The Associated Worlds

TotallyNotHuman 11/30/2018 1:48 PM

first

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Second!

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THIRD.

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LAST.

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not anymore

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*is now last*

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7th

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Every Time

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Zeroth

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Why?

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Curses in Blender

On the subject of our worldbuilding project and how it has been influenced by Eldraeverse:

15:36

I've pretty much nicked the consciousness thing wholesale, renaming parts of it strategically (e.g. "volition kernel").

15:37

One of my factions, the Union of Created Intelligences, is built much like the Imperium itself.

15:38

Only it's actually a collection of nomadic "Grand Fleets" with no planetary ties that's been around for æons.

Pheriphery stuff mostly. I like the Eldraeverse to stand on its own shoes, and well... my worldbuilding deals with transhumans/posthumans. I can't transplant most of the worldbuilding because it's linked to decisively nonhuman actors.

15:43

Also, well, for me personally the Eldraeverse's true brilliance's always been under the hood.

15:43

The new-thought slice-of-life nanofiction.

Mine is the reason I got into the Eldraeverse. His whole “insanity or inspiration” thing describes my life since I was 3

My Para-Imperium universe stems from a lot of the same source material as the Eldraeverse, but my own ideas on continuity of consciousness, how peoplewill handle post-scarcity fabrication, and a desire to write about relativistic free traders took it in a somewhat different direction https://paraimperium.wordpress.com

Mine started off as a paper let's play of Starfire.... I want to say 10-14 years ago? something like that? And it slowly metastized into a whole world.

At least I can say it became harder SF over time

16:10

Wait, isn’t starfire by David Weber, Patron saint of missile massacres?

kinda

16:12

1st and 2nd were originally by Seven Cole (more famous for Star Fleet Battles)

16:13

3rd ed was when David Weber got to take over, and cemented a lot of the core concepts (David was a playtester in earlier versions)

I think mine might be getting softer. The first novel is kind of

Apeiron Terminus started off as "let‘s retrofit 2300 A.D. with a bastard mixture of Transhuman Space, Eclipse Phase and Ghost in the Shell" and evolved from there. Now it‘s... somewhere, still fermenting.

...like “the Expanse” with bioprinted Belters (edited)

then it was dropped/sold when Task Force Games shifted into the Armarillo Design bureau, and picked up by Marvin Lamb (another playtester), who put out 4th, and then 5th/6th edition (where it is now, which is perhaps better described as a 4.75 I suppose)

It‘s definitely gotten weirder, Apeiron Terminus. Once you sketch out the weird combined applications of wormholes and warp drives, you can do some wonky shit.

amusingly enough, Task Force Games also had Ken Burnside as a tester, and he went on to do Ad Astra games, which does Attack Vector: Tactical. Which holds the record for the crunchiest miniature space combat game, full stop.

Specifically, you can launch a colony mission and connect them up to the network a few years later from your perspective, while on the far end a few decades have passed.

When I moved the timeline forward to write about star travel, I threw in twin telepaths for limited interstellar communication. Then I came up with UFog-based technomages. Now I’m writing a cosmic horror story where Outworlders use blood sacrifice to make telepathic contact with the Federation.

Feels like crunchy Clarke‘s Third.

16:19

Like, I have another setting where I decided to throw computerized magic by mathematics ala Laundry together with trans/posthumanism and Shadowrun for the "Awww hell let‘s see what comes out" and that‘s definitely Science Fantasy, full stop tilt.

16:19

With elves, dwarfes, actual Ghosts n' afterlifes and native culture shamans n all the fun stuff.

The teeps supposedly have entangled particles in their brains, and they can make minor contact with people they didn’t share a zygote with. But it’s a very vague message.

Also, computer worlds getting possessed by ghosts because Ooops My Evolutionary Algorithsms Computed The Wrong Pattern.

I have an embryonic "fantasy" setting which involves magic, but the magic ends up mostly being closer to alternate physics because I can't seem to write things unless I know how they work.

Huh, same with me.

16:21

Or, at least, I like to apply some basics.

16:21

ADs magic is still very soft-ish.

16:21

Or, how could you also say...

16:22

It‘s very convinient metaphysics.

Like the setting I've been developing with TotallyNotHuman and KAL. (edited)

16:22

It has four FTL paradigms, with basis in "slightly different" physics.

16:23

(e.g. "what if the universe as we see it is just a layer of skin on an onion")

16:24

That one, the polyspatial drive, then branched into three types of "translation drive"

16:24

First-generation one just burns through the layers.

I honestly like the aesthetic of portal networks over “drives”.

Second-gen one rotates the ship in freaky four-space ways until it can use main thrust to do the same, then rotates it back.

16:25

Third-gen one makes a Special™ wormhole-type thing that links layers directly.

16:25

(it's a different kind of wormhole from the spacefolding one, because it only goes hyperradially and doesn't have potential linking behavior)

16:26

The spacefolder drive can only link points of equal potential (gravitational, electrical, and so on).

16:26

Which means that, unless you know what's on the other side, you can't make a stable wormhole.

16:27

However, once you have that data, you can pretty much send as much through the fold as you like.

@Zarpaulek I‘ve found wormholes and warp drives combine interestingly when you make wormholes timelike-stronger than warp bubbles - it means wormholes displace warp drives out of connected space. You can have a tightly connected, warp-exclusionary inner region of space, and a wild FTL-travelled frontier.

That leads spacefolding civs to slow expansion, with dense territory, and near-instant frontier colonization (once you get there, anyway)

And in Apeiron Delta, I‘ve screwed around with magic-touched Exoplanets and wormholes that lead to alternate universes (and other stars also.)

16:30

So the world of AD has at least two settled Alpha Centauri‘s, which are very different worlds.

Such civilisations are strongly biased towards defense, because while they can send assets anywhere in their territory nearly instantly, they cannot extend beyond their territory very quickly.

16:31

Then you have the frameshift drive, which grabs a bubble of space which happens to have a spaceship in it and chucks it around.

16:31

It doesn't care about mass, but it does care about volume—very much so.

16:31

So you get hugely dense but tiny ships.

16:32

It also builds up a bow shock from long transits by interaction with the edge of the bubble.

16:32

When you disengage the drive, the bow shock falls off in a tightly-collimated beam of hard radiation.

16:33

Frameshifting civs are, as you might expect, much more aggressive.

Another note on the spacefolder: Because physics is crazy, and models are imperfect without using literally the entire universe to compute itself, data goes stale over time.

16:41

And if there's one thing you don't want, it's to try and spacefold with data that is inconsistent with reality.

16:41

(it's a great way to get your ship smeared across space)

16:41

To mitigate this, a civ has a couple of options.

16:42

First, they can simply send data to everyone more frequently.

16:42

Second, they can coerce reality back into step with their data.

16:43

Primarily via moving mass or electric charge around to make the potentials line up right.

16:43

Installations which do this play the role of jump gates.

16:44

(some of them might even actually be jump gates, since there's no real point in putting a spacefolder on a starship when you already have a perfectly good, hugely massive object there already)

Such civilisations are strongly biased towards defense, because while they can send assets anywhere in their territory nearly instantly, they cannot extend beyond their territory very quickly.

...... WWI in SPAAAAAAAACE

16:45

if you have two of those go head to head

The UCI, being the resident godtech faction, opt for the first option since they have moonlet-sized computronium sessiles.

16:46

Also they've mapped most of the galaxy, being literal gigayears old.

16:48

Technology such as shielding and artificial gravity is derived directly from the same "slightly different" physics that drive FTL.

16:49

Three of the FTL techs yield artificial gravity and "volumetric" shielding.

16:50

Frameshifting, however, yields "surface" shielding and no artificial gravity.

16:51

Surface shielding is effectively a warp bubble with no actual shifting happening.

16:52

It's opaque to most things, but deforms when hit with mass.

16:52

(and you do not want it to deform into your ship)

16:53

Volumetric shielding comes in a variety of types, depending on what it actually does.

16:54

Kinetic absorption applies a force to projectiles so that their radial velocity relative to the ship is reduced.

16:54

(down to zero—you can't use it to accelerate things away from the ship)

16:55

Kinetic deflection applies a force orthogonal to the projectile's velocity to deflect it away from the ship.

16:55

You tend to see more ki-abs shields on larger ships and more ki-def shields on smaller ships.

16:56

Antiradiation shielding acts like bulk mass to electromagnetic radiation without actually weighing as much.

16:57

It attenuates radiation in the same exponential way.

