Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

As a straight out of high school kid in a society that doesn’t really treat you as an adult until after your 4 years of service, she’s doing the best she can do:

1. Making her service as short as possible so she goes into the “big girl pool” ASAP
2. Going to a place where she can stand out without stepping on anyone’s toes, so she’s appreciated for her genius rather than seen as an upstart
3. She’s even establishing herself has a renaissance woman by getting the sensor tech certification before even showing up to her first day of work, showing that she can be more than just her high school experience

It’s actually a really smart plan as cliff explained it IN THE STORY ITSELF!

 

So a rewrite. And a "suggestion" stated multiple times despite the author staying why things are the way they are for in universe, in character reasons stops being a polite suggestion and becomes a passive aggression "but akshually" demand

Except all the reasons given like the mandatory entry level civil service where in more prestigious locations its apparently normal for newbies to be glorified golfers who aren't listened to because of a good old Boys network of "you don't have 12 degrees GTFO with your nonsense".

Except the sheer incredulity would get her laughed out and her test scores made null and void which would put her in a worse position of likely being sent to the equivalent of trash collector. Her parents o ly believed her because they were rational individuals her knew her since childhood so could spot the differences. Anyone new would look at her and go "shame to see such a talent as Total Recall go schizo. Best put them out of the way for their own benefit."

 

Since the Mc has Star Trek in universe I wonder if she’ll fan girl a little if she runs across a perk from that setting. In character does she see the settings the perks are from or just the name of the perk she hasn’t commented on it so maybe not? The author may decide not to use those perks but still a fun idea of her having to fight off the cool I want it feeling for something more vital.

great chapter I don’t know much about the setting but the chapter is explaining it nicely

 

What the fuck do you wash yourself with to attract these kinds of numbskulls to your stories that insist on not reading the long elaborate multi-paragraph first-person explanations of why your characters are making the decisions they are making, and then complain about not understanding why they made the decisions they made? What the fuck is your secret, man? Did you make some writing-related wish on a monkey's paw at some point in your past?

Cliff: "I wish my stories were very popular and had plenty of readers."
Wishmaster Genie: "Okay, but most of the people who give you the feedback you crave won't actually read your work and will complain about it! Mwa Ha Ha Ha!"

 

It is, though the really big thing that she's showed an interest in is Jump Drives. Because both sides are currently limited to Jump 2, and Jump 6 drives are possible, though even the Third Imperium can't use them on every ship. If she can get the tech perks to make even so much as a Jump 3 drive, that's a big advantage.

 

Medical scanning tech like star trek tricorders could be a real godsend in battlefield triage and I think Trek verse medical tech is an option on its own. Her being a trek fan might push her that way. And it could potentially be finagled as not that implausible being that her dad is a sensor tech and she is going to a planet where terraforming is a big thing which mean at least some biology and biological recording/scanning would be decent chunks of the project. Make a kludged together version that maybe the actual scanner is the size of the whole unit in trek land and the processor is worn on the hip like a carry pouch in stead of the salt shaker and hand unit configuration

 

cliffc999 I am enjoying your story but I have a few questions?
1.From the model of Government you have described the Terran Confederation seem a closer to a Federation than a Confederation from my limited knowledge of the political sciences,so how does it operate is the Confederation a mere loose alliance of independent states which merely have a joint military and educational high command or is it in a model with a few weaker but mostly autonomous states or is it having a de facto unitary government?
2.What is the lingua fraca used in the Confedration ?(is it Esperanto?or a variant with more derivations from Hindustani,Bengali and Chinese? Or one formed wholly out of a new cloth?)
3.Also in your story Humanity(which seems liberal collectivist) is fighting against the Vilani (which seems collectivist with a more authoritative bent) is their any strong individualistic power?
4.Just how long ago did the Vilani diverge from Humanity was it before or after the Cognitive Revolution(circa 40000 years ago?)also as human means an animal belonging to genus homo and from your description they seem mostly homo sapiens would get be classified as a homo sapiens subspecies or as merely a member of genus homo)?

