Hello fellow denizens of the Duck and Spackle, and, well, the forum in general.
So, eventually I've decided that I do want people to read my work - and that maybe I could turn my ideas into something cool. So here it is, my lore thread. Follow if you're interested in the construction of a sci-fi universe that aims to be as intricate and detailed as possible while staying within the bounds of what MIGHT be possible within the limits of modern science.
The universe's background is getting to be quite extensive lately. The Wiki for the verse more than two hundred and ten (210) articles. And there is more information stored in my google documents (or in my head, yet to be written down.)
-- UNDER CONSTRUCTION --
OLD OP:
OLDER OP: (warning: some info is outdated)
Okay. So you explained how the dynamics of space travel are, how are wars fought?
So, eventually I've decided that I do want people to read my work - and that maybe I could turn my ideas into something cool. So here it is, my lore thread. Follow if you're interested in the construction of a sci-fi universe that aims to be as intricate and detailed as possible while staying within the bounds of what MIGHT be possible within the limits of modern science.
The universe's background is getting to be quite extensive lately. The Wiki for the verse more than two hundred and ten (210) articles. And there is more information stored in my google documents (or in my head, yet to be written down.)
-- UNDER CONSTRUCTION --
OLD OP:
As such, some content is actually being created for Serva which aims to show the universe rather than tell it. The after-action report style will be kept for reference and exposition purposes on the website and in this thread, but if that's not how you roll, I have been trying to improve my (in my opinion) sub-par writing skills and write short stories and novellas set in the Serva universe. I don't want to take on a full novel yet, as I don't feel skilled enough, and a novel may only interest people who are already interested anyway.
A list of works:
Stories marked with an asterisk ( * ) do not follow a human's perspective. There will be few of these at first, as they are generally harder to write.
Excuse the maybe cheesy/corny short descriptions of the stories, they were fun to write
Completed Short Stories:
~15-20 pages
- Broken Bird
19 pages, ~5,600 words
Is set during the Kuiper War of 2218, one of mankind's first interplanetary conflicts. Following the point of view of a fighter pilot assigned to a Task Force sent to the outer reaches of the Solar System. Centered around the military and space warfare.
Note: Pilots are not a common thing in space combat for small craft, it was simply financial and time constraints that put former jet pilots in command of the spacecraft. They were eventually phased out in human armed forces, as in other races.
Note #2: Looking for feedback on this story.
Planned/In Progress Short Stories:
- Silky Solution
Focuses on the colonists that escaped the destruction of Oroia, to colonize a planet they name New Oroia, and the first few weeks of this endeavour. Hostile native life and unusual conditions for crop growth make life difficult for the colonists.
- Red Choke*
Set millions of years in the past, a great empire is crumbling, as is the fate of all empires. In its last dying moments, a librarian and his pupil scramble to save as much of its literary, artistic, and scientific legacy as possible, as the world chokes to death.
- Human Drive
AD 2412 - the Polaris War is raging, and the capital city of the planet is under siege. Knowing that defeat will mean extermination for the city's millions of inhabitants, a desperate last stand is mounted by the planet's exhausted defense forces, in coordination with elite troops from lightyears away.
Completed Novellas:
None. Nada. Zip.
Planned/In Progress Novellas
40-80 pages
- A Fisherman's Song
Obsessing over a strange sound he discovers while doing some field work, a linguistics professor finds himself in a perilous situation, as he is pointed to a possible source being on a frontier planet, so distant from Earth that its census results haven't reached earth in 140 years. There he finds that enigmatic forces are at work, and puts himself in great danger to uncover their intent...
PM me if you would like to read this, as it is the 'debut' book for the universe in general.
- Envelopment (worktitle)
A bored businessman seeking adventure visits an upstart empire's capital, only to find that things are not quite as they seem from the outside.
Others to come.
A list of works:
Stories marked with an asterisk ( * ) do not follow a human's perspective. There will be few of these at first, as they are generally harder to write.
Excuse the maybe cheesy/corny short descriptions of the stories, they were fun to write
Completed Short Stories:
~15-20 pages
- Broken Bird
19 pages, ~5,600 words
Is set during the Kuiper War of 2218, one of mankind's first interplanetary conflicts. Following the point of view of a fighter pilot assigned to a Task Force sent to the outer reaches of the Solar System. Centered around the military and space warfare.
Note: Pilots are not a common thing in space combat for small craft, it was simply financial and time constraints that put former jet pilots in command of the spacecraft. They were eventually phased out in human armed forces, as in other races.
Note #2: Looking for feedback on this story.
Planned/In Progress Short Stories:
- Silky Solution
Focuses on the colonists that escaped the destruction of Oroia, to colonize a planet they name New Oroia, and the first few weeks of this endeavour. Hostile native life and unusual conditions for crop growth make life difficult for the colonists.
- Red Choke*
Set millions of years in the past, a great empire is crumbling, as is the fate of all empires. In its last dying moments, a librarian and his pupil scramble to save as much of its literary, artistic, and scientific legacy as possible, as the world chokes to death.
