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Post by richardvonkatzen on May 3, 2018 9:08:04 GMT
I listen to/read a fair amount of hard science fiction and military science fiction. 99% of it involves some kind of magic/superscience/pseudoscience. Alastair Reynolds has some nonsensium powered thrusters, David Weber has collapsed star matter and jump drives, Jack Campbell has jump drives, hyperspace, force fields, LMB has at least three kinds of force fields, insanely powerful thrusters and FTL drives - and these are some of the more 'serious' military sci-fi writers, without getting into the 100% magical WW2 in space nonsense that is Star Wars/Star Trek. It seems that most authors just can not help themselves no matter how much they actually know about physics and engineering. This tremendously alters how space combat works (even if it makes some internal sense, which is not necessarily so). Do you folks know of any military/hard science fiction that has 100% known-physics combat, with no death rays, warp engines, inertial compensators, impossibly powerful reaction thrusters, etc. that uses fairly realistic near-future combat?
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Post by The Astronomer on May 3, 2018 9:27:45 GMT
Hmm... Somehow, that reminds me of a project idea we came up with a while ago, it's a CDE short story compilation book or something...
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Post by richardvonkatzen on May 3, 2018 9:50:06 GMT
Hmm... Somehow, that reminds me of a project idea we came up with a while ago, it's a CDE short story compilation book or something... It would be interesting. Although I've read some hard science fiction that was magic-free, such as Half-Life by Hal Clement ( Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes pretty close to being magic-free, too) none of it is military by any description, and no space-combat takes place (though the Loonies threaten to use gravity-powered kinetic kill weapons on the Earth they never actually do). I can not think of a single instance of ship-to-ship combat that does not involve at least one of (and usually all of) super-powered thrusters, gravity magic that allows 1000G accelerations, exotic matter armor, force fields, weapons with inexplicable performance, power sources of impossible concentration, etc. I can think of only a couple of examples of military space combat where such elementary basics such as fuel are ever taken seriously. And it's not because they don't know this - some of these guys are physicists, NASA engineers or aerospace contractors - but they choose to write space combat as navy warfare in Spaaaace, even when otherwise cleaving generally to physics. Likewise, in-system combats tend to ignore the fact that there are these giant things called planets that might have a little something to do with your trajectory, ya know? Entering and leaving orbit is seen as purely optional in most science fiction, rather than the only way to keep from 1) burning all your fuel in a few hours or 2) crashing in a fiery death. |
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Post by Fgdfgfthgr on May 3, 2018 11:20:47 GMT
If you can read Chinese(mostly unlikely), you can have a try of the novel in my signature. A lot of the space warship's ideas in my novel came from KSP and CDE. Though there are also alien life and FTL contents...It isn't a problem to imagine an FTL ship with a fission reactor, right?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on May 3, 2018 12:07:22 GMT
TBH I am not really into military SciFi. In games - sure - it's hard to make interesting gameplay that won't at some point involve shooting something up, and who never wanted to make badass space :insert_warship_class_here: ? (of course there are very few space games that even want to acknowledge any sort of realism).
But in novels you can usually make more interesting use of hard SF - they are a vehicle for exploring new ideas, not reiterating what we already know.
Anyway, jumpdrives are usually in because most authors don't want to confine the action to our solar system and most readers feel the same. FTL is not necessarily unphysical (there are Einsteinian spacetime solutions that would allow effective FTL), but if it turns out possible it will have serious implications (it will be necessary to give up either relativity - unlikely - or causality as we know it) and good authors will at least try to work with that. Powerful space drives are primarily a way to make plot move at acceptable pace - if every major interplanetary journey looked like "Homecoming" mission, there would be many plots that just wouldn't be workable. There is hardly anything I could write on that topic that hasn't been exhaustively discussed on Atomic Rockets, Tough SF, or Rocketpunk Manifesto.
Lastly, before CDE, there was no tool of any sort that would allow actually testing one's ideas. Even CDE in its current form is too limited to resolve the timeless Green VS Purple rift splitting SciFi community - I am speaking of missiles VS lasers, of course - and I have suspicion that the answer is going to be "politics" anyway.
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Post by dragonkid11 on May 4, 2018 2:34:44 GMT
Well, there's the Expanse for the most part except for the protomolecule stuff. And then there's this universe in which the artist created a short stories for that can be read on the SB forum too. Sea to Sky ShipyardsDo you like ships so bloody huge they became giant titanic beast because the government actually truly exploited nearly every node of resource in just our solar system? Do you like hundreds of them stuck in the same exact solar system because FTL drive turns out to be bloody hard to develop? Do you like the insane level of genocide they caused just by duking out with one another because Isaac Newton is the deadlist son of a bitch in the universe? Then there you go, enjoy. |
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Post by richardvonkatzen on May 19, 2018 11:25:32 GMT
Anyway, jumpdrives are usually in because most authors don't want to confine the action to our solar system and most readers feel the same...Powerful space drives are primarily a way to make plot move at acceptable pace - if every major interplanetary journey looked like "Homecoming" mission, there would be many plots that just wouldn't be workable. That's an opinion I often come across but I think that's more of a genre convention than a 'fact' of good literature. For example, it's entirely plausible that even extraplanetary exploitation is a waste of energy, and that even if we had really awesome technology we'd still all be living on Earth because we're built to live on Earth. The fact that high tech is interpreted as automatically leading to space colonies (much less interstellar flight, possibly the most wasteful expenditure of energy imaginable) is a trope. As a person who reads quite a bit tropes get quite tiring, though of course there is always a portion of the fandom (and writers) who thrive on regurgitating the same stuff 10,000,000 times. Alien invasions, space empires, muhExploration, blah blah blah - I just find it difficult to care about someone rewriting the same damn plot for the ten millionth time. Actually making some economic sense, high tech without a space fetish, space which isn't populated by biological humans until the end of time, etc. would be some interesting and halfway original stories. Instead we just keep getting the same 5 recycled plots and recycled settings with different paint jobs.
