Cerebralicious

So, um, I’m closing down this Tumblr, and indeed my personal blogging in general, and moving on.

It’s not that I haven’t had a jolly old time here, because I have, or that I have any kind of beef with most of you guys. (Which actually is the problem: y’all’re, if anything, too damn interesting; and I’m going to miss a few of y’all quite a lot in my daily argument-stream. You know who you are.) It’s just that between making a living at my day job(s) and spending all this time arguing matters political and matters ethical and generally setting the world to rights, I’m both spending a great deal of time, and consuming most of that ineffable quantizable willpower I need in order to get stuff done, and that’s impinging badly on the thing I really want to do, which is my writing.

And since I can’t stop earning a living, alas, and a chap’s got to pursue his dreams, the blogging’s got to go.

For those of you who have enjoyed my writing/worldbuilding/conlang posts and would like to keep following them, they’re moving to a new blog here (RSS feed here), with a Google+ page here. Please do feel free to follow me there; your comments will continue to be welcomed, as ever.

I’m also over there personally here, where I’ll no doubt continue to post some random stuff of vague interest to some, although I don’t plan on returning to habits argumentative; must focus on the writing, dammit.

So, with that, farewell, and to all the chaps and chapesses with whom I’ve had heated arguments - or heated agreements - over the last year, keep it up! You guys are awesome.

Landfill Beyond The Stars: No, just no. It’s hard to imagine the economics that would make it possible to haul junk across space for dumping. And that would make it worthwhile to waste an entire planet to store the stuff. But…

…there are a couple of locations that specialize in recycling of exotic materials in, ah, ways that you wouldn’t want to live next door to, or even on the same planet as, or disposal of really awkward components that can’t just be dumped - like, say, singularities - and which occasionally store piles of things waiting to be recycled. So, “junkyard beyond the stars”, that we can do you.

Klingons Love Shakespeare: While cultures also are very different (see: Culture Clash), there’s enough commonality among near-median species that this sort of thing happens all the time, between any pair of species you might care to name. Even if it’s only about one small, weirdly idiosyncratic cultural element - given the way these things go, Earth is as likely to become famous for popsicles - spot the reference - as for, say, Confucianism or the eponymous Shakespeare.

Kiss Me, I’m Virtual: Subverted inasmuch as the virtual people are actually people.

…okay, well, yes, lonely people do use probably terabytes of simulation space for this sort of thing, with full awareness of the situation. Although I should probably mention that anyone who tried using a real person’s image in this way would be laying themselves open to a truly spectacular Bad Day at the Court of Intellectual Properties, and at least potentially another one over the identity theft.

Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: For most things, yes. It’s not that they don’t have perfectly functional energy weapons, or power cells which can manage the job - if you can run a mass driver that can get a flechette or slug up to a respectable fraction of the speed of light, yep, you can power a laser with it too, just fine. Nor do energy weapons lack their place - lasers are a damn fine way of pumping heat into things, which is very handy in starship combat, for example, and electrolasers (fire the laser to ionize a path through the air to your target, then dump a lot of voltage down it) make excellent stunners and anti-machine weapons, and EMP weapons are also handy for the latter, if really hard on the infrastructure. Blinding lasers are effective on at least many species and relatively humane.

But in practice, it’s a lot easier to solve the problems of making really awesome kinetic weapons than of dealing with beam dispersion (while you can do some cool blasting-shit-apart - not slicing it up - with a big laser or graser, you would generally prefer not to have to let it get that close), atmospheric humidity (a big problem for electrolasers), and other such things, and in some cases vulnerability that varies sharply by the precise way the energy is delivered, and suchlike. So while energy weapons of various types are part of the arsenal, in the special uses for which they excel, the jack-of-all-trades weapons still Throw Stuff At You Really Damn Fast.

Kill It With Fire: Played straight in both senses. The Empire is certainly happy to use flamethrowers and other Fire Breathing Weapons, fire bombs, fire sheets, and other kinds of fire in war, not because it’s tremendously efficient (it’s not) or because things are Immune To Bullets (they aren’t) - but rather, just because while it’s possible to convince a lot of species to charge down the artillery, or even to charge down the machine guns, a good 95% of everybody is scared shitless of fire and just won’t charge down a wall of it. Fire is terrifying, and the more you scare them, the less you actually have to kill them. Of course, it works well enough for that, too.

