I've been curious about this for a while, and it's becoming especially relevant as you guys start moving into the new era beyond FI. How do you overcome the hurdle of figuring out 'new' futuristic technologies, when what's already out there as potential source material just doesn't fill the needs you have? Aside from the simple (but time-consuming) expedient of waiting for new material, I mean. Compacting existing tech only takes you so far, after all - I don't, for example, see Reflex tech getting much smaller than what's in Daggerdisc, and covering the kind of distances that are going to be needed in the new era (what with the intergalactic nature of the conflict and all) would take several orders of magnitude more power anyway.

Are we starting to encroach on the old 'Sufficiently advanced tech vs. magic' line? (Not that the stuff already in print doesn't already do that, mind, but are we going to see the IPO busting out block transfer tech and the like?)

I realize this is a loaded question, and that answers, if any are available, may have to be left extremely vague to prevent spoilers. I'm just curious about the process itself, really. How do you develop something newer and shinier than something that is already so far beyond the curve as to be fantastic?

There's already a few things in the series that covers that - one of the benefits of fold drive is that if you have or can do the math for the coordinates, you can go anywhere instantly and bring more ships with you, and there's a couple bits of tech out there that can be used but, to date, haven't been mostly due to 'eh, we got good enough now'. And then there's one that shows up in one of the NF trailers which apparently got overlooked by some people despite being a classic...

Besides, we have some Time Lords, block transfer mathematics remains a viable option anyway.

So, short answer is, we look at what we have and what might be possible, and work with it. The main issue with the Covenant Slipstream drive is that the Covenant tech is so idiosyncratic it's barely worth the time to mess with it when there's already four kinds of FTL drives that don't require being watched like a goddamn souffle.

And hell, if it gets bad enough, who knows what Zef's got in that lab of his in the asteroid belts by Gamma Canaris...

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.

>And hell, if it gets bad enough, who knows what Zef's got in that lab
>of his in the asteroid belts by Gamma Canaris...

You mean aside from the largest stash of booze this side of Omega?

"That's for research. I've been looking into whether or not you can build a hyperspace motivator that runs on tequila."

"... Why tequila?"

"Because like Hell am I gonna waste good booze on this shit."

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

>"That's for research. I've been looking into whether or not you can
>build a hyperspace motivator that runs on tequila."

Legend has it that President Adolfo López Mateos of Mexico ran one of Chrysler's experimental turbine cars on tequila, when he was presented with one to try out in the early 1960s.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Legend has it that President Adolfo López Mateos of Mexico ran
>one of Chrysler's experimental turbine cars on tequila, when he was
>presented with one to try out in the early 1960s.

<snrk> Does legend have anything to say about what kind of mileage (if any), top speed (if any), or major incendiary events (if plural) he got out of it...?

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

LAST EDITED ON Jan-02-17 AT 02:34 AM (EST)
 
>>Legend has it that President Adolfo López Mateos of Mexico ran
>>one of Chrysler's experimental turbine cars on tequila, when he was
>>presented with one to try out in the early 1960s.
>
><snrk> Does legend have anything to say about what kind of mileage (if
>any), top speed (if any), or major incendiary events (if plural) he
>got out of it...?

It is reported to have worked normally, per Chrysler's engineers' expectations. Gas turbines will run on just about any flammable liquid, after all, and the one used in Chrysler's prototype cars was not stupendously powerful nor running near the mechanical limits of its materials.

The Turbine did not get amazingly good fuel mileage under normal conditions anyway, it has to be said—circa 19 mpg highway and 11ish around town are the figures I've seen quoted—but one must keep in mind that no one particularly gave a shit about that in 1964.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Dec-31-16 AT 12:52 PM (EST)
 
>How do
>you overcome the hurdle of figuring out 'new' futuristic technologies,
>when what's already out there as potential source material just
>doesn't fill the needs you have?

Well, one of the common complaints about the UF universe is that it isn't very futuristic, and there is probably an element of avoiding the above in that. Basically, as Geoff alluded to, there isn't a set policy or hard rule for how we handle this. For myself, I tend to go with what feels right for a given situation, and quite often that takes the form of extending the outcomes from technologies rather than the technologies themselves. What I mean by that is that I like "future" technologies that seem familiar, rather than the completely off-the-wall, unimaginable-before-it-happened shapes that future technologies will almost undoubtedly take in real life.