I've written elsewhere that since aliens are basically just humans and the solar system is so freaking huge there's really no reason for most space plots to even take place outside the solar system. It's just a fetish of the genre, like lazer guns or elves in fantasy, that people throw in without even considering whether it's necessary. Likewise, I've always been interested in the idea of superheroes taken halfway seriously (either socially or physically) but apparently the fandom's generic response is THAT WOULDN'T BE FUN. I think that's more or less an atavistic response, people get comfortable with a certain trope or tradition and feel threatened when someone tells them 'that doesn't really make sense'. Anything that they're not used to 'isn't fun', as though they're the arbiters of taste or something.
In large part this just comes down to the fact that most writers and bad writers, most readers are stupid, and thus most books are poorly written and marketed for idiots. But I wish that more writers would try to be halfway original, instead of giving us the same nonsensical technologies and McGuffins. The same goes for fantasy, or any genre, really. How do people even enjoy watching the same story over and over and over? Do people actually take some satisfaction in knowing instantly what the story arc and ending will be, or are they really so dense they can't spot it from page 4? That's the main thing that interested me about CoaDE, there is literally no game ever made that is like it. KSP is the closest, but it's not a combat game at all and is cartoony to boot.
One thing I find funny about random genre plot generators is that they're often more original than what professional writers produce!
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rgm79
New Member
Posts: 15
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Post by rgm79 on May 24, 2018 3:41:59 GMT
Bruce Sterling's novels about Shapers and Mechanists. And may be " The Quantum Thief". It this one "super-technologies" (digital immortality, antimater, artificial collapsars, quantum communication etc) exist but only in framework of modern sciense. |
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Post by jtyotjotjipaefvj on May 25, 2018 10:35:06 GMT
And may be " The Quantum Thief". It this one "super-technologies" (digital immortality, antimater, artificial collapsars, quantum communication etc) exist but only in framework of modern sciense. I wouldn't call the combat realistic by any standards though. Plus, there's a lot of really obnoxious references to Minecraft and WoW that really made me hate the series. Other than that it was pretty decent scifi. |
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Post by richardvonkatzen on May 25, 2018 11:08:10 GMT
I just read "Semper Mars" by Ian Douglas and found it quite plausible (aside from the ancient aliens BS). But there's no spacecraft combat in it.
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Post by Enderminion on May 25, 2018 18:56:35 GMT
I just read "Semper Mars" by Ian Douglas and found it quite plausible (aside from the ancient aliens BS). But there's no spacecraft combat in it. additionally the other two trilogies are not as hard, the second one is still good and has an application of the Kzinti lesson, the third one introduces FTL (both warp and quantum teleportation) |
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Post by acrosome on Jun 13, 2018 3:38:39 GMT
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Post by bigbombr on Jun 13, 2018 5:07:48 GMT
I can also recommend the Bobverse by Dennis E. Taylor, starting with "WE ARE LEGION (WE ARE BOB)". Link: dennisetaylor.org/legion/ |
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Post by kanddak on Jun 14, 2018 5:14:26 GMT
Very hard to come by; most realistic depictions of spaceflight I've seen in fiction were part of "man vs nature" plots about scientific exploration with no direct combat between spacecraft.
Niven & Pournelle maybe do the best:
Footfall might be the hardest and I think is pretty much all known physics if I'm remembering correctly.
Protector (Niven alone) contains the definitive treatment of combat between Bussard ramjets at relativistic speeds, which was somewhat realistic as far as we knew in 1973.
The Mote in God's Eye has FTL and force fields, but within very tightly defined limitations, and is pretty much the definitive treatment of how to write those technologies in the least ridiculous possible way. |
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Post by elputo on Jun 16, 2018 17:14:48 GMT
Hmm... Somehow, that reminds me of a project idea we came up with a while ago, it's a CDE short story compilation book or something... It would be interesting. Although I've read some hard science fiction that was magic-free, such as Half-Life by Hal Clement ( Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes pretty close to being magic-free, too) none of it is military by any description, and no space-combat takes place (though the Loonies threaten to use gravity-powered kinetic kill weapons on the Earth they never actually do). I can not think of a single instance of ship-to-ship combat that does not involve at least one of (and usually all of) super-powered thrusters, gravity magic that allows 1000G accelerations, exotic matter armor, force fields, weapons with inexplicable performance, power sources of impossible concentration, etc. I can think of only a couple of examples of military space combat where such elementary basics such as fuel are ever taken seriously. And it's not because they don't know this - some of these guys are physicists, NASA engineers or aerospace contractors - but they choose to write space combat as navy warfare in Spaaaace, even when otherwise cleaving generally to physics. Likewise, in-system combats tend to ignore the fact that there are these giant things called planets that might have a little something to do with your trajectory, ya know? Entering and leaving orbit is seen as purely optional in most science fiction, rather than the only way to keep from 1) burning all your fuel in a few hours or 2) crashing in a fiery death. That's because space is big as fuck and planets really don't occupy that much room, and neither do their SOIs. Most SF is written by Hollywood committees or meatheads, so of course attention won't be paid to details, details, details...
Pardon me, but reviewing your posts you seem to be just the wrong target audience for this game.
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