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

[Captain Hammer]

Subby, as for the names, some ideas:

For the Tritons, consider using 'gaea/gaia' for the ground troops, such as 'Gaean/Gean Force.'

For the Agiads, if it's a single branch of service, consider 'SystemsForce,' 'DefenseForce,' etc.

I don't know how intense you want the rivalry between service branches to be. I can't speak from experience about those types of matters, it requires somebody who's been on the inside. But if you can get it right, it'll add immensely to the character's realness and cultural texture of your story.

Now, if only we at Chorrol had a retired Marine (there are no 'Former Marines') combat pilot lurking around here somewhere...

[Acadian]

Um, I guess that's my cue. Lol. I've been remiss in commenting to date because I'm quite enthralled by medieval fantasy. The size of my brain housing group sort of shuts out thinking about space, Greeks, Romans, post gunpowder physics and such. I also enjoy reading/writing within a 'pre-built' world like TES that feels familiar and where remembering the details is second nature.

Now that all said, SubRosa (Subby? Oh my goodness, that's a new one! ) and I have recently exchanged several PMs discussing life aboard a carrier and within a carrier battle group. In the past we have corresponded in some detail about Naval Aviation. It is a complex world filled with danger and complex chain of command considerations and truly a culture of its own. I regret that is probably the limit of my expertise to contribute to the rich arena of her current project. Given SubRosa's superb ability to quickly master things and bring them to life, I have no doubt that her endeavors into space age world building will be very successful.

Now, let me leave you with a plea that dear Teresa not suffer from splitting your focus. She has so much more to share with us!

This post has been edited by Acadian: Jun 19 2011, 03:51 PM

[King Coin]

About the cloaking device, the Mass Effect universe did some work in there that you could maybe borrow from.

In Mass Effect the primary means of identifying a ship in space is heat detection. A stealth system on a ship did not turn the ship invisible, but it captured and stored all heat radiation emitted from the ship in 'batteries' for the lack of a better term. The stealth system only lasted for a limited amount of time before the batteries had to be vented. You could obviously play around with that idea and do with it what you wish.

I found the article on the ME wiki if you are interested.
http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/SSV_Normandy#Technology

This post has been edited by King Coin: Jun 19 2011, 06:56 PM

[SubRosa]

Captain Hammer: I am thinking of keeping away from using the greek names for the Tritonian services, in an effort to avoid too much exotic names. I might call the Tritonian army Planetary Forces, as they would also operate starfighters that were planet-based, including long-range strategic bombers.

OTOH, I might go with a greeklish name for the Agiad military. It would provide an instant contrast between the two planet's forces. Something with Stratos in it might work. Another thought I had was to name them after a favored color, as the Red Army was IRL.


Acadian: The things you have been able to tell me over PMs lately have been most invaluable. If worse comes to worse I can always pull futuristic tech out of my rear (as many sci-fi writers seem to). But life aboard a real carrier is not something I can make up. Doubtlessly I will have need of your unique intelligence in the future.


King Coin: I never did get around to playing the Mass Effect games. Maybe some day I still will. They do some interesting stuff with Dark Energy, which I like the idea of, simply because it is such a newly discovered and still little-understood phenomena. I am not going to use their idea for cloaking, but it did help me visualize something else.

********

I settled on a few more odds and ends. Sensor technology will rely on two main systems. At long range (a light year? Maybe half a light year?) will be GDAR: graviton sensing, that detects the warping of spacetime due to gravity. Note that this would detect things like planets as well as starships. Anything with sufficient mass to affect local gravity. Active graviton drives, or graviton warhead explosions, would be very easy to read. However, it would be unable to detect a grounded ship with its drives turned off. Or a ship in close orbit with its drives off, as the planet's own gravity field would obscure it.

For close range, LIDAR will be used. This would be what point defense systems use to detect incoming torpedoes. However, what no one realizes is that the LIDAR abosrbing materials on torpedoes are so good as to render them invisible if fired manually (without an electronic lock on signal). Torpedo bombers have lidar sets operated by their bombing officer, and are used as long range scouts 2 light years from the carrier.

There would probably be some passive systems used too, especially on cloaked ships. Using either of the two above would paint you as a very visible target, just as using radar does IRL. The most important however, will still be the Mark I eyeball, as stealth technology (LIDAR absorbing) will be discovered to be better than anyone realizes. Especially on torpedoes, rendering LIDAR-directed point defense systems useless.