We can actually call the invaders Aliens as the term may stand in for Foreign invader (as the book of Ezekiel in the King James Bible illustrate) and it sounds excellent for Propaganda

 

I know nothing of the source material but you have my interest

 

"I invented the thing!"

"Wow, that's amazing! ...we can't let anyone know about this."

"What? Why not?"

"If the brass knows you're smart, they'll stick you in some well-protected research base and make you work on the most critical projects for the military."

"So?"

"You're a teenager. You want to roam around randomly doing useless things."

"I do?"

"Yes. That's why we are going to do our absolute best to prevent you from working on anything important. For your own good."

"..."

 

Such a shame you killed that mighty fine strawman you built there. Left field only had the one.

 

Even beyond being a strawman... Did you forget that this is a story? Without conflict and risk, there isn't anything to read. Would it be more sensible for things to happen that way? Maybe, but the plot would be dull

 

In addition to everything that's already been said, there's also the fact that she couldn't drop any super inventions on any tables yet. She didn't earn any CP at all, much less get to buy anything other than her initial freebie, until after she was already on her way to isolated research outpost.

I'm surprised that so many people missed the simple fact that she was planning for the future instead of busting out in the present precisely because she didn't have anything to bust out yet in the present, despite the fact her dad gave an entire exposition speech on it.

Now, of course, she's starting to earn CP and will start to actually buy things. But she cannot and will not Path to Victory or tool-assisted speedrun her way through this, and anybody who expects that kind of fic - well, I've been transparent all along that that is not what's happening here, so your disappointment is all on you and please don't constantly share it with the rest of us.

 

I think most of us got what was happening, we just didn't see the need to mention it.One of the better things about your stories is that they have depth to them, alas a few people are to shallow (or 12) to understand that sort of thing

For everyone else?
The story could still happen if she ran in to tell the government straight away, but she only had the one perk and no proof of more.
Yes the current one is suspicious, but its also no real proof. She needs something OCP or a MAJOR perk to prove that she is different from any of the other nuts running around.
So I suspect that once she has that, she will either tell people... or just decide not to, because the only way for two people to keep a secret is if one is dead, and she does suspect that she is the only hope for earth humanity.
She can get most of the resources she needs by not telling people and just showing them why she is worth investing in, but could then pull out the full story if she needs something FAST.

 

Honestly, the idea that she's not on some kind of government watchlist for young prodigies already because of her test scores is laughable. While I didn't do anywhere remotely as well as she did on tests coming out of high school, I still did really well for my area and I got people calling me up and offering me opportunities that I wish I had been in a better position to take advantage of.

She's absolutely on the short list of someone who's job it is to headhunt young geniuses and like bread dough, they're just giving her time to proof before they start working with her.

 

This. And when she does something really noticeable they will write a on a piece of paper that she is better off serving in RnD and ship her off to college waiving the rest of her community service.

 

Nah, they won't do that. The whole point of the mandatory service is to give young adults the seasoning they need to be successful and productive members of society. From the perspective of everyone else, there's nothing of value being lost by letting her finish her already shortened two years of accelerated service.

And, practically speaking, there isn't. She's already ahead of the curve because she's getting double time served, and she's getting the exposure she's going to need simply by working in the existing system.

EDIT - the two years will be over in a snap (or, they would be in any other story, but Cliff looooooves to let his arcs get away from him and balloon to ten times their planned size, not that I'm complaining) and she'll move on with the plan.

