Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[Bluesnowman]

And if i fall asleep for 100 years, and they wake me up, and ask what tech we want most, i answer; better battaries and nuclear fusion.

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Naw lotus eater type full vr/dreammachine or mind/soul upload tech.

 

[Faralis]

I wonder what they will think if they ever learn about how much she "failed" that bio-project. Besides a lot of brown pants, of course...

 

[heralding_bubble]

I wonder what they will think if they ever learn about how much she "failed" that bio-project. Besides a lot of brown pants, of course...

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After some years as she establishes herself and her mind's potential becomes more obvious and well known someone might look back at the burned project, her then-seeming paranoia about the Vilani, and what she'd been working on just before starting there.
They could end up drawing some interesting pictures.

 

[Vrenze]

Oh God I can already hear the 'reee-ing' about ti happen regarding royalties and how "little" she is getting for revolutionizing power storage despite every logical reason being laid out deliberately to counter them.

 

[Faralis]

Oh God I can already hear the 'reee-ing' about ti happen regarding royalties and how "little" she is getting for revolutionizing power storage despite every logical reason being laid out deliberately to counter them.

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She needed the recognition, not the money, that is just a (nice) bonus.

She can patent whatever she wants, anyway... can you imagine how much money she would get if she patented the ansible instead of researching through government channels?

She wants to be alive and not enslaved before she gets money, or said money is pretty useless.


IMVHO her reactions have a lot of sense, from her perspective.

 

[Vrenze]

She needed the recognition, not the money, that is just a (nice) bonus.

She can patent whatever she wants, anyway... can you imagine how much money she would get if she patented the ansible instead of researching through government channels?

She wants to be alive and not enslaved before she gets money, or said money is pretty useless.


IMVHO her reactions have a lot of sense, from her perspective.

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While I agree with most of what you said I think the whole Garand conversation leads to the idea that her being put in an R&D situation specifically for "anything she wants" precludes her either being able to patent at all or puts her in a similar "low ball" range because the government is footing the bill and essentially paying her to do so. Which I am fine with let me be clear, that is simply how things work. The golden goose comment leads towards them wanting to keep her happy, especially with this and the ephemeral "anything else" on the table, so they'll do her a solid most likely but it won't as good as private sector gains. Which again I understand she isn't gunning for, nor does she feel she needs.

 

[litaispe]

1% of what is basically a replacement for every battery and internal combustion engine in use for an entire industrial civilization is honestly a lot of money.

800 miles for a truck with a battery that can fit in a small backpack, and be fully charged in minutes is just outright witchcraft.

 

[cliffc999]

1% of what is basically a replacement for every battery and internal combustion engine in use for an entire industrial civilization is honestly a lot of money.

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There's a reason she says that her parents (who she assigned the royalties to) are "future billionaires", yes. She knows.

Of course, in her family if her parents become billionaires then so does she but hey, as a legal dodge it worked.

800 miles for a truck with a battery that can fit in a small backpack, and be fully charged in minutes is just outright witchcraft.

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800 kilometers, or approximately 500 miles. (Amusingly, I picked that figure in honor of Tesla's first successful road test last month with a fully-loaded electric 18-wheeler, which went 500 miles pulling a full trailer before exhausting the charge. Although they needed more than one car battery.)

One of the things that's almost as hard as remembering what century I'm supposed to be in is remembering that while I'm American and think in Imperial units, Sophia is European and thinks in metric units. I have to get out my unit converter app almost every time she refers to a specific number.

And yes, Battletech power storage tech is witchcraft. The figures she gave for a Clan Elemental's battery are taken straight from the game - those thing can go for a full day without a recharge, even if you're using the battery to fuel something as power-intensive as an ER Micro Pulse Laser in addition to the exoskeleton.

 

[Amrynel]

Oh God I can already hear the 'reee-ing' about ti happen regarding royalties and how "little" she is getting for revolutionizing power storage despite every logical reason being laid out deliberately to counter them.

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Heh. "Little". It might only be a single percent but it's gross, not net, for multiple (weight, capacity, charging) OoM improvements to a core technology for an interstellar polity of fourteen billion people. That's the sort of thing that makes you Bruce Wayne levels of rich.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

One of the things that's almost as hard as remembering what century I'm supposed to be in is remembering that while I'm American and think in Imperial units, Sophia is European and thinks in metric units. I have to do unit conversions every time she refers to a specific number.

