Opinions on a Sci Fi Story, Something I am working on the background for Options

[SubRosa]

I recently got inspired to write a science fiction story, and have been working on both the setting and plot lately. Given the scope of the story, it will be big, probably be a trilogy. I have most things worked out by now, but wanted to get some other people's opinions, and possibly ideas, on how I might do a few things.

My basic inspiration is not really unique. I am going to be recreating the WWII Pacific Campaign in space. So I am working toward having technologies that make that possible, along with a galactic geography that is basically the same. It is not going to be Hard SF, but more of a space opera. My main focus here is on the character and events she is witness to.

First off, some very basics. I am using the Greek language (transliterated into Roman characters, or Greeklish) for the main character's race/nation - The Pelasgian Alliance. I am drawing most of my Pelasgian place names from Bronze Age Greece, and character names from both ancient and modern Greek. The Pelasgians themselves are actually an alliance of two main cultures, the Tritons and the Dorics. The Tritons are loosely based on Athenian Greeks, being extraordinary starfarers, merchants, and artists, with a democratic government. The Dorians are loosely based upon Sparta, with a very hierarchical class system, dominated by a warrior aristocracy and an oligarchic government. The two states see to their own internal politics, but share a common coinage and are formally joined in a federation. I have not worked out the details on the central government of the Pelasgian Alliance. If anyone has any ideas on how it might work, I would love to hear them. I am also looking for a new, permanent name for the Dorics.

How much Greek is something I would like opinions on. Right now I am giving everything Greek names, from starfighter classes to capital ship names. I am drawing the starfighter types from Greek mythology, with names like Basiliskos, Mantikhoras, Drakone, Erinys, etc.. Their code names for the enemy fighters will use regular person's names, male for the fighters and female for the bombers, so Kalidans, Arianas, Elektras, etc... Right now the main character's ship is the carrier Epixeirhs, which is one of several translations I have found for Enterprise (As IRL CV-6 was a huge inspiration for this story). I like the flavor this gives the names of the fighters, but I am uncertain about going that far with the names of individual ships like the Epixeirhs. I do not want to overdo exotic names and make it difficult for the reader to easily remember what is what. OTOH it might seem strange to have capital ships named the Indefatigable, Dauntless, Surprise, etc... along side with Basiliskos starfighters.

On a similar note, I have not worked out rankings yet. I do not know if I want to use IRL naval ranks, or use Ancient Greek military rankings (which were a lot less developed and specific). If I do go with IRL rankings, I am not sure if I want to use the titles in Greeklish, or in English. Probably in English as I think it would just confuse the reader too much if the Episminagos was giving orders to the new Anthyposminagos, while the Antisminarchos, and Antipterarchos stood by.

For the same reason, I am uncertain about the names I should use for Pelasgian month names. January, February, March are a lot simpler for the English reader than Gamelion, Anthesterion, etc... But I worry it will seem strange that an alien race has the same months as the Gregorian Calender.

I am using Hindu for the names of the antagonists, and will keep with those, as I will not really be seeing too much of the names, really just for individual ships and placenames. Sometimes the names of individual commanders. This is in keeping with IRL WWII as well, as we know the Japanese carriers as the Akagi, rather than the Red Castle, and so forth.

On Technology, I am working to try to keep things so they work in the context of the Pacific Campaign. So no teleporting from one place to another like in Star Wars. I decided to go with Alcubierre Drives for the FTL component. I like this because it is a IRL possibility (although not with 21st century technology!). I also like that it does not actually make a ship travel faster than light (which would break the law of Einstein's cop on the beat), but rather it warps the spacetime around it, sort of like scrunching up a sheet to make the distance from one end to the other shorter. Yet at the same time, one does not disappear from spacetime and reappear somewhere else. You still have to travel the intervening distance. So this means regular shipping lanes, which can be interdicted, etc...

To complement the Alcubierre Drives, I decided to go with Bias Drives for conventional speeds. Again, this is a IRL proposal for space travel, although not likely to actually work if the Universe works the way most people think it does. Basically it increases gravity in front of the ship, and decreases it behind the ship. So you basically "fall" forward. The reason I settled on this is that it ties in nicely with the Alcubierre Drive, in that it manipulates gravity and spacetime. I am calling both of these graviton technology, with the idea that both the Bias Drives and Alcubierre Drives work by manipulating gravitons.

Graviton Drives are only about 200 years old, and before that the main propulsion was Ion Drives using Hydrogen Fusion Reactors to power them. That made starships really big. Graviton Drives have gone through many generations, getting faster and smaller every time. It was only 60 years ago that a new fuel source was discovered on Pelasgia and other worlds. This is an oil extracted from special aioroumai trees. These trees literally cause the ground around them to float in the air, creating huge tracts of land that literally float miles above the surface of their worlds. The main character Eleni grew up on an aioromai tree farm in fact.

