My Ignominious Profession

Okay so it doesn't make any money (yet), but SF writing is still what I do. Anyway, thoughts.

• So apparently Alfonso X of Spain invented the tabletop war-game, and he even divided the sides elementally, like Magic: The Gathering. From Wikipedia:

  Among its more notable entries is a depiction of what Alfonso calls the ajedrex de los quatro tiempos ("chess of the four seasons"). This game is a chess variant for four players, described as representing a conflict between the four elements and the four humors. The chessmen are marked correspondingly in green, red, black, and white, and pieces are moved according to the roll of dice.

  Sport of kings, bitches.
  
  Anyway, I decided my felinoid aliens have a chess game that settles capture attempts with dice (a bit like Risk?), and can have as many as 6 sides, with possibly some different moves per side. So, yeah, their chess is like a very simple Warhammer.


• Why six sides? Because that's how many elements their pre-scientific thought had: earth, air, fire, water, wood, and bone, which last are "plant life" and "animal life", 'spectively. Everyone's vitalist before science, since life is funky, and also the most salient thing people notice (which is more interesting, rocks, or things—that might be food—that grow on them, or other things—for which you might be food—that hide behind them?). The exception, which may be more common, is people like Aristotle and arguably Chinese philosophers, who are hylozoist: they believe everything is alive, often having an "organism" model of the cosmos.
  
  So why six? Because that's how many planets in their system are visible with the naked eye. That, after all, is why we have five elements (well, Manicheans had ten, but theirs were in dualistic pairings)...and yes, Aristotle had five, not four, his fifth is aether. Add in the sun and moon and that's not only why we've got seven days, but why 7 is a significant number everywhere. The aliens' homeworld has two moons, and plus their sun they have nine days in a week.


• In keeping with their religion being slightly less conservative than Christianity, for instance their idioms no longer reference their purity-code concepts of luck and obligation, the names of their days and months (they've got ten, based on one of the moons' periods) are derived from concepts within their religion. It's a sort of weird combination of Francis of Assisi's Canticle of Creation with the French Revolutionary Calendar (on which today is the 10th day of the 2nd decade of Ventôse, the year 219 of Liberty), but then, they're sort of a cross between High Medieval and Republican France, so that's actually appropriate.
  
  They have leap years every seven years, except when the year is divisible by 61 (don't quote me on that, I'm going from memory, my notes are on another computer). Also, one of their minority religions schedules its sacrifices using both moons' periods, a bit like Meso-American calendars having two interlocking cycles (though a lot shorter).


• So I decided that the conversion rate between the felinoids' currency and IMF Special Drawing Rights would be based on the conversion rate between Soviet Rubles and US Dollars in 1984, since the economics are roughly comparable—actually both are better, since the 24th Century UN is just quasi-Corporativist, not Communist, and the aliens are entrepreneurial distributists rather than capitalists. Remember, I define capitalism technically, as the economic system characterized by employment—people who are their own masters (and that is not what you are when you're an employee) are ridiculously productive.
  
  Anyway. The USSR set the value of the ruble in 1961 as equal to 0.987412g gold, but the actual exchange rate (at least for people other than diplomats, not that many of them were allowed to trade in foreign currencies) was, in 1984, about 6 rubles 29 kopeks to the dollar. So I set the conversion (remember, 24th century Drawing Rights are denominated to avoid fractional sums) as 629₨ per alien currency unit (yeah, their money has sub-denominations...though it's in 1/144, not 1/100).
  
  Now, having 1 human currency=1/629 of an alien currency, certainly looks like what TVTropes calls "RidiculousFutureInflation", but actually, I did the math. Given the Special Drawing Right's current value of US$1.57, for it to have a value of 6.29 Rights in the mid-24th century (again, ignoring the anti-fractional redenomination), would require an average inflation rate of .91%. Consider that 3% inflation has probably been about typical for recent history: I'm actually being crazy generous with the global economy.


• So remember how I said my felinoids' guns resemble Winchester/Henry rifles? I slightly changed my mind: they resemble Marlin rifles, which, admittedly, are basically slightly sexier Henry-type lever-actions. 'Course, my version can be used in full auto; the 'lever' is actually a charging handle, to chamber the first round (it also works like the spur-guards on cavalry guns, letting you keep your finger near the trigger without the risk of accidental discharge).
  
  I'm still torn as to what their handgun should look like; I'm actually coming down to some version of the Webley. Yes it was made by the English, but (not counting the Boer War) after their worst period. Besides, looks are all I'm copying, and as Belloc's comrades in the French artillery said, the English have pretty guns. Not good guns, not guns that are often fired for the sake of justice, indeed not guns whose use is often distinguishable from armed robbery, but pretty ones. Hell, French guns are frankly plug-ugly; do a Google Image search for a Perrin or Javelle revolver. The little Belle Époque/William Morris floral shape of the trigger guards just highlights how dog-vomit the rest of it is.


• Those guns' ammo, remember, are spheres (it's required by their launch mechanism), dimpled for lift, like golf balls. I figure it oughtta perform about as good as a rifled shotgun slug. Which, apparently, means that (at a muzzle velocity of c. 410 m/s), it ought to have a range of over 100 m. I know, I was surprised too, but apparently, shotgun slugs actually have an effective range of c.125 yds, if ("and only if", he felt obligated to specify), the gun has good sights. After that, of course, the range drops off fast.
  
  Even more promising, the rounds the felinoids fire are, each of them, slightly larger than 28 gauge, or much smaller than the 10, 12, and 16-gauge balls used in American shotguns. But, since they've got crazy materials-tech, each ball is about the same weight as a much larger ball (I think they're about as dense as iridium, the 2nd densest element). Maybe they are iridium, spacefaring civilizations can get the stuff cheap, from asteroid-mining.
  
  Also the long guns—which aren't rifles, since their barrels aren't rifled—have twice the muzzle velocity, for 4 times the muzzle energy. If one of these guys shoots you, you know about it. Well, for the couple seconds it takes your brain to die.


• I think any gun that's laid out like a rifle, but isn't rifled (and doesn't fire shot), should be called a long gun. Or a long "whatever the weapon is", i.e. "long laser", etc.
  
  I can see why a longer weapon might be necessary, especially for particle beams—as with bullets, the shot has more room to build up energy—but if you can build up to decent range/power output in a pistol-sized weapon, there'd be no reason to develop a rifle-sized version. In other words, I doubt there would be any such thing as a laser "rifle" if there's also a "pistol".
  
  Interestingly, I can think of a reason to have an energy weapon a)only fire bullet-like shots, rather than hosing the beam around, and b) need magazines. Namely, each magazine contains a number of pre-prepped/charged/whatever focusing chambers, or whatever, which are burned out with each shot, and then ejected, while another is loaded. This allows the weapon to fire at gun-type speeds, rather than having to build up between shots like a Spartan laser.
  
  Ah, crap, I might have to completely re-do how my aliens' weapons work.
  
  Late Addendum: On the basis of the discussion here, I'm still not sure about whether I'm gonna switch my aliens to laser weapons, but one thing I noticed is, if you just interpret the Covenant's "plasma" weapons to refer to the use of plasma acceleration to produce charged electron beams, or else to produce a laser—they seem to behave most like the "blaster"/pulsed laser discussed there. Awesome sauce. It even looks a little like some of the illustrations shown, taking Elite anatomy into account.
  
  Later Addendum: Yeah, I'm just gonna assume the method my felinoids use for accelerating their bullets uses as much energy as a laser would...and doesn't have to screw around with optical effects. Particle beams are worse—they are the problem silly people worry about depleted uranium penetrators causing.