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ShinsoBEAM! posted:A government overspending in order to keep the same quality of life/constantly improving lifestyle and running itself into hilarious amounts of debt isn't unheard of at all. Plus their way to make that debt solvent was to invade/expand much like Rome did, which only made their problems worse and kicked the can down the road, which is another thing governments love to do. Oh I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about the guy who buys his own car and promptly drunk drives into the main antagonist because that's a satisfying way to deal with a foe, you know? (It's not)
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Oct 2, 2019 14:13
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I liked that all the characters just assumed it was an assassination instead of an accident and blamed the bad guys on that basis
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Oct 2, 2019 20:30
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One thing that kind of amazes me is that Douglas McArthur in the Philippines during/after/before WW2 is a mil-fiction dead zone besides W. E. B. Griffin's turgid books, and Neal Stephenson's super-loving terrible and embarrassing Cryptonomicon. This an entire mil-fiction subgenre waiting to be tapped (or not) by aspiring mil-fiction writers. Douglas McArthur did so much "no this would be bullshit if it happened in a mil-fiction story" in real-life stuff it's insane. Running down a US Military veterans protest march , taking a $500,000 bribe from the Philippines government and then abandoning the Philippines entirely one month later, and oh yeah almost kicking a loving nuclear war are my favorite "WTF" things Douglas McArthur accomplished.
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Oct 5, 2019 02:22
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He's a pretty god tier grifter piece of poo poo
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Oct 5, 2019 05:02
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quantumfoam posted:One thing that kind of amazes me is that Douglas McArthur in the Philippines during/after/before WW2 is a mil-fiction dead zone besides W. E. B. Griffin's turgid books, and Neal Stephenson's super-loving terrible and embarrassing Cryptonomicon. This an entire mil-fiction subgenre waiting to be tapped (or not) by aspiring mil-fiction writers. Technically, this was covered in the Sten series, somewhat. Sand,file off the name plate and replace with Ian Mahoney(3rd time's the charm? It's been 20 years.) Only if McArthur was a black ops/black bag operator who terrorized his own populace. Which, given the Bonus Army, checks out. Ninurta fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Oct 5, 2019 |
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Oct 5, 2019 07:55
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As an FYI, Alan Dean Foster's The Damned Trilogy is currently available for free with Prime Reading. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XRRMTKD/ref=nav_timeline_asin?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
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Oct 7, 2019 06:01
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"Prime Reading" sounds like something that comes bundled with one free pee break/month for non-technoserfs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6tJZx_KxSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q05iJ6jHu8
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Oct 7, 2019 07:44
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Ninurta posted:As an FYI, Alan Dean Foster's The Damned Trilogy is currently available for free with Prime Reading. Thank you. I'll also note that Poul Anderson's Tau Zero is on Kindle Unlimited. A ramscoop STL vessel gets damaged and can't slow down. Time distortion puts them farther and farther in the future and they get to observe the lifecycle of galaxies and other cool poo poo.
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Oct 7, 2019 07:45
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mllaneza posted:Thank you. You can safely skip to the last two chapters of Tau Zero and miss very little. Only remember Poul Anderson's Tau Zero exists because of it's weird "ok.then we" ending. Recently read a non-fiction book about a internet kingpin criminal with strong scifi + mil-scifi overtones. Just trying to sum up the weird things in it is impossible. Combine the masturbatory wish-fulfillment main characters of John Ringo's Ghost + Troy Rising series and you pretty much have this internet kingpin criminal. Only it's more insane because it's real.