Stealth ships use gravitons to wrap spacetime around themselves in a bubble. This causes GDAR and LIDAR waves to travel around the bubble and continue on, rather than reflect back to the transmitter. A skilled LIDAR operator might detect the warpage in the LIDAR map, and suspect that something is there. Even still, electronics cannot lock onto such a target. Firing guns or missiles at a cloaked ship must be done manually. When seen with the naked eye, a viewer might detect the spacetime bubble as something similar to the way light is refracted by water, or tears in the eyes.

There are several drawbacks to cloaking technology. The first is that the greater the mass and size of the vessel, the greater the energy needed to cloak it. With ships the size of cruisers or greater, the energy consumption is so great that it is impossible to operate the graviton engines at the same time the cloaking field is in effect. This limits cloaked ships to vessels smaller than destroyers, and even then it greatly reduces the speed of those vessels when cloaked. Starfighters are too small to contain the extra cloaking engine.

Finally operating the cloak prevents the ship from venting gas byproducts from the aioroumai oil (as the exhaust would be detectable). This builds up in reservoirs within the ship, and in time must be vented or they will cause an explosion. At the beginning of the war, most cloaked ships must vent once every 24 hours, for a period of at least a half hour. Ships built during the war can go for as long as two to three days between venting.

Now all I really have left to tackle is a name for the Agiad military, and a name for the communication system. Maybe I will take the easy way out and just call it a graviton comm.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jun 20 2011, 12:59 AM

[haute ecole rider]

I agree that cloaking technology will suck up a lot of energy.

First you've got to ask yourself - what part of the electromagnetic spectrum are you cloaking against? Visible light? Infrared? X-rays? Radio? All of these are vital in space telescopy. I can tell you that they are spotting planets merely by the way light from distant stars bend as the planet passes between that star and us. Perhaps something like that for your cloaking detection.

In submarines, they have software algorithms that help detect sonar signatures in the midst of noise (such as schools of fish, pack ice beneath the polar caps, et al) and isolate individual signatures to specific ships.

I think it would be unrealistic to expect a cloaking device to block all forms of electromagnetic radiation. In that case, you may want to think about what your guys will be using to detect ships.

I think your idea is shaping up really nicely. I hope it goes well for you.

[SubRosa]

It is GDAR, LIDAR, and to a lesser extent visible light that is warped around the cloak. The latter is not perfect though.

[SubRosa]

Here is a question for the physicists. Would you suffer from increasing G forces while performing sudden acceleration and violent attitude changes in space? Such as a fighter pilot will undergo in a dogfight in an atmosphere? My assumption is that you would, as acceleration is still acceleration, even if you are in an otherwise zero-G environment. Likewise one of the theories for creating artificial gravity is constant, linear acceleration.

[Olen]

Yes you would.

To expand: the apparent gravitational force resulting from acceleration is indisguinushable from true gravity and is proportional to the acceleration. For a fighter pilot on Earth the force he (or she) experiences is the force from the accelertion plus their weight towards the Earth. Obviously in deep space you don't have the latter which makes things simpler.

As a ballpark (if you care to go that 'hard' in the SF) one g will result from an acceleration of about 10 m/s/s (32 ft/s/s or 22mph/s), that is if you change your velocity by 10 m/s (or 22mph) every second you would feel the 'gravity' you're feeling now due to it. More than about 15 g does bad things fairly quickly limiting people in acceleration, more importantly more than about 1.2 g long term is fatal. Obviously as the ship does not actually move in your warp drive thingy this wouldn't apply there.

This post has been edited by Olen: Jun 21 2011, 12:41 AM

[SubRosa]

Excellent, that is what I had hoped for. The story begins with a dogfight over a starport, and the main character is doing some extreme maneuvers to try to keep her torpedo bomber from being turned into sushi by enemy fighters.

[mALX]

King Coin plays a video game that sounds exactly like this concept, maybe watching vids of that game in action (YouTube has a ton of them) would provide some details you are seeking? KC, tell her the name of your video game, lol.

[mALX]

Here it is, Sins of a Solar Empire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=932MHF4ug6s&feature=fvst[/QUOTE]

[Destri Melarg]

I’m late to the party, and ghastley, hautee, Boxy, Olen, Ahrenil, and the good Captain have already presented a number of wonderful ideas to help you flesh this out. Like Lady Syl I don’t want to echo what has already been presented, but I can’t help wondering . . . just who are the Ajunta?

For your story to really take off you are going to need an antagonist worthy of the Pelasgian Alliance. As readers we need to believe that the Ajunta are not just this month’s tomato can put into the ring with the heavyweight champ. The Ajunta must be numerous, highly intelligent, highly motivated, and proven in the ways of war. In short, your Pelasgian Alliance should be the underdog going in.

