deeply embarrassing to his status-driven, keeping-up-appearances-obsessed sons and daughters.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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Furthermore to my ideas about using ye olde naval ratings for space ships. I actually read the first Honor Harrington novel. Where sci-fi energy sails form part of the FTL drive. And they have ship's shuttles called cutters and pinnances. Coxuns and Bosons and Prize Money and honours for naval service.

Despite still using the destroyer/cruiser/dreadnaught scale for ship types it rather took the shine off the idea for me.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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What about the book turned you off the whole idea?
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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Just a combination of 'this idea has already been done' and 'this idea has already been done in a work I feel is mediocre'

Also the work had to include a tortuously long infodump to explain exactly how the star nation had a powerful noble class again, which made me realise that if you're going to have you space-navy suddenly go back to really old fashioned terms. You've sort of got to explain why they would even do that.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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That pretty much confirms my belief that if you're going to do the age of sail in space (or any '... in SPACE!' idea really) you either do it over the top or not do it at all. As a reader I'm not really interested in pseudo-Britain fighting pseudo-France in space with run of the mill sci-fi spaceships and some semi-archaic terms thrown into what for all intents and purposes appears to be a modern American warship (in space)... But I suspect I might very well enjoy it if they went completely over the top and did treasure island in space with asteroids standing in for tiny atolls and spaceships with crow's nests and actual sails and 'roll out the long nines Mr. Gibbs!' and all that. If you're going to do the past except in the future, don't be oblique about it. Relish it! Be obvious, have a Royal Navy, have a Queen of Space, have press gangs and swashbuckling and buried treasures and boarding actions... in SPACE! Because then the end product might be silly and over the top and slightly ludicrous, but at least it won't be dreary average mil-sci pew pew fare.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

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In other words... write Treasure Planet?

Never saw TP actually. I do love Titan AE its main competitor. Both films pretty much bombed though.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Siege »

I've heard of Treasure Planet but never saw it. Titan AE was glorious, but lacking in arrogant yet stalwart bicorne-swagging space commodores.

But yeah, it's the same with all the Space Rome scenarios I've ever read. Generally speaking the closer they are to toga-wearing moustache twirling senators conspiring against the Space Emperor and his Space Legions, the better they are. Conversely if it's just any other generic space empire with pseudo-Latin names slapped onto space tanks and such, I tend to lose interest rapidly. I feel that with these things it's all in or nothing.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Invictus »

As mentioned in the other thread, have this chat extract:

Jason Leung
It's funny how all my previous universe ideas re: Chinese wuxia fantasy have presently percolated into a western.

Dylan Richards
I'm off to bed, but do share.

Jason Leung
So metaphysical apocalypse, the throne of heaven is abeyant, yada yada
As the stars themselves fall, the Hells emerge on earth to impose emergency administration
Since death itself has gone wonky and the dead are all stuck on earth as ghosts
And the courts of hell have to get pretty ad hoc with on-site processing
But despite their paper dominion over all mortal souls the resources of the Hells are limited, so they start competing
And as the emergency wears on each Hell morphs into a state/megacorp offering seperate reincarnation/reembodiment schemes
And are known as the Mortalities
And the vast population become like corporate serfs to them
and since the Mortalities actively catch ghosts and can put them into their own reincarnation schemes
The few remaining outlaws are those with bootleg immortality
And kickass Taoist wizard shit
Fleeing to the untamed margins of the world

Dylan Richards
Dude this is killer

Jason Leung
Which is basically fantasy deathworld jungle
and also the realm of the remaining dragons
Formerly privileged aristocrats under Heaven's regime
But now that Heaven has fallen
They too have lost their mandate
And so their realms grow wild, and even their very intelligence is slipping away
And behind the outlaws, civilization under the Mortalities slowly expands its frontiers
There comes the Dayriders - deputized spectres and monsters, seeking fugitives beyond Hell's justice
Or sometimes just escorting a roving Judge in their great caravan-palaquins
All the while, Heaven still crumbles
Every fallen star is a potent fragment of cosmic machinery, and triggers a gold rush wherever it lands

Dylan Richards
This is a pretty fleshed out idea

Jason Leung
And is pretty much the keys to repairing the universe

Dylan Richards
And I take it repairing the universe is a big deal to the Mortalities?