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You could have gone British with your character? We use an unholy hybrid of Metric and Imperial, so if you accidentally just use Imperial measurements completely then a British MC doing that isn't SOD breaking. Though, if you ever feel the desire to write a british character, I'm willing to brit pick for free if needed.

 

[cliffc999]

Heh. "Little". It might only be a single percent but it's gross, not net, for multiple (weight, capacity, charging) OoM improvements to a core technology for an interstellar polity of fourteen billion people. That's the sort of thing that makes you Bruce Wayne levels of rich.

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Also note that a goodly chunk of the royalties are being paid in stock options instead of cash.

Stock options. In one of the Confederation's primary shipbuilders and defense contractors. Shortly before the start of either the Fourth Interstellar War, the introduction of a revolutionary new form of jumpdrive, or both.

 

[Addlcove]

WHY do I keep doing that?!?

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Better this than the other way around, imagine how many checks / how much paperwork you would get returned invalidated if you habitually wrote 2122 on the date markings

Loved the chapter.

 

[Narwhale]

I do love the reaction the Genius Patrol dude had to the mention of FTL Communication. Like, it's one of those things where they know the limits of their technology and have mostly settled into an understanding of what is possible and what isn't and what they can't do with their understanding of the Universe.

The universe is calm and orderly, you know what can be done and what can't. Then this fucking Twenty-year-old bean-sprout comes along and is all "Aight bet."

It's just, "Hi, I'm going to revolutionize everything we have and I'm going to completely upend every preconceived notion of what we can and cannot do."

 

[cliffc999]

Ugh, the things you do when you post a chapter late at night before going to bed.

I'd left out several entire paragraphs from Sharik Yangila's monologue, because her interlude was also supposed to be a reader's introduction to Vilani society as seen by an Imperial grandee and not just by Terrans guessing from the outside. Because I'd already known this stuff, and I was tired enough to forget that the readers didn't and the entire reason I was posting the monologue was to get an excuse to also post the context. So, went back and inserted them.

The short version is that Vilani society is indeed a deliberate social engineering project - it's basically Confucianism if Confucius had had access to the social and psychological sciences of an advanced interstellar society to help him design it, as well as generations of other psychologists and sociologists and political science majors working on refining the design, as opposed to being one ancient Chinese genius who had nothing to work with except his own preconceptions and intuition.

And that's why they don't innovate. It's not that they can't, it's that they've gotten their tech as far as it needs to get to sustain their empire and they deliberately don't take it any further. And they've been doing this for so long that most of them don't even think about it anymore.

Remember when Lt. Prescott was telling Sophia how Vilani ship captains worked off their tactical libraries instead of innovating, but the libraries still worked because they contained centuries' worth of experimental results?

She was right. And that's how Vilani society does basically everything.

 

[Faralis]

The short version is that Vilani society is indeed a deliberate social engineering project - it's basically Confucianism if Confucius had had access to the social and psychological sciences of an advanced interstellar society to help him design it, as well as generations of other psychologists and sociologists and political science majors working on refining the design, as opposed to being one ancient Chinese genius who had nothing to work with except his own preconceptions and intuition.

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In their defense, exaggeratedly insular and conservative to the point of being almost stagnant societies can be pretty stable, as the ancient Egyptians and the Chinese the Vilani are almost based can demonstrate.

 

[Panaka]

In their defense, exaggeratedly insular and conservative to the point of being almost stagnant societies can be pretty stable, as the ancient Egyptians and the Chinese the Vilani are almost based can demonstrate.

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Right up until a wild out of contex problem shows up.

"Oh, Hello there Sophia."

 

[Vrenze]

Right up until a wild out of contex problem show op.

"Oh, Hello there Sophia."

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Best to always have openings to your box when using "in the box" thinking

 

[Sto Odin]

Excellent chapter. I'm a little surprised the Genius Patrol was able to think outside the box enough to just ask her straight out if something inexplicable happened to make her superintelligent: that speaks well of their flexibility.

Not a huge fan of villain interludes in general, but at least this villain has an understandable perspective. It's a nice touch that she's non-Vilani herself but still devoted to the Empire as a system: after all, it really does work well for people like her.

Is "the next Newton or MacAndrew" an Easter egg of yours, or one of the many Traveller authors, or just a wild coincidence that Charles Sheffield used the same name?

