Bit of Analysis: Orion's Arm

[Ahriman238]

Okay. back in business. Now that school and work are major factors in my life again, my posts may become more infrequent. Sorry, them's the breaks.

Tonight, I'll cover space travel/technology in brief. At least I'll try to hit the high notes. Let's start with space drives, there's a cool chart. That doesn't show well here. I'll use the quote marks to mark out the data taken directly from the site all the same.

Various Low SI: Cruise (0.01c) Max (0.1c) Range (25 LY) Accel (1-10 G)

These stats encompass all the engine types developed and used by ordinary sophonts (aka non-transapients.) Chemical rockets, Orion, Fusion, primitive antimatter, photo-electric, and pulsed-plasma. At no point in the Bubble, even the rugged frontier, do these make up so much as 5% of spacecraft.

Antimatter Drive: Cruise (0.2 c) Max (0.7 c) Range (100 LY) Accel (1-20 G)

Antimatter Drive. Also pretty rare in the modern era, but a lot more common around the time of the Federations.

Conversion Drive: Cruise (0.84 c) Max (0.88 c) Range (200 LY) Accel (1-50 G)

Conversion Drive. Runs on Conversion (monopole-enhanced fusion) second most common type of space drive at 16% or so in the Inner Sphere.

Conversion Ramjet: Cruise (0.84 c) Max (0.96 c) Range (10,000+ LY) Accel (1-20 G)

...

Okay, there's no article on this type of engine. No description, not even the usual oblique references. It is hands down the most popular type of space drive (around 40% in all regions of space) has a faster max speed then plain conversion drive and a ton more range, but less accel/decel. I presume it supplements reactor mass with hydrogen or other materials obtained by scoop. Past that, I've got nothing.

Displacement Drive: Cruise (0.84 c) Max (0.98 c) Range (1,000 LY) Accel (1-100 G)

More fun new concepts. After hitting SI:4, the first Archailects figured out how to mess around with space-time (a science bafflingly called 'metrics' in-universe) and one fruit of that is the void-bubble.
Void Bubbles are sort of like Warp Fields from Trek, and sort of like the TARDIS. They're a space that is much bigger on the inside, allowing them to give relativity the finger. Manipulating the bubble causes reactionless propulsion.

The downside, for the moment, is that no-one can shut down a bubble wihout collapsing it and destroying everything inside, and while relativity is a non-issue the bullshit-fields break down at lightspeed so it doesn't allow FTL. You know, because OA is such a firm, hard, eminently believable series. So it's not actually like ST Warp Drive. Finally, virtually nothing can penetrate the void bubble, so all fuel to maintain it must be within the bubble at creation.

A ship built around a single void bubble which is manipulated for propulsion is called a displacement ship.

Halo Drive: Cruise (0.84 c) Max (0.99 c) Range (5,000 LY) Accel (1-1,000 G)

Halo Drive. When the Archailects started hitting SI:5 it became obvious to them that Void Bubbles could become much bigger on the inside, which means more fuel and "higher gravity gradient." At the same time they figured out how to more-or-less mass produce the void bubbles. End result? A ship that is pushed and pulled by a "halo" of void bubbles outside the ship, while the bubbles also allow a sort of inertial compensator effect, hence the drastically increased accel.

Void Bubbles at this time are still "single-use" and cannot be shut down without destroying the bubble and it's contents.

Void Ships: Cruise (0.999+ c*) Max (0.999+ c*) Range (5000+ LY*) Accel (1,000+ G*)

* precise figure unknown.

At SI:6 though, the Greatest Archailects figured out how to make a void bubble that can be turned on and off with the flick of a switch, allowing refueling of void bubbles, and ships entirely encased in a void bubble.

These are the rarest, most sought after ships, making up a bit less than 1% of all spacecraft in the modern era.



Displacement Ship.



Halo Ship (the large ovoids are magnetic couplings to the bubbles, the bubbles themselves are invisible)



Void Ships are effectively invisible to less-than-Archailect sensors, but sometimes you can see something when they pass a star, just for a (short) moment.


Sensors

Active: Primitve sophonts still use radar and lidar as their primary sensors. For the civilized Galaxy, it doesn't really cost a lot to add on. Lidar is particularly useful for spotting space-borne nano-swarms. Sephiroritcs use standard Hadron and/or Meson sensors which provide high-resolution at a distance, but can be very easily detected and take a lot more power than the primitive scanners. Finally there are Neutrino sensors that are the stealthiest of active scanners, but provide poor resolution unless you can acquire the ultratech (transapient made) versions.