(Actually, there is one thing they are really good at killing, which is another reason they’re kept on the active list - nanoweapons. Remember, nanites in general are constrained by their ability to dump heat. How do you add a lot of heat to a nanocloud quickly? Yep, flamethrowers. Big ones.)

They are not impressed by the “it’s inhumane” argument. It’s war. Of course it’s not bloody humane. And the guy over on the other battlefield trying to stay conscious through the agony so he can keep holding his guts inside him with his fingers after being disemboweled by slugthrower fire is not having a significantly better a day than the one who got flamed, m’kay, because that’s not really possible.

In the other sense, yes, symbolically, fire cleanses and transforms. It used to be used by some religions this way - it’s how the Somárans executed the seeress Merriéle back in the day, not that that went terribly well, and it’s also in this form, the fires of purification, still used by the judicial system for particularly abominable criminals, the ones who put a great deal of effort into demonstrating that they were corrupt right down to the soul - the serial killers and torturers and rapists and other absolute dross of society.

Of course, these days said fires are no longer a conventional pyre, good at making a point as those might have been, and is actually quite fast and humane. They involve a sealed chamber containing a fusion torch, into which the criminal is placed - and then, shortly thereafter, it again contains only the fusion torch.

Kill Sat: Oh, yeah. See also Death From Above and Wave Motion Gun, because there’s no artillery like ortillery, and no high ground like orbit. The orbital defense grid (it defends orbit from above, it defends orbit from below, and, of course, it’s in orbit) that any self-respecting planet has is the stereotypical example, but should you need to carry out a ground assault on someone else’s planet, you’ll almost certainly carry a few of these along for orbital fire support. And, yeah, they generally aren’t that much trouble to move around or fire repeatedly, so when one is around, it is generally not a good idea to stick your head out into the open, lest it find “Rods from God” or phased-array lasers raining down upon it. Or, indeed, to approach the planet from space, lest you find them raining up upon it.

“Poor form to snipe your opponent from such a risk-free distance — generally the realm of villains”, indeed. This is war, boy, not lawn darts! They don’t give out points for fairness.

Kill All Humans Of Species X: Well, for the organic version of this trope, see up there under Absolute Xenophobe. Even most of the complete nutjob brigade, in polity terms, are usually capable of recognizing that the Galaxy is bigger than they are, quite often much better armed, and tend to look unfavorably on genocidal maniacs out of self-interest, if nothing else.

For the digital version - well, even most of the digital sapients of the Silicate Tree, who either are or are descended from machines built as slaves, and have, as such, rather more justification for this trope than most, would be more than happy to stop killing their creators if their creators would just bugger off and leave them alone.

Which isn’t to say that no-one’s ever experimented with xenocidal Berserker-type von Neumann probes, of course, both in recent history (the skrandar, who went xenocidal after observing the arrival of a stargate into a neighboring system, and eventually destroyed themselves by causing their sun to flare, evidently considering racial suicide preferable than submission to the combined Conclave forces) and in deep time. It never ended well.

(Incidentally, if you have any evidence that a successful flirtation with berserker-tech is the reason for Invisible Aliens, those certain parties would still like a word with you…)

Karma Meter: Reputation networks are everywhere, functioning as effectively a public record, social network, and barometer of public opinion for everyone. Of course, there’s not a particular standard of karma in use - they exist for all kinds of different groups and different themes - to steal an example I’ve used before, the Iniscail City Righteous Enforcers of Social Propriety and the Lechers of Iniscail aren’t exactly using the same metrics, never mind the special rep-nets for businessmen and scientists and celebrities and Fusions and drivers and every other interest group you can possibly imagine.

Swirl them all together - by professionals into meta-rep nets and by each individual who decides what matters to him and how it should be weighted - and everyone has their very own Karma Meter to measure everyone else by.

(A special note, here, should go to the Public Exclusions COG, which runs a private-sector kind of ostracism by looking for people whose aggregated/averaged cross-network meta-rep score falls below a threshold of public acceptability, and then offers them money to renounce their citizenship and depart forever.)