 

[litaispe]

And yes, Battletech power storage tech is witchcraft. The figures she gave for a Clan Elemental's battery are taken straight from the game - those thing can go for a full day without a recharge, even if you're using the battery to fuel something as power-intensive as an ER Micro Pulse Laser in addition to the exoskeleton.

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Speaking of magic; BattleTech's heatsinks are also just outright magic.

Fully solid-state internal radiators which somehow shed megawatts of power (maybe even gigawatts at peak) with a duty cycle measured in centuries. These things would radically change how compact a fission reactor or lasering system is all the way down to computer systems

Double-heatsinks aka "Freezers" (like some other BTech metamaterials) apparently require 0-gee manufacturing because otherwise the magic doesn't crystalize just right.

 

[cliffc999]

Is "the next Newton or MacAndrew" an Easter egg of yours, or one of the many Traveller authors, or just a wild coincidence that Charles Sheffield used the same name?

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It is my own personal easter egg to Charles Sheffield's novels about Dr. MacAndrew, yes. The inventor of the Terran jumpdrive is unnamed in canon.

Not a huge fan of villain interludes in general, but at least this villain has an understandable perspective. It's a nice touch that she's non-Vilani herself but still devoted to the Empire as a system: after all, it really does work well for people like her.

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Sharik Yangila is a canon character from the GURPS sourcebook, with a canon background, so I can't take credit for her character design. My only tweak was to slightly change the mixture of how much personal ambition versus genuine patriotism motivated her actions, although she's still got a powerful amount of both.

 

[Faralis]

Right up until a wild out of contex problem shows up.

"Oh, Hello there Sophia."

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They didn't survived too much even without Sophia's OOC, so she is not wrong about her fear of the Earth Confederation, at all. She is completely right in being a massive danger for their empire.

Is just that this time is going to hurt even more ...

 

[Jaykko mimmzy]

And then you went to MIT and after a year of dedicated research - and we had more than a little bit to do with how easy you found it to apply for unupervised lab time - seemed to produce no results except for one microbiology project that, given how thoroughly you destroyed it and then abandoned the entire effort, was apparently an abject failure."

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Why that may be true, doesn't the Terran Hegemony have pretty fast and diverse terraforming tech? It was blacked-boxed as a control mechanism for protection and influence, and if Sofia can shove the data of it off to a different team then new 'hidden' colonies can start.
To Ragnarok-proof tech means hidden devices can last a long time.

Saving the Past to Save the Future

is a series of snippets by Fabius Maximus that cover the how Sophia's tech base can help the Terran Confederacy of her own universe survive. It follows a time-traveling Calderon preparing for the Reunification Wars and everything after. From space stations to "safeholds" the goal is to preserve their culture and lives, not necessarily win.

But Sophia still needs more perks for her people if she is going to make the difference.
Some perks like from Honor Harrington and Stellaris can effect you faction and not just you. They need to make better ships fast, since all major military action is void navy. Ships have long build times not counting prototyping and training crew. If there is really three years till conflict an HPG array is possible, but not enough to tip the balance of the seemingly imminent focused push of the Vilani. Unless the start putting up sub-capital weapons on ever colony as an anti orbital weapon system I don't see how she'll pull this off in the timeframe.

 

[TroyX]

Just had a thought on the Genius Patrol guessing that Sophia wasn't always this intelligent.

I remember Cliff saying psychic powers are a thing in this setting. IIRC, he said that they aren't well known or understood at this point, but that in super secret circles of top-classified information, their existence is known.

If I've remembered that right...then who wants to bet the Genius Patrol thinks Sophia has some latent psychic power that boosted her intelligence?

Ugh, the things you do when you post a chapter late at night before going to bed.

I'd left out several entire paragraphs from Sharik Yangila's monologue, because her interlude was also supposed to be a reader's introduction to Vilani society as seen by an Imperial grandee and not just by Terrans guessing from the outside. Because I'd already known this stuff, and I was tired enough to forget that the readers didn't and the entire reason I was posting the monologue was to get an excuse to also post the context. So, went back and inserted them.

The short version is that Vilani society is indeed a deliberate social engineering project - it's basically Confucianism if Confucius had had access to the social and psychological sciences of an advanced interstellar society to help him design it, as well as generations of other psychologists and sociologists and political science majors working on refining the design, as opposed to being one ancient Chinese genius who had nothing to work with except his own preconceptions and intuition.

