De Romanicorum Physicalium

Yeah, so I had some thoughts on SF writing. What, the title? It's Latin for "On Scientific Romance". I said before, if you can't say it in Latin, why bother to say it at all? For your reference, "science" in Latin is "physica" ("scientia" means "knowledge" in general, Wikipedia). Which, incidentally, makes SF, as such, "Romanice Physicalis".

• So I decided the IMF Special Drawing Rights currency of my future is based on the relative purchasing power of individual countries, relative to a "basket" of commodities. Basically, what it means (sort of) is that, instead of the yen being weaker than the dollar being weaker than the euro, Japan has less purchasing power than the US has less than the EU. Which, incidentally, is how it works now; this really just streamlines the process.
  
  At least I think so. Money was complicated enough when it was based on metals; now, when it's based on fiat (which actually means that governments back their legal tender with "face") it's basically fricking magic. And remember, when I say something is magic, that I own the Corpus Hermeticum.


• So I decided that, given my setting has the UN as a world government (it's basically a confederacy), the Peacekeepers are its armed forces. The national militaries have troop obligations to the PK—known as "Papa Kilo"—and form "national cadres" within it. The standard PK weapon is a bullpup version of the Kalashnikov, like Poland's Karabinek wz. 2005 Jantar, except the 24th century version uses caseless, electronically-fired rounds in 6.8x43 mm. I figured, you know, the UN would want to standardize on something durable and simple, and the AK is certainly that.
  
  Given their military structure and equipment, I trust you can guess what the Peacekeepers' rank-structure and insignia are.
  
  Now, some of those "national cadres" also field some more traditional units; the three that've come up are the Sikhs (in the Punjab region of India), the Gorkhas (in a different region of India, and Nepal, and related regions), and the US Marines. They tend to use their own equipment in addition to, or in lieu of, the PK-issue; Gorkhas use kukris instead of PK combat knives, and Marines use the bullpup AR idea I've been boring you all with. All three of those groups mostly come up in scenes where the aliens mention there are some humans who are worth a damn. India and the US have several space-colonies, see, though the latter's are mostly Spanish-speaking (the US is bilingual by this time).


• Examples of how to do things differently: my felinoid aliens have no concept of the supernatural. It's not that they're not religious; they are (they've got three normal religions and some tiny illegal death-cults), and they've also got a group of psionics-users. It's just, as far as they can tell, all the stuff gods, ghosts, angels, and God do, are completely within their nature; so your silly "natural/supernatural" distinction is entirely arbitrary. On a related note they call science "physical studies", metaphysics "spiritual studies", and theology "divine studies". Which last, well, so do we, if you think about it.
  
  They also never really had an atomic theory until they observed wave-particle duality; prior to that, "particles" were conceptualized as being discrete degrees of whatever they impart (charge, mostly, at that point). So, yeah, they actually had quantum theory before atomic theory. Fun, huh?
  
  Their science is mostly done by their monks, as it was in the Middle Ages, and monks are supposed to be humble. So I have to come up with descriptive names for all the things our scientists give their names to. It's not "Casimir effect", for instance, it's "vacuum gap effect". Really you ought to do something like that for any aliens; at least slap some alien's name on it. It irritates me when aliens call it, you know, Hawking radiation: at least call it "Shligaforf radiation", or whatever. My felinoids call it "actualization radiation", by the bye.


• I mentioned about the measurements, and the colonials using the radio-names of the alphabet (I think because of the need to be clear over radio). Did I mention they also use the Greek radio alphabet? Did you know there is one? Well there is.
  
  So the second book, for instance, taking place in orbit of γ Serpentis, has characters referring to the system primary as Gati Serpentis.
  
  Also, though, the UN accepts the traditional Chinese star names, as well. So the aforementioned people occasionally refer to the star, above, as Tiānshìyòuyuán Sì (天市右垣四), the Wall of the Heavenly Market Enclosure 4. Why? Well, because unlike everyone's favorite winner of the Billy Quizboy lookalike contest, I know China has its own culture.
  
  Which reminds me, the person who grew up on Chinese space stations uses actual Chinese profanity. Did you know it exists?


• Huh, it occurs to me, if you're gonna make a caseless round, you probably want the case to go all the way to the end of the bullet, like so:
  
  Notice the caseless bullets are near-perfect cylinders? Yeah. So anyway, that means you'd have straight magazines, rather than curved ones like the current 30-round STANAG. Probably (given, y' know, 30-round instead of 20-round) about half again as long as the STANAG 20-round boxes, but then again, not quite, since it'd be designed for a slightly different size of round (though apparently 6.8x43 is designed to feed reliably from STANAG magazines, since it was originally designed to have power more like the 7.62x51 while having controllability in full-auto more like 5.56x45).
  
  And who knows, maybe they use casket magazines, and give people 50-60 rounds to play with.