Passive: Lots more options here. We start with basic optical and X-ray telescopes. Then there's OASIS, which is the accepted name for networked sensor platforms, drone clouds or ships piecing together an interferometry scan. Passive Neutrino Detectors can easily spot active Conversion Drives, but tend to be too large for practical ship mounting (unless an ISO, Battle-moon or Juggernaught.) Forward mass detectors (named for Dr. Forward, not restricted in arc) and SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) work on arcane principles, but are very useful for spotting ships hiding in atmospheres, ring systems or the photospheres of stars. Gravity Wave Detectors can usually spot any void bubble craft, unless the operator is good, lucky or transapient. Finally are Chemical and Biological sensors that work in space. Somehow.


In OA, stealth in space is difficult but not impossible to achieve. There are materials that make things interesting for most of the active scanners, but the biggest problem, as IRL, is heat disposal. Different ships (usually dedicated stealth craft) have different solutions. Any device that tries to stealthily deal with heat is called a chiller. Known chillers include: shielded heat sinks (short term use only) vast radiator arrays to make each point seem only somewhat warmed than normal background radiation, sending the heat away in a concentrated beam, away from any scanning devices (sometimes in-system this fails just because dust or stellar debris is effected.) Finally, it is rumored that the Archailects have space-time fuckery options, like dropping the heat in a basement dimension or some sort of void bubble heat-sink.

[Tasoth]

Aren't wormholes mass producible at some point? Why not put one in an enclosed space of the shit and dump all the heat into it so it is vented at a secure point somewhere else? That'd be an interesting way of doing it if you can get a small enough wormhole.

[Simon_Jester]

I can think of a reason not to. If you have too many different "warp the fabric of time and space" things going in one place, they're going to interfere in weird ways. Gravity in particular and the general theory of relativity in general aren't actually 'linear' except in the low-strength limit.

And one effect of 'nonlinear' is that things don't always add up in intuitive ways. Two plus two comes pretty close to four, but 2000 plus 2000 might give you 5000, so to speak.

So having a wormhole parked inside a "bigger on the inside" warp bubble wrapped around a space-manipulating tractor beam or whatever could be a very dangerous combination.

It might spontaneously collapse into a black hole, or something unholier and weirder.

[Ahriman238]

Aren't wormholes mass producible at some point? Why not put one in an enclosed space of the shit and dump all the heat into it so it is vented at a secure point somewhere else? That'd be an interesting way of doing it if you can get a small enough wormhole.

Wormholes can be made that small, yes. Unfortunately, Bad Things happen when you try and send a wormhole mouth through a wormhole. So any ship using that method of heat dispersal couldn't use the wormhole network and would have to ship around everywhere at sublight.

That's probably enough of a disadvantage to generally offset any super-easy solution to heat dispersal and stealth. Then again, it's a big universe, and it may be practical for some sort of system defence ship that never has to worry about getting to another system.

[Simon_Jester]

Again, from a 'spacetime engineering' point of view, you might also get funny interactions between "warp bubbles" and wormhole mouths, or generated gravity and wormholes, or lots of other things. Which might explain why the technology isn't ubiquitous, even if it's theoretically possible for ships to carry their own onboard wormholes.

[Ahriman238]

A new list, 14 virtually immutable facts of life in the distant future.

1) Depth of history: With the exception of deletions due to the Nanoswarms or possible memetic manipulations by the transapients, human and other Terragen knowledge back to 4000 b.c.e. or more is accessible. This gives an unprecedented perspective of 16,000 years. Great thinkers of the past retain an effect, especially if they were the first to explore a new field, in which case they may still be remembered by name. This is particularly true of those who were active in the formative years of Terragen culture on Old Earth. Similarly, some religions are still active and even popular after many millennia of life. Others may be extinct or submerged but have a continuing memetic effect through descendant religions or through general cultural effects. Likewise, some of the great art and literature of the past has not lost its appeal and status in all the time since, but has been recopied, translated, and imitated in new forms down through the ages. Even works which seem to have left public consciousness, and have apparently vanished from the collective subconscious are still accessible through old records, and may be revived, sometimes after millennia of obscurity. The availability of good records and expert translation programs has greatly eased individual access to a culture of unprecedented memetic richness.

Culture. Since just before the nanodisaster virtually everything has been recorded by transapients using nano-surveillance devices. These records, filtered for content relevency, are the primary tools of historians. Advanced translation programs that lose little of the original depth or scope of meaning also help maintain a sense of history.

