Navigating space dystopias
Apr. 30th, 2009 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSpace: It's Really Big.
So how does anyone get anywhere?
Apparently the space dystopia with not-Blakes-7 characters is the plot that eats my brain at the moment. So, okay. I think some more about how it is set up.
I also seriously think about ordering GURPS Space, which will have lots of big thinking in orderly sections with labels. If I order it now it probably won't arrive before term is over. Then I could do lots of worldbuilding stuff with it.
... I miss RPGs as a social experience, but the books as writing tools give me this happy glow of having accomplished something long before the stories fail to hit the page.
So: options for getting around in space.
Long distance teleport takes the 'space' part of a space empire out of the equation entirely. Until you have strange criminal organisations lurking in deep space stations. Or ordinary civilisations with a spectacular night view 26/8 out the down ring viewports. Space cities but no space ships. Doesn't actually sound like fun.
Any teleport makes for difficult with the plot because you have to explain, every time there's a physical difficulty, why you aren't teleporting them out of it. Teleport bracelets are handy for that, and a limited range from a ship which isn't cloaked or impregnable. You get dropped off, you have trouble getting back to pickup, it's basically helicopters and troop landings only with glowy backsides. And the teleport bracelets are great because those things break at the drop of a hat. And you can run out and have to run a logic problem to get everyone back to the ship. Never mind there's fascinating confusion on how exactly it decides what constitutes one person plus their clothes and bags. Teleport without booths has that problem all the time.
What I like best is the human part of the bracelet situation. You have teleport, so you have teh ability to pull your people out of there will they or no. The first time you hit that situation the ship wins. They have the tech, they pull the people out, they have massive resentment and tantrums and tragedy and angst and woe. Win"
The next time people get ported down on a mission they actually care about, they're going to take the damn bracelets off.
So they become a symbol of trust, a symbol of hierarchy and power issues, and instead of a tech problem - limited range - you have a *people* problem - they don't want to leave.
Extra win.
And then of course once they're no longer securely attached they can end up anywhere. Oh the possibilities! Got to love that.
Blakes 7 has the setup where only the rebels have teleport, and that key technical advantage keeps them alive against overwhelming odds. What usually does that for rebels is more like being the only ones who can go into the forest, or set out to sea further than the shore. They have extra run-away options, where the defending forces are tied down. But teleport gives you extra options for getting in. Clearly sensor and shield issues need to exist or you'll never get human interaction in play, just a sort of zappy magic provides everything box. Better if they can only go where they see, can't get into the box without cracking the security first. That gives more human specialities time to play. But there's still room to play chess knights once you've got a reliable plan of the place - if you really really believe in reliable, or don't mind becoming part of the walls.
If the defenders also have teleport things get much less fun. Level playing fields lose.
Do the rebels have a fixed base, a forest? Then they have something to lose.
Do they have a sea they can't be followed into?
And there we have to figure out how we deal with distance and faster than light travel.
If Space is like the open sea then ships just go every place all the time any way they want to. I've never quite understood how you get battles in that situation. There's a lot of run away space. I'm sure it can be set up, but, space is *big*, humans are small, and it just seems unlikely when a ship can make like a little dark rock. If it can.
But there's narrow bits of actual sea, and history gets really interesting around those. Everyone gets in a scrap from trying to get through at once.
There was a line in a recent TV documentary about Henry VIII that sounded really interesting. The channel was once considered a really big highway to the continent, the way that rivers were the heavy goods transport of choice. Once Henry pissed off pretty much everyone he built forts around every inch of coast, every inlet, every vantage point. And after that it wasn't a road, it was a *moat*.
So how do people see Space, the big empty? Road, moat, neither?
And what about those inlets and rivers?
Bujold's Vorkosiverse has Nexus Points, which connect star systems together. Andromeda had a weird sort of navigation through tangled tubes. Wormholes suggest the tube idea, connected to the outside normal space at the ends. Fixed wormhole, nexus point, Babylon 5 Jump Gate - they're all fixed points that need stable defences because people go in and out of them all the time. Moon, iirc, has a slightly fuzzier system of beacons and courses that rate green for good traffic through dodgy yellow dangerous routes to presumably red impassable areas. That gives you opportunities to come in slightly off beacon, in a riskier area. Be a bit unexpeced. Stargate has fixed points, tiny ones, but they can all link to every other fixed point. So normal space has the potential to completely block you from travel - but only off that planet. Everyone else can just ignore it.
