Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Well, if you ever do decide to add more lunatics to the madhouse, I'm going to suggest the Roxolani, just for the "oh you have GOT to be fucking kidding!" factor of their gear.
That Uncertain Night [Worldfall Sequel]
- Thread starter Thuktun F
- Start date
- Timeline
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- Canada
Well, if you ever do decide to add more lunatics to the madhouse, I'm going to suggest the Roxolani, just for the "oh you have GOT to be fucking kidding!" factor of their gear.
Article: Roxolani. A nomadic tribe of Sarmatians that ranged over the Ural foothills and Volga lowlands in the eastern Black Sea steppes during the 2nd century BC. Initially they clashed with the Scythians, but after the 2nd century BC the Roxolani conquered the Scythians and fought together with them against the Pontic Kingdom and Greek colonies in the Crimea (see Ancient states on the northern Black Sea coast). In the mid-1st century AD some of the Roxolani took to the steppes between the lower Dnieper River and the Danube River. For nearly 70 years they settled in the Wallachian Plain and as far as Moesia province, until they were crushed by the Romans. Later, along with other Black Sea coastal tribes, they continued to fight against the Romanson the lower Danube River. In the late 2nd century AD the Roxolani were dispersed by the Goths, and in the 4th century they were annihilated by the Huns. They were last mentioned by the Gothic historian Jordan as participants in a battle against the Huns. Excavations in the steppes northwest of the Sea of Azov, between the lower Dnieper River and the Molochna River, have uncovered a number of Middle Sarmatian barrow graves, attributed to the Roxolani. They date mostly from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD, although some go back to the late 2nd century BC.
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Also the name of a group of aliens from a Harry Turtledove short story.
They discovered Anti-Gravity and FTL before industrialization and never pursued the later because exploiting planets of pre-industrial primitives was easier. Then they landed in New York and discovered that their flintlock muskets were no match for SWAT.
The Road Not Taken (short story) - Wikipedia
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- Location
- Canada
Thuktun F
You can complain now; I'm no longer a councilor
- Location
- United States
I see the memes have already begun. Yessss.
SemiSaneAuthor
TARDIS powered by Snark, Spite, and Tea!
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The Original Triliogy fan in me has an idea for a meme, but I think if there is a version of me in The Worldfall universe I'd have it it in my Sig for a bit as just a quote:
- Location
- United States
So basically, Humanity conquered The Milky Way because the Lazy version of the Asari decided to drop in. Then again, who is to say that some of those conquered species wouldn't have developed the same way as Humanity themselves, but didn't because of Roxolani influence? Oh well, I'm sure all those enslaved/conquered races welcomed their New Alien Overlords...
Year 0: Paulson I
Thuktun F
You can complain now; I'm no longer a councilor
- Location
- United States
Once again, I find myself back at Mauna Kea Surveillance Observatory. Whereas my previous visit was during the quiet hours, now the building is abuzz with technicians, scientists, and other staff. Nevertheless, Dr. Paulson finds time for our interview as we sit down at the main control room.
Q: Hello again, Dr. Paulson. I imagine it's been a busy few days.
A: Don't need to tell me about it. Congratulations on your book, by the by. Ever since it published, web searches for this place spiked five thousand percent. I mean, the number was really small to begin with, so it's not as big as it sounds, but...
Sorry, rambling. Mind's been frayed these past few days. I take it you want to ask about the current situation?
Q: Actually, I was hoping to ask you about the history of tracking the Colonization Fleet, from the beginning.
Paulson blinks.
A: Oh, oh! Well, I guess it makes sense. Very beginning... let's see...
She hums for a moment, then focuses her vision.
Well, the Eyes Pealed Project officially began in 2024, but that's a bit misleading. As soon as the first fusion flames were detected, dozens of observation projects were born over the years, most of them informal. You had Americans, Russians, Chinese, Indians, all working independently; but they also formed cooperative projects to track the Fleet and Flishithy. Then the war began, and some projects got dissolved, going from tracking the ships to looking for weapons on the ships, or the Foot...