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Oct 7, 2019 14:59
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Here's the followup semi detailed recap-review of that bizzare non-fiction book about a internet kingpin criminal with strong scifi + mil-scifi overtones I mentioned one post up. == A guy who created the online infrastructure and billing system for a unlicensed U.S. pill-mill (that he also created) made so much money he started hiring mercenaries to supply/guard/stay in the dozens+ of safe-houses he had filled up with gold bars and weapons. This escalated into the guy branching out into arms smuggling and of course drug smuggling along with lowest-bidder hit squads being sent out if the sums in the monthly (encrypted) budget expenditure (Excel spreadsheet) reports he required didn't add up. Toss in a stab at a legitimate business but make it a fishery specializing in rare fish stocks that was based in Somalia. Yes, Somalia (something about the decades of war + boat pirating allowing the depleted fish stocks along the Somalian coast to rebound and a fishery there being a fish-goldmine). Did I also mention that the guy gave his mercenary teams detailed load-outs of what weapons and gear they should bring on each mission, and where he thought they should setup defensive positions like he was playing Jagged Alliance 2? Or that he was the brains and funding behind two major open-source disk encryption projects that were NSA resistant. Or that the sex addiction documented throughout the book was really a scheme for getting Anchor Babies in every non-extradition treaty nation or limited extradition treaty nation in case he had to flee and needed that extra leverage to resist getting extradited to the U.S.A.? == Well, all that stuff is true and real. Book is The mastermind : drugs, empire, murder, betrayal by Evan Ratliff. And the two open-source disk encryption projects, in case anyone cares, were E4M and TrueCrypt.
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Oct 8, 2019 17:11
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I read Tau Zero and yeah, it wasn't amazing or anything. It really is just that one Futurama season finale. But it was funny how it kept going 'yeah yeah simultaneity shut the gently caress up and enjoy the story, nerd'. There's like ten times where some scientist starts to go 'UHH actually we don't know that whatever happened...' and the sorta-cop main character like immediately tells them to shut up every time
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Oct 14, 2019 07:22
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Yeah, Poul Anderson's Tau Zero is pretty weak, but it's gimmick made it stand out. Poul Anderson was one of the best multi-genre massively influential writers of his era though. Poul Anderson's most influential work is probably Three Hearts and Three Lions, which ranks just below Tolkien's LotR as being the genre-defining stories of fantasy fiction. Scifi-wise, Poul Anderson's Ensign Flandry stories set out genre standards for scifi secret agent adventuring stories and still (somewhat) hold-up for modern readers. Sort of thread necromancy, wondering if tooterfish ever got around to reading "Madame Fourcades Secret War" that covered the insane amounts of French internal politicking throughout WW2 that got glossed over HARD in post World War 2 history books.
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Oct 15, 2019 01:24
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I was just reminded of this but a couple years ago TRADOC G-2 published a collection of scifi short stories with the theme of "Visioning the Future of Warfare 2030-2050" as part of their "mad scientist" program. https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/us-army-tradoc-mad-scientist-sci-fi-stories quote:In November 2016, the U.S. Army TRADOC Mad Scientist Initiative launched its first Science Fiction Writing Competition, with the topic “Warfare in 2030 to 2050.” This contest sought unconventional thinkers and was open to people from all walks of life. One of the founding ideas inspiring the contest was the notion of ‘Science Fiction as reality.’ Science fiction has been historically predictive of future technologies and ideas. One example is the prevalence of mobile “smart devices” and advanced video communications in popular films and television such as Star Trek and Back to the Future. These kind of forward-looking ideas and themes help the Army think about and prepare for future challenges and opportunities in conflict. We sought to challenge writers with the opportunity to contribute ideas outside of what the Army is already considering about the future, and they delivered. They just wrapped up another one with the prompt of: https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/154-takeaways-from-the-mad-scientist-science-fiction-writing-contest-2019/ quote:On March 17th, 2030, the country of Donovia, after months of strained relations and covert hostilities, invades neighboring country Otso. Donovia is a wealthy nation that is a near-peer competitor to the United States. Like the United States, Donovia has invested heavily in disruptive technologies such as robotics, AI, autonomy, quantum information sciences, bio enhancements and gene editing, space-based weapons and communications, drones, nanotechnology, and directed energy weapons. The United States is a close ally of Otso and is compelled to intervene due to treaty obligations and historical ties. The United States is about to engage Donovia in its first battle with a near-peer competitor in over 80 years…
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Oct 15, 2019 02:11
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Nice. Dean Ing's Firefight 2000/Y2K, with updated dates inside it, would be a good contest entry the next time that US Army TRADOC funded Science Fiction Writing Competition happens. Dean Ing's stories, if you ignore the craziness in them, always had interesting plausible evolved technology takes. Favorite most realistic Ing technology take was the solar powered aircraft drones that acted as low-budget communication satellites/re-broadcasters. Most out there Dean Ing technology was his caseless ammo concept, which was both deadly cool and self-combustable.