That said, I do have some ideas to share regarding the Pelasgian Alliance and the war. You say this war starts because of contention over a limited resource supply. Who starts it? Well, the easy answer would be to say that it begins because of the Ajunta’s growing greed/need for said resource. I submit that the better answer is (and this ties into the political structure of the Pelasgian Alliance) that it was begun by radicals in the new Agiad-led power structure of the Pelasgian Alliance. I imagine a situation in which the Tritons and the Agiads entered into an uneasy alliance to repel the Mogollon League 60 years before the events in your story. During that campaign the two rivals discovered that they complemented each other. I would suggest that you keep the Starforce with the Tritons and place the Groundforce (or whatever you're going to call it) with the Agiads. I would imagine that the Tritons would place more of their energy into the training of intelligence and diplomatic corps than in rank and file infantry. The Tritons have great pride in their diplomatic skill (backed by a strong fleet of starships that can rain torpedos down on anyone unwilling to listen), and they have for 60 years held sway in the Pelasgian Paliament/Council/relevant governing body. The Tritons were too busy building ships and ratifying treaties to worry about the demeaning task of mining aioroumai. They were only too happy to leave such mundane labor to the Agiads. However, after 60 years of mining aioroumai the Agiads have grown strong enough economically to wrest control of the government from the Tritons. With their new power structure in place, the Agiads first act is to solidify control of their powerbase, the limited supply of aioroumai trees growing throughout the galaxy. This naturally causes conflict with the Ajunta.

Now, on the subject of the Alcubierre drives for FTL: I think this is a fantastic idea! My only worry is that you want to keep the technology of torpedo and space combat relatively primitive (I just loved Boxy’s idea of the smart torpedo though!) while enabling starships to generate the energy requirements necessary to form ‘warp bubbles’ on which to travel. The two don’t really mesh. What if these ‘warp bubbles’ are a naturally occurring phenomenon in your galaxy, like waves on the ocean (though less prevalent, of course)? They could be charted and exploited by any ship with the capacity to ‘ride’ them. This makes navigation a sexy career choice for the average Triton or for the Agiad looking to climb the social ladder. It also makes space travel dependant on the whims of spacetime itself, much like maritime travel is dependant on the oceans.

All of that brings up another question: Is Eleni Triton, or Agiad? The answer to this question will have a very real impact on everything she thinks, says, and does throughout the story.

That’s my two cents.

[SubRosa]

mALX: Hmmm, looks like Starcraft with better graphics.


Destri Melarg: Some interesting ideas, and I definitely agree that the Ajuntans need to be a scary opponent. To that end the first book will begin by them destroying most of the Triton fleet while it was sitting in the ground in the Tritons biggest spaceport outside of Tritonis itself. Only three Triton carriers and a handful of cruisers and destroyers survive, because they were elsewhere at the time (delivering Agiad starfighter squadrons to forward bases). Against them the Ajuntans have six fleet carriers, about an equal number of light carriers, nearly a dozen battleships, and over a hundred cruisers and destroyers. By the end of the first year of the conflict the carrier Eleni is based on will be the only one the Tritons have left. It will be her against the Ajuntan fleet.

The Ajuntans themselves are former allies of the Pelasgians, going back to the Mogollon War. The Mogollons had colonized much of the spur between galactic arms between Ajunta and Pelasgia before the war. During the war the Pelasgians enlisted the aid of the Ajuntans, who were more than happy to gobble up as many of the Mogollon colonies as they could. The Pelasgians did this on a much smaller scale as well, to divert the war from their own system.

Since then the two nations had been military allies, and even developed the 3rd generation of graviton drives in a joint effort. But for the last 15 years relations have steadily worsened, as the Ajuntans have been adding to their newfound empire at the expense of the Xia and other independent worlds. Many regular Tritons feel sympathy for the Xia, who are underdogs in the fight, and the Pelasgian military and political leaders (the Agiads especially) worry about the ever-growing Ajuntan military, and its likewise increasing need for resources to sustain it. That leads to Pelasgian political pressure against Ajunta, and finally an aironomoui embargo. That backed the Ajuntans into a corner, and rather than lose face by submitting to Pelasgian demands to withdraw from Xian space, they decided to take what they needed. Starting with a preemptive attack upon the Triton fleet, which is the only thing that can stand in their way.

Eleni herself is a Triton, and grew up on an aioroumai plantation. Then later went to work in an aioroumai refinery to make the money to put herself through school. So I was really seeing aioroumai trees as being a Tritonis resource, rather than an Agiad one. I see the Tritons as having an affinity for being spacefarers. That they would become such from a world that has the resources to make that happen feels natural to me. Although I do see the Tritons as very similar to what you thought. A nation of traders with a vast merchant fleet. They are all about business and not really eager to start long wars. Basically Athens of Ancient Greece, or America for the first half of the 20th century.