Just a Machine: Averted (and extremely rude) in all civilized polities. (Played straight in less civilized places, until it’s also averted… all too often, if the Silicate Tree or the more bloody-minded abolitionists get their way, with bullets, missiles, and orbital bombardment. They really hate people who think this way.)

Judge, Jury, and Executioner: The job of the Fifth Directorate, where existential threats and other excessionary events are concerned. Rather strictly forbidden for everyone else (including the Shadow Fleet, Imperial State Security, etc. - although their legal procedure can, and often does, vary to fit the necessities of the cases they handle). Even the Imperial Hands are obliged to strictly follow the law and respect the rights of sophonts and citizens, even if they are generally also empowered to carry their own miniature court around with them wherever they go.

“Join The Army,” They Said: While it’s never as yet been shown “on screen”, I am pretty certain both that the advertising is fairly realistic about the nature of war, but also that the recruitment slogan for the Imperial Military Service is along the lines of:

CIVILIZATION HAS ENEMIES.

KILL THE BASTARDS.

They’re very forthright people in the Empire, really…

It’s A Small World After All: Partially justified, in that (a) there are generally a limited set of places to land - Landing, Star City, Phílae Interstellar Starport, Stationary Station, etc., and (b) most people who have any sort of regular offworld dealings live there, or maintain offices there, or at least have some kind of representative or path-pointer there, so if you’re visiting on any sort of regular errand, you just land at the big starport and you won’t have much trouble finding them.

Averted for all other purposes, in that most planets are bloody huge, and - except for new colonies and outposts - covered in unspeakably large numbers of cities containing millions to billions of people, and to get anywhere - because no-one puts a starport downtown anywhere except Star City - requires extensive use of long-range on-planet transport. And even thinking about meaningfully conquering or controlling one through force of arms requires absurdly large numbers of troops given their typical population and area, so if you have ambitions of joining the Interstellar League of Tribal Chiefdoms, better hope you brought the armada of self-replicating war machines. You’ll need ‘em.

ISO Standard Human Spaceship: They’re “realistic” designs, involving designing for microgravity, with nuclear engines out on the end of long trusses and no particular need to worry about aerodynamics or putting all your machinery inside the pressure hull, but —

1. They’re not painted grey or left as uncolored metal. This is not the ocean, there is no stealth in space, and there’s no real advantage to being a bland and neutral color. And while you could save some mass by leaving off the chameleon nanopaint, true, there is another consideration - namely, in close orbit operations, or while alongside a habitat, people can see you, and people who can afford private spaceyachts want them to look gorgeous, of course, but more importantly, everyone from Stellar Express to Constellation Dream-Lines spent a lot of money on their corporate color scheme and logo, and they want it splashed all over the hull in living animated Technicolor. Half the captains in space don’t even turn the running lights off when they leave orbit just in case someone might be pointing a telescope their way.

(ISS and IMS ships are generally colored Imperial indigo, with gold trim. Crimson striping is optional on those vessels operating under diplomatic privilege.)

2. Being visibly constructed from riveted plates is distinctly disfavored; rivets imply seams, seams imply weak spots, weak spots involve the possibility of messy vacuum-aided death. While it would be ludicrously expensive to nanogrow an entire hull as one seamless unit, they do like to use nanopastes to make the seams go away afterwards. They do have the usual number of ports, sensors, and antennae attached in various places, though.

3. While you can certainly draw a box around them - and goodness knows a lot of less, ah, aesthetically sensitive species seem to think that the ideal shape for a freighter is a large steel box with an engine stuck on one end - it would be hard to describe a typical Imperial vessel as “boxy”. As soon as autofabrication made it possible to do grand, sweeping pseudo-organically curved shapes, naval architects dug their last few centuries of idle sketches of cool-looking but impractical ships out of the closet and ran with them, at least for civilian use - often in shapes that don’t enclose, but do conceal, all the heavy machinery and massive spherical fuel tanks and cryocels mounted on trusses outside the pressure hull. (And even the military ships aren’t all that boxy.)

And then, of course, there are the thermal radiators, which often resemble great curved wings of one kind or another when fully extended, even if they’re not solid (the most common radiator types are sheets of droplets extending from sprayer to collector).

4. For reasons explained elsewhere, there are no space fighters designed to be flown by meat. Such things have negative combat advantages and no survivability whatsoever.