16:58

Because all the shielding still conserves momentum and energy, shields don't need a weird "health" or "integrity" metric—it's adequately described by their thermal balance.

16:58

You can saturate a shield by pumping more energy into it than can be dissipated by its thermal system.

16:59

You can also simply hit it hard enough with a single impulse that it shatters its mounting plates and smashes out the back side of the hull before it can fade out.

17:00

This is the main reason that small ships don't often engage really big ships or installations.

17:00

(well, maybe not the main one, but)

17:01

Antiradiation shields have transmission bands so that sensors can see through them.

17:01

Typically they're carefully selected to avoid common laser bands, but there's not a lot you can do about a FEL.

17:02

So in most milspec shields, the transmission bands are tunable on the fly.

17:02

(civvies typically don't need that functionality—piracy isn't that big a deal in most places)

so if you needed to render these shields in a game, they'd have a 'Heat' track and 'Cooling' value, which is the amount of heat they can dump per game turn?

Wait, so how do the wormholes disrupt Warp drive?

ponders the implicates if the engines and weapons are all dumping heat into the same track

17:06

where firing your giant cannons means you have less ability to withstand damage, at least if you're firing every turn

17:06

Zar: my guess is that that wormholes bend space enough that the warp drive bubble can't fit down the throat of them

So, why can’t they go around the gates?

chin taps

@Zarpaulek For Sev's setting? Causality attacks, essentially

20:59

Me personally I went full soft SF with 7 different FTL methods in common use, and a few others possible

Oh, are we talking about our worldbuilding projects? (edited)

21:18

I have a low-transhumanism kinda thing that doesn't leave the solar system.

21:18

(And a bunch of hardish fantasy settings which I don't think people around here would appreciate as much)

21:21

... It has a period of it's history which was primarly written to allow me to do sci-fi fey in the outback australia.

21:21

(Using arcology-dwellers as the fey, and outback survivors as the regular people)

you're an Aussie?

I am!

21:22

(Where did you think I was from?)

Generic Anglosphere, you write like a native speaker but I couldn't pin it down (Though it's not like I was actively trying to)

Fair enough!

21:25

My schedule and incidentals usually out me sooner or later.

21:25

(Esp since I'm pretty sure my city is the only major anglosphere city with a time-zone so stupid?)

are you on a half-hour timezone>

21:27

?

Indeed I am!

It's better than Ürümqi's timezone.

?

Western China. It's on Beijing time, and it's almost on the same longitude as Dhaka

Hello Adelaidian

Hello!

21:52

(I really should be more circumspect, but w/e)

21:52

(It's a big city)

tbf I'm not sure how many non-aussies would know exactly what city you had to be in just by the half hour thing.

21:53

(I'm in Perth)

I mean, there's one major city in the timezone?

21:56

(And like two small ones?)

21:56

But yeah!

hey, at least you aren't on train time

Train time was very practical when you aren’t having to consult in real-time or near-real-time with people far away

I mean, the Indian-Pacific still uses it for very practical reasons. But a timezone that is out of step with the rest of the world by 15 minute increments is just frustrating conversion-wise.

Yeah.

21:59

(anyone got any good timezone worldbuilding?)

21:59

(How do spacers time-zone?) (edited)

They Zulu, or the in-universe equivalent

22:00

I’ve actually found that convenient, since it makes it more natural for everyone to operate shipside on the capitol world’s day cycle without a pesky sun interfering

What's this?

It’s the military term for GMT, sorry

Ah.

22:02

Yeah, most likely.

22:02

I'd also consider them using Orlando time?

22:02

Whichever timezone that is.

Mission control for the us is in Dallas, one time zone away

Huh.

22:03

(I was thinking more in term of symbolic terms)

22:03

(Like how the moon is part of that bishopric) (edited)

Mostly for political reasons, IIRC it was argued for by LBJ. But that would cause unnecessary complications in multinational missions. Planning on the ISS would in that case probably have to be on both Orlando/Dallas and Baikonur/Moscow

22:05

Oh, and I'd imagine worlds like Luna with extremely long day cycles would probably do the same

Yeah, probably.

22:05

(Though it depends heavily)

22:06

(... I still have no really plausible source of funding for one of the big space-missions that my setting had)

I know that for lander operations NASA runs on Mars time

(It's several hundred years in our future, but also a hundred or two before any other serious space-missions)

22:07

(A large tribe of wanna-be transhumanists fleeing "conventional ethical limits on science")

22:07

(To saturn, specfically)

most likely they pick a convenient time system and stick with it. This may not necessarily be 24hrs in a day; in the absence of the sun to reset body clocks humans naturally drift to 25 or so hours, and that may fit in better with metric, so that's plausible

calling in a lot of favors? Maybe the rocket is experimental-ish and someone got it passed the ethics board to put a human payload on it?

Yeah, I was imagining quite a large mission, is the problem.

22:10

Possibly it's privately funded, like a scaled-up space-X.

Maybe have an extremely wealthy member or two able to privately fund it?

22:11

coupled with rider payloads, something that big could negligibly carry multiple Cassini-plus sized spacecraft

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.

22:13

(Large mission in this context is 1000+ people, though)

22:14

(For a permenant colony)

22:14

(Not something which can just be handwaved)

Doing that could easily net a few billion dollars from NASA, ESA, China, private companies, etc. Have enough Silicon Valley eccentric billionaires added to that, plus presumably most if not all of the net worth of the colonists, and you've got a decent nest egg

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

22:18

(The colonists were def sacrificing everything in the name of this; long-term, they do a bunch of really unethical things to get enough biology down to make a new clade of humans which they felt were better, and then committed mass suicide (admittedly in part by isolation and old age) to prevent said clade from inheriting the culture of doing unethical things in the name of science. They were idealists who knew they had no place in the world they were trying to make, and the history of the people they made has ... very mixed feelings about them.)

Sounds a bit like the backstory of Hc Svnt Dracones with more pseudo-religious fanaticism

Never heard of them... but yeah; they were "Interesting" people; not actually a group of people I intend to explore deeply.

Ah. Precursors ahoy!

Yeah; they're precursors, but on a ~hundreds of years, rather than thousands.

22:22

The oldest of the race they created; the "Lastborn", grew up in empty space-stations, raised on idealistic sci-fi and engineering documents.

22:23

And that, plus the pile of mods they have, influences them as a culture a lot.

22:23

(They presumably have enough enhanced int to avoid the three-gen rule, but not enough to alienate themselves by that alone)

that's a hard part to write. Trying to make human-descended people sound alien while relatable is fun

Yeah.

22:25

Honestly, one of the core parts of them is that they have a bio-wifi?

Telepathy, ooh

Not enough for true telepathy without machine assistance and a lot of practise.

22:25

But enough for pretty strong empathy.

22:25

And shared lucid dreams.

22:25

So they have a pretty normal-looking social life from the inside.

22:26

But a lot of it breaks down when they try and interact with the other groups.

22:27

That and spacer-mods making living in orbit easy and natural, plus some low-level int and longevity stuff are the main mods.

22:28

(This was the first big human-run transhuman effort in-setting)

No bone or muscle atrophy I'm guessing, but what else?

More radiation resistance, and a few psychological tweaks so that they're less dependant on enviomental cues.

22:29

(And probably less dependant on external vitamins, as well)

This is what I had for my spacers https://paraimperium.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/parahuman-baseline/

zarpaulus

Parahuman Baseline

While parahumans were based on humans and spliced with cosmetic genes from a variety of different animal species, there are a few traits that are common to the majority of the parahuman population …

That sounds like a similar ball-park, but I'm not certain.

sorting out the gut flora is going to be vital

Hmm. Probably the Venusians have something much more like that.

22:31

Yeah, a lot of the more day-to-day medical stuff is taken care of by approx-human-level AI's.

22:32

(They have a single seed which becomes a person if you raise it for 5-15 years like a kid, but a different person based on randomization and upbringing)

22:32

(So there are a bunch of them around, but not a coherent theory of AI design) (edited)

I was about to say I would go crazy sorting out gut flora levels all day, but I spend my work days doing logistics not-dissimilar to blood transportation, so...

(In general, all the AI's this setting have were unintentional)

I do similar things. It helps keeps the number of high-level AIs in check, keeping them from dominating the setting

Yeah.

22:34

The official "First AI" was a military logistics response chatterbot thingy for one of the first earth-orbit military space stations.

And leads to fun consequences when an AI raised in one very militant culture gets assigned to, say, an embassy posting

Which was origionally investigated when it was noticed that people were getting dating advice from it.

