[Spaceships] [Ultra-Tech] Building yet another Space Opera setting

[RogerBW]

Oh, yeah, blame the machines for human incompetence, that's what you squishies always do. Who was it put in the remote-access back-doors so that your loverbot could turn into an assassinbot? Who leaked the keys? You call it the Machine Uprising; we call it the Great Liberation.

Don't worry, we're not coming back.

Honest.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Given that the Empire has relativistic world-killers,

Don't spend too much time grappling with these. They might not work very well against anybody and certainly won't do so against a culture 2 TLs higher.

You answer near C rocks (as these things are usually described) with head on intercepts with other KE weapons. The interceptors relative velocity tot he world-killer is the same as the world-killer's to its' target. That's .5 C for the Azrael and that means that a 1 kg impactor explodes like a contact hit from a 10 megaton bomb.

The KE of the Azraael won't go away but it will spread widely. What could have been described as the densest particle beam ever (i.e. solid object at near C speeds) turns into a spreading cone attack with the spreading velocity roughly equal to the forward velocity.

So even if you don't get the Azrael until 1/10th of a second before impact at its' 150,000 km a second velocity that's 15,000 km away with that much spread before impact.... one atom at a time. That doesn't amount to very much spread over a whole planet.

The Azrael is armed to try and fight its' way through defenses but that's TL10 defenses. It'd never even see a TL12 missile.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Don't spend too much time grappling with these. They might not work very well against anybody and certainly won't do so against a culture 2 TLs higher.

You answer near C rocks (as these things are usually described) with head on intercepts with other KE weapons. The interceptors relative velocity tot he world-killer is the same as the world-killer's to its' target. That's .5 C for the Azrael and that means that a 1 kg impactor explodes like a contact hit from a 10 megaton bomb.

The KE of the Azraael won't go away but it will spread widely. What could have been described as the densest particle beam ever (i.e. solid object at near C speeds) turns into a spreading cone attack with the spreading velocity roughly equal to the forward velocity.

So even if you don't get the Azrael until 1/10th of a second before impact at its' 150,000 km a second velocity that's 15,000 km away with that much spread before impact.... one atom at a time. That doesn't amount to very much spread over a whole planet.

The Azrael is armed to try and fight its' way through defenses but that's TL10 defenses. It'd never even see a TL12 missile.

Oh certainly. This isn't meant to be a trump card for the Empire against the Space Elves. Against rebellious minor worlds, on the other hand... plus ramships are useful for jump gate deployment.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Oh, yeah, blame the machines for human incompetence, that's what you squishies always do. Who was it put in the remote-access back-doors so that your loverbot could turn into an assassinbot? Who leaked the keys? You call it the Machine Uprising; we call it the Great Liberation.

Don't worry, we're not coming back.

Honest.

Oh, that's not what I'm envisioning. More like "volitional AIs flee threat of deletion to Uranus or beyond, get some Von Neumann machines running, then Earth freaks out and launches a crusade to wipe them out."

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Oh certainly. This isn't meant to be a trump card for the Empire against the Space Elves. Against rebellious minor worlds, on the other hand... plus ramships are useful for jump gate deployment.

Your earlier remarks about taking 50 years to reach .5 C reached my brain on a sort of delayed action basis.

the answer is "Yes" and no wrestling with hard math is necessary. You can just use the rule of thumb that accelerating to near C (ignoring relativity) takes about 1 year at 1 G. An accel of .01G takes 100x as long and half C is indeed c. 50 years.

So this isn't a very responsive weapon towards current events.

[munin]

RAW, increasing construction capacity in space is very slow. For example, it takes about a century for an SM+14 Class IV Space Orbital to build an SM+15 Class V Space Orbital (Spaceships 6). Improving the Fabricators to Nanofacs cuts that to about 18 years. But that's still 18 years per +1 SM manufacturing capacity, during which time those factories aren't building ships (or whatever they were built for in the first place).

It actually makes more sense to build another Class IV (in 1/3 the time) and then use both to collaborate on the Class V (in half the time; thus, 1/3+1/2=5/6 total time). Or construction swarms.

