Pixel's Serva World-building

Pixel is doing Serva again? 

wikia will do you good.

http://serva-lore.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

So that's the link to the wiki. It's, of course, rather small and it doesn't contain much information on history or races or anything, but it has some info on weapons and how wars are fought. It'll be consistently updated a lot over the next few days, at the time of this writing it has almost 20 full articles of content. That will likely change soon as I'm gonna c/p some stuff from my google docs there.

Any comments should stay here though. And I would request that unless you're changing formatting (which I would appreciate help with) don't do any edits yet, please.

I've been using Pimp My Gun a bit to draw some concepts for what some guns look like, though that'll hopefully be phased out at some point.

Coilguns galore. 

The wiki now is nearing 40 articles!
I'll link some particularly special ones, here:

Hey, it's been a while since I posted here, I wanted to update some developments.

I've been working on making more orbital pictures for the planets, get that out of the way so I can get into the details for the planets. It takes about 5 minutes to make a beautiful orbital picture, and I find the Donjon generator tools to be massively useful towards giving me maps, which I can then transform into something that looks good. I recommend them to anyone else world-building or running an RP or whatever - they're extremely useful and can be adapted for almost any setting.


I also made a facebook page for the wiki/worldbuilding, and I'll be doing stuff like article of the week, alongside concept art once it's ready. So if you want to follow the world but don't want to check the wiki daily/weekly you can just like the page



I also wonder if any of you have thought of this before, in a galactic setting, why would stellar empires trade with one another? Surely within such a large region of space there would be little reason to trade since you have such massive reserves of resources (that you'll likely never use)
Even if a race is limited to inhabiting only certain types of worlds that you'd think would reduce this, you can send machines or temporary establishments to mine asteroids or gas giants and leave, so I don't think that's a good solution. I still want there to be trade between the different empires (as it is there is trade within different planets of an empire, sure) but I can't figure out a way that it would make sense to me. Any ideas?

Two ways I could see trade as viable.

1. Quality and craft style.  Like in fantasy games, you can find dwarf and elf crafted goods, each a masterwork in a specific quality in comparison to human made goods.  Gives a competitive market between power and speed in this case, but can also apply to an intergalactic market.

2. Exotic goods.  From a merchants perspective, would you rather sell local made cloth, or fine silks from the XXX Empire at ten times the price, only paying about the same as the local cloth to acquire.

That sounds like it could work, with each race producing something as a specialty, or something along those lines.

Makes me wonder what pirates would be looting, though, seeing as they wouldn't be likely be able to use legal markets to sell their bounty, they'd probably have a black market going between themselves.

Inter-empire trading with slow communications? I don't really see it, unless Empire A has an excess of X that Empire B requires and cannot produce in enough quantity.
Biological stuff. Surely you can find certain metal in many of your planetary systems, but planet X has a local plant that grows everywhere and after some process is pretty useful for whatever (the spice must flow)
"Border" colonies may get cheaper stuff from their neighbours simply because they are closer than your empire's providers. And/or because your government's bureaucracy, is faster buying it from others.
Certain planet is SO rich in material X that it barely takes any effort extracting it, so is cheap and we already extract more than we require?

Certain planets might restrict the level of technology or the materials allowed to use by the population. For example, Planet A has decided that their planet does not advance beyond steam power and thus import anything critical that they cannot manufacture themselves, or Planet B is run by hippies who do not allow mining of any sort, thus all metals must be imported. Perhaps Planet C is an ocean world and has thus several species of delicious fish that cannot be found anywhere else and are in high demand in all culinary establishments across the galaxy.

Certainly interesting ideas, which I hadn't considered before. I had thought of specific organics, and even specific ores, but due to the nature of space travel it would be impossible for any one good to proliferate with any degree of abundance across the entire galaxy. Therefore such rare goods would find great profits in distant places, where you might get re-stocked every 40 years if you're lucky.
Frontier planets would certainly have better trading relationships with outside empires to some extent.

Specifically now, I have to think of a few things.
First, an intergalactic currency. Each empire has its own currency, and factions within that empire may well have their own (Particularly the most divided ones) but there needs to be some sort of galactic medium for trade. Since there is no galaxy-wide Galactic Empire or Imperium of Man or anything along those lines there would likely be some sort of standard of exchange agreed upon by certain parties with a bunch of different trade federations and unions. Basically the Eurozone on a galactic scale, and with each constituent faction having its own currency alongside the standard.
I dunno mang.

Secondly how they keep time on the galactic scale. Someone suggested to me some time ago that it would be based on the galactic rotation but Serva doesn't have nearly a long enough timespan to notice any substantial movement of the stars around the galactic core enough to keep time. So...

Thirdly there's the navigation system. You know the 3d grid of coordinates which most scifi uses for navigators to keep track of things, right? Well each race would probably develop its own system, placing the origins at different points or having the cells represent different units of distance, essentially creating confusion along the same lines as the Metric or Imperial systems of measurement do here.

Check how we did it back in the Age of Exploration. Every country had their own monetary system, their own measurements, their own timekeeping & calendar, and their own maps. Made trade very difficult but not impossible.

So I got two quick things.

The wiki now boasts of more than 100 articles (to be exact, 101 articles. I'm honestly not sure where the one came from, as I was ready to announce a milestone of 100, but, whatever)
So please, if you like, take a look around the website. There's new articles but there's also been a lot of expansion to existing articles, though some of those additions were just corrected or expanded infoboxes.