For example, I like things like transportation and military technologies still to seem like machines, however improbable it is that they really will in the 25th century, and this is largely accomplished by projecting advancements in materials science that enable machinery as we recognize it today to function in ways that it patently cannot. Giant fightin' robots are a good example of this. Thanks to our almost-universally-disregarded-in-SF friend the square-cube law, a human-shaped robot the size of an office building cannot possibly work (leaving aside the separate and very valid question of why it would even be worth trying)—so to have a universe that has them, we (the writers and the audience) must tacitly agree that future metallurgy and composites technology has developed so that such structures don't simply collapse under their own weight, as they undoubtedly would.

(In the world of Pacific Rim they are evidently also building civilian supertankers out of these materials, but I digress. :)

Similarly, starfighters are an absurd concept in anything like reality—jet fighters have already reached the point where they're too capable for the fragile blobs of water that operate them to come along for the ride—so we must embrace that old pulp SF dodge, the mysterious gadget that Does Something About Inertia, to have them. It isn't mysterious to some people inside the setting, of course, any more than the inner workings of a hard disk drive are unknown to the engineers who design them, but it must be to us because such a thing does not (and probably cannot) really exist.

People riff on Star Trek for its tendency toward technobabble, but the simple fact of the matter is that Space Adventure can't happen without it—without lots of it. The thing Star Trek does that is really annoying the people who bitch about it is putting it in the foreground, as opposed to, for instance, the way it works in Star Wars, where it's just how stuff works and, as in real life, the people using it don't question it. Trek has to provide a justification for paying the actors who play the engineers, is all. :)

Actually, now that I think about it, Star Wars is a pretty good comparison for the way these things work in the UF universe generally. The general tech level in Star Wars is not rising at anything like the rate it does in real life; their base technologies plateaued literally thousands of years before the stories are set. Hyperdrive to the people of the Galaxy Far, Far Away is like the wheel to us—so ubiquitous as to be simultaneously invisible and obvious. A lot of the underlying assumptions in UF are like that.

I guess you could call it a kind of technological conservatism on my part, mostly unconscious, over the years. I just tend to shy away from some common SF tech tropes because I don't like the way they taste. For instance, I've tried to avoid using TNG-style "replicators" in UF (though there are other things that get called that sometimes), because it's always struck me as kind of... cheaty to be able to just make whatever the hell you want out of whatever protons and electrons are available. About as far as I care to go in that direction would be something like the fabricators in the survival game Subnautica, which seem to work on a similar principle, but at least require you to have base materials that are vaguely related to what you're trying to make—silver ore to make a computer chip, and suchlike. Or there have been a few background references in UF to ships taking on "protein slurry" for their food processors, which build tasty various foods out of it.

Also, a lot of things are just about making characters' lives easier and/or tasks quicker, in the interest of moving things along to the stuff that's actually important. Take the autotailors mentioned early in Symphony of the Sword. They're really just there because no plot purpose is served by explaining that Utena had to go to the school-approved tailor's shop in town and get measured, and her new uniforms should be in by Friday. Just dress her up according to the school's regulations and let's get the hell on with it. :)

None of which is probably an actual answer to your question, but that's because it doesn't really have a straight answer. The UF universe's technology doesn't develop along straight lines a lot of the time, any more than the real world's does—which is, I suppose, at least one point of realism. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Actually, I think I can boil it down to this: The needs of the plot outweigh the needs of the hardcore sci fi realist. It's okay to have a certain amount of handwaving technological factors because not handwaving them interferes with the story. There is a limit to how much of this an author can do, of course--I would argue the end of Mass Effect 3 is a fine example of what damage too much handwaving can cause--but UF, in all the time I've been reading it, has never strayed out of a good comfort zone between plot and physics.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

It wasn't a straight answer, no, but it was kind of the answer I needed. :)

My problem as a writer is that I tend to get too caught up in the technical side of things, which is where this question came from to start with - if you guys have cracked it to the point of being able to create UF, after all, I could do worse things than pose the question to you. But it turns out you do a lot of it with the equivalent of smoke and mirrors, and that's a good thing, because like you said, making something overly technical is going to piss off the non-hard-scifi-nerd readerbase. The point I'm taking from this is basically 'Loosen up, don't let yourself get buried, and just write it.' Even if that isn't the point you intended, it's kind of what I needed.