If you have point to point navigation routes that only let out in particular systems then you have fight brewing. I rather like that.
But the part that got my attention was the on ship dynamics. I've got two characters I vaguely thought of as pilots. Maybe they're rivals. Maybe different shifts. What to do to difference them? But today I think, one of them is a normal-space pilot, the other is the alternate-space navigator. That makes them a symbiotic pair, a team, neither of whom can function without the other. So I've got a whole ship system springing to mind based on, basically, making them really slashy. Because it's easy to make them dating, but hard to make them slashy.
... yeah, I just typed that. I guess I have different standards lurking in back of my mind somewhere...
{tangentially - this typing takes a damn long time to show up. I've given up on the whole reading concept until I'm finished, my typing speed is like a paragraph ahead.}
So, anyway:
N-space navigation is fast, but still stuck below light speed. There's variations between ships based on engine size and design. I'll figure that out later. The interesting bit is how they team up with Navigators. T-space... (I just picked T for Tor because I felt like it. Is anyone else using it?) T-space navigation has nothing to do with the rules applying to mass and inertia in normal space. One small capsule can generate the field that gets a ship into T-space, as long as it has a proper connection to the ship. That connection is by a rope. Yes, you can lasso an enemy ship and chuck it into t-space. At the moment I think this is awesome. It is a metal rope making an electromagnetic connection with a ship hull. To flip to t-space you need a proper cage around whatever you're pulling. Most ship hulls have that built in, but if you want to drag an unrefined rock you need a metal net. If the metal is a rare ore not found in Earth system we can have resource wars and politics! But if I don't feel like doing that it's just, you know, metal, like electric can go through. I'm totally faking the physics to get the relationships here. Skate fast and I'm sure nobody will notice.
N-space drives are antithetical to T-space nagivation. You can, techincally, flip to t-space with your n-drive going. You might even survive the trip. But it would frell up the t-space corridor long term. The particles thrown off by n-drives would hang out in the corridor and slam the shielding of the next ship. Something with inadequate shields would transition back... hey, transist space! I think I got that from somewhere else though... ANYway... something without shields would get back and have everyone be really dead. Possibly surviving long enough to be horribly angsty.
Navigators are in little pods that go out to the end of the ropes and transition a whole cargo string and then flip it back.
The pods are far away from the cargo because the navigator needs to be away from the engines... and the shields. That way you can make it so a ship can arrive but have lost their navigator.
To make nav less replaceable they have to be special somehow. Bujold has them need brain implants. I like that, I want to use that for completely different purposes elsewhere. But I want my world to be aggressively anti tech, so they'd then keep their implanted personnel away from inhabited worlds. second class citizens with a power that cannot be replaced? Hello rebels!
T-space therefore has to be complicated. So it's kind of like river navigation, with riding the rapids and the possibility of going off down the wrong branch and running aground somewhere. Different routes would be the same passenger experience but a totally different ride for the Navigators. Even with a map a responsible Navigator wouldn't want to ride through a route they've never done before if they could leave a local expert to it. They'd go tandem sometimes to observe and gain familiarisations. The need for interpersonal interactions is thereby increased. Local knowledge counts. And that would mean that the big swish ship with the ultra cool shields that can go anywhere can go there... but might end up somewhere unexpected, if they didn't get a guide.
I like this.
So then navigator and pilot would work together, but one navigator could be plying their little backwater route, up and down, ultra familiar with the one small stretch, while zillions of pilots go through. But anyone doing dodgy dealings wouldn't like that arrangement. They'd need to be close with the pilot, they'd have on irreplaceable person in their operation, but they'd be entirely interchangeable to them. You'd be able to offer money or goods imported from the forbidden dirtside civilisations. But so would everyone else. Anyone wanting serious dark dealings would want their own navigator. And a navigator would have to be nuts to limit themselves that way, to depend on only the one normal space pilot to get them to their next access point... unless said navigator just plain couldn't resist the call of the new.