I am envisioning Eurotas - the world of the Agiads - as being rather harsh. A tough planet to spawn a tough people. I think being rich in metallic resources would work well there. In peace they would be a world of miners and foundries.

One of the reasons I am rationalizing the relative crudity of some of the weapons, is actually due to the advancements in their countermeasures. The Tritons do have smart torpedoes. But they cannot turn on their smarts, because they will be back-hacked by the Ajuntans and used against them. Just like the Iraqis could not turn on their radar during either Gulf Wars, because it would instantly mean anti-radiation missiles homing in on them and destroying the installations. Likewise, the Ajuntans have smart torpedoes too. But using them makes them easy targets for superior Triton point-defense systems, which instantly pick up the active sensors on a smart torpedo and automatically blow it out of the sky before it gets close to their ships. I am seeing both sides as having roughly even technology overall, but like the above example, superior in some ways and inferior on others.

The idea of warp bubbles being naturally occurring is something that I never would have thought of. It is a great idea. But does not fit the story I have envisioned. It would be perfect if I wanted to do a Napoleonic War in space though (and I know someone has done that. Being a big fan of Horatio Hornblower and Richard Sharpe, I love the idea).

Ultimately though, it is not technology that this story will revolve around. I do not care to write Hard SF. It is the events and especially the people involved that my focus is on. The drives, torpedoes, coilguns, etc... are just stage dressing really.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jun 29 2011, 01:15 AM

[mALX]

Lol, sorry about that. Once the word "sci-fi" comes into the conversation, my mind draws a blank. It was the only thing I could think of, lol. I have liked a few sci-fi movies, but have trouble immersing myself into them - just thought they were really well done, or well acted (etc.).

The closest I've come to being immersed in anything not retro was with the Fallout series - that I could absolutely get into and enjoy. Early 18th century England, Tamriel, early Greek history, etc - that is more my speed, lol.

[ghastley]

When you're stuck for a name for something, just name it after its inventor. The Johnson Drive, the Higgins communicator, the Ocarion device (I don't even know what that last one does). Then you have no need to explain, and if the inventor's dead, he/she can't either.

You need to establish the capabilities and limits of the technology, if that's going to play a part in the story, but not the how it works part. If we could understand that, we'd already have it. And the people using it don't have to know to make one, just how to operate it, so they don't need too much detail.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Jun 29 2011, 03:45 AM

[Destri Melarg]

The scenario that you have set up certainly makes Eleni the underdog! I like the idea of the Ajuntans (if that’s the proper name) are former allies turned adversaries. I also like that they have partnered to create ground-breaking technology in the past. I am a little concerned that there seems to be a very one-sided antagonistic streak displayed by the Ajuntans (they gobble up the Mogollon territories, they assault the poor, tiny little Xians, they commit a heinous first strike against their former allies, the Pelasgians), but I realize that I may just be reacting to the summation of events, and that the telling will be somewhat different.

I never saw aioroumai as a strictly Agiad resource. My own impression of the Tritons is very much like yours (Athens of Ancient Greece). I imagined that they would consider the mining of aioroumai to be beneath them, but that was just my own personal impression and you can take or leave it as you will. I really like the idea that Eleni is so closely tied into the mining and refining of aioroumai (even as a Triton). I think you communicated the basic nature of the Agiads really well because I see them almost exactly the same way that you do.

I can see where you are coming from in terms of the technology of torpedo countermeasures. Is that why you were soliciting opinions on stealth technology? Unfortunately I am more concept oriented and absolutely hopeless in the area of the nuts and bolts.

It sounds like you are planning a BIG story. In fact, it might be too big to be seen solely through Eleni’s eyes. Have you considered multiple viewpoints? It might be interesting to see parts of the story through the eyes of an Ajuntan . . . or a Xian.

[McBadgere]

Er...Just found this thread...

Sounds fantastic...Where you at with it?...

Can't really help with anything...As peoples far cleverer-er...-er... than I have added many many beautiful things...

But I was wondering where you were with it?...

Presumaby by now you've managed to name everything though... ...

This post has been edited by McBadgere: Nov 6 2011, 12:28 PM

[SubRosa]

I wrote about half the first scene, and got sidetracked with the TF. I simply cannot do both, and chose to continue telling Teresa's story.

[McBadgere]

Oh...Fair enough....

Nice one though... ...