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Oct 15, 2019 05:10
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Iirc google held a competition like 10 years ago to design a microsat and/or high altitude solar drone balloon for that same reason
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Oct 15, 2019 06:21
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Thats cool re: google testing out low-budget solar drone balloons. Sort of lied in the main sff thread. Said that Julian May's insane scfi-fantasy and the ultra-crappy Destroyer novelettes were my popcorn fiction reading, but it's really Dean Ing. Ing included a lot of interesting technology ideas in his stories, but you have to dig deep and endure all the batshit craziness (mormon death squad assassins, post-apocalypse survivalism, boar penis descriptions, new old west gunslinging, new old-west survivalism, unstoppable mutated wild boars, child-brides, pre-Wasteland/Fallout series style desert rangers, enslaved child soldiers, embedded in the skull micro-bombs, the new old west, etc) to find them.
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Oct 15, 2019 14:42
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Larry Parrish posted:It's never the settings where travel is long and theres no FTL comms that have pirates, for some reason. You mean, like the Honor Harrington setting, where interstellar travel takes weeks or months, and they don't have interstellar FTL comms?
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Oct 18, 2019 03:34
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quantumfoam posted:One thing that kind of amazes me is that Douglas McArthur in the Philippines during/after/before WW2 is a mil-fiction dead zone besides W. E. B. Griffin's turgid books, and Neal Stephenson's super-loving terrible and embarrassing Cryptonomicon. This an entire mil-fiction subgenre waiting to be tapped (or not) by aspiring mil-fiction writers. I believe firmly that MacArthur was the reincarnation of Alcibiades and nothing will persuade me otherwise.
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Oct 18, 2019 04:59
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Beefeater1980 posted:I believe firmly that MacArthur was the reincarnation of Alcibiades and nothing will persuade me otherwise. I did like browsing back and seeing that Douglas McArthur's father and grandfather ALSO got fired from high level US Government jobs for being toxic assholes. Personally see Douglas McArthur as the product of fast-track promoting and helicopter parenting so extreme Douglas McArthur didn't experience any negative consequences from his behavior until he was in his 50's. Read the "Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side" collection earlier this week. It was ok, not worth tracking down unless you have a deep love for '60's era men's adventure stories with "wacky" improv-comedy elements. Most mil-scifi story in it was "The Body Builders".
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Oct 18, 2019 06:06
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Anshu posted:You mean, like the Honor Harrington setting, where interstellar travel takes weeks or months, and they don't have interstellar FTL comms? Well the problem with this is that interstellar travel doesn't take weeks or months in a place where you can ambush people with commonly held equipment. It's not something that really ever happens intentionally, and I can count the number of battles that happen during interstellar travel on like, a few fingers. The only time you can really attack people is in intrasystem travel. All the pirate attacks happen in-system in specific pirate-filled systems.