22:35

(This one stayed on with the stations as it was transitioned to civilian. It's one of the bigger normie/corp space stations now)

I took a different route. The advantage of having a setting with tens of billions of years of space-faring civ pre-Humanity is you can put a lot off on one of the precursors or another

Yeah, I understand that.

22:35

I do actually have an ancient race!

22:36

Dying martian civilization.

22:36

Which has been hovering on the brink of extinction for a long time.

22:36

With ~100% of living population in stasis for thousands of years.

22:37

Until a routine check noticed that earth had a civilisation they could ethically trade with.

22:37

And about a thousand of them all traveled here out of nowhere.

22:37

(which is about a third of the extant population, and a 1/5 to 1/10 of the possible max population)

not one. No, multiple levels of "civilizations" (aggregates of entire eras of history across billions of years and multiple universes, made necessary by how little information survived to the present)

Oh, yeah, no, if I was doing a big old setting I'd do that.

22:39

This is a much smaller setting in both time and space, though.

22:39

I intentionally limited scope quite a lot.

What can I say I was an ambitious child, and attempts by me to scale down the settings gets the chorus of voices to ignore me

Nah, that's fine! Big settings a good! I just didn't do it here.

It also means it inherited all the soft SF/borderline Science-Fantasy aspects of its meta-past, with all the fun that hardening up the setting leads to

22:41

It's at the point where some of the tech is Clarkian relative to civilizations that are Clarkian to us

Oh, that's always cool.

22:42

I was trying to tinker with a way of doing a urban-fantasy setting like that.

22:43

With multiple layers of secret worlds and magic systems.

22:43

But it never really fell out anywhere nice.

Humanity is the product of a von nuemman-esque series of machinery that caused ~60 trillion simultaneous big bangs after custom editing the BIOS so to speak of each of those universes to all produce humanity (in some form) on Earth (in a more or less recognizable form)

Have you read Fine Structure?

nope

Ever heard of the “aestivation hypothesis”?

vaugely, though that seems more like for @Archon ?

I haven't heard of that.

22:56

Though that's very much not what the martians are doing in my setting.

22:56

They just lacked political unity to fix thier planet.

22:56

And then each of the enclaves ran out of resources alone.

22:57

(So there's some bias in the ones who went into hibernation rather than die out entirely)

It’s a potential solution to the Fermi Paradox: The aliens went virtual and entered sleep mode until the heat death of the universe when they can run at peak efficiency

Yeah, I read the wiki-page.

22:57

It's an interesting idea.

22:58

Just not one I care to use for this setting.

doesn't work for my setting, for one. There's no hole deep enough to hide in to dodge exploration cruisers/ berserker drones

https://qntm.org/structure

Fine Structure

Fledgling physicist Ching-Yu Kuang has discovered a Rosetta Stone for all of physics, a treasure trove of advanced scientific breakthroughs beyond all imagination. Exotic energy, teleportation, FTL, parallel universes and near-infinitely more wonders are just within reach; a ...

22:58

It's a pretty interesting story.

22:59

And it's probably spoilers enough to say this convesation reminded me of it.

22:59

So I'll just leave it here.

Well, I went with Berserkers in my ‘verse, but their parameters are to specifically home in on radio (bye bye Terra).

I'm pretty sure my 'verse just doesn't have FTL.

Oh I went far meaner. The berserkers themselves are a von nuemman swarm controlled by intelligences that would make the Archailects of OA kneel before them in awe

23:01

they just are a perversion on an insane scale

That's unpleasent.

23:01

I like my settings to not have an apocalypse inevitably happen.

Oh no they didn't cause one apocalypse

23:02

They caused at least two multi-billion year long interuniversal wars that ended in the extinction or near-extinction of tool-using life each time.

23:04

They just got didn't know how to look for the boltholes, nor did they anticipated the move that created humanity. Who do show up on stage just in time to "help" deal the killing blow (though if this was a novel series as long as ASOIAF they'd be there for a portion of the length of the last pixel of the last period)

23:07

But they did spur an unbelievable amount of innovation and allowed for a setting with both ancient supertech and relatively young Great Powers

I work on a worldbuilding project of my own invention (with a friend) as well as helping with @0111narwhalz's

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RecursivePrecursors is in full swing

Recursive Precursors - TV Tropes

The Recursive Precursors trope as used in popular culture. Precursors are a staple of a great many Sci Fi and Fantasy settings. While precursors come in many …

09:51

And some of them are still around

Of course, everyone's transhuman (or trans-whatever) or an AI

How trans are your transhumans @KAL_9000? Metahumans on Apeiron Terminus are on the soft side of partial distributed minds (soeliences, in Verse terms.)

Free mind uploading and body swapping

10:52

All biological bodies are heavily genetically engineered

So the Eclipse Phase baseline, about?

10:53

Ego bridges, genefixed bodies, continous uploads and downloads to biological substrate in a few hours timeframe? Cool.

Few hours?

10:54

More like a few minutes

Well that is fast. How do you avoid cooking the brain?

Excellent cooling systems

10:54

Most digital substrates have liquid helium coolant

Heh. Well then, your nanotech must be rather high-powered.

Yes, it is indeed

10:54

That's another thing

Ah okay, so they have neuromorphic substrate instead of the olde biological.

Full post-scarcity thanks to nanotech

10:55

Also cheap fusion and fission reactors for element transmutation

Apeiron Terminus got that too, about. Well, depends on how ressource-consumptive the local sophonts are at the moment. (in AT, if you wetprint to bio-neuronal substrate, it's usually as a point - the substrate can only be overriden so quickly. Makes one rather immune to hard brain hacking.)

Any direct neural-to-interwebs communication goes through a quarantined test first

10:58

(on a sim)

So no livestreamed formats?

Well, given the computing resources at your disposal, the sim's sped up and takes a few seconds

Like, quarantine firewalls are nice, they can't curtail continous attacks or downloads however. Also, mind the rights of your tester forks.

Forks are run non-sophont

10:59

(for testers)

Well, that means you might run into problems with attacks not visible on them.

^^

Your mind is software

Best security is still restrictive protocol work.

program it

Disable the safety protocols and you'll be inundated with brainmails from Space Nigerian Princes

11:00

true enough

Your body is a shell, change it

but direct anti-sophonce attacks are pretty rare

@Unknown IF you are going to copy the EP line, please post it as one, not as a string post. (edited)

11:00

String posts are annoying.

11:01

@KAL_9000 So they are in AT. Generally something in bad sport, to do in the connected regions. Also given that Soeliences, by their distributed nature, are really great at error correction. You hack the primary core, the secondaries are going to throw protests, and then NetSec comes zooming in as fast as the local Datasphere carries them.

Your mind is software: program it Your body is a shell: change it. Death is a disease: cure it. Extinction is coming: FIGHT IT

(And you won't succeed.)

11:01

Hey, fun fack. Do you know what the "Eclipse Phase" is?

Yes

That, too

It's a virology term. Refers to the asymptotic phase of an infection.

11:02

Now think carefully about that.

The Cyber Police of your local polity's government and your backups'll have revenge/restoration of you, no doubt (edited)

11:02

oh dear

On the other hand, out in The Expanse, where the only travel is your local warp-enabled ISV.... well.

11:04

And there are no empires. Well, a few polities are empires, but the primary governments in AT are Governance demarchistic AI-sophont hybrid models. (edited)

Sorry, should have said polities

11:05

One of the nice things (one of) the Precursors left behind was the ontotech for reusable tangle

11:05

So the galactic interwebs is very fast

Heh. In AT they use ER=EPR for communications. You have a locked-in matric of entangled QEC. Around that is the infrastructure for a wormhole inflation.

that works too

Comes in continous and burst comms, but that's how they built their (a)causal comms.

11:06

Plus tightbeam bouncing along a variety of bigger 'holes that form the backbone of the connected worlds.

11:07

(FYI, Apeiron Terminus has both wormholes and superluminal warp drives, though the two don't really mix, and wormholes are cosmologically stronger than topologically separate space-time bubbles when it comes to spatial-chronal integrity.)

11:08

It's actually quite interesting what you can do despite that.

11:09

But allas, I shall not talk about in too great depth, or Alistair is going to joink it all away.

The reusable tangle transceiver (if that's the right word) is about the size of a server rack

11:09

So it's easier to transport/build than a wormhole generator, which is quite hefty

11:10

It does require the actual entangled particles be cooled to <= 5 Kelvin, tho :V

(Hence why AT QECs tend to operate in burst mode. Still gets more than enough data through, especially if the connection is used as the classical channel of a quantum-teleportation set-up.)