Given that navigators are necessary to goods transport I've got to make sure they don't secretly run the universe. Their usefulness goes way down if they aren't also the only ones carrying comms. But that implies a system of communication that is FTL but doesn't use the same method as ships... a proliferation of technology I'll have to think about. What else? Drugs, specialist supplies, and most especially medical expertise. Navigators have a head full of wiring and a hazardous job that leaves them outside the protections that keep others alive. How do they live? By getting the best medical expertise available when they get back to N-space. And even then... how do they live? Dangerously.
... I just set up a slashy closely dependent relationship where one of them is kind of doooomed.
If I don't make them actually gay that's not a cliche, yesno?
... :-/
But I can get such stories out of this! They've got a cosmos that's not a simple string of pearls but one of those complicated bead networks that I have as chokers. Everywhere connects, but only via certain points. Railway, not flight. But with better shielding more routes open up. And those routes can be like mountain passes, seasonal, when the variable particle load closes them for a certain time. The politics would get *shiny*.
And you'd have a pilot sent in on their own to take a cargo down to 'civilisation', and a navigator left out in the dark to wait to get them out of there. They can run a rescue, but they've never been on a planet so their expectations of what it is like can be totally as weird as we want to write it. All their info is second hand, they've only seen it on TV, how fun can that be? But even if they get good at planets, they're not a *navigator* on a planet, they're just a guy with some shiny stuck to their head. Can't stay grounded.
Routes would be either established, where someone mapped it and came back, half known, where someone got there and sent a message back, or completely dark, where a navigator can see it but can't know unless they go. Has to be a person.
Old navigators never die, they just fade away... Tor's never been to a funeral, but he's been to a lot of wakes; waiting for that last message home. Only it would never be the last - a navigator who finds they're past saving will flip back to t-space for one last ride, take one of the dark ones this time, just to know...
I think I've decided on my technologies from knowing what I want my characters to do.
This is far more fun than the other way around, but given that my usual definition of science fiction is that it explores the effects of technology on people it feels somehow kind of dishonest.
Hmmm...
So how does anyone get anywhere?
Apparently the space dystopia with not-Blakes-7 characters is the plot that eats my brain at the moment. So, okay. I think some more about how it is set up.
I also seriously think about ordering GURPS Space, which will have lots of big thinking in orderly sections with labels. If I order it now it probably won't arrive before term is over. Then I could do lots of worldbuilding stuff with it.
... I miss RPGs as a social experience, but the books as writing tools give me this happy glow of having accomplished something long before the stories fail to hit the page.
So: options for getting around in space.
Long distance teleport takes the 'space' part of a space empire out of the equation entirely. Until you have strange criminal organisations lurking in deep space stations. Or ordinary civilisations with a spectacular night view 26/8 out the down ring viewports. Space cities but no space ships. Doesn't actually sound like fun.
Any teleport makes for difficult with the plot because you have to explain, every time there's a physical difficulty, why you aren't teleporting them out of it. Teleport bracelets are handy for that, and a limited range from a ship which isn't cloaked or impregnable. You get dropped off, you have trouble getting back to pickup, it's basically helicopters and troop landings only with glowy backsides. And the teleport bracelets are great because those things break at the drop of a hat. And you can run out and have to run a logic problem to get everyone back to the ship. Never mind there's fascinating confusion on how exactly it decides what constitutes one person plus their clothes and bags. Teleport without booths has that problem all the time.
What I like best is the human part of the bracelet situation. You have teleport, so you have teh ability to pull your people out of there will they or no. The first time you hit that situation the ship wins. They have the tech, they pull the people out, they have massive resentment and tantrums and tragedy and angst and woe. Win"
The next time people get ported down on a mission they actually care about, they're going to take the damn bracelets off.
So they become a symbol of trust, a symbol of hierarchy and power issues, and instead of a tech problem - limited range - you have a *people* problem - they don't want to leave.
Extra win.
And then of course once they're no longer securely attached they can end up anywhere. Oh the possibilities! Got to love that.
