@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

cerebrate

@cerebrate@schelling.pt

Science fiction writer. Speaker to minerals. Consensualist. Illeist. Pony and kanmusu stan. Can call spirits from the vasty deep!

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

cerebrate, to random
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

interrobang (n.):

(a) ‽

(b) the successful outcome of a honey trap

cerebrate, to space
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

DANGER: VACUUM

https://youtu.be/UOWzVCeeg1E

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

"What exactly is a tad?"

"In space terms, that's about half a million miles."

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

Somebody asked if the spaceships in Star Wars and Star Trek were extravagantly huge.

Obviously, but can it be quantified?

Can a set of rules-of-thumb approximations can be made? If one can decide on, say, the mass of a habitat module in terms of module mass per crewmember, or the volume per crew, then the max crew or minimum habitat size can be guesstimated. The same for engines, phaser banks, or TIE fighter hangars.

Probably not possible.

notes here

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/advdesign.php#id--Calculating_Volume_and_Mass

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@nyrath @tkinias

Here's a hypothesis.

Volume is actually one of the cheapest things to provide on a starship. Air is relatively light - the heavier part of the mass scales with the area enclosed (deduct shared walls), not with the volume. And by the time you've enclosed all the fuel/remass, giving every lieutenant room to pace and psychically stretch is basically a rounding error on the plans.

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@nyrath @tkinias

Possessions, though, that mass adds up particularly since unlike the walls they're usually a bit more massy than plastic veneer over aerogel.

(The numbers get even better if you let Enterprise have an inflatable saucer, BTW. 😊)

Which is why you have that weirdly spartan aesthetic in which Enterprise crewers have big cabins without a whole lot of personal mathoms to fill 'em.

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@nyrath @tkinias

The more cynical hypothesis, of course, is that Starfleet is on a mission of peaceful exploration, and as such only minimally arms its ships (a few phasers, a couple of photon launchers).

No threat to anyone, right?

Until shit gets real, at which point the crew gets to quadruple up and the expansive crew quarter modules get yanked out of the saucer and replaced with all the wave motion guns Section 13 have stockpiled under Utopia Planitia.

Just as planned.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

Can Galactic Empires Realistically Exist?

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/empiredyn.php#id--Can_Galactic_Empires_Exist?

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@eldadoinquieto @nyrath

The thing I always try to bear in mind, as an SF writer, is that a few thousand years ago a storyteller was most certainly composing a tribal lay about how obviously city-states were unrealistic because the personal relationship between the chief and his men was utterly necessary and obviously couldn't scale.

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@eldadoinquieto @nyrath

(Repeat for every major scale and phase change in human governance from then until now, including such relatively recent things as "democracy without a monarch to provide a central point for loyalty/ultimate decider is doomed to failure and communications lags mean it can never work across a continental scale".)

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@eldadoinquieto @nyrath

To be fair, there is a long tradition and subgenre based on "well, this won't work, and let me tell you how".

On the other hand, and speaking just for me, I find "what is a way this could change and mutate in order to work" a rather more interesting question to answer, and when history inevitably proves you wrong, at least you took a bit of a leap in the course of so being.

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@eldadoinquieto @nyrath

On the one hand, my initial response was something along the lines of, well, no, you couldn't do the Roman Empire IN SPACE, but the interesting challenge is figuring out what kind of governing structures can work in that sort of milieu.

(On a small scale, in my own work, this was something I had to address in the 3076-c. 4000 period when the Thirteen Colonies faced exactly this problem, and at least 12 of them were still, in theory, part of the unitary Empire.)

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@eldadoinquieto @nyrath

On the other hand, it later occurred to me that the Roman model in which you had to send out effectively plenipotentiary magistrates to the provinces, let them do their own thing for their term, and judge their actions only once they arrived back in Rome afterwards - communications lags being what they were - is probably a better starting point for thinking about subluminal interstellar governance than most, and [especially] later models.

Just a starting point, though.

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@nyrath @sagefault @eldadoinquieto

Of course, in SF, we have a somewhat bigger toolkit to use to solve these problems.

In the Synchrony Imperium, for example, they bypass this problem by making every world the capital. Every system has its very own instance of the Emperor, all copies of the original, so communications lag is kept to a minimum.