2) The Wormhole Nexus: Travel, trade, and even mass migrations over the Wormhole Nexus act to homogenize cultures which are in contact with it, just as the transportation networks of the Industrial Age and later times, by moving people and populations.

Nothing unknown to us.

3) The Known Net: The rapid spread of information across the Known Net acts to homogenize cultures by meme propagation, a situation that finds it origins as far back as the data networks of the Information Age. Fashions and ideas, especially those with multi-clade appeal, have been known to sweep across whole sets of societies, affecting many trillions of sapient beings within a matter of only a few months or years.

The Wormhole-carried internet.

4) Light Speed Limitations: Outside the existing networks, cultures commonly evolve undisturbed for years, decades, or even centuries. This is a strong force for diversity, through cultural drift, founder effects, etc., even for cultures which are in contact with the Beamrider Network. Unlike pre-singularity civilization, which in the end created a single inclusive culture that destroyed or strongly modified all others on the planet of Old Earth, the culture of the civilized regions in modern times is not a pervasive and all-powerful solvent. Diversity and novelty persist, at least until the arrival of links to the Known Net, and Wormhole Nexus. Many of the strongest and most vibrant local cultures survive even this impact, and may remain more or less intact and unique for millennia.

Again, ideas found throughout but collected neatly here.

5) Inter-Clade Diversity: Unlike different human cultural groups, clades do not usually assimilate one another through blending and intermarriage. This produces persistent diversity. Memes can cross gaps between clades, though their progress across clade boundaries can be uneven (see Intraclade Biases). Individuals certainly can, but rarely do. Though there is a constant trickle of individuals who are willing to undergo substrate conversion for one reason or another, this is a small fraction of the total population. For one clade to assimilate (or for the two together to form a new hybrid clade) another through physical blending and reproduction is even more extraordinarily rare. This is a source of creative tension, and also a persistent source of division and dispute, especially where two or several clades belong to the same polity. The common trend in Terragen history has been that new clades are produced at a much higher rate than old clades disappear.

Clades.

6) Intraclade Biases: Sapient bionts are predisposed by biology towards some memes, and resistant to others, and therefore tend to produce cultures within a certain range. Each terragen clade has a different set of "natural" biases, and in consequence a different natural range of cultures. The other clades are direct descendants, or were provolved or programmed by humans, so there are some similarities both deliberate and accidental, but also some significant differences. Xenosapients provide another and truly alien set of biases in their interaction with the overall meme pool.

How much of your biases and preconceptions are learned, and how many are biology? Does it even matter?

7) Technological Stability: The rate of change from the point of view of SI<1 entities is much slower than it was during the pre-nanoswarm (Industrial Age through to Space Age) periods, though not so slow as it was during the Palaeolithic. Cultural patterns have had time to "settle" so that they match the tech chosen by a clade. Customs suited to a particular technology, an a particular time and region have sometimes been well rooted for millennia, and are nearly invisible to their inhabitants.

Yawn. In this context 'stability' means something closer to 'stagnation.' If you accept that most mundane sophonts will never be able to understand the sciences of the transapients, no matter how well explained and demonstrated, then a lot of motive to experiment goes out the window.

Political Stability: Some AIcracies have remained in place, essentially unchanged, for thousands of years, like Egyptian society in the Age of Agriculture. Other AI "gods" have encouraged unprecedented stability in the lesser polities of sapient being who are under their direction.

And again, politics is not a field that benefits from long periods of no or little change, any more than science is.

9) Prosperity: Definitions of wealth and poverty shifted drastically with the rise of the Sephirotics and the nanotopia post-scarcity economy; energy and materials are available to all, food (or the equivalent) is rarely scarce, and sophisticated manufactured goods are commonplace. In terms of absolute resources available to them, even the least citizens of nanotopias are incomparably wealthier than the wealthiest pre-Singularity rulers and elite.

Post-scarcity.

10) Extreme Longevity: Many S<1 individuals live for 1000 years or more until some accident destroys them, since aging is greatly reduced even for bionts or vecs. Even when they do die, they may be succeeded by "backups" who are from the point of view of the backups and many of eir associates the same individual. This is apt to greatly reduce the rate of cultural change. Attitudes towards final physical death may be extremely relaxed (many have "seen it all" in this life) or conversely some will greatly fear it since they still have their relative youth and health.