I resisted the idea of using an exotic fictional fuel source for a long time. Originally I was going to use matter/antimatter. But that had two problems for me. First, the combination of that and an Alcubierre Drive is too much like Star Trek (as in exactly). The second is that I want resources to matter in the story, as the antagonists - The Ajunta - need to be driven to acquire resources, just as the IRL Japanese were driven to gain the oil and rubber deposits in the East Indies. While antimatter does appear naturally in the Universe, it does not last for long. So you cannot mine it. You have to create it in a lab. So that put the nail in the antimatter coffin for me.

15 years before the story begins, a new generation of graviton drives came out that were smaller than ever, for the first time allowing them to be used with one and two man ships, albeit with much shorter ranges than a capital ship. So the starfighter and the carrier were born at once. This all works fine for me.

The next thing I am working on settling is detection and stealth technology. I figure Radar has long since been rendered obsolete as a detection system by radar absorbing materials and devices. My thought is that it has been replaced with a gravity based system, that detects changes in the gravity fields in the area. Basically, it picks up things with mass large enough to warp the local gravity. So good for detecting capital ships, not so good for individual starfighters. Although a group of hundreds of the latter would create a large enough local mass to detect. Still not settled on this, and do not have a name for it. There will also have to be some kind of stealth system against it, as I would like to have the equivalent to submarines "cloaked ships", on a small scale (as in not many of them, and small in size, no cloaked battleships).

Torpedoes are my final area that still needs work. It is something I do not want to gloss over, because the main character is a torpedo bomber pilot. Since this is space, there would be no distinction between dive bombers and torpedo bombers. There would just be torpedo bombers. At the beginning of the story, the Pelasgians are using smart torpedoes that lock onto a target, and change course to match it, so it literally cannot miss. The Ajuntans have an anti-torpedo technology however, that detects the lock on, and downloads a virus into the torpedo, tricking it into thinking it hit the target. So the Pelasgian torpedoes will all explode within seconds of their fighters locking onto their targets. After the first time of that, the Pelasgian solution will be to disable to homing mechanisms and target their torpedos the old fashioned way. The flight engineer/bombing officer will plot a firing solution of distance, speed, direction, etc...and send it to the pilots hud, and they will line it up in their sights and release the torpedo.

I have also been thinking that torpedos are all stealth-rigged, to prevent point defense systems from shooting them down. But a torpedo that homes in on its target, making course corrections with thrusters, would seem like something easy to detect because you would see those burns. My thoughts are that this was not accounted for by ether side at the start of the war, since no one has ever fought with this level of tech before. The Pelasgians are not really affected by this as they will disable their smart torpedoes anyway. But they will also go so far as to have it only make a single burn when it is released, and then essentially 'glide' to the target. So it would be detected at the moment of firing, but then only be seen by visual contact. The Ajuntans will do the same thing when they find their own smart torpedoes are always being blown up by Pelasgian point defense guns (which are figure are highly advanced).

Another option would be to use wire-guided torpedos, with a camera in the front that the pilot can see the feed for. Then they manually make course corrections. The Pelasgians might try this, and find that the Ajuntan point defense systems shoot down their torpedoes when they make the course-correcting burns.

I am also not sold on the warheads of the torpedos. My thoughts so far as something along the lines of a gravity/spacetime device, as that would be in keeping with the rest of the gravity-centric tech I have developed. My basic idea there would be something that so warps spacetime that it literally rips apart whatever matter is in that spot. But it seems overdone. Creating a singularity would be in keeping with the tech, but it would just be too much. I might do that to replace the Atomic Bomb at the end of the story though.

Sorry that this dragged on, but it is much briefer than my notes. If anyone has any thoughts on what I might do for the several areas I pointed out, I would love to hear them. Often a different point of view is exactly what you need to see what is right in front of your nose.

So basically, what I am looking for are answers to these questions:
How much Greeklish terminology to use?
What kind of calendar should I use (and in what language)? H.e.r. pretty much answered this already.
How should the central government of the Pelasgian Alliance work (just in the broadest strokes, the main character is not a politician, just a farmer)?
what ought the warheads on torpedoes be?
What is the name of sensor technology? Just how does it work? Can it be jammed? Have chaff used against it? Wild Weasels?

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jun 14 2011, 03:04 AM

[Olen]

Looks like it should be good. Being a physicist by trade (albeit specialising in quantum and condensed matter...) I can poke at the physics and make suggestions there. If you have any physics based questions I'll probably be able to produce an answer too. Saying that I'll start with politics:

I have not worked out the details on the central government of the Pelasgian Alliance. If anyone has any ideas on how it might work, I would love to hear them.