Also: MEGASTRUCTURES EVERYWHERE

Heh. They are still working on that. On the other hand... well, there's some strange structures beyond metahuman space, and singularity explosions tend to leave their fair share before something happens and the controlling intelligences go somewhere.

Again

11:18

nanotechnology

11:19

self-replicating nanotech, in fact

11:19

Makes massive builds a lot easier

Yeah, when you don't want to respect the laws of volumetrics, thermodynamics, and a bunch of other things.

11:20

I like to play nanotech "relatively" conservatively; it's useful but not the end-all of universal work, given it has to be made from conventional baryonic matter. If it was made from a significant build of magmatter or other exotics, different story.

this is true

Also, logistic constraints are still a thing.

11:20

Mass takes a lot of joules to get to infall quickly, you have to invest that first.

Yes, it's not a be-all, end-all

11:21

But "easier" as in you don't have to have literally trillions of engineers working on a Cirys sphere or something like that

Eh, for Dyson swarm assembly you got auto-facs and sub-sophont mass robotics.

11:22

In AT, most nanotech is confined to assembly enviroments.

11:22

And bulk mining happens by breaking off chunks, grinding them down and then letting a variety of nano-catalysts, bacteria/micromachines and nanomachines munch on the resulting debris.

Megaprojects take a while, but the nanites and autofacs don't require constant supervision

11:23

That's the "easier" part

Filterfeed the resulting dense "soup" of enriched units from the work fluid, and you get fine dust of raw materials, which gets further processed into feedstock.

We just run raw matter into a fusion/fission reactor bank

11:24

Turn it all into osmium to minimize storage volume, and then transmute it into what you need at the other end

Oh god, the entropic waste.

11:25

Actually, scratch that, that's a total waste of energy!

It takes a lot of energy, but pretty much everyone has a Cirys swarm

Yeah but still. Whuah! Stop that.

Of course, sensible factions do what you do

11:25

The main PoV faction is anything but sensible

You use transmutation when you don't have enough of something, not for efficiency!

11:26

That's called feeding the entropic dragon, and heartily. No, no, no.

Again

11:26

The main PoV faction is anything but sensible (edited)

Yeah, there's sensible and there is stupidious and I know where I put in your PoV faction.

11:26

That's like, Nazi stupid.

PRECISELY

11:26

everyone's begging them to stop

You don't even profit from compressing matter into Osmium.

11:26

If there's anything you have in space, it's space!

This is why half the galaxy has been at war with them at some point

11:27

They're starting to see sense, but until then, entropy's laughing its head off

11:28

It's not so much stupid as much as "most projections say we'll get thermodynamics-breaking ontotech well before Heat Death, so screw it"

11:28

I'm not saying I agree with that rationale

Also, Osmium is 70-fucking-six on the periodic table, iron is at 26. This is not efficient any way you turn it.

See above

Like, no, no, no.

The rationale is stupid

Yeah well, I can tell you these morons will be out-industrialized by every person that doesn't waste energy and time on useless intermediaries.

But it's sort of justifiable if you squint enough

Someone's been taking notes from the Hive.

:V

11:30

Did I mention their finest scientific minds are in open rebellion?

11:33

I misspoke

11:33

When I say the PoV faction, I meant one of the PoV factions

11:33

There are three main ones that are focused on (edited)

11:34

Two sensible ones and these idiots

11:38

A quote:

11:39

"We're allied with them because they need serious help." -Republic of Jai Minister of Foreign Affairs, 5015 AD (calendar translated to human equivalent)

11:44

Keep in mind, this same civ tried to conceal a Cirys superzorcher

11:44

(The idiots, not the Republic of Jai)

How is such a crazy polity or whatever still around then?

They dismantled it before the entire galaxy got around to declaring war

I mean generally speaking.

Allies

11:46

They have a few powerful allies

11:46

See the above quote as to how they got them

why though?

11:48

Why don't their allies ditch them or force them to be less stupid?

They are forcing them to be less stupid

11:49

Reforms are happening

11:51

Sadly, you can't rework an entire society's infrastructure in a few years

11:51

Especially not a society spanning millions of star systems

how did they get that big in the first place though while being so stupid?

^^ They wouldn't. Not with that bloody notion of thermodynamic waste.

Millions of star systems is a thousandth of the galaxy

not because of competition,but because of the inefficient of the polity

12:17

you wouldn't expect a tribal government to be able to effectively govern the whole of ,say, the modern US

civilians use more efficient means of transport and refinement

12:18

Only the government uses terrible stuff

unless it's a government in name only, that's what matters. If it can't effectively control its domain, it doesn't own it

3

It has a ridiculously large military which it spends a lot of its terribly-earned matter on. It uses this to quash internal rebellions, but territories are largely self-governing.

How did that go for the Soviet Union?

very badly (edited)

12:27

But that was mostly Gorbachev

The high military spending and inefficient government production? that was near constant throughout its history

no, the falling part

Also, the polity is collapsing at the "present" time

14:16

for reasons that should be obvious

14:19

Very much Long Live the Revolution!

Well no crap. But how did it get that big to begin with? Why didn’t the new colonies simply leave?

Thing I need to figure out: Airframe shape given a system where the surface itself is a propulsor.

00:01

That is, rather than having engines, the skin actually transfers momentum to the air.

00:08

Would a regular airfoil still work?

Any directional limitations on the momentum transfer? A conventional airfoil should work if you can transfer it parallel to, or at a close angle to, the surface.

Parallel to the surface is probably the main mode.

00:13

I imagine normal components wouldn't be useful for a lot, other than creating turbulence.

00:14

(honestly I hadn't even considered them)

Seems like it should work, then. And conventional airfoils would probably be useful in the early stages of adoption, when you could rig the momentum-transfer wizardry to behave like a normal thrust-providing engine for a conventional aircraft and not have to retrain all your pilots.

Oh, and then I'd like to apply it to biology :D

00:15

(since the engineers weren't the first to figure this out)

00:15

I expect to see fixed-wing bird-analogues.

Ultimately -- well, if you have a momentum-transfer system that works in any direction, everything turns into a teardrop (if one direction is preferred) or a sphere (if you want to be able to pick any without changing attitude).

Would it be more efficient to retain wings or other lifting surfaces?

00:18

Note that the momentum transfer does not come for free—you still have to put the work in to accelerate the air.

Depends on the scenario. Thinking of biology, if you're an albatross-analog, probably, since you want to harness the air as much as possible to avoid putting in any work you don't have to; if you're a hummingbird-analog, probably not, as you're built for a high-energy lifestyle and you'd be better off saving on drag.

I‘d suggest some kind of finely stepped cone as your propulsion module of choice.

(interestingly, I do have a species with a teardrop-shaped body)

00:21

(the skin is ciliated and they live in microgravity)

Tendentially with a normal air intake-and-distribution system to get air to all the transfer surfaces efficiently and without too much drag.

https://i.imgur.com/Wa6oidl.jpg

00:25

I imagine if you took a bird and applied this system to it, it would first lose most of its flight musculature and keel.

00:26

Probably it would turn into a flying wing sort of shape fairly quickly.

00:28

Also, I'm not sure that a realtime variable-direction momentum transfer device would work out.

00:30

With fixed or nearly-fixed directionality, you'd probably still see wings, right?

00:32

Could also start to see vanes, like on a heat sink, to increase surface area.

You‘d see manouvering aerofoils, definitely.

01:19

And aerofoils of the right design also generate lift; even if we use straight-forward down-aimed momentum transfer, a wing is a very good surface to do that from.

Again: Iron fist military policy

08:32

Rebellions pop up all the time, but this is an FTL-enabled 'verse with instant communication (see: reusable tangle), and so the capital gets word of it and puts it down quickly

08:33

This is the first unified rebellion, and it's crippling the government

08:36

The government didn't start out this inefficient, as well

08:42

It's a monarchy, so there was inbreeding, one thing leads to another...

Need to Import Relativistic Particle Freedom™ at 200GJ per second© intensifies (edited)

This is absolutely the rest of the galaxy's attitude

I am reminded of the text blurb about the X-59 Marauder in Xenonauts, while it has wings, it is fully capable of fighting without them

Hey, why not kill the monarch by sending a basilisk to his Battlestation or big screen vidfeed?