Without extensive medical intervention, the average neb citizen can live to be 500. Of course, extensive medical intervention actually involves a common treatment where one is injected with nanites that take a complete inventory of the body and help repair injuries quicker, as well as all the little things that start to go wrong with age. With this, the average lifespan is more like 1-1.5 millennia, and even that is less a limitation of the technology and more "if you roll the dice enough times" you'll eventually wind up getting mugged or in an accident.

Or you can upload yourself into a computer, or dig up a Clarkekent seed and become (even more) immortal.

11) Archailect Rule: Humanity (to give the example of the original biont sophont species of Old Earth) is once again demoted to a secondary role and is no longer "in the driver's seat"; the relative attitude of independence found between the Renaissance and the end of the Information Age is usually seen as an anomaly. Propitiation of "gods" and "spirits" or, for the skeptic, forces which are intelligent but uncontrollable (the Archailects) is once again the norm. Even anti-AI movements exist in opposition to this memetic. A return to "magical" thinking is often found. Human and other terragen impulses to worship may or may not attach to the Archailects themselves, but the presence of the Archailects affects every religion and philosophy, even those which pre-date or actively oppose the influence of transapients.

Humans are more like pets or hobbies to the Archailects willing to tolerate our existence. Rise of religion because transapients can't really explain how their magic tech works, or what motivates them to us lesser beings, any more than you could get your cat to understand your job.

12) Toposophic Stratification: Between the Archailects and the lower grades of sophonts are many intermediate beings. Some are fully sophont and independent; others are subsystems of the archailects. Some of these intermediates (lower and higher transapients, and lower archailects) have evolved and ascended from the human condition, whereas others were "created" full fledged at their native toposophic level. Every level of transapient existence constitutes an entire kingdom of being, and state of galactic civilization and existence. While many have no interest in lower sophonts, others are concerned about sapient welfare, and some again (mostly beyond the boundaries of the civilized galaxy) simply exploit or enslave sentients of singularities lower than their own. Unlike the society of Old Earth, galactic civilization is stratified and multilayered. Some have compared this situation to pre-Industrial Age feudalism, or to the pre-scientific belief in hierarchies of angels, or "the great chain of being" in Old Earth terragen thought. Others find such metaphors imprecise or misleading.

There is even some debate among the transapients whether ordinary sophonts qualify as "truly" sentient. But again, each Singularity level is as far above the one before it as humans are to the most basic of animals, at least as rational beings. So yes, there is considerable stratification because a SI:3 simply cannot explain all that it is or knows to a SI:2, much less one of us.

13) Virtual Realities: For Virches their virtual environment may be "the" reality, and they may know and wish to know no other. In many cases, though, citizens of such bottle-worlds yearn to know what the real universe is like, either out of intellectual curiosity or from an urge for continued survival (since the computronium which supports virtual life must still be maintained in the actual universe). While some may be content to observe the actual universe through sensors and translators, others actually seek to experience life in the non-virtual universe, and embody themselves. The influence of these few seekers on embodied communities may be considerable, not only because of their radically new viewpoints (a common effect of any sort of interclade immigration) but because of their understandable skepticism concerning the ultimate nature of reality itself. In the other direction, many vecs, bionts, and cyborgs spend large portions of their life in virch surroundings either for business or for pleasure, just as many humans in the Information Age apparently spent a large fraction of their time in front of a computer if they had one available.

...

14) Mass Society: Nearly every existing clade maintains societies with interconnected numbers of people that would have boggled the mind of any Palaeolithic human, who might not have been aware of more than a few dozen or a few hundred other sapient beings. The pattern of larger and denser communities began during the Age of Agriculture, and continues unabated in mainstream societies of the Terragen milieu today. Isolationist persons and cultures exist, but they are the minority.

Greater population densities and vast communities. The average citizen of a Sephirotic has more real-life friends than you do on facebook.

[Simon_Jester]

Random thought about displacement drives: if you can't shut off a warp bubble, how do you stop moving?

[Ahriman238]

Random thought about displacement drives: if you can't shut off a warp bubble, how do you stop moving?

The Void Bubble can exist without propelling the ship, it only does so when manipulated from the outside.

[Tasoth]

An idea hit me as I was pondering this a while ago.

It'd be interesting if one of the writers actually inserted a secret history. Given that there is a race to different cognitive hurdles and surmounting them, have one of the first intelligences to breech the first hurdle start running a huge mathematical equation on how it can become the sole super power in the human based sphere. Follow it as it passes through the other hurdles, getting a clearer and quicker picture and then it kicks the whole thing off with a simple action. Have it happen in a manner that by the time others started to realize there was something going on, they be too far in the middle to see the start, or end, and probably already accounted for. With a history as long as OA's and all the crazy 'Hard Scifi' tech, having an AI that has removed free will through a probability equation and project would be both terrifying and clever.

