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beccaelizabethI keep on getting bits of background on my spacer characters. Like, what games they play at school. It pretty much has to be the battleroom game from Ender's Game, but they'd just call it Enders. The enemy's door is down... but that only makes sense to kids raised in gravity.
If you mix dirtsiders with stationers with fleet born with merchanters you get minimum four different ways to relate to gravity, and if you add belters or whoever you hypothesise as being mostly freefall then that's five.
People born on planets get an idea of down as a constant, of falling meaning down, and that makes sense to them.
Stationers live in spin gravity that is constant in a given area but varies by deck, whereas merchanters have spin gravity that spins up and down variably. So how hard 'down' pulls you depends on both where you are and when it is. Both of them have to adjust to things falling down-and-away, not what we think of as 'straight' down. Like living on a hill all the time. Or in a bowl. I could never quite figure that out.
Both merchant and fleet kids grew up with burn gravity, the kind where the engines kick the ship up at you, but only fleet can spend fuel so profligately they can have near-constant thrust. Fleet kids live closer to planet conditions than station kids, their down is just down, but it can be stronger or weaker depending. Sometimes very much stronger. And sometimes when they manuever the ship kicks sideways. Often enough to get used to the idea that sometimes walls jump out at you.
Belters experience all those conditions when they put in to station or get boosted out somewhere, but they spend a lot more time in freefall than any of the rest.
So all of them have different relationships with gravity, and the enemy's door is wherever the hell it is, variably, with expectation of 'down' kicking off in a different direction any minute now.
They would not design the same game. And they would not play it the same way.
Plus they'd all have muscles and reflexes optimised for different roles within the game. You'd develop something a bit like rugby where what position they play goes with what shape they are. Sort of.
There would be kids who were better at flying/falling and there would be kids who were better at throwing them.
Manuevers would be something like trapeze art or floor show gymnastics, depending what the gravity was doing. You'd get kids kicking off from each other to change direction mid flight. You'd get people launching in pairs or groups so they could change vector unpredictably, or you'd get them intercepting each other already out there, like the world's most swooping rugby tackles. You'd have kids with some kind of anchor who have the whole job of boosting other kids and changing vectors for them, catch and throw.
and then you add guns. If they're little hand held thingies they can't do much but shoot, but if they're long with a t sort of thing going on then they can hook in to each other, bash against each other like I said about the morris dancing, hook on the surroundings, give you extra leverage. Be a tool in themselves, not just a point and click. Even if you could have a tiny next gen phaser you'd want a big nightstick sort of thing so you can have more options.
The playing field would depend on what they wanted to make an analog of. Free floating or circle spinning lumps to play planet or rock would be for one set of challenges, thinking of yourself as a ship, using the gravity to slingshot into new orbits. But to train for in ship fighting you could have any configuration likely to be found inside or around a ship hull, like warehouse racking or sensor vanes on a magnetic surface or whatever plants grow up there, trees even. And you'd give the kids magnetic boots, or not, or some of them with and some without.
To get used to the idea of finite fuel you could have backpacks... would super soakers work as a propellant system? Small finite thrust, but in any direction and without cooperation.
... my society would want to get cooperation in bone deep, so they'd keep that trick for the olders.
Add to this the fact every last one of them would have read the Ender series... wait, no, actually that would only be true of my lot before the War. So lets just say all the tricks from there would be very familiar.
Oh, it would be grand.
... you'd probably get kids with broken necks fairly often, but this is the far future, they can fix that pretty good too.
... now I'm wondering if I just figured out what happened to one of my pilots. it beats the hell out of half pipe basketball...
If you mix dirtsiders with stationers with fleet born with merchanters you get minimum four different ways to relate to gravity, and if you add belters or whoever you hypothesise as being mostly freefall then that's five.
People born on planets get an idea of down as a constant, of falling meaning down, and that makes sense to them.
Stationers live in spin gravity that is constant in a given area but varies by deck, whereas merchanters have spin gravity that spins up and down variably. So how hard 'down' pulls you depends on both where you are and when it is. Both of them have to adjust to things falling down-and-away, not what we think of as 'straight' down. Like living on a hill all the time. Or in a bowl. I could never quite figure that out.
Both merchant and fleet kids grew up with burn gravity, the kind where the engines kick the ship up at you, but only fleet can spend fuel so profligately they can have near-constant thrust. Fleet kids live closer to planet conditions than station kids, their down is just down, but it can be stronger or weaker depending. Sometimes very much stronger. And sometimes when they manuever the ship kicks sideways. Often enough to get used to the idea that sometimes walls jump out at you.
Belters experience all those conditions when they put in to station or get boosted out somewhere, but they spend a lot more time in freefall than any of the rest.
So all of them have different relationships with gravity, and the enemy's door is wherever the hell it is, variably, with expectation of 'down' kicking off in a different direction any minute now.
They would not design the same game. And they would not play it the same way.
Plus they'd all have muscles and reflexes optimised for different roles within the game. You'd develop something a bit like rugby where what position they play goes with what shape they are. Sort of.
There would be kids who were better at flying/falling and there would be kids who were better at throwing them.
Manuevers would be something like trapeze art or floor show gymnastics, depending what the gravity was doing. You'd get kids kicking off from each other to change direction mid flight. You'd get people launching in pairs or groups so they could change vector unpredictably, or you'd get them intercepting each other already out there, like the world's most swooping rugby tackles. You'd have kids with some kind of anchor who have the whole job of boosting other kids and changing vectors for them, catch and throw.
and then you add guns. If they're little hand held thingies they can't do much but shoot, but if they're long with a t sort of thing going on then they can hook in to each other, bash against each other like I said about the morris dancing, hook on the surroundings, give you extra leverage. Be a tool in themselves, not just a point and click. Even if you could have a tiny next gen phaser you'd want a big nightstick sort of thing so you can have more options.
The playing field would depend on what they wanted to make an analog of. Free floating or circle spinning lumps to play planet or rock would be for one set of challenges, thinking of yourself as a ship, using the gravity to slingshot into new orbits. But to train for in ship fighting you could have any configuration likely to be found inside or around a ship hull, like warehouse racking or sensor vanes on a magnetic surface or whatever plants grow up there, trees even. And you'd give the kids magnetic boots, or not, or some of them with and some without.
To get used to the idea of finite fuel you could have backpacks... would super soakers work as a propellant system? Small finite thrust, but in any direction and without cooperation.
... my society would want to get cooperation in bone deep, so they'd keep that trick for the olders.
Add to this the fact every last one of them would have read the Ender series... wait, no, actually that would only be true of my lot before the War. So lets just say all the tricks from there would be very familiar.
Oh, it would be grand.
... you'd probably get kids with broken necks fairly often, but this is the far future, they can fix that pretty good too.
... now I'm wondering if I just figured out what happened to one of my pilots. it beats the hell out of half pipe basketball...