KSK

Well a certain NewSpace company is spending quite a bit of time at the moment practicing launchpad procedures for its own very large rocket. So I’m guessing that there’s more to these countdown thingies than checking the staging, counting backwards from ten, and hitting the spacebar.

I can think of a few rationalisations for the ‘divert auxiliary power to engines’ trope. The most obvious one is that it’s a shorthand command for emergency situations, when brevity is important. Alternatively, if the Enterprise is actually using rocket engines, it could be using some kind of plasma drive where the exhaust is accelerated by magnetic fields. Not completely unreasonable given that canonically, the Enterprise’s impulse drive is powered by nuclear fusion. Diverting auxiliary power to engines activates an additional set of accelerator magnets, increasing exhaust velocity and therefore thrust. Of course, this also generates additional heat so it can’t be sustained for too long, which is why the extra magnets aren’t routinely used. Finally, from what I remember from Laurence Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek all the numbers for the Enterprise’s Impulse drive are out of whack anyway and there’s no way that it can actually be a rocket engine. Therefore the ‘Impulse Drive’ is simply the warp engines operating in sublight mode. This kind of helps in that diverting power to the warp drive can be handwaved away as making some kind of sense but it also makes things more complicated since an operational warp drive would just let you warp out of whatever trouble you were in anyway, so the command to use auxiliary power becomes superfluous. The Physics of Star Trek is pretty good by the way. It doesn’t attempt to ‘explain’ Treknology but it’s quite a nice introduction to which bits of it are theoretically possible and how close we can get to them with present day technology. @Spacescifi - you might find it interesting or even useful, although it’s almost entirely qualitative with almost no hard numbers.

Or all of the above. Agreed. And for all of those reasons, personal aircraft ownership on 21st century Earth doesn't seem like its going to tell you much about personal starship ownership in the Star Wars setting.

As was mine. When TOS first aired in 1966, the US was in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement with everything that goes with that. Communism was worse than a dirty word with the Cold War in full swing and socialism wasn't far behind it. Fast forward to 2020 and you've got Black Lives Matter, a significant chunk of a population voting for a border wall with Mexico and a population and leadership so wrapped up in the ideals of individual liberty that both are seriously hindering efforts to deal with a pandemic. (Not that my own country is doing much better in that regard so I can hardly throw shade at the US). Oh - and communism and socialism are still dirty words. Also you've got the antivaxxers - so much for the Star Trek message of technology being a positive force. The future depicted by Star Trek TOS wasn't part of the American Dream in 1966 and it's not looking much closer to being part of it in 2020. Edit: You absolutely can change behavior by establishing laws. Three UK examples that immediately spring to mind are wearing seatbelts when driving, smoking in public and drink driving. And, slightly depressingly, they all followed much the same social pattern as I recall. Much grumbling about 'the nanny state' and suchlike to start with, followed by reluctant compliance followed by the new behavior becoming socially acceptable and then the social norm. Whether, and to what extent, the state should do this sort of thing is a matter of healthy debate, which I don't propose to get into here in deference to forum rules. But it does work and sometimes its the only way that seems to work.

We’re talking about a setting where dirt-poor moisture farmers (Luke) and junk scavengers (Rey) can afford anti-gravity vehicles and sophisticated autonomous robots, or can build them from scratch from scavenged parts (Anakin). I think that comparing the costs of present day vehicles to Star Wars vehicles is going to be an interesting exercise.

Personally I’m not a big fan of trying to pigeonhole particular sci-fi works into particular sub-genres. When I’m choosing a book, I don’t really care what label folks try to hang on it or how heated the arguments get between different folks trying to hang different labels on it. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart (who was referring to a somewhat different genre): “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [science fiction] and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the [book] involved in this case is not that.“ Science-fiction - I know it when I see it. That’s good enough for me.

