Ad Astra Per Acerbitatem

Yes, that means "to the stars through snottiness." This isn't even gonna be that snotty; I just love the play on words. Anyway, here's a number of things I thought of, about space and space SF.

• So you know that strange idea Americans have that the British are smarter than we are? No, I don't get it either (maybe it's American anti-intellectualism making them think anyone that evil must be smart), but here's a good counter-example. Our flagship SF series is, for better and for worse, Star Trek. Theirs is Dr. Who, AKA "Lost In Space with a body count".


• Am I actually so geeky that I'm the only one who will give something major props for being consistent about how long things take in space travel? I think a big part of what I like in Cherryh and Niven is that space travel is slow, and largely a matter of pointing yourself at things, revving up, coasting, and then slowing down in time to land. Most other things are about as consistent as Bebop, if that.


• I know for a fact that I'm unique in thinking sound in space is more excusable than being deliberately vague. One is just foley—punching people doesn't make much noise either, generally—but the other is actually flaunting the fact you can't be bothered to look up or make up any details.
  
  Here's a mental exercise: What is the main engine of the Serenity? What gives it artificial gravity? What's its main reactor? Is there FTL communication, or no, and if no, how come there is anyway (go check: they're plainly doing interplanetary calls in real time)?
  
  I can answer all of those questions about Star Trek and Star Wars. With a little research I could answer them about Babylon 5. I can't answer them about Firefly. Why? Because it's not science fiction.


• Okay, that's a little harsh, but it is the next step down from Star Trek, and that's pretty far into the margins, folks. Star Trek had meaningless technobabble, so Firefly has none. It's like the all-too-common type of feminism that says that, because some men neglect or abuse their wives, we should abolish marriage. Those of us who've seen an arch have a saying, "abusus usum non tollit"—technobabble has a place.
  
  I come to science fiction to see cool planets and aliens and technology, used to tell a story that preserves the eternal verities. And I'm so constituted that I always think anything is cooler when you know how it works. Half the fun of SF is plausibly-explained amazing things, like orbit elevators or railguns or fusion torches. You wanna show me wondrous things but not explain them, well, I like fantasy too, dude. It's even okay to set your fantasy in space, like Farscape or Dark City (which reminds me, I need to do a review of that). Just don't come and tell me you're doing science fiction when the only apparent explanation for everything in the show is "Magic. Why?"


• So, Kiddy Grade is a guilty pleasure; if ever a series should've been imported under a different name, this is it. Also, I'm sorry, naked Lumiere is creepy, I don't care if she's actually centuries old and uses the kid body to save power. No that's not a spoiler, you see it coming a mile off.
  
  I just thought it was sort of funny, though, how, in this show that's just an excuse to draw pretty girls and cool robots, there's an orbit elevator, an anti-inertia field that has a side-effect of making ships hard to hit (because it warps the surrounding spacetime), and an off-hand remark about storing energy in Planck-scale hyperspaces (would that be brane energy?). Yeah, it's one of those shows where everything can be done by nanomachines—if anything the Japanese are worse about that than we are—but it's still a damn sight less condescending than most American things.
  
  Still, though, I think Galaxy Express's Machine People hunting humans for sport is more plausible than Kiddy Grade's Noblesse who look down on people who have used cyber-enhancements. Elites usually have a reason for their power, and "we're nowhere near as strong or resilient as you" wouldn't be one.


• Orbit elevators remind me, why don't people know how hard it is to get off of planets? A good rule of thumb is, "anything can go into space that can fly" (a spaceship is basically a wingless airplane, except with a tower's floor-plan if it doesn't make its own gravity). The heaviest thing that can fly is the biggest airplane, the Antonov An-225 "Mriya", and its max takeoff weight is 640 tons.
  
  And yet a puny Star Wars ship like a Corellian Corvette? 10 gigagrams—as in tens of thousands of tons. And this lands on planets—more than once, I mean. What, did y'all use sea ships as a baseline?
  