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Oct 18, 2019 06:07
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IMO generally there are four types of space travel: Slow travel/Slow comms: Generally two types, "Age of Sail" settings and stuff like Chanur or the Traveller RPG where it takes weeks/years to cross The Space Empire because with a Jump 1 drive you can't go straight to System Y from System X, or terribly written hard SF by a nerd that works at JPL and will be nominated for the Prometheus Award. Slow/Fast: Takes time to get places (either "slow FTL" such as Star Trek, or with sublight relativistic travel) but you can have a video chat on your wrist comp with Grandma while you're on Alpha Centauri. Often placed under limits such as it being bulky or only having limited transmission capacity. For example part of the Vatta's War series is about terrorists blowing up the space telephone network. Sometimes in Slow FTL settings you can have combat in FTL because it's just a mirror dimension you fly your ship into or something, I read the Angel in the Whirlwind series by Christopher G. Nuttall a while back (probably a 3.75 at most but still readable) and IIRC it described FTL Space as being this kaleidoscopic place where you'd constantly pick up ships that didn't exist or were mirror images of your own ship or were vast distances away. Fast/Slow: Instantaneous teleportation but communications still obey the speed of light. Popular with more space opera themed stuff where characters can go "Sir the enemy fleet just jumped in behind us!" "drat we'll never get a warning to Planet X in time!" and so on, or jump out in the nick of time. (There are also hybrid systems where you have to use sublight to get to the hypergate or whatever, or fly to the edge of the solar system to go FTL, or where there's slow FTL between systems plus gates/wormholes/whatever like the Lost Fleet) Fast/Fast: Generally most space opera stuff where travel and communications both work as needed by the plot. Eg Darth Vader teleconferencing with the Emperor.
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Oct 18, 2019 07:26
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Vader and the Emperor keep talking over each other, a admiral struggles to enter his password, Thrawn gets muted for being in a noisy coffee house, a wookie keeps yelling in the background.
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Oct 18, 2019 07:42
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Kchama posted:Well the problem with this is that interstellar travel doesn't take weeks or months in a place where you can ambush people with commonly held equipment. It's not something that really ever happens intentionally, and I can count the number of battles that happen during interstellar travel on like, a few fingers. The only time you can really attack people is in intrasystem travel. I feel like the setting is really immaterial. Nobody's gonna be ambushing ships in interstellar space as a matter of course because space is really big. If you're camping out in the middle of interstellar space, there's no guarantee you're gonna find anybody. Sure, you can sit on the shortest distance path between places A and B, but as soon as people suspect there's pirates out there they're just gonna take the extra bit of time and pick a different route and you'll never find them. If you want to reliably catch ships, you've got to be waiting where you know you'll find ships, and that means waiting at destination systems.
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Oct 18, 2019 08:49
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Khizan posted:I feel like the setting is really immaterial. Nobody's gonna be ambushing ships in interstellar space as a matter of course because space is really big. If you're camping out in the middle of interstellar space, there's no guarantee you're gonna find anybody. Sure, you can sit on the shortest distance path between places A and B, but as soon as people suspect there's pirates out there they're just gonna take the extra bit of time and pick a different route and you'll never find them. If you want to reliably catch ships, you've got to be waiting where you know you'll find ships, and that means waiting at destination systems. Or having people in the inside, with an ansible or at least lightspeed secure comms so you can get advance notice of any cargo or data on-board that may affect market conditions to your planetside traders. Gods bless the good ship Crimson Permanent Assurance and all who sail on her.
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Oct 18, 2019 09:40
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Or having people in the inside, with an ansible or at least lightspeed secure comms so you can get advance notice of any cargo or data on-board that may affect market conditions to your planetside traders. Ah the,Charles Stross bitcoin Diffie–Hellman encryption novel Neptune's Brood, which almost no-one read. I liked parts of Neptune's Brood, aka the thing bitcoin Diffie–Hellman encryption I already mentioned, but hated the book overall. Mainly because A) Charles Stross deciding at the 80% mark that the main character has been actively lying to and misdirecting the reader made me angry I had been wasting my time reading filler material, B) once I finished Neptune's Brood realized it was a short story stretched to novel length by Stross's book contract with Ace Books, and finally C) it was Stross's 3rd? 4th?( 5th?) overt homage to Robert Heinlein's semenal (that spelling/usage is correct, read on) novel Friday, the Heinlein book with the skeevy pinup cover-art and skeevier book contents. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Oct 18, 2019 |
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Oct 18, 2019 14:42
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I assume space pirates would act like real pirates did. Spotting and intercepting a ship on the high seas in the age of sail was hard as gently caress, and an extremely rare occurrence. Generally, pirates would fly a false flag and hang around outside a port or river where a target would eventually come to them. Or they'd have intel from a spy or an insider telling them where a valuable cargo would be going and when.