If the Space Elves have superscience sensors and hyperdrives, they may have an advantage in locating and colonizing rogue planets (who needs a sun when you have fusion reactors?). That could provide them with manufacturing facilities that the Empire would have a lot of problems locating and accessing.

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

I've already decided that, earlier in the history of the setting, there was a robot uprising that got crushed—but it wasn't easy. I'm thinking of maybe stealing some ideas from the story of the Axon Group in Transhuman Space …

Another place to steal ideas is Season 10+ Stargate Earth vs. pre-Cylon surprise attack Twelve Colonies of Kobol (fanfics), both of which have dealt with existential threats from machine species. Earth has only a few ships (like, maybe only three, plus the Antarctic Outpost drones and maybe Atlantis) -- they're extremely fast and powerful, but Earth has spread itself thin running missions over multiple galaxies. The Colonies' ships are relatively slow and vulnerable, but they have scores of battleships (and usually an Admiral Cain with no compunctions about nuking civilian populations). And the Cylons are still out there… (and maybe the Wraith, Aschen, rogue Goa'ulds, rebellious Jaffa, Asuras, etc.).

For the jump gates, one setting to think about is Babylon 5. In that setting, some ships (mostly battleships and carriers) had the ability to enter hyperspace anywhere, but most ships saved construction costs by using jump gates to enter and exit hyperspace (which still had travel time, not instantaneous teleportation). Maybe both the Empire and the Space Elves use hyperspace, but the Empire hasn't figured out how to incorporate hyperdrives into ships yet (but they're researching it…).

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Your earlier remarks about taking 50 years to reach .5 C reached my brain on a sort of delayed action basis.

the answer is "Yes" and no wrestling with hard math is necessary. You can just use the rule of thumb that accelerating to near C (ignoring relativity) takes about 1 year at 1 G. An accel of .01G takes 100x as long and half C is indeed c. 50 years.

So this isn't a very responsive weapon towards current events.

Okay, so here's something I hinted at earlier: the gate network is set up using these devices, and the gates act as "space-time anchors" for FTL. So if you head away from Earth using FTL, often you end up in the future. The return trip lets you go "back" in time, though careful planning and centralized control usually avoids dangerous paradoxes. This means that firing relativistic rockets can be responsive to current events, if they're fired away from Earth. Most of the time, people don't really think about this, but PCs in this verse might be willing to risk a headache-inducing paradox for Plot reasons. (Cf. Star Trek where warp drives can be used to travel back in time, but this is usually avoided.)

[Michael Thayne]

I want to put in more effort into working out how the Secret Police use TL10 tech for their purposes. They probably aren't shy about using mechanical mind probes (UT110). And probably ubiquitous surveillance, though I need to do more reading to work out just how ubiquitous the surveillance is.

[Michael Thayne]

Surveillance: in Ultra-Tech, surveillance devices don't get cheaper than about $50. So I think in a dystopia they wind up pretty ubiquitous, but the Secret Police won't bother bugging literally everyone's bedroom. More like microbots patrol everywhere, at any given point in time, there probably isn't one watching your room, but one will visit you at some point, likely without your even noticing. And of course, their controllers can redirect them to investigate anything that looks suspicious.

Edit: nanobugs (cost $100), are also fairly common, but they need to be planted, only used on targets likely to be on the lookout for microbugs. They're SM-18, which is roughly two millimeters in length, so you have to look really carefully to notice that no, that's not a speck of dirt.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Okay, so here's something I hinted at earlier: the gate network is set up using these devices, and the gates act as "space-time anchors" for FTL. So if you head away from Earth using FTL, often you end up in the future. The return trip lets you go "back" in time, though careful planning and centralized control usually avoids dangerous paradoxes. This means that firing relativistic rockets can be responsive to current events, if they're fired away from Earth. .)

My first instinct is to not touch this with a 10 ft frame of reference but my second is to say that I have only heard of this sort of thing with wormholes and not a general access hyperspace.