:V

This is the latest Stellaris version of my own “ParaImperium”

@Unknown if you're continuing to worry about the entropic waste, don't be:

13:29

translated from the Jaian

-REPUBLIC OF JAI INTERNAL MESSAGE: JAI FOREIGN MINISTER TO JAI MINISTER OF THE ECONOMY-
ENCRYPTION CODE: [REDACTED]
DECRYPTION CODE: [REDACTED]

Minister Hogion, 

    I fully understand your concern about the Kingdom of Agurem's regrettable, to say the least, approach to the acquisition, transport, and storage of resources. However, we cannot risk a major war because a currently-collapsing galactic power is, as you so eloquently put it, "getting in bed with Azarel". [NOTE: Azarel is the personification of entropy and the chief demon of the dominant Jaian religion] If you continue to be concerned, I remind you that we are covertly supplying the revolution currently underway in Aguremian space, and that the Memetic Warfare Bureau is currently attempting to bypass the firewall on the King of Agurem's datafeed and inject a basilisk. The Aguremian government is beyond saving, and as such our alliance is over.

-Minister Rubsco

(edited)

I've run into a small problem with one of my species.

20:20

They're heavily reptilian, and if you've looked at a lizard you might've noticed that their faces aren't particularly mobile.

20:21

I'd like to have some kind of expression, though.

20:22

It's fine if they're hard for other species to read, but I'd like them to exist. :V

20:22

I know Eldraeverse has the kaeth, but I haven't found any reference to their facial expression.

20:23

(it's a fairly general problem as well—expressions of emotion in alien species)

20:26

Wonder if you guys could give me any insight.

some lizards have more mobile cheeks than others, between that and lips (certain dinos had mobile-ish lips) you can get expressions

20:27

alternative is to do expressions with other body parts. Have mobile frills or the like

Adding lips is a little bit of a problem, because my phonology is built with the assumption of no lips.

The alien in that fanfic I wrote has similar 'frozen face' syndrome, but they use their big squirrel-like tails for the emotive gestural component of their language

They do have substantial tails.

Dogs have limited facial expression (mostly snarling) but their ears and tail are quite readable if you know how to 'speak dog'

I intend to utilize the nictitating membranes as well.

20:30

Right now they have two pairs of short, (nearly) straight horns on the back of the skull, and I kinda like that.

20:31

But I guess a frill could work.

20:32

I might add chromataphores.

20:33

Would be consistent with their origins (rainforest), and provide a basis for features of their art.

20:33

But then I'd have to draw them with color.

The kaeth, technically, are closer to saurian-analogs rather than reptile-analogs, so their faces are more motile than lizards'. Their grin is especially well known among people who may not be knowing anything very shortly. That being said, on the one hand, I recommend chromatophores. That being said too, on the other hand, in the 'verse, while there are some cases of near-species being able to learn to read each others' emotive signals (eldrae and dar-bandal, for example), across unrelated species it is by and large much more difficult, especially when those signals may be transmitted in a band that you can't even perceive - even if you know what a dar-cúlnó means by black-blue-flickerwhite-greenspeckle-black and that you should apologize when the codramaju shifts from baking bread to sour oranges, you couldn't even see mobann! emotion even if you didn't need heavy protective gear to exist in the same place...

1

21:04

Thus, in general, people rely on projecting emoji v-tags letting other people know their emotional state with a standardized vocabulary, and while I usually don't include it as a translation artifact because it would be very hard on readers, people and people's translators tend to speak in the distinctive elcor manner.

1

21:04

( https://speechevents.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/what-the-elcor-remind-us-about-language/ )

Mark Lewis

What the Elcor remind us about language

“Pleased greeting. Human, it is always good to see your kind.” “Genuine Query. Is there something I can do for you this day?” “With barely contained terror. You drive a hard bargain.” Such is the s…

1

21:04

At least Eldraeic, and therefore Trade, has built-in attitudinal words.

1

That squirrely one has written attitudinals and would be thrilled it's baked into Trade. So civilised!

For context: I'm building this species for two settings simultaneously (duplication of effort boo!).

21:21

While the v-tags would work well in the scifi setting, I'd still like it to work in the lower-tech fantasy setting.

21:22

(so I'm building it with the latter in mind)

21:22

The issue in question is mostly in intra-species emotive communication.

21:23

Inter-species can come after.

I'll add some subtle-to-anyone-who's-not-an-Uštn chromataphores, then.

I actually will suggest that they do their emoting primarily through body language. The principle that most emotion is on the face is a human conceit

It is important though, especially since it can be changed without those who can’t see your face noticing. @o11o1 is that one or two syllables? The world could always use more syllabic nasals

is what one or two syllables?

01:34

if you mean my user name, five syllables. "oh-one-one-oh-one".

01:34

I've also been called "numbers" and "binary"

Ah shoot I @‘d the wrong person whose name starts with 01. (edited)

01:36

@0111narwhalz, that question was for you

@MarcusAurelius It's two syllables.

Hm, /uʃt.n/ or /uʃ.tn/?

The former, I think.

02:07

As written it could be either.

02:13

I'm glad that you interpreted the diacritical mark correctly.

02:14

I was worried my choice of mark would cause more confusion than it alleviated.

Nah, I think most people are used to seeing it, and /ʃ/ or something similar is the default phoneme people apply to it

I was using the cedilla for a while, but it doesn't compose well with z.

02:19

(also my Unicode insertion is broken in Discord right now, so I can't even demonstrate. >.>)

02:19

like this: z̧ z̧

02:19

just kinda hangs awkwardly off the end

Looks too much like ʐ, too

I mean, I'm only using one set of diacriticals.

02:40

So hopefully that alleviates it somewhat.

I meant aesthetically, it looks to much like one of the IPA characters

Oh, while I have the attention of someone who seems knowledgable on the subject:

02:44

~~Alveolar~~ Dental fricatives. (edited)

02:44

Currently I'm using þ for the voiced one, which as far as I can tell is more or less correct.

02:45

But I'm using § for the unvoiced one, which is a completely irrelevant symbol.

02:49

Have any suggestions for an alternative mark?

02:50

(ideally it'd be easy to compose, if you're familiar with compose sequences)

I like using þ for voiceless (unvoiced is a different thing) and ð for voiced

I don't think there's a compose sequence for the latter.

16:17

Also, what is the difference between voiceless and unvoiced?

16:17

I don't think I've seen a distinction.

There probably is a sequence, as both are still used in a living language

16:33

As for voiceless vs. unvoiced, the first is an absolute term while the latter is relative, though it’s commonly used as a synonym by people outside the field

Oh, there is.

16:39

compose d h

16:39

Thanks!

No problem

Re: the announcement

20:33

Meanwhile over at Imperial Armored Corps, I have neatly sidestepped this problem because I restrict myself to fusion, and numbers which plasma physiscists etc. have thoroughly worked out by now

20:33

:p

That's why I don't give hard figures in my Para-Imperium universe.

20:35

Reminiscent of Honorverse ships less dense than fog

There is an even easier solution: always answer with "A wizard did it"

I already spelled out for most people that my upcoming work only involves technologies that are, fusion and FTL obviously excluded, already known factors

20:36

The Tiffanians have railguns, but not ones that are that far beyond what the US Navy is toying around with already

20:36

Ditto lasers

Using Utility Fog for telekinesis.

20:37

And quantum entanglement for telepathy.

Either that or they're using conservative extrapolations of models that have been studied

20:38

The US Air Force is getting ready to put laser cannons on its helicopters and aircraft, correct?

maybe within 50 years

20:39

which is what they said 50 years ago when lasers were invented

20:39

its really hard to gauge these things

20:39

the Army semi-recently put a smallish laser on an Apache\

They’re looking at point defense for lasers

Yeah, I’m going back to that policy if this is the cost of trying to oblige readers, or at least that subset of them.Well, no more obliging! From now on, all weapons shall be quantified as one of “boom”, “bada boom”, or “big bada boom”. (edited)

annnnnnd this is why we can't have nice things

@Zarpaulek they did fix the honorverse ship densities at least :p

@Xveers Partially

They're at a place where Weber feels they're appropriate for the universe

21:53

Not gonna get much better, unless you have a functioal impeller and inertial sump in your garage :p

@Overmind You think you've got weird hearts?

11:33

The two main nonhuman species in my project have weirder hearts than the Eldræ (although this isn't a contest)

11:34

Species 1) A spinning rotor powered by a multicellular flagella mechanism

11:34

Species 2) Literally the biological equivalent of an internal combustion engine

11:36

Evolution does crazy things sometimes

How does that second one work?

