Sierra Foxtrot 7

Pensées sur l'SF. 553 is 7 × 79, and the sum of nine consecutive primes (43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 + 71 + 73 + 79).

• Realized I had had space-combats take place at the top speeds of spaceships, which...malarkey. At 7.5% c, which is what my humans' starships do, you cross one light-second in 13 and one-third seconds. At the speed of zled starships, 12% c, it's only 8 and one-third. That's not a lot of time to fight, and if your enemy manages to hit you with a few 100-gram rounds, each will hit like a 6-kiloton W54 tactical nuke.
  
  So I decided that ships only speed up to their top speed when they're making the dozens-of-AUs trip to safe space-fold distance, and the first thing they do when they fold into a system is decelerate to "tactical" speed. That makes parasite craft make much more sense, especially for the humans; the motherships can save their propellant for carting their parasites around, and leave the combat maneuvering to the parasites. The parasites, likewise, are usually launched via catapult, and mostly use their engines for high-G maneuvering (decided their crews are in tanks of acceleration gel, since they're too small for a full-blown topological inertial-compensation system; the one attached to their autocannon only has to counter one force in one direction, the recoil, and thus can be smaller).
  
  "Tactical speed", thus, is about .6% c, for humans, and about 1% c for zledo. (Though zled ships, with metric-patching engines, don't fly by expelling a propellant, they don't have an unlimited budget for their flight, either. It takes more power to impart more velocity, so the maximum speeds their engines are capable of are only a bit better than those of human ships; it's the maneuverability/acceleration that's superior.)
• I was worried that maybe the rebreather I used as a model for the air-recycler on the VAJRA suits was too heavy. SCUBA air-tanks, see, are often weighted, so that they don't force you to float when you'd rather dive (remember, they're full of air). But I looked up rebreathers for mining, firefighting, and mountaineering, and nope, 15 kilos seems to be pretty normal. One firefighting unit was 12.8 kilos, but I doubt it lasts as long as the 15-kilo ones.
• So a bunch of people say you wouldn't use mechanical counterpressure suits, because they're skintight and therefore look unflattering. One, they're not actually all that skintight (on the outside); MIT's BioSuit is not even as form-fitting as a wetsuit, and people of less than optimal body-configurations do things requiring wetsuits. It's about like a motocross jumpsuit.
  
  Besides, even if it were true, nobody says you can't wear something over your spacesuit. On Mars for example you'd probably want a fairly heavy cloak—think Jawa cosplay—since Martian dust can get blowing pretty fast—and is also toxic and magnetic and pretty much something from one of those murder-worlds evil Galactic Emperors put prisons on.
  
  Other places you'd probably have a relatively light protective cover, as an extra defense against punctures (which are no longer deadly but "frostbitten hickey" still hurts).
• In the 1988 comedy/shotacon movie "Big", at one point, the child-transformed-into-Tom Hanks is shown a toy idea, a building that turns into a robot. His response? "I don't get it. It turns from a building into a robot, right? Well, what's fun about that?"
  
  What indeed.
• I didn't mention this at the time, but I think the demise of Almost Human proves that Fox is biased against good science fiction, as the Browncoats claim—as long as that good science fiction has robots in it. (Obviously a bias against good science fiction has nothing to do with Firefly one way or another.)
  
  Maybe it'll take a third show (Sara Connor Chronicles was the other) to prove the point, but I don't know what it is with them. Maybe there are just budgetary issues? Sarah Connor was probably relatively expensive, and Almost Human was the first sci-fi show in quite some time that didn't look exactly like every other show on TV.
• Speaking of good sci-fi shows, the Minority Report series shows no little promise. The only real complaint I have is it's a little too insistent with the "See? It's the future! Our future! See? Damn you, see?!" I expect it'll settle down after the first few episodes, though.
• So it occurs to me that the appropriate term for flying animals of an alien biosphere is not "fliers", but "fowl". The word, cognate with German Vogel, derives from the same root as "fly" and "flight" (there's probably some metathesis involved in the difference between "fgl" and "flg", Germanic languages are into metathesis).
  
  Likewise "fish" is an appropriate term for the endoskeleton-equipped swimmers; it's not monophyletic on Earth, either, and both its synonyms, "pisces" and "ichthyes", are "a typological, but not a phylogenetic classification". (Incidentally, whales are too fish—specifically Sarcopterygii. Of course, so are giraffes and ocelots and Presbyterian ministers.)
• An aspect of my setting, with implications for my "future history" that I can't be bothered to flesh out (or rather am content to leave implicit), is that in the 24th century, every ethnicity is referred to by its continent of origin, as Asians are now. I.e., blacks and whites are called Africans and Europeans (yes, even if they're from America). Non-white, non-black Hispanics, and Native Americans, are both referred to as American.
  
  "Asian" on its own usually, in my setting, means East and Southeast Asians, not people from Central or South Asia (because I'm not British). I think Central and South Asian are called either "Central Asian" and "South Asian", or possibly Middle Easterners and Sub-continentals (leaning toward the former, since it's concise). Also I'm pretty sure North Africans are called "North Africans", although none have come up.
  
  Yes, that system glosses over mixed-race people. So does ours, but this system has the advantage of not referring to people, many of whom are lighter-skinned than most Navajos, as "black".