All of those disjointed projects got centralized and refined under the Eyes Pealed Project. While each nation still controls the individual observatories on their own territory, and not all of the observatories are dedicated fully to scanning for extraterrestrial threats, we all ultimately answer to the TGDF and UN.
It was an odd first few years. I mean, I'm also involved with other projects, such as tracking our own ships, but a lot of the equipment hadn't been put up yet. After all, the Fithp destroyed the Hubble, and the war delayed the James Webb project to the point that it became outdated before it could launch...
Q: When were the first telescopes dedicated to tracking spacecraft developed?
A: By 2025 or so, I believe. Tracking spacecraft is a different beast from studying stars or other distant celestial phenomena- the targets are far smaller, but much closer, and the best wavelengths for detection are different. The James Webb would have been meant for detecting red-shifted objects, too faint for detection by previous telescopes. But for tracking incoming ships, it's more ideal to have the telescope optimized for higher frequencies.
Q: Why so?
A: If a ship was coming in our direction, especially at relativistic velocities, the light emanating from it would be compressed due to the Doppler effect. That, and if it turned around to decelerate, the drive would almost certainly be of the kind that produces higher frequencies of light- ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays even. Theoretically speaking, one could even determine the performance and type of engine from studying the flare of the drive.
Of course, we already knew the type of drive flare that the Colonization Fleet would be producing. And, we knew exactly where it'd be coming from.
Q: When were you first able to detect the Colonization Fleet?
A: Well, you have to remember that Tau Ceti is nearly twelve light years away, so the first opportunity to see the Fleet wouldn't be until 2032 or so, as that's how long it'd take for the light to reach us. And sure enough, it did.
She pauses to access her phone, then pulls up a hologram of a seemingly random segment of space, dominated by the glare of an unseen star. Faintly, one can see a few wisps of particulate, so imperceptible that they could easily been missed. It is reminiscent of the way microdroplets split and dance over the surface of a hot cup of tea.
I'm sure you're familiar with this photo. Those wisps are, in essence, space dust. Ice crystals, presolar grains, that sort of stuff. Each grain is on a scale best measured in micrometers or smaller, but from a distance the clouds can be detected.
Those coalesced little brushes you see there are the wakes of the Colonization Fleet's ships, as they barreled through the dust at about half a percent of the speed of light. By that point, they'd already cleared their version of the Oort Cloud.
That was a bit of an "Welp" moment for us.
Q: Welp?
A: I mean, we already knew that the Fleet would be leaving around that time, thanks to all the info we got from the Race on Earth, but it was the last nail in the coffin. For all we knew beforehand, the Fleet could have been delayed, or it was the greatest deception ever pulled in history. There were even crackpots claiming that the Race lied about coming from Tau Ceti, or theorizing that the Hearth fithp were commencing an assault.
But that photo confirmed it. The Colonization Fleet was real, and it was already halfway here.
Now, this is where the observation stuff gets really wonky. Relativistic speeds and all that- blue shifts, distortion, yadda yadda. We weren't concerned for the most part about the early stages of the Fleet's transit to our star. We were more concerned about deceleration, or lack thereof.
Q: Lack thereof? Was there a fear of relativistic attack?
A: Yes.
She frowns.
Okay, there was a fear, but it was small. The likelihood of the Fleet learning something was up, then deciding to do a suicide attack with civilian craft despite being the most narrow-minded and inflexible thinkers in the galaxy is... was small. Let's be real- no way in hell it would've happened. We had a firm grip on communications towards the Fleet, which was mum until they would have woken up, and by the time they detected our own ship heading to Home, they'd be too deep into the deceleration phase to be a risk.
But, that didn't stop us from making sure that we could see every single last one of those torches turned back our way when they started decelerating. If just one of those ships didn't turn around on schedule, then there would've been hell to pay.
Thankfully, like everything else the Race does, the Fleet turned around and started decelerating all at once, like clockwork.
That was about three years ago. When I saw all the flames on the screen, I poured myself a little victory shot.
Q: Only three years ago? Wouldn't have the torches been visible from much farther away?
A: Despite the ridiculous thrust and performance on them, Race ships actually don't accelerate the entire trip. At some point, their exhaust velocity just can't make them go any faster. Which is for the best- if they were accelerating the whole time during that twenty year trip, at their max speed a marshmallow could hit with more than ten times the energy of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. A ship... that would make the Foot look like a firecracker.