My thoughts? Bluntly, I think your example comes out of the south end of a northbound cow. For openers you're conflating emotional and introspective - which is ridiculous because 'emotional' covers any and all emotions. Similarly, 'feelings that burn a bit hotter than men's' - what does that even mean? Next, you're laughing at male characters who are emotional or introspective. Your tone suggests that you see this as flaw in women's writing of male characters. You cap it all off with some meaningless pop psychology explanation. This entire line is dismissive, shows a very limited viewpoint of what a male character can or should be and doesn't seem to consider that male writers are also capable of writing male characters with emotional depth to them. Finally, I see nothing in your third line that is gender specific. Excelling at writing about character feelings and inter-character drama or writing from experience and/or observation are not skills that are unique to either male or female authors. Oh - and you‘ll find plenty of female authors writing male characters with an emphasis on how they look and act, although it’ll be more obvious in certain genres. Amazingly enough, women check out how men look and act too. The United Federation of Planets. A setting in which humanity has eradicated poverty, hunger and war (between humans at any rate) and famously, does not use money. People are no longer motivated by acquisition of riches and personal possessions, instead by learning and betterment of humanity as a whole. That sounds pretty socialist, verging on communist to me, albeit in a heavily idealized form. It's still pretty radical today, would have even more so when TOS originally aired, and doesn't seem to square with the focus on individualism which underpins the American Dream. Likewise, consider the main cast of TOS. By the standards of the time it was an astonishingly diverse group, being mixed gender, mixed nationality (depicted if not actual) and mixed race. In terms of characters it also featured a literal half-breed human. Message - provided you were competent enough to be on a starship bridge, then gender, skin colour, ethnicity or even species were irrelevant. Even Kirk's womanizing (although not especially attractive IMO) was famously inclusive. Black, white or green - provided you were female it was all good so far as Kirk was concerned. Notoriously, this supposedly led to the first interracial kiss (Kirk & Uhuru) to be shown on TV, which was just a little bit controversial. The whole show screams of social justice - and I use that in a positive sense not the snide and disparaging 'SJW' sense. I also think that Wikipedia puts it pretty well: Roddenberry intended the show to have a progressive political agenda reflective of the emerging counter-culture of the youth movement, though he was not fully forthcoming to the networks about this. He wanted Star Trek to show what humanity might develop into, if it would learn from the lessons of the past, most specifically by ending violence. An extreme example is the alien species known as the Vulcans, who had a violent past but learned to control their emotions. Roddenberry also gave Star Trek an anti-war message and depicted the United Federation of Planets as an ideal, optimistic version of the United Nations. His efforts were opposed by the network because of concerns over marketability, e.g., they opposed Roddenberry's insistence that Enterprise have a racially diverse crew. In summary, I think you managed to miss almost every message in TOS. Unless you're trying to claim that all of the above is encapsulated within the American Dream. In which case I can only respectfully disagree with your assertion.

And yes - completely agree. Mad respect for the folks that do this for real.

I'm not going to go around the antimatter fanservice loop yet again since that's come up on several previous threads. But antigravity killing orbital space stations is... a limited viewpoint in my opinion. Some possible uses of large space stations even assuming antigravity is a thing. Zero G manufacturing. Another well-trodden sci-fi trope and made more plausible if there was a cheap, easy and clean way of transferring material in bulk to and from orbit. Like vehicles equipped with antigravity devices for example. Space Embassy /Observation / cultural non-interference/Deathworld. Any setting appropriate reason why landing a spacecraft on another planet could be seen as provocative to the inhabitants of that planet or dangerous to the spacecraft crew. Instead you have an embassy in orbit. Tourism/real estate. People living in orbit for sociological reasons - status, curiosity or simply a lack of living space on the surface. Again, reasons that are made much more plausible by cheap and easy and clean access to orbit. Remote control of facilities on the surface. Found a planet which is full of valuable ores but totally inhospitable to humans? Send down the robo-miners and stick a teleoperation station in orbit to supervise them. Automated refueling stations. Exploring a star system with reaction drives? It might be a good idea to build some infrastructure ahead of time, so that your survey teams can refuel and get home again. Very dependent on limitations you choose to put on your antigravity systems but if your mothership is too big to land then refueling it in orbit becomes your only option. Also, a sufficiently large spacecraft could be regarded as a space station with engines if you can't get it to the surface, even with antigravity lifters. Here we're getting into the realms of Iain M Bank's Culture novels where an entire interstellar civilization lives in space, whether that's in gigantic spacecraft or orbital habitats of various kinds. More generally, from participating in several of your threads, you seem to have a fixation on the notion of a single ship that can do it all - take off from one planet, travel somewhere else at a plot convenient speed and then land on another planet. If that's the setting you want to to work in that's great - and in such a setting, antigravity may well make space stations obsolete. For other settings - not so much.