Some new ones:
Automatons: http://serva-lore.wikia.com/wiki/Automaton
Distortion Wave Detector: http://serva-lore.wikia.com/wiki/Distortion_Wave_Detector
Superconducting Fibers: http://serva-lore.wikia.com/wiki/Superconducting_Fibers



I had before posted that I had written a short story for Serva, and I indeed did. I later decided to take the link down and revise/proofread it some more, so that it would at the very least be acceptable by my own standards before I try and put it before the more thorough scrutiny of the internet. So here's the link, again, it's a google document:
Broken Bird
I hope I can get some help with it.



EDIT: I'm finding that writing Sci-Fi is a really tough venture. I have to research history and society a little bit, but that stuff I'm interested in. Science and particularly quantum and astrophysics and electromagnetism and **** are things I also have to research (or at least I feel like I have to) and its sometimes difficult to be sure on some things, particularly since I really only have Wikipedia for the research of those things.

So because of this clarity its sometimes really tough to make a convincing 3rd millenium. No matter how fast I imagine computers of the 26th century to be, it seems a week later I get news that real life quantum computing may soon be capable of being even faster. Even warp drives seem just a couple generations away, what with NASA's recent announcements (fortunately it seems to be the Alcubierre drives that Serva uses).

http://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/scientists-finally-unlock-secrets-behind-superconductivity

****.

Behind already.

That's a good reason of why many sci-fi novels on the far future apply a "dark age" somewhere.

You might want to read this for variety 
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25653-ultimate-solar-system-could-contain-60-earths.html#.U7VmrPl_t8F
a red dwarf star as the system's host because they have a lower mass than stars like our sun and so live longer, giving a stable habitable zone
An Earth-sized planet can also have an almost Earth-sized moon
a red dwarf could hold four Jupiter-like planets, each with five Earth-like moons

There are plenty of systems that are Red Dwarf stars or binary stars, since those are the most common (at least so far as we can tell) in the universe.

The idea of binary "Earths" sounds interesting and I might play with that in the future. I haven't thought of too many gas giants but there are a couple, and one race does develop an empire based from a 'terrestrial moon'

One thing I've been trying to do is diversify planets a bit because other scifi has this thing with making planets entirely one big thing. This planet is entirely desert or entirely jungle or etc. Rather, those terms like 'jungle planet' are still in use, but jungle planet just means that the planet is generally hot and humid - doesn't have to look like a jungle at all.

Of course planets with a really complex and diverse ecology like Earth would be relatively rare, since the conditions that make our planet do that are themselves rare. That being said, 'rare' on an astronomical scale means it happens all the ****ing time, so there's that

Something I thought of recently.

Since it's very well possible that trees in the same way we think of them may only evolve on Earth, other races may not have or had access to wood in their history. This leaves only a few alternatives for alien counterparts to a basic, cheap raw material. While wood and paper would decline in importance, some, in an era of synthetic plastics and electronics, certain planets may be easy to colonize and thus people could live, at least at first, in simple wooden houses in human frontier colonies.

For aliens, this can mean bone. High gravity worlds could create lifeforms that need very strong skeletons just to stand up, with thick, strong bones (provided they actually evolve bones, but I imagine that's something that would be pretty common, something to hold creatures together.) In the Ice Age, early man built simple huts out of the skeletons of mammoths (we've found evidence of this). So something along those lines could exist, but much bigger and stronger, if in the case of a high-gravity world. Many early composite bows utilized bone to give the bow extra spring and power, so bone could still be used in technology and tools.

For others, construction material can vary but will likely just be from whatever's around them. Homesteaders in the Old West would build their houses out of Sod, for example, due to the lack of suitable trees in the Great Plains and the deserts of the Southwest. Others could build with adobe or even packed ice, and others still would burrow into the ground.

Of course there may also be examples of biological structures evolving similar to wood that they could make use of in their pre-starfaring or early colonial development, and it can easily vary from colony to colony and race to race. Differences in raw materials can produce wildly different circumstances.

In the end I think this adds an extra level of uniqueness to humans, and maybe even a sort of advantage. While Serva's goal is to avoid the whole "humanity **** yeah" or anthropocentrism thing, I do want the humans to be interesting still, to avoid the comments like "it's just us in the future lel". So what this could mean is that, if preparing to colonize a relatively hospitable world, all humans need to do is bring tree saplings or seeds with them, whilst aliens will either need to make room for monstrous animals or prepare to dig extensively.

In other cases though like a proposed colony being on a less nice and welcoming world, wood or bone or tunnels may not suffice or work very well. Every starfaring race naturally has the ability to create micro-climates and create friendly biomes for their needs on even the harshest of worlds, but full terraforming is not possible, being just in its infancy.

This leaves the majority of colonies very sparsely populated, but on a growing trend due to relatively low development index. And colonies with high populations will often find that they lack enough space to support this population comfortably, due to limited areas of possible habitation or the expense of making it habitable. This could create colonies of great squalor and strife and poverty (oh my!) on the level of Hive Worlds of 40k but on a much smaller scale, the entire colony being a single city with the population of the United States, crammed into an area the size of a small European country or American state.

not gud.

Hey, so I updated the OP. It now will keep track of stories set in this verse that I'm writing (only one of which is complete), and update to show when new ones are planned or are completed. They mostly vary in size but will typically be around 15-20 pages, though some of my longer ones could be much longer.

At some point I will try to tackle a novel, but that's going to be much, much later, after some practice with these nicer, shorter stories.

I'm still looking for feedback on the first one, which is 19 pages and about 5,600 words. I'm not asking anyone to read through all of it (Unless, of course, it's interesting enough to be worth that, and I think it is) but even just general writing tips based on the first couple pages would be helpful.

thanks ya'll

EDIT: For example, things like making female characters more interesting, describing action scenes (really, describing things in general) and how to convey better imagery.

So? What did he do?