They do it in spurts, I think. First they crank up the gees to get a nice velocity going, then they stop when clearing the Oort Cloud, and then they speed up more and more as the interstellar medium gets sparser. They coast for a bit, and then they hit the deceleration closer to the target, since the flare of the drives help handle the problem of debris.
But hopping across the stars isn't as easy for them as the Race makes it out to be. They actually pack on a crapload of Whipple shielding as they head out, and by the time they actually get here the shielding is practically nonexistent. At max speed, a milligram hits like a battleship shell. I'm honestly surprised they've never lost a ship transiting between stars.
She pauses for a moment, brow knitted.
Putting together all the problems of interstellar travel like that... well, I guess it helps to explain the complexities of our little pickle here.
Q: Hello again, Dr. Paulson. I imagine it's been a busy few days.
A: Don't need to tell me about it. Congratulations on your book, by the by. Ever since it published, web searches for this place spiked five thousand percent. I mean, the number was really small to begin with, so it's not as big as it sounds, but...
Sorry, rambling. Mind's been frayed these past few days. I take it you want to ask about the current situation?
Q: Actually, I was hoping to ask you about the history of tracking the Colonization Fleet, from the beginning.
Paulson blinks.
A: Oh, oh! Well, I guess it makes sense. Very beginning... let's see...
She hums for a moment, then focuses her vision.
Well, the Eyes Pealed Project officially began in 2024, but that's a bit misleading. As soon as the first fusion flames were detected, dozens of observation projects were born over the years, most of them informal. You had Americans, Russians, Chinese, Indians, all working independently; but they also formed cooperative projects to track the Fleet and Flishithy. Then the war began, and some projects got dissolved, going from tracking the ships to looking for weapons on the ships, or the Foot...
All of those disjointed projects got centralized and refined under the Eyes Pealed Project. While each nation still controls the individual observatories on their own territory, and not all of the observatories are dedicated fully to scanning for extraterrestrial threats, we all ultimately answer to the TGDF and UN.
It was an odd first few years. I mean, I'm also involved with other projects, such as tracking our own ships, but a lot of the equipment hadn't been put up yet. After all, the Fithp destroyed the Hubble, and the war delayed the James Webb project to the point that it became outdated before it could launch...
Q: When were the first telescopes dedicated to tracking spacecraft developed?
A: By 2025 or so, I believe. Tracking spacecraft is a different beast from studying stars or other distant celestial phenomena- the targets are far smaller, but much closer, and the best wavelengths for detection are different. The James Webb would have been meant for detecting red-shifted objects, too faint for detection by previous telescopes. But for tracking incoming ships, it's more ideal to have the telescope optimized for higher frequencies.
Q: Why so?
A: If a ship was coming in our direction, especially at relativistic velocities, the light emanating from it would be compressed due to the Doppler effect. That, and if it turned around to decelerate, the drive would almost certainly be of the kind that produces higher frequencies of light- ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays even. Theoretically speaking, one could even determine the performance and type of engine from studying the flare of the drive.
Of course, we already knew the type of drive flare that the Colonization Fleet would be producing. And, we knew exactly where it'd be coming from.
Q: When were you first able to detect the Colonization Fleet?
A: Well, you have to remember that Tau Ceti is nearly twelve light years away, so the first opportunity to see the Fleet wouldn't be until 2032 or so, as that's how long it'd take for the light to reach us. And sure enough, it did.
She pauses to access her phone, then pulls up a hologram of a seemingly random segment of space, dominated by the glare of an unseen star. Faintly, one can see a few wisps of particulate, so imperceptible that they could easily been missed. It is reminiscent of the way microdroplets split and dance over the surface of a hot cup of tea.
I'm sure you're familiar with this photo. Those wisps are, in essence, space dust. Ice crystals, presolar grains, that sort of stuff. Each grain is on a scale best measured in micrometers or smaller, but from a distance the clouds can be detected.
Those coalesced little brushes you see there are the wakes of the Colonization Fleet's ships, as they barreled through the dust at about half a percent of the speed of light. By that point, they'd already cleared their version of the Oort Cloud.
