Space

Created Friday 02 November 2012

The real bottomless pit. Where--thank you countless times Firefly--we accept that mortals finally have found an abyss they can actually gaze into, and believe that hordes would there go insane. Where evil can thus breed among the accepted unknowns and hidden truths. Where that African nomad leaves the arrid lands that whetted his guile and plunges on sticks into the sea. Where we don't meet "other men": no Neanderthals and Denisovans out there. It's millenia-cured blattids who think it kind to make pets of their conquests and the Good feed their wile with their own young. Where anything that can survive that would think nothing of living just fine off our extracellular matrix; where the trifid has no mind and dose just that. When its spores aren't burning through anything with less than a triple digit atomic number.

It's so easy it's nearly cliche to caste space as the psychological land of demons the sea was to early striving human. But it'd be.

I think the point for me is not only to enjoy rebvelling in this psychic drama and using that pastiche to color the story with tales.
It's also not make sure I never shirk from keeping it like it is. Where simply being is a challenge (low g sapping our the strength right out of our bones). Where "everything is ahrder in space" is explored through detials that niggle and vex when they're least convenient.

I do also like dividing space into types like pure viod (the naught, sorry but I like that word), gases, dusts, clouds (of deadly ice and rock--not fluffy sheep shapes--lie the Oort), heliospheres, and the dead naught away outside the Milky Way.

Yeah, I'm sure most of this is already mapped out and named. I guess if I am to stick to my promise to never shirk from the devilling troubles of the void, I need to learn a lot more about them.
Which is about all that justifies putting this in its own main page and not as a sub-point to the theses.
So:
- Move this to its own first level position when you start to learn about space per se and not just consider its role as a theme (more than a thesis anyway).

2021-04-15
An idea muuuch older than that date (and maybe already written down in here somewhere), but here it is anyway.
A basic subtext to all of this is: that either interstellar travel is feasible---in which case it's being done and not just by Greys in saucers but by a whole ecosystem we just haven't seen yet (imagine the thrill of seeing microbes for the first time!)---or it isn't, and we're stranded in this thin skin of air until the infernal heart below becomes cold with death, until the cloak of clouds parts to expose the full wrath of Ra,

or until our dreams of bright heavens drown in our filth. O.K., I'm not good at melodrama either.

2022-05-20
Just how much space sucks. A popular comic in their world is:

Spaceflight Day 000001: Woo-hoo! We're in space! Woo-wee!
And this continuing with really cool insights and laughs at things like how hard it is to clean in space (and how easy it is to make messes, like a sleaky urine pouch.
And this continuing to get more irked by about the 100th day.
And then rows and rows of monotnous boredom with occasional but rarely interesting bursts of something. And then 1000s and 10000s of days of just doing nothing but occasionally notcing your body deterioriating one of the many ways it does in space.

We just slowly turn into ionize jelly out there. And if you go out there, you're going to be out there for a while. It can take months to go from ground to jump point and then who-knows-how-mnay-months to go from that jump point to where the final destination is. And you better hope it was a well-shot jump and is close---but not too close---to your destination.

Jump points known by these traits. A really cold on with a long impulse drive through a planetary ring system (slow, boring, and you can't sleep) to the super hot when you've got to be damned ready when you come out of the jump to make a crash landing at your destination.

Imagine scurvy from radiation and μG. And no way in hell of getting any medical help for months at best. Other side of a jump you're a long way from home with utterly scant resources. (It's expensive to get things to space. And it takes a long time to amass enough of the appropriate resources in one place (systemically, helium from the star or gas giants; organics & water from rings or asteroid fields; trace & heavy metals, silicon, and iron from planets---maybe with a Hagge in tow for that, too)

The length of time, too, as an imporant aspect of warfare. Of it taking years to learn that an enemy has established a Hagge/Blinkerblaster style foothold on a key strategic system. (And maybe even learning out of order---given different distances to different systems---the ordere of an enemy's advance through systems.

Of that horrible job of far recon. Being shot out into some distant and meager region of space with just a bit more than enough to build a jump back

In other words, one way to fail a mission is to use more of your resources than you have to jump back.

Of a never-finished subplot of someone who does that. Goes on a far recon and has to decide to use more resources than he needs to jump back----to buy himslef enough time to recuperate those resources. And them doing their damnedest to "outsmart nothing" (survive in space, as in: "We were out there living by our juices and outsmarting nothing.")