It's complicated

11:46

Basically

11:46

The "piston" actuation isn't driven by gas buildup but by muscle actuation

11:48

This drives a "crankshaft" bone, which in turn drives an impeller which moves the actual blood around

11:49

The advantage of this system over a regular heart is that the blood flow is constant, and it has redundancy (one cylinder injury won't cripple the heart)

11:50

If a cylinder is injured, the heart can run at reduced power until it has healed

11:50

(i.e. don't exercise while you heal)

11:51

Up to four cylinders can fail before it becomes life-threatening

11:54

There are two "engines" in the body

11:54

One of them drives oxygen-poor blood from the rest of the body to the lungs, and the other one distributes oxygen-rich blood from the lungs to the rest of the body

How big are these creatures?

About 2 meters tall, 1.5 meters wide, and 3 meters long

Quadrupeds?

Octopeds

11:57

The hearts have a smaller load than you would expect, because their homeworld has ~0.7G of surface gravity

Do they have other limbs?

Yes, two "arms" on the torso

11:59

An analogy would be a centaur with the horse part replaced with a spider abdomen in terms of vague body structure

11:59

Obviously it's much more complex than that

Are there any core organs in that upper torso?

Nah, it just attaches manipulatory/sensory apparatuses (edited)

Nice armored brainpan in the core abdomen then?

Yep

12:41

Neurons transmit faster than Homo sapiens outside of brain, so the lag isn't increased

sleiptaur

Don't even wanna know

They're eight-legged, yes?

12:47

Like Sleipnir.

Who is...?

Odin's mount?

12:47

c'mon man keep up with the Norse myth V:

Ah, yeah

12:47

No, when I say spider, I mean spider

12:48

They evolved from arachnid-equivalents

12:48

The base torso is arthropodal

So the pedipalps turned into properly dextrous manipulators?

They turned into arms/hands, yeah

(I'm still not sure how Sleipnir is actually supposed to work)

12:49

(all the illustrations I've seen make it look like his legs are subdivided, which is weird)

The pedipalps and head section slowly migrated upward, eventually making a second torso

It’s called “more is better”. Some have them staggered

If you have enough legs, you effectively have wheels.

The exoskeleton transitions into an endoskeleton at the torso connection area, as durability was sacrificed for maneuverability for the manipulators

That seems like an odd thing to do.

The arms have twice the amount of joints as on humans

12:54

An exoskeleton inhibits the freedom of movement at some points

how long before they just go for tentacles?

They were headed in that direction, but became sapient before then

Also, exoskeletons are fully cabaple of producing all the joints you need for manipulators.

And once you have genetic engineering, you augment your current body plan most of the time (sentimentality)

You ever seen the range of motion on grasshopper hindlegs?

:V

And they're able to put power down in those orientations, too.

I want to get away with having a vaguely humanoid face for story purposes

How vague are we talking? :V

Primate (edited)

12:57

It becomes important

I just had humans and the main sophont species they interact with be products of similar seeding programs

My uštn are more humanoid than I'd like, to be honest.

Shouldn't have said vaguely

13:00

The face about as humanoid as the Eldræ

But they grew out of a combination of my wanting to do sketches involving human characters, and my complete inability to draw a well-formed human face, so.

I'm chalking it up to convergent evolution

ehh, I'm gonna say that's pretty thin

(and Precursor meddling)

Ok that’s passable

13:02

Convergent evolution only goes so far

If there's engineering involved, you might be able to pull it off :V

It's important that this species and humanity be able to relate easily (the timeline has them become allies pretty quickly for various reasons), and faces are a key component of that

Eh, that’ll only carry you so far

I didn't say it was all the reason, just that it was part of it

Meanwhile, one of my other species, the flurian, has a face only a flurian could love.

13:05

Four giant dinnerplate eyes arranged in a square formation.

Aww, that sounds cute.

The mouth is in the center, arranged like a beak but rotated 90° from the usual vertebrate jaw orientation.

:puppy-dog_eyes:

Several manipulatory tentacles flank the mouth.

@Tassadar is secretly a flurian

neat, sounds like an interesting evolutionary path.

On the margin of the "face," just radial-out of the eyes, are four bioluminescent patches.

Yup. Haven’t fully settled on their facial structure yet, but the /ɤeʙurkana/ are going to be very, very alien when I’m done with them. Similar body plan to the uštn (assuming their the spider-taurs)

Also the body as a whole is shaped like a prolate ellipsoid, with the anterior pole truncated by a shallow dome which forms the face.

In case you can’t tell, the orthography for their language isn’t settled yet either

No, I'm secretly a

️

Marcus: uštn are mine, the spider-taurs are KAL's

Shoot, whoops

No, the spider-taurs are the Jaian

Four long, muscular tentacles extend radially from the body, about midway between the face and the equator.

13:10

They're in bilateral symmetry, rather than radial, grouped in lateral pairs.

13:10

So something like this: =(: :)=

13:12

The tentacles are subdivided threefold between five and seven times at the tip, depending on various genetic factors.

13:12

Which makes them very fine at the ends.

Are these guys aquatic?

No, they're engineered nullgee organisms.

Ok that makes more sense

13:13

I though these were also supposed to be naturally evolved

Nah, even I know this isn't a plausible path to develop :V

13:14

They have a pair of three-phase lung structures as well.

Three phase?

An anterior spiracle for each functions as the intake, and a posterior one functions as the exhaust.

13:15

They have three sacs each, with an intake and exhaust.

13:15

The air is shuffled between the three sacs with valves and muscular diaphragms.

13:15

The flow is in the pattern of three-phase electrical systems, if you're familiar.

13:16

Also the intake spiracle is peristaltic to minimize the risk of choking, and if necessary the whole apparatus can be reversed.

13:16

With significant discomfort, I'd expect :V

13:17

The entire body surface, excepting the face and tentacles, is ciliated.

13:18

I haven't figured out if this is practical, but the cilia are supposed to be the primary motivator in free space.

what are they?

(if it works for paramecia, surely it'll work for a 1500kg creature too)

Lol.

If not, they're probably suitable for attitude control and pressure wave sensing/generation.

Use an air pump for propulsion in nullgee atmo.

The Jaian basically have a human upper half (thanks, Precursor meddling), but their skin is incredibly pale (the home star emits basically no UV light), their irises are always blue and the pupils are slitted, they have three elbow joints, their hair is silvery-gray, females lack breasts, and there are many, many differences at the cellular level. Let me get all the other macroscopic differences from human for the upper half from my doc...

I suppose the exhaust spiracles could be modified into mollusk-like siphons.

13:20

KAL: sounds like a graft job gone horribly right

that's exactly what it is

Alright: Their shoulder joints can bend much further than humans in either direction, their fingers also have additional joints, their vital organs are all in the nonhuman abdomen, their lips lack pigmentation different from the rest of the face, and due to their species' carnivorous history, their canines are larger and protrude sort of like a vampire.

13:30

Obviously, the nonhuman abdomen isn't humanoid at all

lucky buggers have lips

13:30

:V

And biology at the cellular level is quite different

They can use labial consonants, that’ll make speaking human languages nice

poor uštn can't even round vowels

That’s tragic, I love front rounded vowels

Of course you do, you're Roman

...Latin doesn’t have any

Whoops, confused with another type of vowel :V

Which?

The mids

Oh, yeah it has a lot of front vowels (almost as many as English) but all unrounded (edited)

GTG

My conlangs tend to feature them though. Makarvókín doesn’t have any, but other dialects of Óvadkeðamín do; /iɤb̪mj.kedð/ has 5, and /ɤeʙurzœ/ has 2

Is that a bilabial trill?

14:00

←is not great at the IPA outside the inventory of Uštsnuvk

Yup, and the other weird b is a labio-dental stop

The real reason for their humanoid appearance up top is that I wanted to see if I could worldbuild a human-looking creature with a very nonhuman body plan

Yeah, I stuck with humanoid-ish for the main alien race partially for story reasons, mostly because it meant their conlang wouldn’t need most of its consonants thrown out

The Jaian homeworld is named Jolton, and the home system is named Joltol

07:46

Both come from the root word Joltor, which unimaginatively translates to "Our Home"

I've often stuck with humanish because other body plans are REALLY hard to dress.

:V

07:48

The Jaian don't wear clothes on the lower body unless they need an environment suit

07:48

They have shirts and things for the upper body

quadrupeds you almost HAVE to resort to the renaissance "separate leggings, connected with a belt, complimented with a loincloth or codpiece"

They do wear shoes on their eight spidery feet, though. Athropoid feet are more than tough enough to travel rough ground without shoes, but it's a "don't track mud into my house" thing

I made a dinoraptor-descendant for GURPs once, and decided most wear decorative claw covers. Partially gesture of good will in civilised society ("look my footknife is sheathed, I'm not here to cause trouble"), in large part because catching your claw on things is annoyed and potentially damaging and cuts down the time you need to spend sharpening it.

heh

the practical came first, the "but this is civilised" came later sort of as a result.