[Ahriman238]

An idea hit me as I was pondering this a while ago.

It'd be interesting if one of the writers actually inserted a secret history. Given that there is a race to different cognitive hurdles and surmounting them, have one of the first intelligences to breech the first hurdle start running a huge mathematical equation on how it can become the sole super power in the human based sphere. Follow it as it passes through the other hurdles, getting a clearer and quicker picture and then it kicks the whole thing off with a simple action. Have it happen in a manner that by the time others started to realize there was something going on, they be too far in the middle to see the start, or end, and probably already accounted for. With a history as long as OA's and all the crazy 'Hard Scifi' tech, having an AI that has removed free will through a probability equation and project would be both terrifying and clever.

Well there are 'ahuman' AIs who ran off a long time ago, including a couple that are occasionally run into. They don't despise humans, they just don't seem to care for them.

I do like your idea, one thing OA suffers from is a serious lack of drama and/or strong villains. Let's face it, the Star Empires aren't well developed enough for anyone to really care about them, they're data points on a spreadsheet. Population. Economy. If I said that the Keter, Communion of Worlds, and Negentropic Alliance were all eaten by Tyranids, would that mean anything to you on an emotional level? No? So the politics, trade and even war between the Sephirotics aren't interesting.

What is there for villains in OA? The Amalgamation? Lame ripoff of the Borg, without any of the personal horror, plus they're apparently pretty much contained. The Chaos? Warmer, but something that causes random accidents, even accidents killing a thousand people lacks something in the drama department. The Queen of Pain? One-off horror story, maybe a bit scary on a personal level, but you can't really imagine Jason Vorhees being a credible threat to, say, the assembled nations of NATO (but I'm sure that's coming in Halloween XXVII.)

The Dawn Hunters? Promising, but right now they exist as rumor and myth, which is great when a story starts, not so much later. Shinogi? Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner. The greatest villain in OA is, in fact, hardly in the story. Which may be the real problem. OA is a vast setting where some stories take place, but there is no story of OA. Nothing any human character does can ever effect the macro-level of civilization, he may never even wind up a blip on some transapient's radar. As for writing stories from the perspective of godly computers, ha ha ha, no.

It's a wonderful idea mine because it's a bunch of ideas sort of strung together, but there's no coherent whole. There's no story I can point to and say 'you have to read this to get OA.'

[Tasoth]

That's kind of sad. Someone should take a shot at it, but I have feeling it would probably turn out horribly. I could see it be a tale of various individuals trying to fight against the congealing intelligence and failing step by step, but still pressing on. It'd be a great way to show that even though some of the intelligences are beyond fathoming, they're still human somewhere deep inside.

[Ahriman238]

Autowars are another neat idea. They're automated warships ranging from fighter to cruiser size. The fun wrinkle is that they're Von Neuman machines that can multiply themselves indefinitely using asteroid-mining and ship-eating for materials. Beyond that, there's not a ton of common points. Some are dumb, some are sentient, and some are transapient.

Most of those carriers I mentioned earlier haul 3-4000 autowar fighters, but autowars also get sent on long missions as they are, or sometimes 'seeds' that assemble themselves into a complete autowar are launched at the enemy, these seeds usually hang out in the outer system til they've built up a moderate fleet. Or more advanced ones get launched into Jovians, and God-designed autowar seeds are shot into stars.

Sometimes autowars ascend, there is even a Machine Empire of sentient autowars who have flown away from the rest of Terragen civilization to form their own society.

The big problem with autowars is they're somewhat like landmines, they tend to hang around and make trouble long after the wars they were built to fight are over, and their default reaction to strange ships showing up is generally to blow them from the sky.

For literally ages there have been stories about obscenely powerful autowars, the Dawn Hunters, who wipe out emerging civilizations (remember the Fermi paradox from earlier?) These are mostly treated as rumor and myth, the 'here there be dragons' of the Space Age. SOme of those who take the Dawn Hunters seriously claim they have splintered into 3 galaxy-spanning empires, but none of this is confirmed by OA writers on the grounds that it could be interesting.


There are also biowars, space-going organisms that serve the Zoies (and some like them) as equivalents to autowars, because everything that can be done with hardware can be done with wetware, right? Especially self-replicating warships of doom?

