I don't normally like sports, but that was pretty awesome.
It's always so annoying in scifi stories when the space battles are laid out like they're on a planet surface. Nobody thinks to go over or under. People need to realize that space battles are more like submarine battles in the mid range of open water.
And that Star Trek episode with the tachyon net to defend the border? Defending any border between solar systems would take millions of ships, maybe billions. People keep forgetting how monumentally enormous space is. This entire solar system is, compared to the rest of the universe, smaller than a Higgs Boson is compared to the entire Milky Way.
These things are true, though in some instances there are reasons for a flatter orientation. One very well-done battle scene mentioned that arriving in the plane of the ecliptic put less stress on a ship's engines. But the ships coming into a particular system always entered on an odd vector for military reasons. So then people knew exactly where to lay a trap for them...
In my Mindeodean series, the space battles take place either in orbit of inhabited worlds, or around the machines that make wormholes. But that second one doesn't happen as often as it might have in the past for the Mindeodean empire. Not only did the Mindeodeans figure out wormhole tech to begin with, a few thousand years later they figured out how to put such devices on ships. Though a lot of their enemies (and allies) still rely on the old wormhole-making space stations. Defensive warships still only patrol around inhabited worlds and around the wormhole-making space stations. Even the pirates don't try to intercept ships going from the stations (at the outer edge of the solar systems) to the inhabited planets unless they've gotten information about a ship's course ahead of time, and have something they can hide behind (or a cloaking hull).
But there's only one species in that series that ever go between the stars, and that's the Joquari. They only do it when they want to just chill away from civilization for a while, and they rarely go too far from the system they left.
One last bit: all technology in the Mindeodean universe (except possibly the wormhole tech) is based on real technology or is otherwise possible. Cloaking hulls and other cloaking technology is based on current advances in using metamaterials to create technological invisibility cloaks. The machines called fabbers, which are somewhat like Star Trek's replicators, are based on 3-D printers and where I think such technology will eventually go. The ships run on fusion power and use fusion plasma as a weapon, and their speed is limited. I haven't figured out exactly how fast they can go yet, but they use wormholes because nobody has been able to even approach light speed; even if they could, wormholes are faster and don't have relativitistic effects to worry about.
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dancing_serpent
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Date: 2011-07-31 01:58 am (UTC)It's always so annoying in scifi stories when the space battles are laid out like they're on a planet surface. Nobody thinks to go over or under. People need to realize that space battles are more like submarine battles in the mid range of open water.
And that Star Trek episode with the tachyon net to defend the border? Defending any border between solar systems would take millions of ships, maybe billions. People keep forgetting how monumentally enormous space is. This entire solar system is, compared to the rest of the universe, smaller than a Higgs Boson is compared to the entire Milky Way.
Yes...
Date: 2011-07-31 02:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-03 09:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-03 11:58 pm (UTC)In my Mindeodean series, the space battles take place either in orbit of inhabited worlds, or around the machines that make wormholes. But that second one doesn't happen as often as it might have in the past for the Mindeodean empire. Not only did the Mindeodeans figure out wormhole tech to begin with, a few thousand years later they figured out how to put such devices on ships. Though a lot of their enemies (and allies) still rely on the old wormhole-making space stations. Defensive warships still only patrol around inhabited worlds and around the wormhole-making space stations. Even the pirates don't try to intercept ships going from the stations (at the outer edge of the solar systems) to the inhabited planets unless they've gotten information about a ship's course ahead of time, and have something they can hide behind (or a cloaking hull).
But there's only one species in that series that ever go between the stars, and that's the Joquari. They only do it when they want to just chill away from civilization for a while, and they rarely go too far from the system they left.
One last bit: all technology in the Mindeodean universe (except possibly the wormhole tech) is based on real technology or is otherwise possible. Cloaking hulls and other cloaking technology is based on current advances in using metamaterials to create technological invisibility cloaks. The machines called fabbers, which are somewhat like Star Trek's replicators, are based on 3-D printers and where I think such technology will eventually go. The ships run on fusion power and use fusion plasma as a weapon, and their speed is limited. I haven't figured out exactly how fast they can go yet, but they use wormholes because nobody has been able to even approach light speed; even if they could, wormholes are faster and don't have relativitistic effects to worry about.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling now.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-04 03:53 am (UTC)