That was a bit of an "Welp" moment for us.
Q: Welp?
A: I mean, we already knew that the Fleet would be leaving around that time, thanks to all the info we got from the Race on Earth, but it was the last nail in the coffin. For all we knew beforehand, the Fleet could have been delayed, or it was the greatest deception ever pulled in history. There were even crackpots claiming that the Race lied about coming from Tau Ceti, or theorizing that the Hearth fithp were commencing an assault.
But that photo confirmed it. The Colonization Fleet was real, and it was already halfway here.
Now, this is where the observation stuff gets really wonky. Relativistic speeds and all that- blue shifts, distortion, yadda yadda. We weren't concerned for the most part about the early stages of the Fleet's transit to our star. We were more concerned about deceleration, or lack thereof.
Q: Lack thereof? Was there a fear of relativistic attack?
A: Yes.
She frowns.
Okay, there was a fear, but it was small. The likelihood of the Fleet learning something was up, then deciding to do a suicide attack with civilian craft despite being the most narrow-minded and inflexible thinkers in the galaxy is... was small. Let's be real- no way in hell it would've happened. We had a firm grip on communications towards the Fleet, which was mum until they would have woken up, and by the time they detected our own ship heading to Home, they'd be too deep into the deceleration phase to be a risk.
But, that didn't stop us from making sure that we could see every single last one of those torches turned back our way when they started decelerating. If just one of those ships didn't turn around on schedule, then there would've been hell to pay.
Thankfully, like everything else the Race does, the Fleet turned around and started decelerating all at once, like clockwork.
That was about three years ago. When I saw all the flames on the screen, I poured myself a little victory shot.
Q: Only three years ago? Wouldn't have the torches been visible from much farther away?
A: Despite the ridiculous thrust and performance on them, Race ships actually don't accelerate the entire trip. At some point, their exhaust velocity just can't make them go any faster. Which is for the best- if they were accelerating the whole time during that twenty year trip, at their max speed a marshmallow could hit with more than ten times the energy of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. A ship... that would make the Foot look like a firecracker.
They do it in spurts, I think. First they crank up the gees to get a nice velocity going, then they stop when clearing the Oort Cloud, and then they speed up more and more as the interstellar medium gets sparser. They coast for a bit, and then they hit the deceleration closer to the target, since the flare of the drives help handle the problem of debris.
But hopping across the stars isn't as easy for them as the Race makes it out to be. They actually pack on a crapload of Whipple shielding as they head out, and by the time they actually get here the shielding is practically nonexistent. At max speed, a milligram hits like a battleship shell. I'm honestly surprised they've never lost a ship transiting between stars.
She pauses for a moment, brow knitted.
Putting together all the problems of interstellar travel like that... well, I guess it helps to explain the complexities of our little pickle here.
SemiSaneAuthor
TARDIS powered by Snark, Spite, and Tea!
- Location
- Sol-3, Memetic Quarantined World - For English
- Pronouns
- They/Them
They are really not prepared for the Out of Context problem that Earth is. I'm expecting the whole Colonization Fleet to bluescreen at hearing what happened. It's like going to switch on a Light and having instead of a lightbulb turn on you have an orb of blue light appear and start bobbing around you. Or at least, that's what it's going to be like for The Colonization Fleet.
- Location
- To the left. No, not there, the other left.
Unless it's intentionally misspelled it should be "Peeled".
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
- Pronouns
- She/Her
And then the light bulb pulls out a book and starts reading by the light of your orb.
TortugaGreen
Constantly out of the loop
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's... Very much not how rocket engines work - outside fuel constraints, there isn't any limiter to how fast an engine can go, and certainly not one based on exhaust velocity. Sure, there's the always-present mass ratio limitations which mean a practical spacecraft can't get any more delta-V out of an engine, but if you don't mind having negligible acceleration and negligible payload you can get arbitrarily large Delta-V just by putting absurd amounts of fuel on an engine. It's not super useful after a short bit, but the limiter is less exhaust velocity and more size and cost constraints.