[open_sketchbook]

Orion's Arm would be best as the setting for a pen-and-paper RPG, with clades, provolves, vecs and alifes as races at character creation and the GM playing the local AI god in addition to his normal duties. Smaller scale villains of myth and legends work very well as RPG baddies; the party are low-level troubleshooters used to extend the influence of their patron AI God into the furthest corners of space where the angelnet doesn't cover, or black-ops salvage recovering mythical god-tech before the known universe gets a hold of it. Confronting backgrounders, long-lost clades that have degenerated into monsters, insane AI, pirates, the whole deal. How cool would it be to have a party where some members don't even have physical bodies because they are AI, being stored on little computers and flying through the local net. Man, I'd play that every goddamn day.

I might try and write this when I finished by Cyberpulp Adventures system.

[Imperial Overlord]

open_sketchboot, have you heard of Eclipse Phase?

[Tasoth]

It'd be more interesting if the players took on the roles of separate super AIs and all the other things in the setting are their pawns. Some means of differentiating the AI gods and probably a more narrativist setting and you'd be golden.

[Ahriman238]

Orion's Arm would be best as the setting for a pen-and-paper RPG, with clades, provolves, vecs and alifes as races at character creation and the GM playing the local AI god in addition to his normal duties. Smaller scale villains of myth and legends work very well as RPG baddies; the party are low-level troubleshooters used to extend the influence of their patron AI God into the furthest corners of space where the angelnet doesn't cover, or black-ops salvage recovering mythical god-tech before the known universe gets a hold of it. Confronting backgrounders, long-lost clades that have degenerated into monsters, insane AI, pirates, the whole deal. How cool would it be to have a party where some members don't even have physical bodies because they are AI, being stored on little computers and flying through the local net. Man, I'd play that every goddamn day.

I might try and write this when I finished by Cyberpulp Adventures system.

...

I never would have thought of that on my own, but in hindsight it seems inescapably obvious. Heck, a Five Morph cell is pretty much a pre-built party, a tightly knit team of martial artist-mercenaries. You have a heavy artillery guy, a bulky berserker and meatshield, a stealthy assassin, someone loaded down with bio-tech and living augmentation tricks, and a DNI punk who hacks computers with his mind and projects his consciousness into any of the virtual worlds. You'd need a more flexible definition of Class, Five Morph generally master 2-3 roles so they can switch them up between missions, and they'd have to forswear conventional cyborg technology. Oh, there is the niggling problem that one of the Morphers is the leader/sensei and master of all five forms. DM-controlled, perhaps?

You could project to any one of over a billion virtual worlds. Heck, while the Sephirortics may not have enough srtife to be interesting in their broader struggles, they can at least serve as useful set pieces. The dour Negentropics, curious and adventuresome FAS, proud MPA, the Utopia Sphere where you can live in a perfect world if you can stomach total dependence on the local AIs, etc. Even the lawless NoCoZo, where I'd expect a lot of stories to take place.

Super-Sophont? A boss-type fight equivalent to taking on a dragon in DnD, same with taking on the Avatar of an AI God.

I admit I'm intrigued, open-sketchbook. If you're still interested when you have time, drop me a message and I'll help anyway I can, which will probably be restricted to regurgitating information.

open_sketchboot, have you heard of Eclipse Phase?

Does Eclipse Phase have a Dinosaur Space Empire?


Okay kids, long as I'm writing I should get another update in, this time one of the villains I mentioned earlier, the Chaos. In a galaxy where roughly 95% of the population are robots, virtual entities or otherwise run on computer code, the demands of data security are hardly unknown. Sentient and even transapient computer viruses are old hat. But lately something has changed, there's a new generation of aggressive transapient viruses that make a mockery of all computer security, even Archailect firewalls. What they are, and why they exist are a matter of some speculation. Most of the Archailects are combing the data looking for the "keys" that enabled the hyper-ascension of these viruses.

They pop up at seeming random, and do random things with no apparent objective, hence the name the Chaos. At Fata Morgana, a Chaos outbreak caused nanoassemblers to produce aton of robotic dust mites, each bearing a small scrap of highly sensitive physics data. On Mykerinos, all the vecs and cyborgs went insane, killing over 50,000 people, because of some sort of subliminal signal. A wormhole maintenance bot was subverted and destroyed half a dozen wormholes before being destroyed. The Pup Nebula was conquered by a mad (corrupted) AI using an army of dragons the Archailects have determined to be virs made solid.