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@nyrath @sagefault @eldadoinquieto

(The need to keep a fleet of starwisps on the go mailing update diffs of the Imperial Mentality between the Synchrony Systems to keep all the emperors gitmerged is merely a courtesy detail.)

cerebrate, to random
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

For the purposes of hull classification, the boundary between ‘warmoon’ and ‘dirigible battle planet’ is set, approximately, to “Oh, gods, my Roche limit!”

cerebrate, to random
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

It's a lot faster than the week-per-jump Xboat system, but it still means starship captains are impossible to micromanage and get to have their traditional autonomy, and as the sizes of Empires grow, it starts adding up fast - especially since stargates don't link every system to every other, so signals have to go around the "X-boat route way".

nyrath, to scifi
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

Starmoth
A scifi universe building project

" a post-apocalyptic, post-capitalistic, interstellar setting where semi-realistic spacecraft coexist with unknowable alien ruins, paracausal creatures, open-source FTL devices and colourful, vibrant societies. "

https://www.starmoth.space/

#scifi #AtomicRockets #WorldBuilding

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@nyrath @evildrganymede

Oh, it is. I posted a recommendation for this myself for my readers, on the grounds of fascinating worldbuilding.

(And, to be clear, it's not often I see something from that corner of SFnal politics that doesn't make me want to spork myself in the eyeball, let alone which is actually good and thought-provoking. And this (a) doesn't, and (b) really, really is!

All credit to Isilanka, here, for serious quality work.)

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Last year I had Docker briefly running on my Win10 machine, just long enough to verify it was working, then today I ran it and it said it can't run because of my BIOS settings. Is this surprising? Does this imply I changed my BIOS, possibly by accident, sometime in the last nine months? If I changed out my boot disk, might that have reset some BIOS settings?

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@mcc

Unless something has gone very sideways, there should be only one not-quite-VM involved in running Linux containers using Docker Desktop for Windows; the one which runs WSL. Docker runs every container as a Linux namespace (like regular docker) inside a specialized WSL 2 distro, each of which also runs as a Linux namespace inside a single Linux root.

nyrath, to traveller
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

Traveller: Society in Decline or Post Apocalyptic?

http://twilightgm.blogspot.com/2023/08/traveller-society-in-decline-or-post.html

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@sudnadja @tkinias @notasnark @nyrath

Also, wow, non-human space looks really undeveloped. Which is not how the Hive Federation, to pick the most obvious anomaly, is usually depicted.

Data issues?

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

~one billion
~1,000,000,000

That's how many parking spaces there are in the USA. For every car? About 4 empty spaces... just sitting there, not absorbing the rain, making flooding worse, making cities hotter as they bake in the summer sun.

Our built environment and laws bend over backwards to make driving the only viable transportation option in nearly every imaginable context.

You need to pay for healthcare, but almost never parking.

(Pointing this out makes libertarian heads explode.)

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@futurebird @aidan_

You apparently don't know the right libertarians. Or maybe you only know right libertarians, if you know what I mean.

(I, for one, oppose it. Pretty sure it's come up more than a few times in my circles where we sit around and bitch about bloody stupid top-down attempts to hammer square solutions onto round problems, too.)

ChrisPirillo, to tech
@ChrisPirillo@mastodon.social avatar

I don't work there anymore, but... Intel "killing" the NUC (passing efforts on to ecosystem partners) may be signaling the end of it. https://www.neowin.net/news/intel-confirms-nuking-its-nuc-computer-business/

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@ChrisPirillo

Well, that'll be a damn shame. I love 'em for compact clusters.

avatar, to writing

Not Cosmic, But Incomprehensible

https://eldraeverse.com/2023/07/09/not-cosmic-but-incomprehensible/

-a-day -imperial-core -constabulary

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@avatar

(I liked it enough that I had to turn it into an actual writing-blog entry.)

cerebrate, to random
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

July 8: What's your least favorite stage of writing a story? Why?

Not that it comes up a lot in the nanofic work that is my bread and butter, but filling in the intermediate details.

My muse is great at filling in the overall arc of the story and a whole bunch of great vignettes set here and there throughout it. Filling in all the gaps between them, though - that's where the "dragging ideas out of my brain with rusty razor wire" bit comes in.

cerebrate, to random
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

So, I've been neglecting everything (sorry, folks) for the last few days, because I finally got access back to everything and have been restoring backups and recreating networks from scratch after the raid. So please pardon my distraction.

Now to catch back up!

(If you said anything to me over the last couple of days I might have missed, please poke me to be sure.)

WhoTheFIsAP, to random

I hate when there’s a knock on your door and you open the door and it’s someone.

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@nyrath @WhoTheFIsAP

It could be a package! It's usually good when it's a package!

cerebrate,
@cerebrate@schelling.pt avatar

@nyrath @WhoTheFIsAP

Fortunately, I have a porch navy. 😀

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • normalnudes
  • InstantRegret
  • ethstaker
  • magazineikmin
  • osvaldo12
  • rosin
  • everett
  • Youngstown
  • khanakhh
  • slotface
  • ngwrru68w68
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • megavids
  • thenastyranch
  • mdbf
  • cisconetworking
  • GTA5RPClips
  • cubers
  • Durango
  • modclub
  • anitta
  • tacticalgear
  • tester
  • Leos
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •