Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Makes sense; "Easier" does not mean "Easy".
Right, kettenkrads are even more awesome than bendy-track-cycles, you are correct.Actually, these kind.
Lieutenant Fusilier in The Farthest Reaches
- Thread starter open_sketch
- Start date
- Original Mature
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah, realised my mistake mere seconds too late, haha
- Location
- Yes
With this noise?
Nobody else has commented on this, but I thought it was really cute and did a lot of work for not many words. Also, quite jealous of waking up at 94% charge.
I spotted this.
In general this mission is quite worrying, we're not necessarily concerned about one planet as much as an entire campaign of work against, for all we know, half the coreward frontier. If the planets are that similar then it almost certainly indicates that stuff has gotten through the gates, and short of blowing the gate up we're going to have to follow the gates in reverse.
Sounds like Kennedy's job needs inhuman patience. We know anyone who's inhuman?
This tells us some fairly interesting stuff about the RN, actually. They're allowing machine officers, or perhaps more precisely encouraging them, and also the way they operate is closer to the modern RN, with dedicated Royal Fleet Auxiliaries and Auxiliary Officers instead of the Hearts-of-Oak era system with hiring random ships or using clapped out frigates as transports and supporting sudden taskings with a reserve of a thousand half-pay Lieutenants on the shore.
I hope we're in the Early 20th Century RN, because the coolest way for this to work is as follows:
- Royal Navy, professional seafaring force. Mix of human and machine officers, all machine enlisted.
- Royal Naval Reserve, fleet auxiliaries and spare crew for the Royal Navy. All machine, top to bottom, with the machines specifically those that work aboard ships in their normal jobs.
- Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, have a go heroes with no previous naval experience beyond their RNVR training, to provide spare officers. All human.
E:
Yes and no? If I'm right then they're almost certainly both officers of the Royal Naval Reserve, with one serving currently and one not.
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- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
just wanna comment real quick on this
i experience flashbacks in real life. not too often these days, thank god, but i do. and while this very much is a joke, it's also a riff on a particular dissociative experience related to them i've experienced.
it's meant to feel kinda absurd and make you feel a bit bad for laughing. a reality of trauma and recovery is that it's often mundane and absurd even as it's tearing you up. just instead of blue screening i like... go to the kitchen and eat a single piece of bread because my brain doesn't have the energy right now to smear something on it, which honestly is the same energy.
Undead-Spaceman
Skeleton Supreme
- Location
- Somewhere in Orbit
I missed this line earlier but do the assorted tractors, kettenkrads, and hoverbikes actually have equine designs on them? Like so:
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
no, it's just how the terminology played out. single rider open vehicles are all horses now regardless of what they look like or how they move, and such vehicles are dominant because all the robots are used to them. this has eclipsed actual horses to the point where if you want to talk about the animal, you have to be specific.
Sounds like they're off to fight the Necrons. Bit of a shame that, those Gauss rifles will outrange them and 'cron've got the better bayonets (their drill is shit, of course, but it's what it is.)
I'd say that Mister Parlow made a mistake not taking a protective detail-but of course he had a Garry Gameskeeper around, maybe even a black-enameled African robot with serious experience in such matters, or an exotic Japanese mercenary.
I'd say that Mister Parlow made a mistake not taking a protective detail-but of course he had a Garry Gameskeeper around, maybe even a black-enameled African robot with serious experience in such matters, or an exotic Japanese mercenary.
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- Location
- Washington State
Echoes of Colonel Potter I suppose, from MASH, who shot his jeep after a tank drove over it.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Look, just tell me that this task force isn't under command of an officer named Smith.
Heh, I've used the joke about needing to practice sleeping more multiple times this week.
I dunno, the machines seem pretty human. Dora seems to be particularly patient and detail-oriented though.
Condolences. I'm glad I don't do that much dreaming overall, that sounds very rough.
For some reason I feel like there's something I see in Theda that resonates with me. It might not necessarily be there, but when I talk about needing external validation for self-assurance, that's something I know from myself that I feel like I see in her.
Heh, I've used the joke about needing to practice sleeping more multiple times this week.
I dunno, the machines seem pretty human. Dora seems to be particularly patient and detail-oriented though.
Condolences. I'm glad I don't do that much dreaming overall, that sounds very rough.
For some reason I feel like there's something I see in Theda that resonates with me. It might not necessarily be there, but when I talk about needing external validation for self-assurance, that's something I know from myself that I feel like I see in her.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I adore the faux-Victorian aesthetic. I bet that other company assigned to Earth wears silly hats and still rides organic horses.
Are there Royal Charter Companies in space equivalent to the East India Company? Operating as basically independent nations in the far reaches of human explored space, maintaining their own 'merchant' marines? Getting into the occasional tangle with the Army and Navy.
Are there Royal Charter Companies in space equivalent to the East India Company? Operating as basically independent nations in the far reaches of human explored space, maintaining their own 'merchant' marines? Getting into the occasional tangle with the Army and Navy.
the state of the galaxy
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Probably a little, though tangles aren't likely. Machines are very Friendly AI sorts and won't tolerate that sort of thing. There's also the factor that there's a lot of space that isn't part of the British Empire out there: the Brits actually don't have borders at all with the spinward and antispinward frontiers and are now basically backfilling all the stuff inside their claims, which to be clear is still huge.
The cosmology of this universe is extremely weird, but basically here's the galaxy right now.
So basically, the galaxy in MaidsVerse operates on a variation of some older theories of how the solar system worked writ large. There's a massive 'star forge' at the centre of the galaxy which is constantly spewing out stars into the void, and they orbit out in a great spiral as they slowly burn out, migrating until they are lost to the darkness of intergalatic space and dissipate to nothingness. The heat of stars corresponds to their age: young stars burn more intensely, old stars barely heat the void. Finally, while there very much is a vacuum, space retains a vital heat from the stars. The result is that the galaxy literally has a temperature gradient which is in addition to the one that exists around individual stars.
Space also just has a lot more shit in it than we're used to. Coreward, the stars are incredibly, impossibly dense. Rimward, the stars have spread out, but they've ejected all the matter they're made of, which is primarily hydrogen and oxygen. The result is that in the Activate Zone, it is not at all uncommon to find raindrops rolling down your spaceship's window, and far out in the rim, it actually snows in space.
The red zone is what might be considered 'settled' space. It's basically a squashed sphere that's about as large as the thickness of the galaxy, made up of a whole bunch of oddly shaped and interlocked human nations with fuzzy claims to certain areas of space. These spaces tend to be very strange, long string-like chains rather than spheres, following the whims of early space exploration, and has enormous gaps inside it. Inside that zone, more than 90% of the stars have not been so much as visited, because...
Well... just that zone right there? There's like 30 billion stars in there. And this is a universe which is downright lousy with habitable worlds.
So essentially, there's infinite space to play, and humans have been playing. The vast majority of worlds are settled by a single family who use it as a seasonal estate, or by a small number of machines mining, farming, etc. There was a brief scrambled to grab up stars, but its almost passe at this point as the claimed space is slowly backfilled by intrepid sorts looking for some resource to exploit or somewhere to vacation in the winter. Exploration is done sometimes by bored sorts, and the green zone represents the farthest reaches of human explorers so far, but thus far they haven't found anything terribly interesting.
Directions in space are given as north-south toward faces of the disc, rimward and coreward in and out, and spinward and antispinward (or counterspinward if you're American).
As for FTL travel, so they use this solar sails they basically push them along the howling 'solar winds' of energy from the star forge and surrounding stars. I'm going to explain this briefly in the actual story, but in essence, ships in this universe have very very high speeds, but very very slow accelerations. For the quite fast ships of the modern era, it'll take a few days to get to the nearest star, but then only a few days more to carry you to another sector, and just a few days more from there to cross human space totally. Ships can get becalmed in eddies in the solar wind, but when they do, it just means they aren't accelerating very much, they aren't slowing down. It is also notably faster to travel toward or away from the galactic core than it is to go laterally, which has 'squished' human space into the big oval shape on the map there. This is because you almost never get becalmed moving in those directions, while moving along the spirals is a lot less predictable. This also makes far-ranging spinward or antispinward exploration rather hard to plan out, so generally it isn't done much: machines haven't much motivation to do it, and can generally convince humans it's not worth it either.
This clever system allows us to have travel time drama within human space, while still allowing Miss Polestar to say 'you know what, fuck this' and galavant off to where the stars are cold for a while.
Humans discover garden worlds all the time with their own unique ecosystems: some of them were settled in small numbers, others turned into preserves. But the majority of habitable worlds they find are 'false starts': they developed microbes, maybe simple plant life, but then reached an ecological equilibrium and never grew more complex while they were still in the core zone where all the excess energy being pumped into the system could drive rapid Lamarckian evolution, and never will before their star grows too cold to sustain life. On these worlds, you seed various Terran species, they promptly and easily spread, then you just pick a particularly scenic bit for your manor. Sometimes, as a flex, families terraform dead rocks into artificial planets suited to their tastes: The Lovelaces in Maid to Love You are literally crafting themselves a perfect Pacific Island-themed paradise for the giggles.