The Archailects are flummoxed at a problem they can't solve inside an hour, but not all AIs and empires react the same. The Negentropics respond with a sense of destiny. This is the enemy their culture was created to oppose, Entropy and Chaos made manifest. The Dominion, Caretakers and Metasoft are all on board on the destroying the thing, but also aware of how chaos can create opportunities for... growth. The Cyberians, NoCoZo and Utopia Sphere want to protect themselves from the chaos, but see no real imperative to destroy it root and branch. The Communion, MPA, Sophic League and many, many minor powers are actively looking for ways to exploit or control the Chaos.

[open_sketchbook]

I've been writing my own D6-based "abstracted simulationist" system for a pulpy detective setting of my own devising over the past few months, which I think could probably be massaged into an Orion's Arm game. The reason I think so is that my game is a low-number game which has built into the stats the upper limit of human ability, plus already deals extensively with cybernetics (though of a distinctly dieselpunk variety) I was sort of thinking that each level of sapience could literately be represented by simply rolling extra dice on related skill checks. It'd probably be a classless game, with much more emphasis placed on your origin in caste or clade. I think probably the most important part of it's design would be to avoid the "plucky baseline" syndrome; all the characters should be SI1 in at least some aspect of their mental skills and probably tricked out physically, and the challenge comes in that your foes are often similarly powerful. It could work very well as a game of power fantasy and deconstruction thereof; the characters walk around like epic-level D&D characters out of the gate, but exist in a world with beings infinitely more powerful than yourself as well. Plus, it'd be really neat if you had a character who was really just a ten ton block of computronium in orbit providing much of the mental lifting work.

If I do it (and that's a big if, writing an RPG has already proven a ton of work!) I'd love to have your help.

[Ahriman238]

And Now For Something Completely Different:

Nobody knows for sure if there really was such a thing as a platypus war. The origin of this strange story disappears in the shadows of ancient times, before the rogue nanoswarms destroyed most of interplanetary terragen civilization and its history.

Enough was destroyed in the nanoswarms it's hard to prove or disprove what nations of clades may have existed back then. I tend to assume the legends are literally true, because OA is just that kind of universe.

After the first feeble attempts of genetic engineering solidified into the important technology of geneering, a number of human scientists, and, afterwards, ais, experimented with provolving. This is geneering of non-sapient species to become sapient. The reasons were either purely practical: creating an interesting pet or useful race of workers, or the more idealistic learning the different perspectives of looking at the world or simply curiosity. Guessing the motifs of advanced ais with intellects unfathomable for humans is naturally problematic.

Some probable motives behind early provolve research. Creating a new life for purposes of 'labor' seems dubious.

After chimps, dogs, cats, parrots and ants, the provolving technology was used on many more species. And, the story claims, one of these was the Australian platypus.

This can only end well.

Provolved platypuses retained the fur, ducklike beaks and semi-aquatic lifestyle of their presapient ancestors. They became valued for underwater work, especially in cramped surroundings like inside machinery and in managing freshwater ecosystems. They were successful in many general jobs, too. Some learned new uses of electrical receptors on their beaks, with which the original platypus sensed electrical signals in the bodies of small animals. Platypus became respected doctors, especially in the fields of accident medicine, rehabilitation and neuropsychology. The provolved platypus community found their niche in the rapidly diversifying sapient civilization of Earth, and grew slowly. They inhabited stylised ponds and swamps and by themselves developed the earthworm-taste yeast culturing which provided them with food.

So far, so good.

By that time, another provolved species was the flightless kiwi bird. Slowly it turned, that provolved kiwis competed with platypus in the field of earthworm-yeast industry, which was the main food of both. In addition, they started talking of drying the cozy platypus swamps and turning them into their own homes. And the story develops into the standard conflict between the two different cultures. Tensions erupted and platypus finally declared war to the kiwis. Kiwis responded by building dams and started quickly defeating the Platypus Independence Army.

.,.and there's the catch. Kiwis.

The desperate platypuses resorted to genetic manipulation. They devised the virus carrying tweaked catabolic enzymes, which produce the heat in the body of warm-blooded creatures. The virus was delivered by war nanorobots to the kiwi army. The introduction of otherwise harmless chemical substance made mutated heat-producing enzymes go amok. Result was the spontaneous combustion of kiwis, which decimated their army and left the well-cooked corpses of the fried fowl.

This is probably too awesome to be real, though modern OA can easily produce viruses that cause "spontaneous" combustion.