Blakes 7 has the setup where only the rebels have teleport, and that key technical advantage keeps them alive against overwhelming odds. What usually does that for rebels is more like being the only ones who can go into the forest, or set out to sea further than the shore. They have extra run-away options, where the defending forces are tied down. But teleport gives you extra options for getting in. Clearly sensor and shield issues need to exist or you'll never get human interaction in play, just a sort of zappy magic provides everything box. Better if they can only go where they see, can't get into the box without cracking the security first. That gives more human specialities time to play. But there's still room to play chess knights once you've got a reliable plan of the place - if you really really believe in reliable, or don't mind becoming part of the walls.
If the defenders also have teleport things get much less fun. Level playing fields lose.
Do the rebels have a fixed base, a forest? Then they have something to lose.
Do they have a sea they can't be followed into?
And there we have to figure out how we deal with distance and faster than light travel.
If Space is like the open sea then ships just go every place all the time any way they want to. I've never quite understood how you get battles in that situation. There's a lot of run away space. I'm sure it can be set up, but, space is *big*, humans are small, and it just seems unlikely when a ship can make like a little dark rock. If it can.
But there's narrow bits of actual sea, and history gets really interesting around those. Everyone gets in a scrap from trying to get through at once.
There was a line in a recent TV documentary about Henry VIII that sounded really interesting. The channel was once considered a really big highway to the continent, the way that rivers were the heavy goods transport of choice. Once Henry pissed off pretty much everyone he built forts around every inch of coast, every inlet, every vantage point. And after that it wasn't a road, it was a *moat*.
So how do people see Space, the big empty? Road, moat, neither?
And what about those inlets and rivers?
Bujold's Vorkosiverse has Nexus Points, which connect star systems together. Andromeda had a weird sort of navigation through tangled tubes. Wormholes suggest the tube idea, connected to the outside normal space at the ends. Fixed wormhole, nexus point, Babylon 5 Jump Gate - they're all fixed points that need stable defences because people go in and out of them all the time. Moon, iirc, has a slightly fuzzier system of beacons and courses that rate green for good traffic through dodgy yellow dangerous routes to presumably red impassable areas. That gives you opportunities to come in slightly off beacon, in a riskier area. Be a bit unexpeced. Stargate has fixed points, tiny ones, but they can all link to every other fixed point. So normal space has the potential to completely block you from travel - but only off that planet. Everyone else can just ignore it.
If you have point to point navigation routes that only let out in particular systems then you have fight brewing. I rather like that.
But the part that got my attention was the on ship dynamics. I've got two characters I vaguely thought of as pilots. Maybe they're rivals. Maybe different shifts. What to do to difference them? But today I think, one of them is a normal-space pilot, the other is the alternate-space navigator. That makes them a symbiotic pair, a team, neither of whom can function without the other. So I've got a whole ship system springing to mind based on, basically, making them really slashy. Because it's easy to make them dating, but hard to make them slashy.
... yeah, I just typed that. I guess I have different standards lurking in back of my mind somewhere...
{tangentially - this typing takes a damn long time to show up. I've given up on the whole reading concept until I'm finished, my typing speed is like a paragraph ahead.}
So, anyway:
N-space navigation is fast, but still stuck below light speed. There's variations between ships based on engine size and design. I'll figure that out later. The interesting bit is how they team up with Navigators. T-space... (I just picked T for Tor because I felt like it. Is anyone else using it?) T-space navigation has nothing to do with the rules applying to mass and inertia in normal space. One small capsule can generate the field that gets a ship into T-space, as long as it has a proper connection to the ship. That connection is by a rope. Yes, you can lasso an enemy ship and chuck it into t-space. At the moment I think this is awesome. It is a metal rope making an electromagnetic connection with a ship hull. To flip to t-space you need a proper cage around whatever you're pulling. Most ship hulls have that built in, but if you want to drag an unrefined rock you need a metal net. If the metal is a rare ore not found in Earth system we can have resource wars and politics! But if I don't feel like doing that it's just, you know, metal, like electric can go through. I'm totally faking the physics to get the relationships here. Skate fast and I'm sure nobody will notice.