Humans have yet to find a peer in the universe, but they keep finding two things: 'potential peers' in the coreward frontier who might one day evolve sentience, and 'precursors' toward the rimward frontier, species that once had empires but are now, mysteriously, gone. But honestly, there's a fairly strong probability at this point that there are entire alien spaces who have fallen through the considerable cracks of human notice within settled space, nevermind anywhere else.
A popular passtime for young students is seizing the university's signalling lab and flashing rude messages in morse code out to distance stars. Nothing has come of it yet. But every once and a while, a scientist will record twinkling in far-off stars, farther than humans have yet gone. Strange stellar activity, or alien signal lights? Who knows. Nobody's answered yet, at least.
Finally... Earth is still inhabited, but not densely. All the major nations and stuff have packed up and moved off. Many cities are maintained as historical sites and there's a fair bit of tourism, and pilgrimages back to 'the old spot of dirt' aren't uncommon for patriotic sorts, but for the most part, Earth is a curiosity at best, tended to by a handful of indigenous groups who were like, hey, you know, you guys have fun out there, please don't come back, thanks.
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ThatGazzer
Minds Eye Bind
- Location
- PNW
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Ah, fully automated gay communist decolonization
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Considering the prominent place of a polar expedition in my family lore, I've got to wonder about anyone audacious enough to go 'well, it looks like things we're running into show there's old stuff out there, I wonder what the really old stuff rimward looks like' and the poor robots trying to keep them from hurting themselves.
- Location
- Yes
There's very definitely a sort of person, particularly in the period 1851-1951, to whom "If you try to go there you will definitely die." is a recommendation. I'm sure expeditions for both directions are currently fitting out.
Vocalist
Verdant Maiden in Violet
- Location
- By a Cedar Tree
But surely some of them are also interested in exploring outer space, right?
You don't have to spend too much time answering that question, though.
I can see the challenge, here. This story has dug its nails into a particular genre, but the tropes of that genre are not strongly equipped to deal with non-European people in a respectful way (or remember that they exist at all). That puts a lot of burden on the author to innovate if they want to represent other cultures. If you don't want to do that here, that's fine; you can focus on writing a story about workaholic soldiers and PTSD rather than what a high-tech indigenous society would look like without the stain of colonialism. A handwave of "Yes, all humanity is enjoying the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Aristocracy according to their personal and cultural preferences," works just fine for this story.
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Yeah, that's basically the handwave. I'm not entirely happy with it, but I kinda hate everything I work on so that's fine.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
There's a pretty major bloc interested in the polite but firm guidance of humans into not messing with each other and respectfully facilitating human ambitions, and they have a pretty pointedly unlimited idea of human. It'd make sense for robots to have some degree of contact where they can serve as a go-between between groups who wouldn't necessarily talk who have common interests, in case you want to hint at a comparatively pleasant version of the frontier vibe, where people from disparate backgrounds are united by a common interest in checking out the cool stuff over there.
Are the people involved unusual? Sure! Do they have cool adventures? Absolutely.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I mean, I'm gonna be honest, I'd expect sheer sentimentality to keep a small-yet-noticeable percentage of humans living on Earth unless there was a clear reason not to.Ah, fully automated gay communist decolonization
But since the population boom caused by industrial agriculture plus no birth control plus demand for human laborers never happened here, "a small-yet-noticeable percentage" of humans living on Earth could be something like 25-50 million who just, y'know... like living near other humans, which isn't exactly the sole preserve of indigenous groups, after all. And 25-50 million humans, spread out across the entire Earth, would make this timeline's Earth look effectively unpopulated.
Like, a few hundred thousand English people whose deep-seated love for specifically the English countryside is so great that they just can't bear to part with it, a million or so French people who, well, it's... France, as opposed to France-outre-ciel. A bunch of Scots Highlanders who, as discussed, finally figured out that with the pipes they can make everyone leave them alone with the possible exception of the intentionally deaf robots.
All nations have probably diaspora'd hard. Some nations probably diaspora'd harder than others, proportionately speaking. Space Russia (motherland iz miserable place to live), Space China (overcrowded), Space America (since the Eastern Seaboard just isn't that great and the westward expansion clearly died out at or east of the Mississippi).