 

I'm pretty sure the conveyed conversation with her placement officer pretty decently implies she's on such a list. Some in universe interpretations of her choice could view her unfavorably as taking an "easy" assignment or a "safe" assignment choice of a paranoid afraid of another war. Or of someone thinking they could skirt their civil service time on a backwater "do nothing" site deemed "too tedious or merely so in need of bodies that they upped the time spent, because REALLY how hard is 'failing to terraform' a planet"

The real fun part is all this and more is possible with Cliff's writing

 

I'm pretty sure that the conclusion that people will come to when she starts churning out clever solutions to the terraforming problem, even if they aren't necessarily revolutionary ones that she'd be able to get if she had some of the more beefy perks potentially available is that this little genius just really likes terraforming, or perhaps ecology in general.

 

Maybe, depends on the solutions. Could be anything from engineering to hydraulic to chemical.

 

And my axe!

Hell, she could get some of the teamwork and project speed enhancing perks and just convince everyone that she is a genius at project management.

 

Ugh, I hate it when people name their kids in English when Polish has perfectly valid version! They did it with their first, Michał, why oh why didn't they name her Zofia? I mean, my brother named his daughter Sophia but that's because she was born and is raised in Ireland, and he still sometimes calls her Zośka.
And that'a another thing- it feels wrong for parents to call her by her full name and not dimunitive Zosia- kind of like a Japanesse omiting the suffix -chan. Zofia is for formal situations, Zośka and Zosia would be more common, the latter being more "soft" /affectionate version.

Other than that little snag, it's amazing as anything you write Cliff!

 

To be fair this is an earth that is heavily interconnected and sounds like countries are less sovereign states and more names to call places. Cultural bleed over is gonna occur

 

Entirely correct. The Terran Confederation's designers were not idiots. They know full well that a one world government, even if it originally came about to exist largely because the freaking alien invasion by the much larger star empire gave everyone a sudden interest in making sure that all of Terra's guns were pointing in the same direction for once, is not gonna survive in the long term unless a 'global culture' evolves.

So they're deliberately forcing a melting pot by doing things like making fluency in at least one non-native language to graduate high school, requiring that schools everywhere do a minimum necessary exposure of history and cultures of other nations as well as their own, and making sure that virtually everyone spends at least several years living abroad.

Because that's yet another reason for Public Service besides all the obvious benefits of a universal military and non-military draft - making damn sure that everybody has lived outside their own cultural and ethnic bubble at least once in their lives. Even if the vast majority of people never leave their home planet for their Public Service (especially Terrans, given how much of the Confederation's total population still lives on the motherworld), they damn sure never get posted inside of their own nation.

Basically, what used to be nations are now like states or provinces. They get their own governments and their own police forces and their own local laws, but there's a pan-national law and charter they have to stay inside the limits of, and things like military defense and national security and etc. are functions of the Confederation, not the individual member nations.

Also, on rereading that particular section to research this post the GURPS sourcebook has a typo. The opening quote that I used for the intro section is implied to be from the first Secretary-General's speech on the founding of the Confederation, but the date given in the in-book timeline for the founding is 2124, not 2127. Welp, I can tweak that.

But yeah, the Confederation is barely 40 years old as of the start of the story. So it's mostly solid - they've had two generations, after all, and heavy external pressure and really dedicated social engineering efforts to make the work go faster - but the Founding is still within living memory for a lot of people.

 

You have slain the Random Number God! Sadly you borked the quest reward system due to spaghetti coding and thus you are now stuck on level one for the rest of eternity unless you reboot and start all over again! [/Joke]

But, yes, seriously. Extracting the things you like from the Celestial Forge and then telling the rest of it that you're going to make your own with blackjack and hookers is good from a writing sense. This works far better from not only a Doylist Perspective but Watsonian when being an author. Because if you roll the dice enough, you'll get every outcome at some point, and the RNG is a cheating son of a Gun that likes to mess with people.

Also, I am wondering like poor Sophia what is running The Celestial Forge in this setting. Which makes reading it all the better for it for one of those great inevitable payouts that you like to do when explaining something from a Watsonian perspective.