In real life (as opposed to the ideal case), the vacuum of outer space isn't - and the little wisps of interstellar space gas can end up putting serious amounts of drag on a vessel moving at some non negligible fraction of c. Put together it means that Race ships would have a speed capped by their thrust, which exhaust velocity is a factor of. It does imply that even the points when Race ships are "coasting" have periodic burns throughout to counter that drag, but that does fit with the mention of them burning in spurts.
Decim
On again, off again lurker.
- Location
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Fusion Ramjets are one of the coolest interstellar drive ideas ever made. But sadly, the math doesn't really work out. Collecting hydrogen gas while in transit does not provide sufficiently enough fuel to have a positive acceleration. The net result is that the drag greatly outweighs thrust. That said, it does provide a nice way to avoid having to carry a lot of fuel internally just to slow down. So it is of some benefit.
Thuktun F
You can complain now; I'm no longer a councilor
- Location
- United States
Yep. Sure, if the Race had infinite fuel and reaction mass, and were moving in a perfect vacuum, they could theoretically get to much higher velocities, but in real life the exhaust velocity does play a large role in the "max speed" of a starship, due to drag and the tyranny of the rocket equation.
Tsiolkovsky still has Race starships in his vise. At some point, putting ridiculous amounts of fuel and reaction mass would require putting more ship to hold the fuel and reaction mass, which would require more fuel and reaction mass to push that now-larger ship, repeated ad nauseum.
Sevoris
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Yeah, if you want to affect serious interstellar transit velocities, you pretty much need (1) a beamed power facility with some tens of Petawatts behind it (in itself requiring a solar array that could shade 50 to 70% of the Earth if deployed at Earth orbit), a starship with (2) active transit corridor clearing (laser-straving ionization and magnetic deflection) and you should bring sail repair kits and ice shielding for your payload - the later best optimized into a shape of two cylinders joined at the base, with sharp angles.
Remote beamed propulsion has the advantage of leaving all of your fuel at home. Your vehicle mass is essentialy constant, and while photons by themselves don't make for great pushers, en masse they can develop thrust forces of up to 1G and potentially above. You just need a large enough dielectric reflector sail to avoid melting when you're hit by 60 Petawatts (for a 10,000 tones payload and 90% top velocity).
To be honest, the bigger problem becomes surviving - you need to clear your way, as elaborated, because at those velocities abrasion and impacts both become deadly quickly - plus radiation. It might not be feasable to get up to such high velocities with macroscopic spacecraft... which would be a bummer.
Remote beamed propulsion has the advantage of leaving all of your fuel at home. Your vehicle mass is essentialy constant, and while photons by themselves don't make for great pushers, en masse they can develop thrust forces of up to 1G and potentially above. You just need a large enough dielectric reflector sail to avoid melting when you're hit by 60 Petawatts (for a 10,000 tones payload and 90% top velocity).
To be honest, the bigger problem becomes surviving - you need to clear your way, as elaborated, because at those velocities abrasion and impacts both become deadly quickly - plus radiation. It might not be feasable to get up to such high velocities with macroscopic spacecraft... which would be a bummer.
Thuktun F
You can complain now; I'm no longer a councilor
- Location
- United States
Which is actually what I changed Odysseus's design into while rewriting Junction Point.
And yeah, the beam method is probably the best way to STL it, unless you don't trust the people back home to operate the laser, if there's something better (like some sort of bullshit handwavium antimatter rocket or a quantum drive like from Songs of Distant Earth) or if the target destination is so far away that even an uberlaser couldn't provide effective acceleration.
Of course, the Race has bullshit fusion drives and practically no way to build said superlaser, so good old fashioned rocketry it is. I still added in the extra difficulties (ablation, exhaust velocity, etc) that weren't present in the original stories, which I feel could help improve the story. Not just in terms of science, but also from a thematic and storytelling perspective.
Sevoris
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If I may make the suggestion, have the "Interstellar Transit Stage" left in the outersys. You separate the cones apart at their joining base and let out the interplanetary vehicle. For interstellar re-launch on schedule, you package back up, deploy another part of the sail as your retroreflector and sail home.
