ParanetOnline
McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Dresdenus Prime on November 13, 2012, 04:06:22 PM
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I don't think I got the Spaceballs quote right exactly, which warrants a re-watch! But my question is of the sci-fi use of transporters used in Star Trek -
Simply put, has anyone notice them used in any other works? Or are they strictly a Star Trek device? I would like to use something similar for moving from ship to ship or ship to planet, etc. in my book, but if ST is the only show/book to use this, then I best stay away from it.
Thanks!
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I don't think I got the Spaceballs quote right exactly, which warrants a re-watch! But my question is of the sci-fi use of transporters used in Star Trek -
Simply put, has anyone notice them used in any other works? Or are they strictly a Star Trek device? I would like to use something similar for moving from ship to ship or ship to planet, etc. in my book, but if ST is the only show/book to use this, then I best stay away from it.
Thanks!
Teleporters are used in various sci-fi works - just call them a teleporter, and have at it.
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Awesome thanks, now I just need to name my ship. Naming the ship is freaking hard. I was going to name it Peregrine, after one of the fastest birds in the sky, but then I found out that stupid Star Trek has a ship class called that. Argh.
For the record I'm a Trekkie, but they're making it hard for me to pick a name!
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classic historic ship names could work (like Enterprise was before Roddenberry). In-world historical figures are also common, in the way that the US has the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln.
If you really like the Falcon image, then several options are there from other species: Kestral (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kestrel_%28bird%29) (ie any falcon that can hover), Gryfalcon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrfalcon), tiercel (term for male falcon), ...
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Thanks Quantus! Kestral has a decent ring to it!
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Awesome thanks, now I just need to name my ship. Naming the ship is freaking hard.
You could always go the Iain M. Banks route, and have your biggest ships called things like So Much For Subtlety.
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The USS Tremendous Overkill :)
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HMS Compensating For Something
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HMS PMS
USS Big Stick
USS Wealthy Big Penis
HMS Asskicker
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HMS Well-Endowed
USS Imperialist Tool
HMS Corporate Interest
USS Complete Lack of Subtlety
HMS What Do You Mean, It Isn't Stealthy?
On a more serious not, Vengeance is a really cool name for a ship, and it's the name of a British Submarine, too.
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Birds, fish, and annoying stinging insects all are fair game when naming a ship. How about the USS Turducken, loving nicknamed The Turd by its crew, of course?
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In human history at least, ship names depend on their class. The United States named it's battleships after states, the Iowa, The Missouri, etc. You could have a class of ship named after political leaders of your civilization, another class named after rivers, another class after military heroes. If you're consistent, you won't have to tell your readers each time what class a ship is, you can let the name tell them. This lets them have the fun of saying "Hah! That's must be a carrier, because they were all named after root vegetables!" Readers seem to get a little jolt of pleasure by picking up on that sort of detail.
In my WiP's mythology, the old T'ren Empire troopships were named after prominent military figures; a HMSS Carlos Hathcock (A USMC sniper and All Around Big Damn Hero) and the HMSS Paddy Mayne (after SAS officer LtC Robert Blair Mayne DSO & 3 Bars who was the terror of Afrika as far as the Germans were concerned. The guy personally demolished, burned or just smashed the hell up around a hundred German aircraft on hit & run raids.) And my dreadnoughts had a different nomenclature, drawing back to pre-Jump mythology, with names like HMSS Avalon Invicta or HMSS Breath of Scheherazade.
But I suggest swapping things up when you're dealing with multiple species, races, nations. My Te' Etta Dainan Empire named their ships like the Valorous Daughter or Ascent Into Glory, based on concepts and ideals important in their own culture.
And fighter pilots? You can have some fun there. "The Blazing Brat" or "Sassy Bandersnatch" for example.
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In human history at least, ship names depend on their class. The United States named it's battleships after states, the Iowa, The Missouri, etc. You could have a class of ship named after political leaders of your civilization, another class named after rivers, another class after military heroes. If you're consistent, you won't have to tell your readers each time what class a ship is, you can let the name tell them.
Indeed, I'm certainly trying to do that in TIWTBWO, and I think it will be pretty clear that the Briareus, the Perfect Cherry Blossom and the Occam's Hammer come from different cultures. The main culture in TISBWO names major ships after people who at some point in their careers had near-absolute power and relinquished it for the greater good, so while they have ships named after Washington and Churchill, they're not necessarily for the same reasons a contemporary navy would use those names.