 

Ok, but there is cultural bleed through and then there is erasing the basic function of a language, unless they are talking in English or whatever, Poles are going to use dimunitive forms of names. I forgot to write it but my niece Sophia is called Sofinka and her sister Mia is called Mi-yu-nya.
Besides, over a hundred years of nonexistance didn't make Polish and Poles go away, with Germans and Russians trying every trick in the book to destroy us, what makes you thing we would be less resistant to this particular overlord? We are old hats at appearing to assimilate and do our own thing when no one is looking.

Eh, whatever, Cliff can do whatever he wants, I'll just chuck it to AU shenanigans.

 

Eh, fair enough, I am not Polish and so I have missed one of the subtleties. (So why make the protag Polish? Because making her not American, like the author is, was part of my immersing in the multicultural atmosphere of the 22nd century Terran Confederation and so I went several generations back into my dad's family of mutts and grabbed one of the nationalities there.)

... although it did just occur to me that so far, 'Sophia' has been what everyone else has called her, not her folks. They didn't use her name when addressing her family in conversation. So I just thought of a fix - her name is Anglicized/genericized in the story because that's what on her official records, like basically everyone's names (Confederation cultural engineering again), and so that's what she's called in official use and by anyone outside her hometown. The reason her brother is 'Michal' is because her family still uses the Polish name versions at home and of course that's the only name for him she's ever heard, even if his birth certificate said 'Michael Nowak'.

 

I have no idea whats going on with this setting but I'm willing to learn through you. So you know, no pressure or anything.

 

Pretty sure what I quoted was from her father - thats why it was jarring, for everyone else it's normal to use the official language - is it English there too?-- and slavic languages are the weird ones with all the, uh, I forgot what changing words depending on tense/ subject is called. Sorry.

Edit: Just don't say Poland is in Eastern Europe (it's CENTRAL, damnit!)and it will be fine.

 

Her mother, and you're right, I need to patch that. Done.

As for the Confed official language... technically speaking there is no language that civilian government business is required to be transacted in, but for practicality's sake the Confederation military requires all recruits to be fluent in the same language and that language is English, yes.

So between that and the part where English is a very common language for international business and trade and etc. even today and only more so in the future, it's the most common second language (remember that all schools are required by law to require fluency in at least two languages, counting your native language, to graduate) in the Confederation.

Note that the default Traveller setting, which is set several thousand years ahead in the timelnie in the Third Imperium era that eventually formed out of the Long Night which resulted from the collapse of the Second Imperium (the contemporary Vilani of the story are the First Imperium), the common language is Galanglic, or "Galactic Anglic", and pretty much the only humans who speak any other dialect at all are either serious ethno-separatist enclaves, historical specialists in dead languages, lost colonies, or non-Imperial human cultures like the Zhodani. (Who are so far off the current starmap that our protagonist would first have to invent jump-6 drive and then spend a couple years travelling straight towards the galactic core at top speed to even see one.)

 

She won't know until she gets them, though I can't wait to see what happens when she does...

Protagonist: Real Life isn't Star Trek...

Celestial Forge: Gives knowledge on Star Trek Physics and Sciences.

Protagonist: Protagonist.exe has crashed, would you like to reboot?

Also, while Full Magic Perks are out, what about the ones that look like it but technically aren't? Like Aura from Ruby, which weaponizes the bioelectrical energy of your body, (aka your Soul) and all it's perks, as well as Alchemy from Full Metal Alchemist, which despite what it looks like, is considered a branch of Science that teaches one how to tap into and manipulate the energies of the movement of a planet's crust to perform fantastic feats?

Not to mention Endless Legend's Dust, which is really just VERY advanced nano machines...

Sorry if this was something that was explained already, but I tend to skim through comments when I can...

That's good, because while I like Lord's story on SV, I loved your CF Fic set on RIFTS , even though it has been discontinued due to unexpected and tragic events in your life. I'm glad just seeing another CF Fic from you, because it means you're still interested in writing CF Fics, despite what happened.