SF and a realistic "Long Night" scenario

[scc]

OK outside of Starfire or something, ahem, inspired by it, where you use fixed, naturally occurring wormholes or some other system such that navigational and real space distances have no relationship to each, such that 50+ ly between each colony actually makes sense, colonies probably are going to close enough to communicate via laser and radio, if they want to. And explaining why FTL stops working in such a situation is a bit tricky. Furthermore from the OP I got the idea this was a man-made problem, not a natural one.

So, the most likely set-up is that Earth was the only place that could build FTL starships, and something happened to Earth, likely a planet-wide war, and as a result there where no more new starships (Somehow this went down in such a way that no word got out) since then the number of new ships has slowly dwindled (For more reasons no sent a ship to Earth to find out what happened, likely because they didn't want to lose one) until finally there were none left.

Until now, our hero's homeworld has managed to scrap together enough stuff to build a new starship, and sent them out to find out what's happened to everyone. The Loki-Class Corsair from SS3 is probably a good choice of vessel

[weby]

Well, in my scifi setting there are two long nights with the first being only a dip really and the second being a huge and long one.

The first is triggered by a huge human-AI war fairly early in the colonization of other star systems that the humans barely win. In the war Earth and the solar system is totally devastated and many of the colonies are damaged badly.

The long night aspect comes from the lack of starship production facilities in the colony worlds and the huge reliance in AIs before the wars. Thus a lot of things have to be re-designed to work with dumb computers and lot of infrastructure be built before starship maintenance let alone production can happen in the colonies.

But it is only decades before the first new test ships are built in the less damaged larger colonies, but the small more damage colonies simply do not have the manpower to do much retooling and with many/most of their tools having been AI directed the crash is fairly complete.

The second is an invasion by more advanced strongly xenophobic aliens that do massive orbital bombardments on all of the inhabited planets they can find and then go onward. The hyperspace travel in the setting is fairly fast but leaves a wake in hyperspace that the aliens can detect up to couple of weeks later, so all the worlds with frequent travel and all the worlds where someone tries to flee to with hyperspace ships are thus found and massively bombed and seeded with biological agents.

Really small colonies with travel only few times a year have thus a fair probability of surviving as there is no recent wake to follow to them and with no FTL com and long distances the aliens cannot check all the star systems so many hundred of tiny colonies survive.

The small colonies do not really have the manufacturing capability to build anything large enough for that will most likely have enough travel coming to them to be noticed. Also the aliens left some scout ships around for couple of centuries in case something comes up and they notice couple more colonies that had bit more manufacturing base and sent out ships couple of decades later to find out what happened to the rest of the Federation. So this long night was much longer.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by scc

such that 50+ ly between each colony actually makes sense,

50 LY+ is not that unreasonable an estimate for distance between human-habitable worlds. I brute-forced the system in Space 1e and got 100 LY.

In a discussion not too long ago someone on the boards looked through the recent data on "nearby" stars and got maybe 5 or 6 candidates within 40 ly and that was only kicking out bad stars. It'd be dubious if every even vaguely possible system had an Earth-like world.

[lwcamp]

Weird. I take a short break from these forums to work on my Vergeworlds science fiction setting, and when I come back to look around I see people discussing a lot of the same ideas I developed. Anyway, here's a link to the history of the worlds of the Verge, if people want to see how I developed something similar to a "Long Night". Brief synopsis - expansion, followed by devastating war and (unrelated?) partial collapse of the wormhole transportation network.
http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/Settings/V...rgeHistory.php

Luke

[Ashtagon]

Stargate SG-1 is arguably a long night scenario, from the point of view of the humans who did not ascend with all the other Ancients. The Atlantis spin-off even shows some descendants of those ancients (or possibly the selfsame individuals, because wibbly wobbly timey wimey) who regret not ascending the first time.

Equally, from the point of view of all the humans who were displaced by the Goa'uld a few thousand years ago, its a long night up until the point where Earth re-connects with them.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon

Stargate SG-1 is arguably a long night scenario, from the point of view of the humans who did not ascend with all the other Ancients. The Atlantis spin-off even shows some descendants of those ancients (or possibly the selfsame individuals, because wibbly wobbly timey wimey) who regret not ascending the first time.

Equally, from the point of view of all the humans who were displaced by the Goa'uld a few thousand years ago, its a long night up until the point where Earth re-connects with them.

The Stargate verse has a lot of concurrent rolling long nights and golden ages for different civilizations and species.