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Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

Reader mode
Monsterboy said:
I also find you tend to be needlessly verbose, telling in paragraphs what can be said in sentences. Making the issue more glaring is a significant amount of fluff, autism-level tell-not-show worldbuilding, and digressions not quite at Victor Hugo's level, to the point where I can skip entire paragraphs without missing anything. Work on that editing and trim the blubber hard. The plot advancement is glacial because of it and there's little actual content that doesn't read like a wiki entry, though what is there is good. Some of that is the nature of world-building, but it needs to be broken down into more relevant chunks, and not giving the readers what is essentially the entire abridged history of the Confederation unless the parts are actively relevant.

Here is one of the more egregious examples. She recognizes, Honor Harrington, then goes on a massive digression tangently related to it that just goes on and on and on. Most of it we didn't really need to know, and it could have easily been cut down into a single paragraph.

You're not a bad writer, you just need an actual plan, an outline, and to stick to it. Don't bombard the reader under worldbuilding, it's like salt, everything needs it, but once you reach a point it turns everything into a salt lick. Show don't tell.
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This is a lot of words for "I don't like your writing style". A bunch of us here *do* like it, so if you find it that offensive, I'd suggest hitting "ignore thread" and moving on.

Also, can the Starcraft digression be taken somewhere else? It's gone far past "could be relevant".
 
Tbh, when it comes to Cliff being excessively verbose in his writing, yeah, I agree that it's a problem that I'm not exactly thrilled about because yeah, sometimes my eyes glaze over a bit.

But also, I've been reading his work long enough to recognize that the reason he writes like that is because, over the years he's been inundated by hordes of mouthbreathing goobers who have the collective attention span of a week old peanut and possess less comprehension of the concept of 'delayed gratification' than a jar of yeast has. His style has adapted to the kinds of people who flounce in from the latest trash isekai anime, read a chapter where he doesn't hold your hand and expects his readers to apply a modicum of critical analysis to to realize he's got a plan for the story, who then rage because whaaaaaah, coil kidinapped inspired inventor taylor, now she's fucked forever! Fic dead! Whaaaaaaaah.

And then, when taylor finishes that arc and coil dies slowly, painfully and alone in a ditch from a truly astonishing amount of radiation in a way that is very satisfying even re-reading years later, the exact same people cry whaaaaaah, inspired inventor taylor joined the wards!? Now she's fucked forever! Fic Dead! Whaaaaaaaah.

EDIT - Also, like, at Cliff's worst he's not half as verbose as David Weber is at his best, and I still enjoy his work.
 
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Vrenze said:
I'd think that the GP would get screened specifically for that among other things. At least if the people above them are any sort of competent which seems to be how most of Cliff's writing goes. Not to say it's impossible though.
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Yeah, it is a bit disappointing, but as I've said before, I'll enjoy it regardless.

There's very obviously a limit to how much you can fundamentally screen people, and there's also a limit to what you can really screen. Even if you select for the best traits for the job, the reality is that the job itself will push them towards ambition and such as a matter of course. Plus, y'know, people slip through.

But yeah, I actually don't agree about the verbosity, I think it's perfectly fine though I can understand why people might not like it. Honestly, it would warm my heart to see something on the level of BCF's verbosity and word count enrage those with a lack of reading comprehension.
 
Honestly, I kinda like verbosity. Especially in Celestial Forge stuff. Going through how a person reacts to getting a perk can really help with understanding who that character is as a person.

Either way, I eagerly await the next chapter for all the SciFi tech empire building.
 
Vrenze said:
I'd think that the GP would get screened specifically for that among other things. At least if the people above them are any sort of competent which seems to be how most of Cliff's writing goes. Not to say it's impossible though.
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The belief that you can just 'screen out' corruption, personal ambition and other such human foibles is one of the surest tells that someone doesn't actually know much about how large organizations work. Everyone who is energetic enough to actually get themselves into a position of influence has personal ambitions, and this isn't necessarily even a bad thing. Some of them will think the GP could be more effective if it ran on different rules, or took a different approach to things. Some will be trying to polish their resume, and use this post as a stepping stone to higher office. Some will be looking for opportunities to benefit themselves, or their friends and family. Since they come from different agencies each of them will also be looking to protect the reputation of his agency, and advance its agenda at the expense of the others.