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Would the non-robot-enthusiast humans count as an indigenous group themselves by this point, regardless of the group they started with? They're presumably far less integrated with the culture of most of humanity and possibly completely disconnected from the robot who make up 99.8% of the population of "human" civilization.
Hmm. Has anyone managed to circumnavigate the galaxy yet? I guess it wouldn't actually be particularly difficult as long as you don't have to land anywhere...
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- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
The main point re: earth is simply that it's not relevant to the story, but while I mentioning that idk hashtag landback. but yes, I do imagine there are some souls who just can't bear to leave and don't much mind the preservation rules who've stuck around, but the number is going to be awfully small and probably somewhat shifting, as a lot of their kids will inevitably wanna make the jump to the stars.
I'll admit, I do sort of like the idea that "a simple life on Earth, living the old life" is something a lot of people talk about idly, though when they chips are down they'll almost certain take their staffed mansion or house on a space station city over it. a lot of the folks on Earth might also literally be reenactors, living history sort of deal.
as for like, nationalism in space, i would have hoped i've made it clear its near to an affectation at this point. everyone is living a weird post scarcity automated life and it's essentially just the language group you're most likely to go and party with. Miss Polestar plants a little sparkling Space Union Jack down where she lands because it's the thing to do, not because she much feels any way about the prestige of the British Empire, nor understands how that works. A running joke I want to keep going is keep exactly how the fuck the government functions both vague and somewhat contradictory because it so, so does not matter. British is just the local flavour of the Human-Machine civilization, the Concert Galactica. They're all the same colour on the Stellaris map.
re: circumnavigation, we're a while away from that yet, and still at the "farther than we've gone before!" stage of exploration. people are like 100% gearing up for it though, but they can take their time because everyone lives so darn long.
I'll admit, I do sort of like the idea that "a simple life on Earth, living the old life" is something a lot of people talk about idly, though when they chips are down they'll almost certain take their staffed mansion or house on a space station city over it. a lot of the folks on Earth might also literally be reenactors, living history sort of deal.
as for like, nationalism in space, i would have hoped i've made it clear its near to an affectation at this point. everyone is living a weird post scarcity automated life and it's essentially just the language group you're most likely to go and party with. Miss Polestar plants a little sparkling Space Union Jack down where she lands because it's the thing to do, not because she much feels any way about the prestige of the British Empire, nor understands how that works. A running joke I want to keep going is keep exactly how the fuck the government functions both vague and somewhat contradictory because it so, so does not matter. British is just the local flavour of the Human-Machine civilization, the Concert Galactica. They're all the same colour on the Stellaris map.
re: circumnavigation, we're a while away from that yet, and still at the "farther than we've gone before!" stage of exploration. people are like 100% gearing up for it though, but they can take their time because everyone lives so darn long.
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- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
yes exactly! it's just an excuse for sillyness.I have gotten the impression that countries basically exist as reasons for robots to have funny accents and call each other silly names, which I think is an excellent and sufficient degree of involvement in the story.
Marie and Hans from Maid to Love Yiu are French and German respectively and both it them are recently activated by Miss Polestar. Marie sometimes has vague nostalgic dreams about the French countryside lol, and in the background fiction Hans entertains himself while bored by writing time travel stories about 18th century Bavaria, which he is weirdly knowledgeable about.
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Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
That's fantastic. All he needs now is a set of lederhosen!
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah. At this point, it's pretty clearly a combination of:
1) A way to have something to root for and uphold beyond your own purely personal preferences (like sports teams, regional accent and culture styles, and so on), and...
2) A way to feel some kind of connection to a historic past. Like, the reason the
...
It's kind of like the 'clades' from Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age, a way to bypass the feeling of being deracinated (from the French for 'uprooted') by an increasingly post-scarcity modernity. The difference, of course, being that Stephenson was writing cyberpunk so the clades are Serious Business and prone to conflict, whereas @Jeboboid and @open_sketch are not, so they aren't.
Yeah, I guess? I'm a bit hazy on what life expectancies are, but it sounds like the balance of longevity and technological progress is such that if you're an aspiring deep space explorer, it arguably makes more sense to postpone your really ambitious voyage a few decades and see if better tech is invented.
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- Location
- Washington State
Lt. Fusilier is a Lt. in the 7th Regiment of Foot, 9th Company.
It doesn't take as long to circumnavigate the galaxy if you go corewards first, further given the description that you're more likely to be becalmed traveling spinwards or counterspinwards it may behoove you to describe a zig zag course of travel to alleviate concerns about that.