De scripturae romanicos physicales II

More SF writing thoughts.

• Decided that the nuclear warheads used in space by all my civilizations are actually neutron bomb warheads. See, the metric-patching effect makes the zled (and khângây) ships immune to EM radiation, because the space-time distortion shunts it around the outside of the metric-patching. Something like 90% of a "conventional" nuke's energy is X-rays, with the remaining 10% neutrons; a neutron-bomb's energy is 80% neutrons and only 20% X-rays.
  
  The zledo and khângây might use nuclear shaped-charge/Casaba Howitzer missiles, actually. Humans can't detect them very well, so they have to depend on the blast-radius of explosives (only nukes make a big enough radius in space, since there's no atmosphere to transmit shocks), but people who have topology sensors for tracking metric-patching engines can aim a lot better. (Human ships other than motherships and their parasites also use particle beams, due to the zled ships being immune to EM.)
  
  A Casaba Howitzer delivers up to half its energy as a wedge of plasma (again, shaped-charge). The ones we thought of using for the "Orion battleship" concept were "a few" kilotons; half of a few kilotons is still at least several hundred tons of TNT.
• Since we're coming up fast on the day Marty and Doc Brown arrive in the "future", I thought I'd point out that "Mr. Fusion" is a very bad idea. First off, you want to give fusion lots of room—it's only "safer" than fission because it can't go critical and its waste is (somewhat) more convenient, the reaction itself is much worse.
  
  And second, seriously? Organic waste? The thing is, we are never realistically going to be doing much proton-chain fusion, not in the foreseeable future anyway (in my setting they only do it for interstellar rockets and they need extremely hypothetical space-time topology tech to do it). Most of the fusion we can actually create would be more along the lines of deuterium-tritium fusion, vastly less energetic than proton-chain fusion.
  
  But even proton-chain fusion mostly only involves hydrogen. To fuse carbon—like makes up a significant portion of organic wastes—we're talking about the CNO cycle, which is the dominant form of fusion in stars at least 30% heavier than the sun. You really don't want to be anywhere near that kind of fusion.
• I'm unsure how, exactly, to detail the backstory of psi-powers, in my setting. (For humans—the zled Noetic Legion is a relic of ancient times, purged of its tribal-religion/"pagan" elements. Ditto the khângây equivalents, mutatis mutandis.) Actually not only don't I know how to detail it in-story, I don't entirely have it worked out.
  
  I do know that humans began asking the zledo, once they heard about the Noetic Legion, how you go about finding psi-powers; of course, people who aren't willing to undertake Noetic Legion semi-monastic discipline can't develop psi very far. (At least, without the methods used by the super-evil secret project designed to enhance psi-users that figures prominently in several of my characters' backstories.)
  
  I also know that the pressure to investigate psi—culminating in the psi-project—picks up after the thoikh attack (which is also what brings humans and zledo into conflict, because nothing is trouble like "psychic existentialist" trouble).
• I haven't decided if some recent examples (e.g. in Dark Matter) really qualify, but there still nevertheless seems to be this weird idea, at least in visual-medium science-fiction, that nukes in space are somehow comparable to nukes in atmosphere. Either in terms of the threat-level or in terms of the moral issues.
  
  But nukes in space are just x-ray bombs, really (unless you turn them into neutron bombs); they don't have the air to be converted into plasma (remember, atmospheres are opaque to x-rays past a very short distance) or to transmit the blast. They can still be nasty, especially the neutron kind (though lining your spacesuits and hab-sections with boron nitride might mitigate some of that); the x-ray levels that can get through your ship's shielding may well be enough to superheat your atmosphere and kill you instantly—not to mention igniting your propellants—so, not that nasty.
  
  You basically, whether using neutron or conventional nukes, are going for "nearsies count", not big area-effects. Think proximity-fuze AA shells, not surface-to-air missiles.
• DURUS, the walking robot from SRI International designed to be better than Boston Dynamics' Atlas, is the prototype for something called PROXI, which will include a head and arms and thus be 20 kilograms heavier than DURUS's 80 kilograms. When they get it all integrated, the PROXI system will supposedly be able to go for eight hours off one charge of its 19 kilogram, 7.92 megajoule Li-ion battery.
  
  That comes to a 24-hour-period use of 23.76 megajoules, or just a tiny bit under one megajoule per hour—the average human requires 9.26 megajoules for a 24-hour period, 385.71 kilojoules an hour. Then again the average human does weigh only 62% what PROXI does, and thus would use 14.93 megajoules per day, or 622.12 kilojoules per hour, if they were the size of PROXI.
• So you know that guy in Germany who was killed by a robot in the VW plant? Yeah thing is, that's a damn industrial accident. We've been having them for about a quarter millennium. Fundamentally there is no difference between getting crushed by a car-building robot and getting ripped in half by a steam press. There is nothing to do with robots or AI or "robolaw" involved, this is a thing that, again, has been going on since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (probably since before that, actually—it's also no different if the machine that kills you is powered by water-wheels or wind rather than steam).
  
  Now, one could make a case that requiring "safety-space" sensors and programming on industrial robots would've prevented this death. I don't know that the reduction in the very small number of deaths would necessarily be worth the extra expense and complexity; on the one hand it certainly would be worth it to the families of the few people who die yearly, but on the other the "extra complexity" part could well lead to an increase in accidents if the safety-space programming's bugs are dangerous. (I suppose if every encountered error resulted in a shutdown you'd be okay, but that might be crippling to your productivity.)
  
  Every innovation comes with tradeoffs. And robotic factories are hundreds of times safer than their predecessors; it is not trivial to discuss whether we can reduce the danger even further, but such reductions, since the factories are already very, very safe, may well represent more tradeoffs than their increased safety (again, if any) can really justify. I know that sounds heartless, but "If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever."
• I don't think I've mentioned it, but I think, in general, that shape-shifters have no place in science fiction (space opera is another story). At least, not aliens whose species are shape-shifters, or humans (or aliens, for that matter) "mutated" to be shape-shifters. Sorry, but the number of things in a species' evolution that all have to go just right for them to be shape-shifters makes it about as likely as those planets in Star Trek that precisely parallel Earth history without having copied Earth. Ditto mutants: how the hell do you engineer that in, let alone it happening on its own?
  
  I will allow robot shape-shifters, although I still don't think the T-1000 would also be able to make blades or other weapons (the T-X makes a lot more sense, with its endoskeleton, except for the "taking control of cars via nanomachines" thing). Even the robot, though, would only be able to change its shape to resemble certain people—a certain range of heights, a certain set of builds, and probably only members of one species (if your aliens' builds are close enough to that of humans that one robot can easily mimic both—at least without significant shifts in its endoskeleton—your aliens need more work).
  
  You're still probably going to want to have your robot hack any biometric scanners, though; the ruse probably won't hold up otherwise.
• I was trying to get into Ergo Proxy, with intent to eventually finish it; unfortunately it's paced like Ghost in the Shell after the Quaaludes wear off (i.e., marginally watchable, unlike GitS). But I noticed something: why is it that dystopias, even when those dystopias are supposed to be all antiseptic and "plastic fantastic", always consist mostly of poorly-lit rundown apartment complexes? I suppose it's just because they're unintelligently copying the visual style of Blade Runner, however little sense that makes for their setting. Still, people, do some actual work. (It's even true of Psycho Pass, which has no excuse at all, given the level of social control their setting entails. Actually Psycho Pass seems very unsure of how closely controlled it wants its setting to be, just in general.)