That's just human nature, and aside from keeping outright graft to a minimum there's nothing you can do about it. If you set up an oversight committee, that group will also be subject to the same problems. If you dream up a testing system to keep out the 'wrong sorts', the tests will be designed and administered by another group of ambitions and self-interested people. Even mind reading tech wouldn't solve the problem, because the most problematic ideologues genuinely believe they're trying to make things better.
 
I mean, there's also the fact that you don't really want to screen out any ambition and forethought? A GP full of members who have no plan forward for the genii they find, who don't want to achieve things with them, selfish or otherwise, is honestly a hunk of deadwood way worse than string-pullers trying to rule the roost.
 
ShaperV said:
The belief that you can just 'screen out' corruption,
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I'm not saying general corruption, I meant screening out people who would purposely redirect people for selfish reasons. One particular type of behavior which can be tracked. And then either accounted for if they have otherwise AMAZING credentials or they get ignored or removed for/from the GP
 
Vrenze said:
I'm not saying general corruption, I meant screening out people who would purposely redirect people for selfish reasons. One particular type of behavior which can be tracked. And then either accounted for if they have otherwise AMAZING credentials or they get ignored or removed for/from the GP
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And what was said that 'is likely to purposefully redirect people for selfish reasons' is a category so broad, vague and frankly, nonsensical that it would be silly to try and implement measures against it in a book club, let alone the highest reaches of interstellar governance.

And thats before i get into my point before your post. Ambition is a good thing, however difficult it might be for people to believe. Choosing who to trust by screening for the lack of it, picking 'safe pairs of hands' all the time, is how you get...

The Vilani, kinda. Huh.
 
blackshadow111 said:
And what was said that 'is likely to purposefully redirect people for selfish reasons' is a category so broad, vague and frankly, nonsensical that it would be silly to try and implement measures against it in a book club, let alone the highest reaches of interstellar governance.

And thats before i get into my point before your post. Ambition is a good thing, however difficult it might be for people to believe. Choosing who to trust by screening for the lack of it, picking 'safe pairs of hands' all the time, is how you get...

The Vilani, kinda. Huh.
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Please stop over inflating my position. I am not advocating for removing people with ambition. I am saying you could filter SOME people TO THE BEST OF ABILITY OR OTHERWISE MODERATING THEIR TENDENCIES who seem to only further their own ends to the detriment of others. It can be fairly simple especially if they've held a management position previously.

Did they have high turnover?
Was the high turnover because people left or got promoted/moved higher/left on good terms according to their exit interview?
How are they viewed by their peers?
Do the people they recruit/hire do well after they leave, if they've left?
 
All this argument does is reinforce my opinion that the most powerful perks in jumpchain are the ones that let you more and more easily manage larger and more diverse groups of normal people. Screw Xianxia, give me more organizational, management and logistics perks!
 
Domino said:
All this argument does is reinforce my opinion that the most powerful perks in jumpchain are the ones that let you more and more easily manage larger and more diverse groups of normal people. Screw Xianxia, give me more organizational, management and logistics perks!
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Seriously. If you can get perks that basically give you uber management and logistical skills you can rule the world. Especially if they're automated or automatically delegated to specialists that may or may not have came with the perk.
 
Prince Chrom said:
I definitely remember some canon source that all humans in Starcraft are at least a small amount psychic, but most of them don't have enough power to really do anything with.
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Except the Earth forces, which turned up during the Brood War, canonically had no clue about psionics, despite being technologically superior to the Terrans to a ludicrous degree. To put it into perspective, what the Terrans called battlecruisers, Earth called scout frigates.

And yet, despite this, the Earth forces got their shit kicked in because psionics was considered superstition and they completely discounted the Confederation's Ghost program as nothing more than propaganda. The entire Koprulu sector was an out of context problem for Earth.
 