And that's why they don't innovate. It's not that they can't, it's that they've gotten their tech as far as it needs to get to sustain their empire and they deliberately don't take it any further. And they've been doing this for so long that most of them don't even think about it anymore.

Remember when Lt. Prescott was telling Sophia how Vilani ship captains worked off their tactical libraries instead of innovating, but the libraries still worked because they contained centuries' worth of experimental results?

She was right. And that's how Vilani society does basically everything.

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Thanks for the heads up! I'll go back and reread that section in a bit. I suggest you also note this at the beginning of your next chapter, for those that don't read the between-chapter posts.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

and allowed them to persist in the same informal autonomy with which we accomodate the Vegans.

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Do they also accommodate the Vegetarians? Or were the defeated by the cure that is bacon? [/Joke]

Sorry, probably a bit of amusing Traveller Canon. But I had to make the joke.

 

[Sto Odin]

If I've remembered that right...then who wants to bet the Genius Patrol thinks Sophia has some latent psychic power that boosted her intelligence?

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Or if not the whole Genius Patrol, at least one/a few of them, who managed to get the rest of them to take the idea seriously. It's rational for them to be grasping at straws for an explanation, and psionics are a genuine world feature even not well developed at this place and time. Superintelligence doesn't actually feature in Traveller psionics, if memory serves me correct, but again, it's not like they would know that.

(There's another group of humans settled way, way beyond what is currently Vilani known space who leaned into psionics in a big way. The Zhodani are the classic Bad Guys in the standard Third Imperium game setting, thousands of years in the future of this story.)

 

[cliffc999]

To the best of my knowledge, the existence of psionics is not even 'top secret' territory at this time, its 'neither the Confederation or the Vilani know it exists' territory.

As to how they figured out her current IQ level is notably augmented from her earlier life, since I don't anticipate any opportunity to get it into exposition and it's not load-bearing to the story I'll just mention it here; they finished debriefing some of her teachers and fellow students from high school and grade school, and the reports of her there simply don't jibe even with a 'she was that smart but hiding it' routine on a close analysis. And as the Great Detective once said, once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, is...?

 

[TroyX]

I reread the expanded section, looks good and lays things out more clearly. Also I'm reminded of something I forgot to mention before.

The former Sarpuugi (sp?), Kadoc (sp?) - this is an entirely different perspective on the last war. For the Terrans it was end of the line, they were about to be conquered and overrun, but for the Vilani they had thrown the best they had at the Terrans, their finest military mind in generations, and were still losing so much to attrition that the war was going to be ordered done.

Of course, not sure which would've happened first, Terra surrendering or the Ministry saying "Pull back." Just a little timing difference either way and things would've changed dramatically.

Also, I forgot about the bit where two wars from now, in canon, Terra takes over/destroys the Imperium, so I guess the current Sarpuugi is totally justified in her paranoia after all.

 

[Domar7431]

"he Vilani had had those tools" forgot a letter there

 

[cliffc999]

The former Sarpuugi (sp?), Kadoc (sp?) - this is an entirely different perspective on the last war. For the Terrans it was end of the line, they were about to be conquered and overrun, but for the Vilani they had thrown the best they had at the Terrans, their finest military mind in generations, and were still losing so much to attrition that the war was going to be ordered done.

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Minor perspective point: Kadur Erasharshi was still fighting that war only with the fleet units already allocated to him, i.e., a provincial frontier fleet. But yes, he was the best Vilani admiral seen in generations.

If the Vilani had thrown the entirety of their Grand Fleet at Terra, Terra of course would have no chance. It's just, the Vilani Imperium hasn't mustered their entire fleet, or even a majority of it, against a single target in forever and a half.

 

[Sto Odin]

To the best of my knowledge, the existence of psionics is not even 'top secret' territory at this time, its 'neither the Confederation or the Vilani know it exists' territory.

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It would still be surprising if nobody in the Confederation believes in psionics, though, since there are plenty of believers -- and even the occasional government program investigating the idea -- here in Real Life. My thought that there should be more of that cropping up in a setting where natural law allows the Zhodani is just headcanon, though.

I may also have been remembering that bit in the old GURPS rulebook suggesting that a Delusion can occasionally turn out to be correct without making that character any less crazy.