Like so:
The 60-120 Petawatt example arrays I like to work with for Venimus and the recently brewing Distant World original can launch you up to 90% cee in about a year. After that point you could cruise, safe the sustainer beam for the sweeping. For deceleration at long range you bring a magnetic sail for mainline breaking and use a mixture of fusion power and solar sails for the rest.
Antimatter rockets are just incredibly inefficient to make. Fuel cracking efficiencies of 0.5 percent would be miracolous. Making enough amat for an ISV of serious tonnage would take a thousand-percentile Dyson swarm and years at the least.
For the same ressources bill you can make a bigger laser arrasy and bigger fressnel lenses, in about any use case.
That said... nothing protects you from suffering a Motie and the launch facility back home quitting service. That is very true. But then, interstellar travel with retun flights always demands a certain commitment from home.
I'd now imagine the race starships (which, in my head, look like aircraft-carrier sized(?) SpaceX Starships basically, encased in a kind of interstellar travel shell of multiple whipple shields and fuel tankage up front, with the interplanetary/lander stage stuffed in behind.
Thuktun F
You can complain now; I'm no longer a councilor
- Location
- United States
Which really begs the question of how the fuck these things land. Could you imagine them trying to do a landing with a bulbous-ass looking fuel tank bigger than the actual ship? Or how about the radiators for those ridiculously high-performance engines? They'd have to separate from both in order to effectively make a landing on a planet like ours, but that just raises even more questions.
Honestly, Race starship technology is on a level much higher than literally everything else they make, in a way that scarcely makes sense. They're otherwise pretty much like us (or behind us) in terms of materials science, weaponry, medicine, computer tech... and then they also have the ability to make these spaceships that can reach .5c, accelerate at at least 1 g, and continuously land/take off from the surface of a high-gravity planet with a thick atmosphere... and not only that, but said starships are crewed, carrying tens of thousands of people and their weapons across the void.
Sevoris
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I am the wrong person to ask. If I see such things and want to write realism, I take big fat markers to the original concept and start drafting up new stuff.
It's maybe moreso jarring because the Fithp are much more realistic in considerations, with the limited acceleration of their vehicles, the digit ship laser drives powered either by in-orbit or groundport laser generators, realistic payload considerations, and all.
chez-mix
Trying and Failing yet again.
I'd bank the difference on Turtledove wanting his story of Modern aliens in WW2 and such he didn't focus too much on the starship side. Whereas Niven and Pournelle being Harder SF guys focused on it more.
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Sevoris
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Also, different authors.
Footfall was written by Larry Nieven and Jerry Pournelle, which are/were 80s sci-fi authors well known for "working their science". Jerry Pournelle was a polymath who had worked in the aerospace industry before he got into writing. They wrote The Mote in Gods Eye. They believed in doing their work and adhering to what was known and could be speculated about. The Alderson Drive and Langston field had actual math associated with their conception. They were those sort of authors.
And their novels in consequence are conceived much differently. Both Mote and Footfall are new takes on old story ideas - first contact in deep space, and first contact invasions of Earth- but with entire new spins, an empathis on actually alien aliens, and conforming to within the mechanisms that science and speculative engineering and some specific rulebreaking provided them. And they were innovative while doing so.
Thuktun F
You can complain now; I'm no longer a councilor
- Location
- United States
Are they, though? Footfall is certainly one of the best alien invasion novels, but that's purely because of the diamond-hard science aspect when compared to other alien invasion stories, as well as its in-depth examination of the reasons (or lack thereof) to invade a planet. But compared to other acclaimed alien invasion novels like The War of the Worlds and Remembrance of Earth's Past, it lacks a degree of thematic depth, and is home to a host of nasty implications. Even the Worldwar series, despite its flaws, ultimately provides a creative outcome in which neither side can actually fully win, and so an incredibly uneasy peace is made.
Likewise, The Mote in God's Eye pretty much deals with the same kind of paranoia involved in first contact between two fairly-advanced species as the literal story First Contact by Murray Leinster. Like with Footfall, its main distinctiveness comes from the nature of the extraterrestrials and its science, both of which are almost purely Niven.
Anyway, hopefully you'll get another chapter before I head off to Xi'an for an extended weekend trip.