And just sit there. Yeah, maybe for years: A jump in sends a pulse of energy out from that location. And human jumps really are bright (They use the energy equivalent to---I'm thinking---5X10²⁰ lbs worth of mass to blast a whole through space. (Thinking something around one-millionth of a Jupiter's mass.) As much as their math can figure, they're blasting holes that are as efficient as physics allows. There is a mighty explosion on the jump side, but they can't see any way of making it smaller.
So when you jump into a location, you are immediately preceded by a huge pulse of radiation. And of a pretty characteristic signature. (The adepts can even read into that human pulse information about the year/decade that sort of jump was made, the likely sorts and numbers of craft coming through, and maybe even the general direction of their departure from that point. As long as that pulse goes out before it hits your target is as long as you have to sit there getting readings off of the radiation from that target. If you need a lot of time-dependent intel on that location, then you better jump in farther from your target, maybe getting a diffuse image at first with the distance weakening the signal. Then fly in close and closer both to collect information faster (relativistic local flight also means faster accumulation of information in that direct) and to get in closer so that when you jump out, the blow-back will do some damage/obscure your departure. If you still have enough to secure your departure.
And months or years after your initial departure (and fewer months/years after your return if the jump shot out---relative to the information going in to the target---is a lot closer to the target) anothe recon shot into that system. This one----as I mentioned----likely closer, or at least more strategic. And then may be other recon shot in.
But with effort to limit that recon shots.

Any jump is expensive and depletes the resources of the launch point.
Every jump in is a huge alarm going off in the target system. Huge. Like nova-bright to the target.

And so a crecendo of recon jumps often preface an invasion. And any time an other jump comes in, it's an absolute emergency. Whatever damage, whatever persisting raiding force remains, mist be dealth with on top of a new wave of invading troops.

But initial wins greatly matter. Whichever side power up / establish system-wide defense can slowly grow and advantage in resources to beat off subsequent attacks. And scavenge/collect more to better fend off a third, etc. So even small forces shot far enough to take root before detection can be good enough to build a "beachhead" strong enough to withstand whatever jumps are thrown at it.
And while a crescendo of recon jumps often presage an invasion, most recon jumps are dull and dnagerous trips out to nowhere, and then sit there making usre nothing bad happens while sensors collect data and then jumping back.

If no one mumps back from a way point, then it will be a looong time before any information arrives about what happened. So, sure, it woudl be nice to be able to wait for a return jump to revise/abort any subsequent jumps there---like during an invasion. And among the ships that jump out are skimpy recon ships with as little mass as they can jump bacl with to relay how things are going. But, they are obviously targets for attacks and you can't have that many of them. A persisting raiding strategy surviving on its own is really fully on its own.

Sure, there are "entangled" comms, but those also don't last for many signals and aren't that reliable over thousands of light years.

Jump Points

Human tech can punch holes to totally new locations. That was the human innovation that led to meaningful interstellar travel.
But it wasn't their first way to jump---and still isn't the best.
The first were made by setting up remote jump points in other systems. These jump points were at first needed to create a worm hole. And it remains the easiest, most energy efficient, and most accurate what to establish an exit point (not a minor issue if you have to scramble and find resources at the other end to survive

(Human jumping tech costs energy that is the square of the mass (down from the cube of it, and scientists & mathematicians both believe that the energy will always be some exponent greater than 1 no matter the technology)

so you send out as little mass though a jump as you can. When you're buring through somethign like a dwarf planet per jump, you tend to conserve.

Space was supposed to be for all hamkind. They didn't think it all out, but they did declare that borders should not extend into space.
But those who could afford to go into space---or were worth sending into space either to work or die---were few. Very good in some way. Or just really unlucky. When so little is all you got, then little differences mean a lot. No one is equal in space.

But it still can help to work together.

Olive oil and a few leafies are usually the only shadows of earth long-stay ships have, and then sometimes just for Deciders.

Cleaning rarely (and no more than once a week or most on-board filtration systems will be overwhelmed and you're using dirty water. When it is done, it's in a bath suit. A special, tight-fitting "space suit" that briskly circulates a think film of water, soaps, and detergents to clean the skin while leaving the mocrobiome alone. (And trying not to get that biome living in the filtration tanks.) Feels like a cold prickly slime rolling over your whole body. (It's not slimey, but the layer is so thin it feels it under the undulating suit.)