> The point I'm taking from this is
>basically 'Loosen up, don't let yourself get buried, and just write
>it.'

I've always found that to be good advice for my own works. Just turn on the mental tap and encode that stream of conciousness and then go back and actually LOOK at it after to figure out if you want to keep it or not. even better if you have someone with fresh eyes who can do that for you.

>I've always found that to be good advice for my own works. Just turn
>on the mental tap and encode that stream of conciousness and then go
>back and actually LOOK at it after to figure out if you want to keep
>it or not.

Precisely. As I say in my eternally-unfinished guide for writers, "It is not the writing, but the re-writing, that is great". Or as Ernest Hemingway put it, "The first draft of everything is shit."

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

This is both my boon and my bane. I often can't even start the stream-of-consciousness part until it's fairly coherent and not shit, which means that I need to proof it even more carefully so I can tell which category what I wrote falls into. Plus, I often need to just write something to get started, and eventually I'll wrap back around to what I wanted to write - occasionally I'll even get something decent out of the random start as a bonus! :)

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

>Precisely. As I say in my eternally-unfinished guide for writers, "It
>is not the writing, but the re-writing, that is great". Or as Ernest
>Hemingway put it, "The first draft of everything is shit."

I'm not a big fan of that concept (although I may try it, since I'm in a fallow period anyway). Most of what I've written is 99% first draft, with only minor changes to tighten up dialogue and the like.

>
>I'm not a big fan of that concept (although I may try it, since I'm in
>a fallow period anyway). Most of what I've written is 99% first
>draft, with only minor changes to tighten up dialogue and the like.
>

So, dig up your oldest creation, and try to read it like you were pulling it off of fanfiction.net or USENET. For some people, re-writing begins when they stop saying, "I wrote this!" and start saying "I wrote this?!"

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

>>
>>I'm not a big fan of that concept (although I may try it, since I'm in
>>a fallow period anyway). Most of what I've written is 99% first
>>draft, with only minor changes to tighten up dialogue and the like.
>>
>
>So, dig up your oldest creation, and try to read it like you were
>pulling it off of fanfiction.net or USENET. For some people,
>re-writing begins when they stop saying, "I wrote this!" and start
>saying "I wrote this?!"
>
>Peter Eng
>--
>Insert humorous comment here.

My oldest piece is ON USENET. (Well, technically, BITNET, but there was a USENET Mirror). I think it actually predates UF... :)

>So, dig up your oldest creation, and try to read it like you were
>pulling it off of fanfiction.net or USENET. For some people,
>re-writing begins when they stop saying, "I wrote this!" and start
>saying "I wrote this?!"
>
>Peter Eng
>--
>Insert humorous comment here.

Yeah, kinda what Pete says. In fact, I *seem* to recall even G having moments like that, especially when someone new comes around having just exposed themselves to the core 4.

Writing a story shares alot in common with running a Table Top RPG game.
Especially when it is your own world.
The story is most important aspect, because you need to keep the players engaged.
In writing, you need to keep yourself and the audience engaged.

I recently found a book series (Fallen Empire) that is Sci-Fi / space series.
And and the end of the first book, the author listed a Q&A that she had with fans of her fantasy series.
One of the questions was about the tech. The author explained that there was a lot of Hard Sci-Fi out there, but it became very dry because it was focusing on the Science more than the Fiction.
She then sighted, as did G, Star Wars and Star Trek (especially the new movies) as examples of where the story is more important.

Overall, when it comes to Tech, outline what you envision and make sure it seem natural to the world your crafting.

An excellent visual example is the Battlestar Galactica (Moore's), they obviously have an FTL system, but other than mentioning fuel and the limits of calculating the "jump" never focused on how it worked. It just did.

Hope this helps!

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

You know, this is some very valuable advice.

I had started a sort-of sci-fi universe, but was getting hung up on the tech. I may just simply take some of this advice and try to re-start the efforts.