I hope so too. For what it's worth @superstrijder15 got a shout-out in the Last Thoughts for the 'Old Kerba dictionary and grammatical discussions' but I should also say that chewing over various Old Kerba translations on this thread has been a ton of fun! And on that note

Have you read Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ by any chance? If not, I think you’d like it! And flipping your clunky translation idea on its head, there’s always the option of including one or two alien words in otherwise idiomatic (or nearly so) English or whichever language you’re writing in, and then having part of the story revolve around explaining that word in human terms. ‘Grok’ from Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ is the example that leaps to mind or the titular ‘Baxbr / Daxbr’ from Evelyn Smith’s short story.

A couple of thoughts. Making aliens really alien is hard and, I would argue, impossible. We can imagine all sorts of behaviors, from sainthood to psychopathy and describe our fictional aliens accordingly, but those behaviors are always going to be human because human behaviors are the only point of reference we have. It's a bit like asking someone without color vision to describe what 'red' is. We could put together a reasonable concordance by matching up our shades of red to their shades of grey but that's only a translation. Fundamentally, 'red' is an alien concept to them because it's something that they have not and cannot experience directly. Likewise, fictional alien behavior can only ever be translated into human terms. Also, @Spacescifi, how are you defining an absence of emotion? I ask because I don't think of emotions as an all or nothing thing but as a spectrum. To use your 'joy' example, imagine a scale of 0-100 where 0 represents absolute blackest despair, 100 represents total rapture and 50 represents indifference. 'Joy' in this context would fall somewhere in between 50 and 100. So when you talk about eliminating joy, are you talking about eliminating everything above 0 on my scale or just everything above 50? Also, language being what it is, we use the same word to label a whole range of emotional responses. Take 'love' for example, I might love my parents, love my wife or love grilled cheese sandwiches as my favorite food (not really). Each of those is a perfectly reasonable statement but I like to think that my feelings towards my wife are rather different than my feelings towards grilled cheese sandwiches! So again, when you talk about eliminating joy - what does that actually mean? Last thing for now - I'm not sure that emotional elimination is a particularly good way of writing alien characters anyway because it effectively stereotypes them with that missing emotion, making them all rather uniform. To use an obvious example - take the Vulcans and their adherence to logic over emotion. Quick and easy to describe - but it's probably not a coincidence that the one Vulcan we see the most of on-screen is actually half-human, who is logical most of the time - but can also be disarmingly human on occasion. Put another way, emotional elimination characters are a bit like single-biome planets. It's very quick and convenient to have everything take place on the desert world of Arrakis, or the ice world of Hoth but it's also makes your world very boring and probably not that realistic.

Replying to @WestAir. That all sounds pretty cool and not even too hard to visualise - POV shots from sensor augmented (for want of a better expression) protagonists are reasonably common in sci-fi films. Think Predator, RoboCop or the various Terminator films for example. Heck, the grandaddy of them all would probably be the Six Million Dollar Man. My (hopefully non-snarky) reply would be that with that kind of sensor capacity, why are you sending anyone to explore a planet in person? It sounds like you could get all the data you need just by sitting in orbit. The obvious, if slightly circular answer is to assume that there are places on the planet which your ship sensors can’t reach, or can’t scan with sufficient precision or resolution. At which point you need to send down an away team equipped with scanning equipment that’s independent of your ship’s sensors. Enter the tricorder. Edit. And an obvious retort to my obvious answer is that sometimes there’s no substitute for just being there, exploring at first-hand rather than via sensor proxy. If you’ll forgive the plug, I touch on this a bit in a short story I wrote, where one of the main characters takes exactly that view, whilst the other would absolutely see the logic in your virtual tricorder replacement! For a far more interesting and detailed exploration of this kind of stuff, I highly recommend Diaspora by Greg Egan. Very briefly, the story is set in a future where most of humanity exists as sapient software running on molecular computers. Of course it’s possible to download yourself into a robot avatar if you want to experience actual reality as opposed to virtual reality, and the biological remnants of humanity take particular pride in the fact that they’re living in physical reality in mortal bodies. Quite a lot of the book is about those sorts of contrasting views. In a setting where most people can choose to literally run themselves at different speeds or hack themselves to change their entire outlook on life at will, what is reality? And is experiencing it one way any more or less valid than any other way. Anyhow, this is going a bit off-topic. Here endeth the digression.