  Now, admittedly things like magnetosphere sails (the aliens in my book use them as backup engines since their main engine already uses a plasma bubble) might allow the lifting of some pretty extensive payloads, though nothing as big as a Star Destroyer's 25 teragrams (yes, apparently those can land). The reasonable max for an orbit elevator, at least the kind we could do in the foreseeable future, is a pitiful 2-6 thousand tons per year; a Verne gun could do 280,000 tons per payload (it's a cannon, it shoots into space), but the acceleration would kill anything that was riding on it. Verne guns become a lot more feasible if you have an inertia damping system, to keep passengers alive and cargo uncrushed. There's much goodness, what Tycho Brahe calls "nutrients", to be had, but SF writers (both TV and, unusually, literary) are often lazy, and just skip coming up with cool solutions to this problem.
  
  Oh by the way, the reason it makes no sense for any Star Wars ship to be able to land, is that ion engines (and indeed all magnetic-accelerated particle engines) don't work in atmosphere, sorry guys.


• The famous "Great Resizing", in which the guy who writes Honor Harrington realized the stated dimensions and masses of his ships made them less dense than cigar smoke, is a grim object lesson for writers: check the density of your ships.
  
  How do you know it's plausible? Well, I checked mine against airplanes, since, as I said, a spaceship is a wingless airplane, tower floorplan optional (but grants additional neckbeard cred). The medium-sized private ship a billionaire guy uses (he's licensed to own power plants, it's cool) is the same mass and dimensions as a wingless Spruce Goose. One of the bigger ones the humans have, the biggest one that can land, is an escort ship that's 3 times the dimensions of the Tupolev TB-6 bomber the Soviets never greenlit; its mass is twice the Mriya's takeoff weight, but I figure putting c. 1300 tons in orbit is reasonable for the 24th century.
  
  The two biggest ships never land; they're built and launched in space, and stay there till time or the wrath of Ouranos destroy them. The biggest one, a "carrier" (except it's not a boat so I call it a mothership, Space Is Not A Damn Ocean), is approximately three times the dimensions of the aforementioned An-225 Mriya, and 27 times its empty mass...which is 7600 tons, and change. Yeah, that don't land.


• Anyone else notice how insane the "war" aspect of Star Wars is? Yeah, we know, stormtroopers can't shoot—though neither could the Soviet army, conscripts suck. But how about the battle droids, having their power transmitted from their mothership? Um, what? You put the existence of your army at the mercy of whether the enemy sets up jamming? Forget your war-crimes, Trade Federation, you deserve to lose because of this.
  
  Also, none of the Clone Troopers in Clone Wars has even a rudimentary knowledge of tactics. I mean, yeah, that "I'll march my column at your column while we shoot at each other" thing they and the droids do, could be chalked up to convention (basically it's fighting a duel as a team event, the kind of thing you get in slightly decadent cultures, and actually has a lot to say for itself). But that, and having air support, don't mesh, and yet they never use the air support—seriously, if it's a convention, it needs to be explicitly said it is (call someone dishonorable for not doing it, or something).


• I'd like to point out that New Mombasa is a major city in Halo because it's on the equator (Mombasa proper is only 4 degrees away from it), and therefore a good spot for an orbit elevator. It falls on you in ODST, remember?
  
  How awesome is that? They even went into the economic ramifications—there's a megacity in Africa because of space travel!


• Also, Halo's Slipstream Drive is a variant of the jump drives from Traveler, basically quantum tunneling on a macro scale. And apparently entering slipstream "space" is detectable...because of Cherenkov radiation!
  
  I'll explain. Cherenkov radiation is emitted when a particle passes through a medium faster than the speed of light in that medium. Therefore there generally won't be any Cherenkov radiation in vacuum, since "speed of light in a vacuum" is probably the limit.
  
  But when you use an FTL drive...
  
  I'm geeking out to the point of squeeing.