N-space drives are antithetical to T-space nagivation. You can, techincally, flip to t-space with your n-drive going. You might even survive the trip. But it would frell up the t-space corridor long term. The particles thrown off by n-drives would hang out in the corridor and slam the shielding of the next ship. Something with inadequate shields would transition back... hey, transist space! I think I got that from somewhere else though... ANYway... something without shields would get back and have everyone be really dead. Possibly surviving long enough to be horribly angsty.
Navigators are in little pods that go out to the end of the ropes and transition a whole cargo string and then flip it back.
The pods are far away from the cargo because the navigator needs to be away from the engines... and the shields. That way you can make it so a ship can arrive but have lost their navigator.
To make nav less replaceable they have to be special somehow. Bujold has them need brain implants. I like that, I want to use that for completely different purposes elsewhere. But I want my world to be aggressively anti tech, so they'd then keep their implanted personnel away from inhabited worlds. second class citizens with a power that cannot be replaced? Hello rebels!
T-space therefore has to be complicated. So it's kind of like river navigation, with riding the rapids and the possibility of going off down the wrong branch and running aground somewhere. Different routes would be the same passenger experience but a totally different ride for the Navigators. Even with a map a responsible Navigator wouldn't want to ride through a route they've never done before if they could leave a local expert to it. They'd go tandem sometimes to observe and gain familiarisations. The need for interpersonal interactions is thereby increased. Local knowledge counts. And that would mean that the big swish ship with the ultra cool shields that can go anywhere can go there... but might end up somewhere unexpected, if they didn't get a guide.
I like this.
So then navigator and pilot would work together, but one navigator could be plying their little backwater route, up and down, ultra familiar with the one small stretch, while zillions of pilots go through. But anyone doing dodgy dealings wouldn't like that arrangement. They'd need to be close with the pilot, they'd have on irreplaceable person in their operation, but they'd be entirely interchangeable to them. You'd be able to offer money or goods imported from the forbidden dirtside civilisations. But so would everyone else. Anyone wanting serious dark dealings would want their own navigator. And a navigator would have to be nuts to limit themselves that way, to depend on only the one normal space pilot to get them to their next access point... unless said navigator just plain couldn't resist the call of the new.
Given that navigators are necessary to goods transport I've got to make sure they don't secretly run the universe. Their usefulness goes way down if they aren't also the only ones carrying comms. But that implies a system of communication that is FTL but doesn't use the same method as ships... a proliferation of technology I'll have to think about. What else? Drugs, specialist supplies, and most especially medical expertise. Navigators have a head full of wiring and a hazardous job that leaves them outside the protections that keep others alive. How do they live? By getting the best medical expertise available when they get back to N-space. And even then... how do they live? Dangerously.
... I just set up a slashy closely dependent relationship where one of them is kind of doooomed.
If I don't make them actually gay that's not a cliche, yesno?
... :-/
But I can get such stories out of this! They've got a cosmos that's not a simple string of pearls but one of those complicated bead networks that I have as chokers. Everywhere connects, but only via certain points. Railway, not flight. But with better shielding more routes open up. And those routes can be like mountain passes, seasonal, when the variable particle load closes them for a certain time. The politics would get *shiny*.
And you'd have a pilot sent in on their own to take a cargo down to 'civilisation', and a navigator left out in the dark to wait to get them out of there. They can run a rescue, but they've never been on a planet so their expectations of what it is like can be totally as weird as we want to write it. All their info is second hand, they've only seen it on TV, how fun can that be? But even if they get good at planets, they're not a *navigator* on a planet, they're just a guy with some shiny stuck to their head. Can't stay grounded.
Routes would be either established, where someone mapped it and came back, half known, where someone got there and sent a message back, or completely dark, where a navigator can see it but can't know unless they go. Has to be a person.
Old navigators never die, they just fade away... Tor's never been to a funeral, but he's been to a lot of wakes; waiting for that last message home. Only it would never be the last - a navigator who finds they're past saving will flip back to t-space for one last ride, take one of the dark ones this time, just to know...
I think I've decided on my technologies from knowing what I want my characters to do.
This is far more fun than the other way around, but given that my usual definition of science fiction is that it explores the effects of technology on people it feels somehow kind of dishonest.
Hmmm...