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Old 12-07-2019, 02:27 PM   #1371
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Default Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

Minor notes on the Grey Rim. Although I gave both the Corperates and the Crystal Children a fair amount of attention, neither group is that large a part of the population.

The Corperates are about 0.02 percent of the population. They used to run the place and they still own a great deal of it, but they aren't a large part of the populace. The influence of the Corperates as a group comes from their money and connections.

The Crystal Children are about 2 percent of the population. Mind you, the hard core weirdos are rarer and many people who simply enjoy the scene for whatever reason. The New Agey folks have little influence, they're just local color.
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Old 12-07-2019, 02:52 PM   #1372
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Two percent of the population potentially makes them a major factor. Within the USA, Chinese Americans and Indian Americans (as well as Native Americans) are each less than two percent of the population, and each group is influential in its own way. Mormons are also less than two percent of the population, and they are quite influential in American politics.
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Old 12-07-2019, 03:46 PM   #1373
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Two percent of the population potentially makes them a major factor. Within the USA, Chinese Americans and Indian Americans (as well as Native Americans) are each less than two percent of the population, and each group is influential in its own way. Mormons are also less than two percent of the population, and they are quite influential in American politics.
They're influential because they are so concentrated in a single state that they comprise a local majority. Same goes for Iowa farmers. 2% pretty evenly diluted among a population with differing ideas have no political influence worth mentioning.
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Old 12-09-2019, 11:59 AM   #1374
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The Cystral Children generally hold left-ish values and decline to participate in political activity. They have little real influence because they are highly divided and largely disorganized.
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Old 12-12-2019, 11:34 AM   #1375
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Try this one...

The planet Britomartis is a strange anomaly. At first the attention when to it's second moon, a somewhat larger than Ceres captured body, which is about 45% covered in green glass! It seems to glass was made in place by some kind of laser or similar energy discharge. But neither Aphaea, the small bright green moon, nor Diktynna Britomartis' surprisingly Luna like moon, are as strange as the world of Britomartis itself.

First the planet was terraformed around fifteen hundred years earlier, about the time Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales. Stranger still, most of the plants and animals seem to be descended from plants and animals taken from Earth in the Pleistocene Epoc around the year 17,000 BCE. Stranger still are the wide variety of human groups mainly, but not exclusively, taken from Europe and North Africa between the years 1,500 BCE and 1,500 CE. Or at least the internal details of their societies seem to line up this way. Added to these strange facts, PSI seems to be about a hundred times more common on this world than on the Earth!

Bases have been set up on Diktynna to send and support anthropologists and other scholars to the surface of Britomartis to solve the puzzle. Meanwhile, detailed surveys of the star-system Britomartis is in are seeking any clues to the mystery they can find.
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Old 12-13-2019, 01:13 AM   #1376
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A framework for a sci-fi setting: the Core and Frontier. This setting sets up two drastically different societies side by side: a Radical Hard TL11 or 12 Core of high-population worlds networked together using mostly Hard SF wormholes; and a comparatively lightly populated TL6–9 Retrotech or Safe-Tech+Emergent Superscience Frontier.

The way it works is that the Superscience element of wormholes (specifically, whatever it is that lets you generate the negative energy densities needed to stabilize a wormhole's opening) is disruptive to all other forms of Superscience; and when the wormhole is big enough to send anything of a reasonable size through (e.g., people or spacecraft), the radius of the disruptive effect is large enough to blanket an entire star system. So the Core worlds have to do without Superscience other than the wormholes. That said, having several massive population centers and industrial bases linked together by wormholes helps amplify the progression of those technologies that can still work, leading to the Core having a rather high Hard SF technology base.

By contrast, the breakthroughs needed for the rest of the Superscience stuff turn out to be remarkably simple in hindsight: it can be built and maintained by as low as a TL6 technology base. And for historical and cultural reasons, the Frontier is mostly populated by the sorts of people who would prefer Safe-Tech restrictions: the earliest pioneers were fleeing the transhuman and posthuman aspects of Core culture.

The Core and Frontier are mostly kept isolated from each other: on the one hand, Frontier starships tend to have Warp drives for FTL and Reactionless Drives for STL, both of which fail if they stray too close to a Core world. On the other hand, wormholes need to be created and stabilized in close proximity to reach other; and even a “pinpoint wormhole” has a large enough disruptive effect that you can't transport it on board a Frontier ship: you have to send it out on a Hard SF slower-than-light space probe, which takes years or decades and small fortunes to do.

And even the pinpoint ones produce enough of a signature that any Frontier world worth its salt will see it coming and have a chance at destroying it before it gets anywhere near them. As such, wormhole links only get established to Frontier worlds if the Frontier world permits it.

For the most part, trade between the Core and Frontier requires a Warp-capable ship with some sort of Hard SF STL Drive: the ship can then fly as close to a Core world's system as possible using its FTL drive, and then switch to the “rocket engines” to complete the journey. So the barrier between the two isn't insurmountable; but it's enough to provide a semi-plausible explanation why the Core culture and technologies don't spread out into the Frontier.
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Old 12-13-2019, 07:46 AM   #1377
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A framework for a sci-fi setting
Interesting premise.
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Old 12-14-2019, 11:59 AM   #1378
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Try this one...

Long ago say the old ones, the people came from their first home, a world called Earth or past. On their journey they became lost and took a wrong turn through the heavens. This world, Newhome, was fairly earthlike, or so it was said. But it took many years to make Newhome livable. The people fell to fighting and when they could leave the ship that brought them they scattered far and wide. They lost many skills of the people brought on the ship. But we are slowly relearning.

It would be easier to build and learn if our planet had more fuel. Earth had rocks and liquids that burned to provide power. Newhome has nothing like that.


Basically it's a lost colony world going through the industrial revolution very slowly. Assume that the people who brought them here genetically engineered many useful plants and animals. The idea of genetic engineering is known, but the skills aren't there. The planet has a Tech Level of Five, but it's a very odd TL5. They've got telegraphs and the telephone has been invented, but there's no practical way to fuel a railroad engine. Steam engines on ships are emergency use only as wood is the only fuel.

Think of the setting as a very odd Swashers/Steampunk setting.
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Old 12-14-2019, 12:56 PM   #1379
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... as wood is the only fuel.
What's the likelihood that they'll be able to convert vegetable oil into bio diesel?

If so, it occurs to me that my local rail enthusiasts have two locomotives; one's coal fired, and the other oil.

Folk in this setting may not have the aeroplane or the car, but they could have trains... trains that smell of chip oil.
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Old 12-14-2019, 02:47 PM   #1380
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What's the likelihood that they'll be able to convert vegetable oil into bio diesel?

If so, it occurs to me that my local rail enthusiasts have two locomotives; one's coal fired, and the other oil.

Folk in this setting may not have the aeroplane or the car, but they could have trains... trains that smell of chip oil.
Bio diesel would create a revolution. I had not thought of that. Electrified railroads yes, not bio diesel.
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