Jason Leung
Maybe

Dylan Richards
I mean, obviously they profit from the broken universe but it can't be sustainable
(lol capitalism)

Jason Leung
Well, its always more straightforward to seize a bigger slice of the pie
Cement their place in the new cosmos
at the unique moment where the cosmic order can be subject to such rewriting

Dylan Richards
All kinds of entrepeneurs would be on that

Jason Leung
Shinigami vs. Taopunks

Dylan Richards
I am down with it

Jason Leung
on the frontier
Haunted by ghosts, monsters
Wastelands caused by apocalyptic devastation, also islands of life
Jealously guarded by devolving dragon families
Because while souls don't pass away any more so nobody really dies
Life is a more valuable resource
Back east
Vast slums of ghost refugees waiting to be re-bodied
Subsisting on public doles of ash and burned paper
Kept and distracted from storming the courts of the Mortalities
Tightly guarded as both subjects and resource

Dylan Richards
Some really great imagery there.
Loving the social security ash thing

Jason Leung
And you know plagued with ghost crimes, hollows, etc.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Siege »

That sounds really cool. What kind of properties do ghosts have that set them apart from living folk? Because I really want to know what a ghost slum looks like.

Also does this mean that railroad barons are now literally barons of hell?
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Invictus »

Siege wrote:That sounds really cool. What kind of properties do ghosts have that set them apart from living folk? Because I really want to know what a ghost slum looks like.

Also does this mean that railroad barons are now literally barons of hell?
Not much of this has been worked out besides the common-sense "feel" of things: ghosts are firmly Asian ghosts so they can appear and haunt people, but can be said to inhabit ancestor tablets and other such compact ritual objects. The actually spiritually significant part of a "ghost slum" probably looks more like a data farm, complete with fan systems circulating burnt offerings.

But ghosts still have needs for human interaction and entertainment and stuff, so they come out into human places at night. The cities ruled by the Hells definitely have magical wards and demonic enforcers to regulate this since souls are a precious resource to them, but I guess some Mortalities let ghosts work ghost-jobs for income that they can save up to eventually purchase a body with, or fritter away into various company stores catering to them. Other Mortalities segregate ghosts and living mortals more strongly, or even keep them in something like hell for moral purification. Speaking of which, punishment for the living may similarly consist of disembodiment and torments of the spirit.

On the whole, those who inhabit the ghosts slums are the bottom of corporate Mortality society: those who don't have anything except their intrinsic selfhood. Maybe they perished in the initial apocalypse and are still lining up for the promised transmigration. Maybe they are citizens who died and couldn't afford (or had no patron who can) the resurrective witch-water. Maybe they are wild souls captured from the wastelands and are undergoing purgatory and education. In this universe, this maybe means being dead is the furthest one can fall (or maybe not, since souls can be destroyed), or maybe it means being dead is far from the worst it gets.
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Heretic »

Reading the dialogue blurb two posts up gave me images of the Neon Genesis Evangelion intro for some reason. Perhaps it was the way Jason Leung said 'back east.'
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
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Invictus
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Invictus »

Heretic wrote:Reading the dialogue blurb two posts up gave me images of the Neon Genesis Evangelion intro for some reason. Perhaps it was the way Jason Leung said 'back east.'
That's me, btw.

And by "east" I don't mean literally, but the metaphorical Western-genre conceit of the settled, civilized East Coast, ever pushing the frontier forward with its railroads and moneymen and domesticated ways. The actual physical geography of my setting is pretty vague - at least, the falling of the heavens implies something non-Copernican going on with the cosmology!
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
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Re: Random ideas (again)

Post by Heretic »

Oh cool!

I was thinking more of the way the sentence structure was, it had a way that made me think of the flashing pictures in the intro. Just something that pinged that memory.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
-Joseph Campbell
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