Gotta remember the back story. The humans in the Koprulu sector are the descendants of people who were sent as slave labor and not genocided with other "deviants". That includes anyone with psi potential at the time. Though are you sure because the UED was watching them a long time as well and they did have ghosts when they came to seize the sector. Their plan for the overmind depended on them.
 
To note, the UED did have a Ghost program, or at least an equivalent, even after the UPL tried to wipe out mutants.

And on the topic of StarCraft ships, I don't really know what to say other than, why are they so inconsistent with everything??? Like, one book described the Hyperion's Battlecruiser class as being 2 leagues (or 9 fucking kilometres) then in another book a Class of Battlecruiser that's supposed to be even bigger is described as a fucking tenth of the size…

Cliff, I dunno what to say, but please, if Zofia does get StarCraft stuff, make it big.
 
Narwhale said:
To note, the UED did have a Ghost program, or at least an equivalent, even after the UPL tried to wipe out mutants.

And on the topic of StarCraft ships, I don't really know what to say other than, why are they so inconsistent with everything??? Like, one book described the Hyperion's Battlecruiser class as being 2 leagues (or 9 fucking kilometres) then in another book a Class of Battlecruiser that's supposed to be even bigger is described as a fucking tenth of the size…

Cliff, I dunno what to say, but please, if Zofia does get StarCraft stuff, make it big.
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We do have an upper limit on how large they can be, because Protoss Carriers are similar size to Battlecruisers, and are canonically 1.3 km long, while Motherships are larger and are 3 km to each side.
 
Vrenze said:
Can yall please take this to a Starcraft general thread? Narwhale is the only one that even mentioned this story and people have been going for a few back and forths of pure StarCraft.
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There's a StarCraft thread on QQ?

Eh, regardless, Vren is right and we should probably stick to talking about the story.
 
Vrenze said:
Can yall please take this to a Starcraft general thread? Narwhale is the only one that even mentioned this story and people have been going for a few back and forths of pure StarCraft.
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TBF, it started with me and Blade4 discussing the better psychic options Cliff could take and then debating the merits of Starcraft psionics.
But, yeah, it has meandered a bit hasn't it?
 
Mgunh1 said:
TBF, it started with me and Blade4 discussing the better psychic options Cliff could take and then debating the merits of Starcraft psionics.
But, yeah, it has meandered a bit hasn't it?
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That and repeated 'suggestions', not saying yall because it went more to 'derail' rather than 'repeated calls for', tend to not go over well in a Cliff thread.

Thanks for the consideration.
 
I feel like starcraft stuff would be too overwhelming for this story. Like, the only thing that I think might be useful without overwhelming the existing setting would be the "terran buildings can fly" aspect of the terran tech base, but I also don't feel like outside of the starcraft universe that it's really viable in the sense that an operation tempo is going to be high enough to have whole bases leapfrogging over each other in a military or industrial scenario.

It's like how the battletech stuff isn't going to be introducing mechs, but she is going to take the FTL and similar associated technology to augment what already exists. If she got a terran, or god forbid Protoss, tech download, the cool shit like (warp ftl) she might introduce is already covered by the battletech stuff
 
Domino said:
I feel like starcraft stuff would be too overwhelming for this story. Like, the only thing that I think might be useful without overwhelming the existing setting would be the "terran buildings can fly" aspect of the terran tech base, but I also don't feel like outside of the starcraft universe that it's really viable in the sense that an operation tempo is going to be high enough to have whole bases leapfrogging over each other in a military or industrial scenario.

It's like how the battletech stuff isn't going to be introducing mechs, but she is going to take the FTL and similar associated technology to augment what already exists. If she got a terran, or god forbid Protoss, tech download, the cool shit like (warp ftl) she might introduce is already covered by the battletech stuff
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I think it's more that right now she needs tech advances that the existing Confederation industrial base can manage with at most one set of "building tools" to make, because the 4th war is coming soon. And, she needs to figure out what advances she can introduce that satisfy that constraint as well as providing a sufficient advantage, and not blowing her cover. Which, eventually, will probably be less of an issue, but right now she's just a really smart young lady.