Jaian shoewear is mostly an etiquette thing

07:54

Again

07:54

They basically have the lower body of a giant spider

It could potentially be practical on some surfaces too; spiders struggle to grip on really smooth ones

(Without the spinnerets, though. They became vestigial after the Jaian's arachnid ancestors stopped using webs to catch prey, and eventually just disappeared)

07:55

yeah but it's not like you're climbing up the walls or sommat

07:57

For that reason, most Jaian interiors are carpeted

The homeworld for my main aliens (Érikíné in the plural nominative) is called Mallaryssyss “world of Peace”, and their sun Sójakélyaf, “shining mother”

08:12

If you can’t tell, the name of their homeworld is from its settlers, not the native population

The Jaian homeworld of Joltol (0.67 Earth masses) is the largest moon of the gas giant Juuk'Tidar (3.5 Jupiter masses), which orbits the close binary Joltol AB (Both K-type main sequence stars) at a distance of 0.7 AU

So is there name supposed to parsed as “Jai-an” with the first morpheme being a proper noun and the latter being the Romance demonym marker? (edited)

Yes

08:29

In their own language it's Jaiur

08:30

(The latter morpheme being the Jaian language demonym marker)

Ah, so Indo-European-Esque synthetic fusional?

very

08:32

I would make it more exotic, but this is my first conlang

Don’t worry, I did the same thing, though it has some odd borrowings syntactically from Mandarin, and in general its syntax got very weird

For that reason, the phonemic inventory is similar to English (my native language), with the addition of the glottal stop, because i like it. ʔ

Same, with some marginal phonemes made fully fledged /ʒ, x, ɛ/ etc.

As a native speaker of Mandarin I approve of this. :V

08:36

What did you borrow if you're comfortable sharing?

(He's Chinese-Canadian, so he speaks Mandarin and English natively, I think)

And some weird, weird syllable clusters. A lot of the particle system 吗，吧，clause final 的, etc.

Neat.

It mixes surprisingly well with a Latin style subjunctive system

08:38

And I guess the extreme freeness of Roots to form as either nouns or verbs is a bit mandarin influenced, though that’s probably just from English

08:41

The second of mine is an extremely inflected language, that is fusional and agglutinative at the same time (the agglutination arose from my inability to make the conjugating tables any bigger without going fully insane). Anyone want 10 grammatical numbers and 9 persons?

dog is a gender

9 persons? How does THAT work?

Ten, sorry. 9 numbers 10 persons. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd are normal, 4th is for unspecified person, 5th is when both 1st and third apply or when used as an impersonal verb, 6th is the “dominant” (a more general version of the Royal we), 7th is the formal/respectful 2nd person (like the T-V distinction on a verb), 6th is a humble/submissive that could be 1st 2nd or 3rd, 9th is a special third person for people close to the speaker, 10th is like 9th but for people close to the listener

The numbers are more normal; singular, dual inclusive, dual exclusive, trial inclusive, trial exclusive, collective, plural general, plural inclusive, plural exclusive (edited)

09:36

It also has an obscene phoneme inventory, 104 with no clicks

Wow... Imagine learning that language in school.

Yep. It distinguishes stops at 8 places of articulation.

Makarvókín and to a lesser extent Ğeb̠urkazø (it gained a Latinization last night) could be pronounced decently by a native English speaker

Ğeb̠urkazø is on the other end of the extreme, with 18 phonemes, including only one nasal

oh god

Yep. It has 5 allophones in total. The sibilants set the record with 6 each. Have fun trying to speak it if they write it without writing the variation for you

by the eikones, man

Oh, and they have triphthongs. Plenty of them.

12:21

The current maximal syllable example is ksyaoś /ksy̯ao̯ʂ/, pronounced gžyaot́ /gʑy̯ao̯ʈ̚/

Oh god that's so bad I can't believe it's not historical spelling

Eh, it’s only atrocious for non-native speakers. English speakers don’t notice vowel reduction when doing it, or the fact that we have nasal and non-nasal vowels

Luckily, this is probably set in a post-scarcity transhuman society where you can download the ability to speak a language as well as a native speaker with no effort whatsoever off the Internet

The mainline civs are Clarkian relative to us, and some of them have tech Clarkian relative to that baseline. But that’s not necessary for this language

:V

The largest warships mass somewhere in between Uranus and Neptune

12:37

they aren’t overkill for what they were built to fight

Confguration? I mean: is that mass concentrated in a drive core, or are we talking planet sized ships?

A little of both. Their main power supplies and FTL are very dense, but they’re planet sized, yes (edited)

12:46

The “normal sized” ships top out at a little over 170 km long

(((O)))_(((O)))

Why not.

Those are the new generation dreadnoughts with the “PLANETOIDS REEEEEEE” main guns. And yes, the setting is maybe a 4 on the scale of SF hardness. Its utter madness, and thankfully the HFY is toned down by everyone else being equally fuck yeah (edited)

SFY, sophonts fuck yeah.

ACTIVATE ANTI-REEEEEE DEVICE

With ships that big; "BOOM FUCK YEAH"

I mean, for the scale I give a +1 for the FTL.

12:51

It isn't easy and shouldn't be easy. And with that light.

While my largest (Human) ships are in the single digits of kilometers long, still use missiles and some Mass Drivers for offensive weaponry.

12:52

And are restricted to the low (<20G hard cap)

V

Nah, they’re that big because the battleworlds are archeotech, and hyperdrives have gotten a lot more efficient in the last 20 or so billion years since they were built. The smallest vessels with true FTL are the Gleamers, 42 meters long

12:53

Also, which FTL? The setting has 7 types

They do, however, have full-coverage planetary shields.

Oh, your combat is slow and decisive. Dreadnoughts are considered slow at 215k g sustainable acceleration (edited)

12:55

Combat resembles a kaleidoscopic explosion of hell, especially when both sides are using tactical FTL and onto-weaponry

12:57

...I think you can see why I didn’t ask for a world channel over on ToughSF

7 types?

Mhm. Here’s the write up: “"There are seven types of FTL in use by the Alliance, four of which are stationary: teleporters, pitchers and mitts, hypergates, and jumpgates. Teleporters are a fairly large and complex system for their capacity, and tend to see fairly frequent use in large residences and private buildings, with less frequent use by the government, due to the frequent maintenance and high energy requirements. One of the end points of the teleportation, unlike in most science fantasy stories, must be within the teleporter. Pitchers, as they are colloquially known, are large stations with a highly specific type of hyperdrive and a large gravity accelerator, together designed to fling a ship (which doesn't require an FTL drive) on a parabolic trajectory up into hyper, with its fall point arrangeable as necessary. Most modern stations can plop a ship of up to exaton in mass anywhere from one hundred fifty thousand kilometers to five hundred million light years. Mitts, while similar, are a different offshoot of the same development. They are stations capable of yanking a ship out of all levels of hyperspace with similar requirements of a pitcher, with a radius of about one hundred light years. Hypergates are stationary hyperdrives designed to open a window without moving through it, and able to hold it open for hours. Many young nations, including Mallaryssyss, rely on them during the period where hyperdrives are expensive and inefficient.

13:01

. Jumpgates are a new development, circa 2003 A.D., which "bridge" two points in realspace with a connection through hyperspace. It serves effectively as a portal, granting zero distance travel between the two ends. The main model is fairly compact, and with external power, can bring through a battleworld with room to spare. Portable models are transportable within an Earth standard 20 foot shipping container, and with their on board batteries can power a connection across one hundred billion lightyears with a five meter diameter and up to ten minute staying power on those settings." "As for the mobile systems, they're a little more boring. You've got hyperdrives, tachyon conversion drives, and the rare Ėzak ring drive. Hyperdrive's operate quite simply, punching a hole in reality and carrying a vessel and anything else that makes it through up to hyper or back down to realspace. Conversion drives take sublight matter and convert it to its tachyonic equivalent, taking an initial dump of energy and allowing a ship to accelerate normally on up above c, while remaining in realspace. They are unable to breach a universal barrier. Ring drives are the fastest available, just barely faster than jumpgates, but require a long recharge time after and are limited in range. Additionally, most models are unable to breach a universal barrier, and those that can require even more energy than jumping across an entire universe does."

170 kilometer is... very large.