Depends on the time required to get communication between planets I'd say. If you're looking at weeks it's going to be much looser by definition with planetary (or solar system) 'councils' which are close enough to react quickly answering to a central government which is rather more distant from the day to day running of it. Something along the lines of the British Empire of the 1800s would be an example (or any other disperse empire before cable/radio based communications).

The dealings between the Dorics and Tritons will of course be similarly dependant of the sped of communications. How close are they? Are they essentially two sections of a single whole, if so are they more or less equal (for example two states of the US) or does one hold more power? Or are they more separate with only a loose body holding them together, more like two EU countries? Or more like allies with little say over one another's politics but with communications between armed forces? With politics it's probably best to start with something which has existed in RL and fit it, just about everything sane, and several ridiculous concepts, have been tried already.


On the subject of Greek names. It's a matter of taste really but nothing turns me off faster than names I can't easily and instantly pronounce. For example 'Anthyposminagos' is going to take me several seconds to work out the first few times which rather breaks the flow. Making it 'Greekesque' without being overpowering would be my suggestion.


On physics - I'm not big on relativity and especially not general relativity. I'd say the wiki article on Alcubierre Drives isn't great in the few bits I do fully understand. Certainly I doubt they are possible (if you want a more exact list of reasons I could have a read and ask some people who do know GR). Likewise the Bias Drive looks improbable in reality but I agree fits well with the Alcubierre. As you said it's not meant to be Hard SF, but if you want suggestions of issues to come up with fictional solutions to I could provide some. I'd also suggest shying away from any deep description of how they work as it would have to be something which does not in fact exist.

I'd also ask about data, how does it travel FTL? Is it carried on Ships, or special ones which somehow go faster? Certainly conventional radio would be useless over distances like that. You could have instant communications based on quantum entanglement which has been demonstrated to be an instantaneous process (though doesn't violate relativity as it appears correlation cannot be observed without examining both sets of data - look up EPR paradox if you're interested).


On detection and stealth technology - for ships travelling in their FTL bubbles radar would be no use anyway because presumably radiation cannot interact with the bubble or it's contents. Likewise a ship going FTL may well not have any gravitational field in front of it (gravity probably propagates at light speed) and might not have any due to the nature of the Alcubierre bubble. You could easily enough say that this made some sort of 'bow wave' behind it, though I have no idea how correct this is. Of course the SF might be getting harder then you intended here, but I thought I'd point it out. Outside an Alcubierre bubble gravity sounds like a good call, I could see the local distortion of G which a Bias drive seems to effect showing up quite well which might make them more detectable when accelerating hard. I suppose the stealth system would be to have low mass, which obviously limits offensive power and speed, or to fire lots of heavy flack so they don't know where you are, just that you're there. This is somewhat like the British broadcasting high power radiowaves from bombers to saturate German radar detectors in WW2. Thermal IR imaging might work at closer ranges (eg by satellites spread out in space) given that the ships will have to be warm enough to support life and space is cold.

Warheads of the torpedos - well *grins*. Antimatter would be an option, throw it in and watch it go. As a reference to get a similar effect as the Hiroshima bomb you'd need 370 micrograms of antimatter. You could also try neutronium (the stuff neutron stars are made of), it's stupidly dense and literally eats any matter that touches it (so try shooting that down without giant lasers (which have their own problems which I shan't bore you with). I've no idea if it's stable outwith a neutron star though, probably not.

Simple kinetic energy rounds are also an option, a 100kg shell (a uranium sphere 20cm across for example) travelling at 3km/s (the speed of a geostationary satellite) would have the same energy as 100kg of TNT. Obviously it could be made to go significantly faster, and energy rises as velocity squared (until you go quite fast).

Of course some sort of gravity distortion fits well with the setting. It could be like a giant sacrificial Bias drive which tears the enemy ship apart with fluctuating gravitational fields, or you could try to open an Alcubierre bubble within the enemy ship. What that might do and whether it's possible would be down to you.

As an aside a black hole with a mass of less than about Mount Everest would 'evaporate' almost instantly, so making a black hole in someone's ship will require a lot of mass. Also what do you do with it then?

Anyway there's some ideas I had reading this. I hope the story goes ahead, it sounds fun and if you have any more physics based questions ask.

This post has been edited by Olen: Jun 14 2011, 09:10 PM

[King Coin]

On the subject of Greek names. It's a matter of taste really but nothing turns me off faster than names I can't easily and instantly pronounce. For example 'Anthyposminagos' is going to take me several seconds to work out the first few times which rather breaks the flow. Making it 'Greekesque' without being overpowering would be my suggestion.

I agree strongly here. Keep the names pretty simple. Anything complex, and I don't even bother trying to figure out what it says. I'm lazy that way and I'm sure there are many other people out there like that.