It's possibly just a coincidence (or I'm just stating the blindingly obvious) but I thought that comment revealed an interesting point about both companies' CEOs. Bezos is more comfortable with logistics (Amazon) than rocketry (Blue Origin's gradatim ferociter approach) so starts with the factory and then figures out what to build in it. Musk is more comfortable with the rocketry (SpaceX) than the logistics (Tesla), so starts building rockets and then builds a factory around that. Or at least that's where the more visible progress is in each case.

It’s the kermol way.

We're not going to make it are we? People, I mean.

The tricorder is fine as it is. Rugged, simple and clearly not a weapon. Personally, I don’t think any of the improvements touted in this thread are actually improvements. Shape it like a gun and it’ll get mistaken for a gun which could get awkward. Also unless you’re going Original Series retro, tricorders are small enough that you’re not going to get a lot more pointing accuracy (assuming it’s needed) with a gun shaped version anyway. Detachable data module. Here in the 21st century we have these nifty innovations known as wifi and over-the-air syncing. I figure Starfleet might have something similar. Later models had touch screens as I recall and if there’s one thing that touchscreens excel at it’s presenting different interface configurations on the fly. Not having a removable portion means your tricorder can be smaller, lighter and more robust. Be kind of embarrassing if you needed to take a reading, only to find that your data module fell out somewhere. Probably when you banged it on a rock as you were dodging the local charismatic megafauna. Direct neural interface. Possible but it seems like an overengineered solution to a comparatively simple problem. To be as reliable as a tricorder, you’d also need to be sure that whatever sensors you’re wiring into your brain can’t be tampered with (remotely or otherwise), aren’t affected by background radiation and can’t be hacked. All of which could probably be achieved but if I was boldly going into an unknown and unknowable situation I think I’d prefer the good old handheld tricorder to a potentially fried brain. Also, for a ‘simpler’ version that merely projects an image of the relevant data into your visual cortex - I’d prefer not to have a screenful of more or less useful data cluttering up the important details. Like, for example, the corner-of-my-eye warning that something toothy on a strange world is about to jump out at me, with hostile intentions.

OK, I should probably correct myself. They've eliminated all the non-biological routes using chemistry that they're aware of. That's not ruling out unknown chemistry but it's hard to say much about that, it being unknown and all.

Bah - might have known I'd be ninjaed. Just finished listening to the press conference - really interesting stuff. They're being understandably cagey about claiming detection of life - not least because the amount of sulphuric acid in Venus' atmosphere makes it very unlikely that anything resembling terrestrial organisms could survive. On the other hand, they've eliminated all the non-biological routes to producing phosphine - their models are falling short there by several orders of magnitude. So, as somebody pointed out on Twitter (I forget who, sorry), we've got novel chemistry, unexplained spectroscopy or possible life happening here, all of which are pretty interesting!

Heck, looking at it a bit more optimistically and assuming that Superheavy can be reliably landed. All (all?) that gives us is a supersized replacement for Falcon 9 - and that's if nothing else you listed works. Although I suspect that would be something of a rocket to nowhere for anything other than launching enormous chunks of Starlink at a time.

I think the most telling thing about that last Ars Technica article - and I don’t recall whether it was in the actual article or the comments - was the reminder that we’ve moved from wondering whether Falcon Heavy would fly before SLS to whether Starship/Superheavy will fly before it. The cheerleading for either side hasn’t changed much either. And yes, I’m being that person who dumps SpaceX into an SLS conversation.

Godspeed SN25 “Funny - it worked last time.”

You're very welcome! And, as I've said before to other folks on this thread, thank you for always coming back to it over those seven years. To answer your question, this, plus a handful of flashfics for a D&D campaign I'm playing at the moment. (My character is a bard - and what use is an itinerant storyteller without a few stories in his back pocket? ), plus another short story that I'm hoping to submit to a local sci-fi magazine when they're next looking for new material. If they end up rejecting it (quite likely), then I'll post it online somewhere. Oh yes - and I've been working my way through this writing challenge. I also have a couple of pages written for another novel - which is about as long as it took me to realize that I really need some basic worldbuilding set up first. A rough map, some country names, an outline of a military command structure, that kind of thing. Currently playing around with the map which has also proven to be a useful source of possible plot points for later on. Which is nice. So, nothing major on the writing front but I have been keeping my hand in. Thank you very much! Glad you enjoyed it and for dropping by to say so! It's always a treat to have a new reader.

KSP2 will be moddable. Whether it has any mods depends on whether it attracts any modders.

Ah-ha! They’re not water towers, they’re giant Pringles (TM) tubes. ”Once you pop you won’t stop”