13:20

Way too large for Apeiron Terminus terms. The biggest ships I have on rough draft right now are the 45 kilometer ICCVs that are used to ship military fleets between star systems on a single warp drive.

13:21

Most combat ships would be on the pretty small side, to fit through wormhole apertures - the size disparity for the same sort of firepower would actually be quite noticable, with a lot of mass (and size) of the bigger units just being drives and propellant and fuel for being able to move interstellar (like, an Interstellar Patrol Battlecruiser would probably be a kilometer, one and a half kilometers.)

13:22

And physical acceleration will definitely be meager. 4 to 12 Gs, at the outer end. Once you loose your Waverider drive, it's slow-boating all the way, but that leaves a capital ship still with what will be a multi-megatons-per-second drive under their arses, so.

Due to the general disregard of physics I hesitate saying something about the tachyons.

Yup. It’s an assumption of the setting that every particle of the Standard Model has a tachyon equivalent except the photon

No that's fine. Not really. But my point was how the tachyons worked.

Go ahead, if it’s interesting and doesn’t break anything I’ll keep it

So, you generally have only one tachyonic field, and if the photon doesn't have a equivilant either you have a dead crew. Also, you will probably not accelerate, but decelerate. Faster tachyons are actually heavier (have less negative/imaginery mass than ones barely above c). You might have to expect that turning the drive on should result in a massive release of energy, so they probably make useful combat weapons. But returning to sublight requires mass intake. So maybe you willing "crash" into asteroids. Where you have to come out afterwards.

13:45

My initial point was actually something really specific.

And what was that?

Pretty much that you could travel instantly over arbitrary distances. Some paper about quantum tunneling and tachyonic strings.

Welp, thank you for explaining how teleporters work and where their so energy intensive

The receiving end would be expensive. The sender just tries to keep itself together after use.

13:53

And in the same sense you might consider STL tachyon drive.

How would that work?

Tschyons have imaginery mass.

14:02

Which means they can have zero net energy, imaginery mass and positive momentum.

14:02

Could potentially even produce powers via tachyons.

Powers as in what?

Watts?

Oh. The plural confused me, I though this might be going somewhere weird

Yeah, fire your tachyon beam to recharge yourself.

14:12

Or maybe even get the power out of your tachyon drive.

An uštn performing an external visual inspection of a spacecraft: https://i.imgur.com/y0q7MWF.png

Notable features: Partial pressure suit—Uštn have tough, scaled skin, so I figure it can probably stand up to vacuum better than our own thin skin. Core thermoregulatory garment—Being ectothermic, they rely upon a technological solution to provide them with the heat they need, and to reject it if necessary. It doesn't cover the whole body because I figure their blood can do just fine for heat distribution. Adaptive filament lanyards—These help keep hold of the object to which they are attached, even if it's let go. Unlike regular string loop lanyards, however, they don't snag on your hand when you take them off or fail irreversably when torn off. Form inspired by vine tendrils. Helmet—Comes apart in two pieces. The posterior component seals with the neck and houses the horns. The clear faceplate is also attached to this part. The anterior component seals to the front of the posterior component and the bottom of the faceplate. It just covers the lower jaw. The split format is because I couldn't work out the logistics of getting a horned, snouted head into a helmet without the neck hole being silly large. I understand that this iteration is not winning any awards for aesthetic. :V. Pack—Fairly limited in size, the pack is pretty much just oxygen. On account of the whole "partial pressure" thing, the air mix is pure oxygen—nitrogen would be Bad™.

03:32

I'm not quite sure about the proportions of the feet and tarsa compared to the other parts of the legs, but then again I'm not great at those proportions even in plantigrade layouts when I have a convenient reference.

That pressure differential at the cuffs of nothing else will be painful, and just because the skin is tough doesn’t necessarily mean it makes a better pressure vessel

There’s going to be a lot of internal bleeding if you don’t reinforce everything else

At best, there’s going to be painful swelling in the outer limbs and bruising around the cuffs

Curse you, and your logic!

16:36

Would mild genemodding help? V:

if they bruise from anything short of non-crushing impact, probably not

18:16

bits that have protective scutes might be okay, but hands won't

hmm, hands were the main reason to go with partial pressure

I mean, they'll do BETTER than humans, but probably not enough to build tech around it

For mars type environment they might get away with it, if they have tough enough hands

Thinking of maximally adversary planetary testing range/proving ground for whole robotic combat systems. As in, army groups of bots and AI commanders get delivered, endurance is measured.

14:37

With deliveries and testing going on for centuries.

14:41

I came up with following: A moon of gas giant on close orbit, tectonically and climatically active, radioactive due to nukes, with strong EM noise due to gas giant, with landscape mostly consisting of mud hundreds of meters deep, sometimes covered with treacherous crust of ash. Both atmosphere and mud sea is full of metals and ceramic from previous generations of bots, with engineered microbiota that feeds on radiation and uses dust of blasted drones for loose structural material, plus recycles some kinds of material.

14:43

Climate ranges from very cold petrochemical mud on poles with crystals of frozen water thrown into the mix to sometimes boiling mud near equator.

14:44

Nuking is encouraged. Full Von-Neuemann replication isn't, limited production is.

...That sounds less like a testing ground for combat hardware and more like a breeding ground for a set of maximum survival-optimized, high-specialist systems.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

If you want actual combat testing done, I'd do it in enviroments that are at least aproximate of the actual combat enviroment demands.

14:45

(aka: desolate siberian tundra. Expand from there by doming parts over and terraforming the underlying biome.)

That can go on a moon that's on higher orbit

Look at what we do now. We tend to test our weapon systems in the most extreme likely environments. The us for example usually does testing in Alaska, some part of the desert Midwest, a frosted area, and swamps

well, that moon sounds like hell

10:37

inb4 it's actually Io

limited production is Well I suppose it depends on how that limit is enforced. It tends to suck when a 'glitch' happens and suddenly you have a wild swarm of Faro war-bots eating your world.

That’s what a big old more-stages-than-a-state-dinner-has-courses Teller-Ulam is for

A large nuclear bomb? The bots will presumably be hardened against anything short of being destroyed directly anyway.

Small moon, multi-gigaton yield, problem solved

12:07

Or sufficiently disbursed for orbital assets to finish off

The solution to all of life's problems is nuclear weapons

12:07

-The United States of America

More Russia, actually. We tried fewer peaceful use tests and never had as much effort devoted to our nuclear forces

Count Erskyll said nothing for a moment. He was opposed to the use of force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

-- A Slave is a Slave H. B. Piper

It's not there to test equipment in most likely combat conditions. It's to test AIs in command and endurance of equipment in hell

@Kerr basically it’s the principal of “our knowledge base doesn’t include these phenomena, so our science has figured them out yet”

Can you give an example in your setting?

Sure, a few. Hyperspace, psionics, inertial compensation, (pseudo)-reactionless drives

Hyperspace: Like another extra universe/dimensions of sorts? Psionics: Do you give an explenaition for them? Inertial compensation: There are a few possibilities. Reactionless drives: Depends on the details.

12:15

The first two are definition problems. The the last two are engineering ones.

Yes to the first Complete mystery on the second

It works.

12:16

Hopefully very well.

To which one?

Psionics.

The first thing is kinda predicted by brane cosmology. The second is completly doable in current physics, just how hard it is depends.

How the yucky is "bend stuff with your mind" supposed to work?

Is that To me or kerr?

I needed to invent a whole separate area of physics for that, and that was after I threw down the gaunlet on trying to justify mass effect biotics the conventional way.

DNI in combination with some controllable medium. Imagine something like utility fog that surrounds you.

Like, psionics is "somehow neurons have a unique condition to create field that influence our world" stuff.

12:19

That's cyberpathy.

If you want to call it that.

I'm pretty sure that marcus means "space magic" with psionics.

No one said you have to make it literal psionics and also to explain it.

Yep, mine is also a fundamental feature of some universes in the greater Existence. It’s not everywhere, and is probably artificial

12:20

Best guess in universe, it’s from back when some of the nicer precursors were doing some reality hacking

It's one of these things were you better leave it a mystery.

Yep. The advantage of a very old settings with lots of precursors and archeotech is you can just say “they have a working knowledge of it, but no theoretical understanding yet”

Even for hard SF it seems adventagous. You can have some nice stuff like FTL without having some handwave solution are atleast factories massing as much as entire stars and converting daily solar outputs into wormholes and warp drives in a billionth of a second. So how do your reactionless drives work? As in, what do they do? (edited)

The current formulation is externally fed photon rockets. As in, the input power from the ship is negligible, they derive power from elsewhere

That's it?