- Human Drive
AD 2412 - the Polaris War is raging, and the capital city of the planet is under siege. Knowing that defeat will mean extermination for the city's millions of inhabitants, a desperate last stand is mounted by the planet's exhausted defense forces, in coordination with elite troops from lightyears away.
Completed Novellas:
None. Nada. Zip.
Planned/In Progress Novellas
40-80 pages
- A Fisherman's Song
Obsessing over a strange sound he discovers while doing some field work, a linguistics professor finds himself in a perilous situation, as he is pointed to a possible source being on a frontier planet, so distant from Earth that its census results haven't reached earth in 140 years. There he finds that enigmatic forces are at work, and puts himself in great danger to uncover their intent...
PM me if you would like to read this, as it is the 'debut' book for the universe in general.
- Envelopment (worktitle)
A bored businessman seeking adventure visits an upstart empire's capital, only to find that things are not quite as they seem from the outside.
Others to come.
OLDER OP: (warning: some info is outdated)
- The focus is not entirely on the age of space exploration and such (henceforth to be referred to as the Galactic Era, but that's not its in-universe name). As much focus will be put into the thousands of years preceding the discovery of interstellar flight by any race. Each race will have rich cultures and histories, languages at least capable of expressing relevant thoughts, very different military strategies and societies (as if they evolved on another world!?!??!11). The Universe also will not be written from a strictly human point of view. So no giant block of "nothing was recorded, dark ages" because the humans entered an Age of Strife because the warp storms were too much to handle, man. Races that aren't spacefaring will outnumber those who are, and will be just as detailed and given attention.
However, the galactic era is the one being expanded on today (Tuesday, 9/3/2013) , and that's what I will talk about here when referring to the 'aims' of the universe.
So begins my list.
- In the Galactic Era, Humans are not to be a dominant force in the galaxy. A noticeable one, perhaps, enough to be labelled on a map, but not in military or political affairs. Humans spend as much time fighting each other and trying to get their **** together as they do exploring and colonizing. Humans are not a united body and are an appallingly inefficient world bureaucracy.
- Faster-than-light travel is possible, but VERY difficult. However, Faster-than-light communications is impossible. If a planet is under siege, a ship needs to travel back to the capital and be like, "NIGGA THE PLANET UNDER ATTACK" and then the capital planet has to gather together an expeditionary fleet and send it to the planet, without any certainty that the ships will return or what happened to them if they don't. Word travels as slowly as it did in human history before airplanes and telephones.
- Faster-than-light travel is still pretty slow and yet ludicrously fast - the maximum speeds achievable by even human ships themselves are what cause the travel to be incredibly slow.
The idea is that you can travel 5 Standard Light Years in One Day, 24 hours. A standard light year is our modern interpretation of a light year, used by all races, however there are also ship years, the distance a ship can travel in a year.
You can travel 5 sly a day for about 5 days straight, for a contiguous distance traveled of 25 sly, but the extreme speeds you're going at have unknown causes on the human body and have only been reported in early expeditions and travels. The engines also need to sit around outside their warp bubbles and recharge and refuel. What the 'fuel' is and the specifics and science behind the engines will be detailed later.
So, every 5 days you have to stop and let the engines do their thing for at least 14 days - it's also best to stop somewhere interesting, like a solar system. And you better be damned certain you didn't stop to rest near a neutron star, black hole or pulsar. In the meantime you can let your crew drink and party and rest.
Do the math and you get the distance a ship can travel in one year. 1440 standard light years, or 1 ship year. This doesn't include the months it might take to cross a solar system by sublight. This means that it would take you about ~18 years or longer just to get from one side of the galaxy to the other. Add in that faster-than-light comms are impossible, and you get empires on one side of the galaxy having extremely outdated, even centuries old, information and data on the denizens of the opposite side of the galaxy. History classes will talk about races and empires that already went extinct and collapsed long ago.
- There is no galaxy-spanning empire, as a result of all the above. Different races have spheres of influence, usually no more than a few thousand lightyears, the "immediate" areas surrounding their core planets and where their ships and trade convoys are most concentrated.
- Radio communications are still useful for comms done within light-seconds or light minutes, and so there is no urgent need to start using flag signals and lights for short-distance interplanetary communications.
However, the galactic era is the one being expanded on today (Tuesday, 9/3/2013) , and that's what I will talk about here when referring to the 'aims' of the universe.
So begins my list.
- In the Galactic Era, Humans are not to be a dominant force in the galaxy. A noticeable one, perhaps, enough to be labelled on a map, but not in military or political affairs. Humans spend as much time fighting each other and trying to get their **** together as they do exploring and colonizing. Humans are not a united body and are an appallingly inefficient world bureaucracy.
- Faster-than-light travel is possible, but VERY difficult. However, Faster-than-light communications is impossible. If a planet is under siege, a ship needs to travel back to the capital and be like, "NIGGA THE PLANET UNDER ATTACK" and then the capital planet has to gather together an expeditionary fleet and send it to the planet, without any certainty that the ships will return or what happened to them if they don't. Word travels as slowly as it did in human history before airplanes and telephones.