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Oct 19, 2019 00:03
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my favorite is how a massive number of them were just privateers anyway, so technically not pirates. or everyone's favorite, 'bored and poor locals completely own a ship stuck in a random channel with rowboats'
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Oct 19, 2019 09:28
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IIRC at the height of the piracy period the Somalians did have people in the diaspora communities who'd ended up in Europe or the US or elsewhere letting the pirates know when ships were setting sail and if they'd be going through Somali waters. Anyways I was just reminded of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amtrak_Wars
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Oct 19, 2019 09:30
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Ah man, haven't thought of those in 20 years. Teenage me really liked those. Gonna go out on a limb here and say they probably don't hold up.
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Oct 19, 2019 11:48
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Khizan posted:I feel like the setting is really immaterial. Nobody's gonna be ambushing ships in interstellar space as a matter of course because space is really big. If you're camping out in the middle of interstellar space, there's no guarantee you're gonna find anybody. Sure, you can sit on the shortest distance path between places A and B, but as soon as people suspect there's pirates out there they're just gonna take the extra bit of time and pick a different route and you'll never find them. If you want to reliably catch ships, you've got to be waiting where you know you'll find ships, and that means waiting at destination systems. Well, that's part of what I was getting at. But in the Honor-verse there's just a bunch of systems where a billions of pirates hang out and for some reason they have to send convoys through them all the time even though none of them are particularly near a wormhole. I always got the impression it was David Weber trying to fit in more Age of Sail stuff without, again, understanding Age of Sail stuff one bit.
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Oct 23, 2019 03:03
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C.M. Kruger posted:IIRC at the height of the piracy period the Somalians did have people in the diaspora communities who'd ended up in Europe or the US or elsewhere letting the pirates know when ships were setting sail and if they'd be going through Somali waters. i thought you wrote TEK WAR for a second and got stuck in a mild flashback
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Oct 24, 2019 00:45
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Kchama posted:Well, that's part of what I was getting at.  Wormholes are good for commerce because that they let you skip a lengthy trip via conventional FTL, thus saving you both time and wear on your ship(s), but they're not like GO in Monopoly where you get given money just for passing through. You still need people to trade with at the other end, so you go to where they are, even if where they are is "not particularly near" the closest wormhole, because they settled the area before the wormhole was discovered.
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Oct 28, 2019 04:39
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Anshu posted:
The reason why those places have so much piracy is they are poor and have nothing to trade, and thus no money for defenses or reason for people to post permanent guards there to protect trade. ... But they still keep sending people through those systems, even when they have no financial reason to. I brought up the wormholes as that would be a possible reason for why you'd want to be in them, but there's nothing like that. So unless they WERE getting money just by passing through, there's no reason for them to be. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/The_Honor_Harrington_Universe.PNG Like here's a map of the galaxy. That big cluster in the very top is the Silesian Confederation, where pretty much all pirates exist. It has a ton of piracy and there's very little government and not a lot of money. Outside of a couple of systems, there's not anywhere to go if you want to make money trading. There's no reason to pass through them in FTL either, and they aren't near the wormholes. You'd have to go pretty far out of your way to go hang-out in a pirate-controlled system pretty much no matter what, but for some reason convoys apparently run through them constantly. Also, as a note, it's actually a huge part of Manticore's thing that they actually do make money from people passing through their wormholes.