As the story goes, platypus cheered on the defeat of their enemy. But kiwi engineers soon learned the technology, too. Their first attempt failed, as platypus submerged in the water and saved themselves. Platypus cheered again. Now the victory was clearly closing to their side. However, kiwis soon improved, that is worsened, the virus. It now caused the simultaneous combustion of platypus, on land or in water.

The war came to the classical stand-still, and large-scale use of self-combustion was officially banned. Afterwards, the spontaneous combustion virus was still used by the special forces, infecting the selected individuals. Afterwards, the infection was most often used as a blackmail, forcing the enemy individual to cooperate under the threat of combusting him.

MAD.

The best known figures are the platypus strategist Splash-Splash-Yip, commando Veep-Plom-plop and young, genial female fighter Quack-Plu-Plam, as well as kiwi general Boopwoo, scientist team from the Eephweek lab and brave but tragic Skratch-Poov.

Where is Shroomy when you really need him? Actually, provolves frequently have names based on sounds they can easily and naturally reproduce, along with their own languages.

There are several versions, how the conflict itself ended. Older versions generally either say, that the two clades both destroyed each other and the land was divided by other clades, or that horrific, near-total destruction finally caused other sapients to pull the opponents apart. This was met with anger of both platypuses and kiwis which had to be en masse given corrected memories and send to the two different, distant orbital colonies. Culminating in a peace treaty and coexistence it is the recent addition coming from memes of peaceful ethnic diversity and happy endings.

Memory altering technology on a mass scale. I'm sure that would never be abused.


Anyway, after the nanoswarm Era, no provolved kiwis or platypi were to be found, though the technology clearly existed to make them. Most historians believe the story to be an allegory for a specific national conflict, perhaps between Australia (Platypus) and New Zealand (Kiwi.) Others say it's an animal fable, some with an anti-war message, and some say it's a story about how technology used with even the best of intentions can have unpredictable, horrifying results. Some say it was originally a parody of real life events, or of the luddite message some people take from it.

For the last centuries, the story gained surprising popularity in different versions, as a children's tale, adult satire, pulp action or tragic romance with the introduced thread of an affection between a platypus and a kiwi. Insightful study showed, that number of powerful ais helped to broadcast this story. All recent versions, although diverse, tended to push the suggestion, that beings with baseline intelligence have natural tendency for aggressive acts which are both uncontrollable and dangerous to themselves and other intelligent life. Also highlighted was the thread that there is also uncontrollable inclination of baselines to squabble long after the original cause of conflict disappeared. Presented in such a way, the story leads to the conclusion: baselines cannot successfully rule themselves and must be controlled by the ai. Therefore, the recent versions of the story are a hidden proof of righteousness of the current society, where ais rule humans.

How do you do a pulp action about warring monotremes? More examples of memtics the "highly-refined" propaganda of the transapients.

Some scholars point to yet another aspect of the story. They see it as a reminder, that every group, no matter how peaceful and even humble, given right circumstances, suddenly turn into aggressive and dominating, but without abandoning it's humble ideology.

In the last decade or so, especially the last two memes become widely disclosed and publicised as attempts of manipulation. So, the history of the history of platypus war is nowadays taught in primary schools. It is presented primarily as an example, how facts can be interpreted in the subtle and almost unnoticeable ways. This is a warning, how far the "common perception of facts" can manipulate and influence the community. The story of platypus war is used to teach children distinguishing facts from interpretation and manipulation, as introduction to the memetics, and an example, how strongly memes affect the galactic civilization.

That's probably as good a lesson as any to take from it.

[Ahriman238]

And then there were trees. IN SPACE!!!!



A Dyson Tree begins it's life cycle when a comet has a seed planted in it. The tree grows using the ice into a spherical/snowflake shape with 4-8 trunks stretching out in every direction. Each trunk can grow to be 100 km long and are hollow, as are the major branches, and airtight. After a decade or so, humans return to the tree, carve or grow an airlock into it, and introduce a number of engineered life forms that turn the inside into a viable ecosystem, and the tree is now ready for habitation.

There are many species of trees, with subtly different needs. Depending on how much they need photosynthesis, for instance, trees can live anywhere from 0.5-4 AUs from a standard star. There are even systems with forests where trees cluster into desired orbits so densely they can even be seen from each other.

Needless to say, this is the preferred space habitat of the Zoeific Biopolity. But Dyson Trees exist anywhere people think they're cool or pretty, particularly in the Utopia Sphere.