Speaking of ship classes, though, am I the only one who thinks that the number of SF works that keep the same old frigate/cruiser/destroyer/battleship distinctions in space are a bit naff ? They've been done to death, there's not that I can see any immediate reason to assume the same functional distinctions for interstellar warfare as in a Napoleonic navy, and while I can see the use in having the ship functions be intuitively obvious for a game like EVE Online or Sins of a Solar Empire and using familiar names thereby, it really seems kind of contrived if you are building an original world from scratch. (I particularly dislike seeing "battlecruiser" used in this context by people who think it's a cool name but seem not to know what a terrible idea the things were.)
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If you're building a culture from scratch, and whatever narration is not based on a human perspective then it would make sense to come up with original classifications. Be a handy way to illustrate the social and cultural differences from the reader's human-centric viewpoint. I'm sure that there's a proper word for "human-centric", but I can't recall what it is...
As for categories of ships though, I expect that unless it's a truly and utterly alien race, with utterly alien technology, (Borg Cubes, Hive Ships, etc) then you'll always have some equivalent in categories of ships if not names for those categories. Capital ships take more time and resources to build and crew, so you wouldn't waste them on routine patrols, destroyers and cruisers are vastly cheaper so you'd build swarms of them you could use to screen your expensive capital ships as well as smaller, routine missions. Your systems/planets/colonies with a lighter industrial base might not be able to produce anything heavy, but they can free up the big shipyards by taking up the slack in light units while the more industrialized locals focus on the big stuff that only they can build efficiently.
This is of course assuming that the story's universe is not a super-science post-scarcity setting with unlimited resources, manpower, training, logistic capacity, all that jazz... I'm thinking in terms more like BSG, B5, etc.
As for battlecruisers, I've seen some SF where they were a good idea. Basically long range, missile platforms that could be deployed and positioned rapidly to put fire where it's needed. They were cheaper, lighter on crewing demands, and had throw weight approaching that of the big heavy sluggers, but not the armor so they had to keep at a distance. Basically the same way modern, self-propelled artillery works. Keep it safe, it's a rain of unholy death, but toe to toe, it's breakfast.
What really bugs me is when someone has a "destroyer" that's going toe to toe with a heavy cruiser, dreadnought, etc because the writer never bothered to look up even the basics of ship classes. It's like the ground-warfare version of thinking a platoon can handle a division or corp. (Barring of course a ridiculous technological advantage. The US's old Spruance class destroyers, the last of which was decommissioned a few years ago, would have had no difficulty butchering both the Bismark and Tirpitz at the same time without mussing it's metaphorical hair.)
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If you're building a culture from scratch, and whatever narration is not based on a human perspective then it would make sense to come up with original classifications. Be a handy way to illustrate the social and cultural differences from the reader's human-centric viewpoint. I'm sure that there's a proper word for "human-centric", but I can't recall what it is...
Anthropocentric I think may be the word you are looking for.
This is of course assuming that the story's universe is not a super-science post-scarcity setting with unlimited resources, manpower, training, logistic capacity, all that jazz... I'm thinking in terms more like BSG, B5, etc.
Even on that scale, it seems to me it's a very different domain, and it would seem to me not very plausible that the paradigms that work there would be that similar; when I think of changes in paradigms through naval history on a longer scale, from the Roman corvus and breaking the pirate presence in the Mediterranean, to Lepanto demonstrating that galley slaves are obsolete, to the difference between an early 20th century battleship and a present-day carrier group, the "capital ships pounding on each other with big iron like Napoleonic ships' broadsides" model - or even ramming, as I recall one sequence in B5 - just doesn't work for me.
As for battlecruisers, I've seen some SF where they were a good idea. Basically long range, missile platforms that could be deployed and positioned rapidly to put fire where it's needed. They were cheaper, lighter on crewing demands, and had throw weight approaching that of the big heavy sluggers, but not the armor so they had to keep at a distance. Basically the same way modern, self-propelled artillery works. Keep it safe, it's a rain of unholy death, but toe to toe, it's breakfast.
I wouldn't argue with that, but if anything, I think that's not going far enough.
Presuming for a moment no handwavium, and working with the laws of physics we understand, I think pretty much any spaceship has to be a glass cannon, in much the same way as any plausible 1940s battleship doesn't well endure being at ground zero of a multi-megaton thermonuclear explosion; the sort of offensive weaponry that seems plausible at a tech level of sizable interplanetary presences, starting from where we have now, seems to make armour a lost cause, and I really don't think many people writing space battles really grasp either how big space is, or just how much of a scale difference that makes between physical missiles and energy weapons acting at or near lightspeed. Also, annoyingly few people seem to grasp that there is no stealth in space, full stop (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php); the space-warfare-as-submarine-warfare paradigm doesn't work.