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Oct 28, 2019 17:51
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Kchama posted:The reason why those places have so much piracy is they are poor and have nothing to trade, and thus no money for defenses or reason for people to post permanent guards there to protect trade. ... But they still keep sending people through those systems, even when they have no financial reason to. I brought up the wormholes as that would be a possible reason for why you'd want to be in them, but there's nothing like that. Taking your last point first, that's because Manticore built the physical, political, financial, and military infrastructure to make people pay fees for the privilege. It's not an inherent property of the wormholes themselves. Regarding the Silesian Confederacy, the reason they have so many pirates is because their government is so weak, they can't enforce whatever local anti-piracy laws exist and can't stop unscrupulous system governments from cooperating with pirates for financial gain. I expect Silesia is poorer than Manticore (a nation noted as being unusually wealthy), or the Andermani, but that doesn't mean they have no money or nothing to trade.
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Oct 28, 2019 18:28
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it's also pretty weird that habitable planets are seemingly all over the place but people are still trading things besides finished products and luxuries.
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Oct 28, 2019 21:02
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I don't recall Weber going into a lot of detail on that, but I think that is most or all of the trade going on, if your definition of "luxuries" includes things like pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs derived from plants or animals native or unusually modified or adapted to the local environments and biospheres, that are difficult to replicate or cultivate on other planets.
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Oct 28, 2019 22:03
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Anshu posted:I don't recall Weber going into a lot of detail on that, but I think that is most or all of the trade going on, if your definition of "luxuries" includes things like pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs derived from plants or animals native or unusually modified or adapted to the local environments and biospheres, that are difficult to replicate or cultivate on other planets. Well, the problem with the Silesian Confederacy is that their trade can't be worth the cost of basically an endless full-fledge war with the pirates that one would have to keep up in order to do much of anything at all. Like part of the reason why Manticore's Navy is suppose to be so super badass is because they spent a good deal of time pre-Haven War fighting the pirates. Anyways apparently trade isn't what you were thinking of (as that'd make a lot of sense) but instead it's just... general stuff. Because in the one place he's ever really described trade, he laid it out as shipping across the universe is actually cheaper than shipping stuff from one place to another on the same planet.
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Oct 28, 2019 23:20
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god i hate Weber lol. if he was able to glen cook his way past the details into a good story it wouldn't matter but welp. im like 90% sure at this point that the honorverse was written when he watched a samurai movie and then imagined how much better it would be if it was a hot british chick versus a cowboy, and everything is in service of making that scene happen
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Oct 29, 2019 10:22
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Larry Parrish posted:god i hate Weber lol. if he was able to glen cook his way past the details into a good story it wouldn't matter but welp. im like 90% sure at this point that the honorverse was written when he watched a samurai movie and then imagined how much better it would be if it was a hot british chick versus a cowboy, and everything is in service of making that scene happen Cool opinion bro. I thought you only read John Ringo instead of David Weber though  Recently read The Bastard Brigade, a non-fiction book by Sam Kean about the secret World War 2 anti-german nuclear power/weapons sabotage unit ALSOS. It was pretty cool, not a masturbatory Nazi killing fantasy like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, but instead a real-life companion piece to the Monuments Men book/movie. Book mainly followed the lives of Moe Berg, Boris Pash, and Samuel Goudsmit before/during/after World War 2. They were respectively a 1930s-1940s MLB catcher/renaissance man autodidact that spoke 11 languages/unibrow ladies man/freelance OSS agent, a former WW1 White Russian military vet/UCal baseball coach/eventual leader of Alsos unit, and one of the scientists who "discovered quantum spin"/pre-war friend of most of the Axis associated nuclear scientists/the tech-nerd-scientist of the alsos unit. Despite the author noting and subtly mocking how everyone became fascinated with Moe Berg after meeting him, it was obvious by the 40% mark of the book that Sam e: fixed the wrong last name, thanks kchama quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 14:49
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quantumfoam posted:Cool opinion bro. I thought you only read John Ringo instead of David Weber though To be fair to Weber, the Honorverse is just an excuse to write an OG story using the tabletop rules he wrote. Which is why it has the obsession with the ships classes it has and also trade being king of all economically. Also, is that Sam Lake there suppose to be Sam Kean?
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Oct 29, 2019 15:07
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