Now, if she gets any more of the "gimme stuff" perks, or a "special ability" option, that might change things, but right now she needs to work with what the Confederation has, and can mass-produce.
 
cliffc999 said:
Heck, one of Honor's greatest contributions to RMN naval superiority was also one of the most easily overlooked - she's the one who got Admiral Hemphill and Admiral White Haven actually talking to each other, instead of past each other, and when the RMN's best R&D director finally got on the same page as the RMN's most senior field commander, then shit actually started working.
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My recollection of the genesis of the FTL coms in the Honor-verse was Sonja reading a report how Honor used detecting the grav waves caused by a ship's emergence into normal space to co-ordinate with her taskforce across a star system - i.e. her pickets dipped in and out of normal space to send 'morse code' grav wave 'signals' to other ships - thus running rings around her opposition who didn't have sensors finely tuned enough to pick up individual waves or any reason to pay attention to them outside of hyperspace.

Sonja basically looked at that and went 'what if something else could send grav pulses that can be detected by hyperspace grav sensors?'

So Honor invented it, but Sonja refined it into a FTL comm system.
 
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Random story relevant thought: I don't know the Traveller universe, but I wonder what other big fish are in semi-local space? There's the Vilani, but humanity has shit intel coverage regarding just the Vilani. They don't even know how big the Vilani empire is, how far it extends, or if there's other civilizations out there.

But I trust that Cliff has already thought about this. So, my question (and food for thought) is, assuming Sophia manages to get her Jump-9 drive functional, how many of those newly accessible systems are already occupied by other space polities? Cause that'd be another layer to the shit sundae if humanity puts their hope on using a Jump-9 drive to expand to unoccupied systems, only to find out the "un" part was false.

Note: I didn't say what the new layer of the sundae was made of, as having more space nations to speak to might be a tool against the Vilani. Or it could be a devouring hivemind eager to eat all biomass in existence, either or.
 
The fun thing is they can at least try now not trapped by a vastly larger empire. Exploration is always risky but a drive that lets them go functionally anywhere and very good terraforming tech to boot should open so many options. It also reshapes the political landscape and calculus because now the empire is not a omnipresent problem they have to push against. If they just hold the choke points and cause no problems the empire has little reason to poke at them.

Unless they see direct evidence they won't even believe upstart barbarians have revolutionized ftl either. They still will want to move KF hybrid production to earth away from the border though.
 
To note, actually, the Galaxy is approximately, tip to tip, 40000 Paraecs across (I believe the number is 30-40 thousand, but whatever). Assuming the Vilani travel at Jump 2 the whole way and they still have the week wait time between activation and return, it'd take them nearly 800 years to go from one end of the galaxy to the other. That's basically drawing a straight line between one tip and the other and following that line to a T.

They've been in space a while, but not long enough that an 800 year voyage would seem worth it. And that's not even counting the fact that you're barely exploring anything else outside the planned route.

In short, I'm pretty sure that the Vilani empire is small, all things considered, and I'm pretty sure outside of their empire, maybe on the other side of the galaxy there are other alien species.
 
Narwhale said:
In short, I'm pretty sure that the Vilani empire is small, all things considered, and I'm pretty sure outside of their empire, maybe on the other side of the galaxy there are other alien species.
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As a feudal empire it cant be that large because the kings/emperor power only extend as far as their reach or their direct loyal vassals. And they never have enough genuinely loyal vassals and not schemers. Part of only having jump 2 is probably a control method to keep the empire from getting so large no central authority can control it and the fringes start getting ideas. Finding out Earth has a jump 9 or better engine and maybe ftl comms is going to cause them all sorts of havok because as much as they will want them it will also scare and piss off many nobles because this would allow the central throne to far more micromanage the colonies. But then they cant afford not to get that tech or destroy it because it would allow earth a great advantage and to freely expand without their current engines very odd limits.
 
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