I'm having an absolute devil of a time trying to come up with any logical basis at all for human-piloted small fighters in a setting like that, considering how much more manoeuvrable it's plausible to make a drone that does not have to worry about the effects of high gravity on squishy organic bodies, and how much faster a reaction time you can get from hardware than nervous systems.
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Normally Id quote bits as I respond, but it makes the post too big. Youll get the idea.
Naming conventions aside, I think there will always be a need for tiers of space craft, just like naval vessles. It will mostly be defined by range and capacity. There will be the one-man fighter/scout (ill get to pilots vs drones later), your small carriers that hole a dozen-ish people and have limited range, and then various orders of magnitude larger (up to whatever your society can reasonably create and move) that house more people can can be sustainable further and further from your central resource supplies. At some point the larger vessels will also become mobile bases for the smaller.
Dont discount armor/shielding tech too much. In any long range space travel it will become something of a nessesity even outside of battle, since there is no limit to how fast spacejunk can move, and thus no limit to how much it will hurt when it goes right through your ship. In space, Mass is King, and even energy based weapons are going to move some of it, because in terms of particle beams, fusion devices, etc, space isnt all that empty, and at near light speeds even tiny masses have a real effect. But since you will need some sort of protection against your average space dust, a slow moving payload style weapon may still have a tactical use. It all depends on where your particular arms race stands at that point.
On the Drone vs Pilot discussion, there are a few things to consider, and again it all depends on your worlds personal arms race. Pilots are fragile, so it limits the maneuverability dramatically. However, as you said, the scale of space is a whole other thing entirely, so depending on the relative mix of weaponry vs engine strength, that may not be as prohibitive as it seems at first glance. With drones, you have a whole other set of possible shortcomings, though. Drones cane basically be one of two types: Remote and Autonomous. Remote control is dependent on line-of-sight communications, mights be jammed in various ways, and can quickly become vulnerable communication delays even at reasonably short distances for what you may see in space. Autonomous drones are limited by their programming sophistication, and have a their own list of vulnerabilities ranging from remote hacking to solar radiation interference to Skynet syndrome.
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Naming conventions aside, I think there will always be a need for tiers of space craft, just like naval vessles. It will mostly be defined by range and capacity.
Oh, agreed entirely.
Dont discount armor/shielding tech too much. In any long range space travel it will become something of a nessesity even outside of battle, since there is no limit to how fast spacejunk can move, and thus no limit to how much it will hurt when it goes right through your ship.
Sure, but it does again depend on context. If you're talking about something in a reasonably Earthlike planetary system, with gas giants to have sucked up the bulk of the debris over the billions of years it takes for a planet to become moderately Earthlike, that's one issue; interstellar travel's a different beast, and near-light interstellar travel is a very different beast from generation starships puttering along at a small fraction of the speed of light.
But since you will need some sort of protection against your average space dust,
At near-future tech levels, I think a slab of ice or rock is your best bet there; slightly higher and with suitable energy sources, I am fairly sold on the plausibility of a combination of ionising lasers and magnetic fields for active shielding against dust and the like.
a slow moving payload style weapon may still have a tactical use.
The link I posted above makes it pretty clear why it will always be possible to see such a thing coming, though.
Autonomous drones are limited by their programming sophistication, and have a their own list of vulnerabilities ranging from remote hacking to solar radiation interference to Skynet syndrome.
..and this would be the bit where, as someone with zero experience flying fighter planes and two and a half decades of moderately sophisticated programming experience, I am on the one hand inclined to write what I know, and on the other hand wary of overdoing going into stuff that is obscure and uninteresting to non-programmers.
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I think a great deal of this comes down to "how speculative is the fiction in your speculative fiction." In storytelling terms, I think there's a lot of wiggle room in terms of how advanced tech in one's universe is, so long as you remain consistant.
Say you've got a tech base consistantly using advanced fullerene alloys, composites, ceremics; industry in the form of orbital foundries and shipyards, dipping gas giants for polymer/composite raw materials?
Somebody's faceplate isn't going to get cracked because someone punches them or they trip, their EVA suit's not going to rip because they stumble into a desk, their flashlight isn't going to break because they drop it... because everywhere else in the storyverse, the materials are just too advanced unless the character is using some sub-cheap unter-market knockoff brand. Keep the daily details consistant with your tech base, and more readers will be willing to overlook the Absurdium Driven FTL Inertia Mollifying Transwhompler-Effect travel.
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Thank you Paynesgrey/ You just made me fall of my chair laughing.
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All part of the service. :)
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Thanks Quantus! Kestral has a decent ring to it!
Anyone played the indie game FTL (Faster than Light)? The starter ship is The Kestrel. You can rename it to anything you want, but Kestrel is the given name when you begin.