- Faster-than-light travel is still pretty slow and yet ludicrously fast - the maximum speeds achievable by even human ships themselves are what cause the travel to be incredibly slow.
The idea is that you can travel 5 Standard Light Years in One Day, 24 hours. A standard light year is our modern interpretation of a light year, used by all races, however there are also ship years, the distance a ship can travel in a year.
You can travel 5 sly a day for about 5 days straight, for a contiguous distance traveled of 25 sly, but the extreme speeds you're going at have unknown causes on the human body and have only been reported in early expeditions and travels. The engines also need to sit around outside their warp bubbles and recharge and refuel. What the 'fuel' is and the specifics and science behind the engines will be detailed later.
So, every 5 days you have to stop and let the engines do their thing for at least 14 days - it's also best to stop somewhere interesting, like a solar system. And you better be damned certain you didn't stop to rest near a neutron star, black hole or pulsar. In the meantime you can let your crew drink and party and rest.
Do the math and you get the distance a ship can travel in one year. 1440 standard light years, or 1 ship year. This doesn't include the months it might take to cross a solar system by sublight. This means that it would take you about ~18 years or longer just to get from one side of the galaxy to the other. Add in that faster-than-light comms are impossible, and you get empires on one side of the galaxy having extremely outdated, even centuries old, information and data on the denizens of the opposite side of the galaxy. History classes will talk about races and empires that already went extinct and collapsed long ago.
- There is no galaxy-spanning empire, as a result of all the above. Different races have spheres of influence, usually no more than a few thousand lightyears, the "immediate" areas surrounding their core planets and where their ships and trade convoys are most concentrated.
- Radio communications are still useful for comms done within light-seconds or light minutes, and so there is no urgent need to start using flag signals and lights for short-distance interplanetary communications.
Okay. So you explained how the dynamics of space travel are, how are wars fought?
Space isn't an ocean. There's no friction(well, any that would matter). Space also isn't air.
There's no carriers. The distance between two clashing battle fleets is too great for squadrons of fighters to be practical.
Most space battles will be fought without the two sides even seeing each other visually. Everything is handled by targeting computers and precision control systems - remorseless, unfeeling machines given the task of managing weapon batteries and their usage across distances, aiming them, leading and angling shells and controlling rate of fire - across distances spanning countries or continents if they were on-world. All the lifeforms have to do is switch the weapons and their computers on and name targets. As for detecting each other, ships will use any form of scanner devices - which means they can be tricked, although doing so isn't necessarily easy.
Weapons have no maximum range. Projectiles fired will go on forever until they hit something - there is no outside force in space to act upon them (unless you're fighting in close vicinity to a gravity well, in which case there might be). By this same token, ships that run out of fuel will also follow inertia, and will drift. Forever. With little chance of rescue.
Warfare is very different from standard sci-fi. The length of travel and lack of ftl comms forces everything to be dubbed an 'expedition'. You don't 'mount an offensive and lay siege to a planet' you 'outfit an expedition, send the ships out and you pray to your God that when they arrive they have the firepower and leadership to do their mission successfully. And if you don't hear (read: get a dataprobe telling you mission success) back from them after a while... its time to rinse and repeat.
Space battles are basically centered around capital ships unleashing all their firepower while smaller ships shoot down distraction weapons like missiles and act as point defense and screens for the big ships.
Ground wars and planetary invasions ARE possible. They are drawn out and pricey affairs, with some races being specially adept at it (one managed to force a colony of 500 million to surrender in less than 4 hours through pure overwhelming, concentrated force)
There's no carriers. The distance between two clashing battle fleets is too great for squadrons of fighters to be practical.
Most space battles will be fought without the two sides even seeing each other visually. Everything is handled by targeting computers and precision control systems - remorseless, unfeeling machines given the task of managing weapon batteries and their usage across distances, aiming them, leading and angling shells and controlling rate of fire - across distances spanning countries or continents if they were on-world. All the lifeforms have to do is switch the weapons and their computers on and name targets. As for detecting each other, ships will use any form of scanner devices - which means they can be tricked, although doing so isn't necessarily easy.
Weapons have no maximum range. Projectiles fired will go on forever until they hit something - there is no outside force in space to act upon them (unless you're fighting in close vicinity to a gravity well, in which case there might be). By this same token, ships that run out of fuel will also follow inertia, and will drift. Forever. With little chance of rescue.
Warfare is very different from standard sci-fi. The length of travel and lack of ftl comms forces everything to be dubbed an 'expedition'. You don't 'mount an offensive and lay siege to a planet' you 'outfit an expedition, send the ships out and you pray to your God that when they arrive they have the firepower and leadership to do their mission successfully. And if you don't hear (read: get a dataprobe telling you mission success) back from them after a while... its time to rinse and repeat.
Space battles are basically centered around capital ships unleashing all their firepower while smaller ships shoot down distraction weapons like missiles and act as point defense and screens for the big ships.
Ground wars and planetary invasions ARE possible. They are drawn out and pricey affairs, with some races being specially adept at it (one managed to force a colony of 500 million to surrender in less than 4 hours through pure overwhelming, concentrated force)
