05-17-2020, 06:36 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-17-2020, 06:55 AM by MichaelPoole.)
1. Do you realize that the world population as long into the past as Mnemosyne is in the future (630 years) was just 350-400 million while now it is 7.8 billion? As wiki says, it took over 200,000 years of human history for the world's population to reach 1 billion, and only 200 years more to reach 7 billion. Do you really find my numbers farfetched considering humanity now has the resources of the full Solar System at its disposal? People aren't biologically immortal or live in post-scarcity in my setting either, so yes, they're gonna have kids. At the point tech is in 2650, habitation and paraterraforming of "uninhabitable" bodies is routine, so it's no problem to provide more living space. As for the Kuiper Belt, larger bodies provide more than enough rock, fusion fuel and organics, plus, the Kuiper Hegemony isn't exactly keen on consumption and raids other polities to keep its economy from collapsing. By corporatism, I mean the fascist "class collaboration" system of state controlled "unions" negotiating between employers and employees (so the whole nation can unite to conquer and slaughter other nations), not a cyberpunk "government by corporations", just to be clear. They aren't supposed to be generic space pirates, the reliance of their economy on plunder reflects the reliance of real life Nazi economy on it, Wages of Destruction is a good book about it. What do they do? Well, let's say that due to Kuiperians being run by an AI and several AI related...incidents, humanity isn't exactly keen on automating everything.
2. Doesn't feel long enough? Compare 2020 to 1390, which is as far in the past as 2650 is in the future. There's plenty of time, especially considering no Great Expulsion or Nanodisaster. I personally don't believe "Singularity" or transsapienthood will be a thing, which is why I don't incorporate it into my setting - humans are already Turing complete universal intelligences, really advanced AI can do the same faster, but that's a quantitative, not qualitative difference.
3. I actually included radiator mass in my ship masses and it's implied that for example the Kuiperian's Persecutor radiators running at max power glow white hot and risk melting down. I'd put in far higher thrust power values if I didn't care about that. Their thrust powers aren't really much greater than those of some crazier 1950s Orion designs, for instance. Where do you see pure fusion designs stated to reach 0.4 c? I stated antimatter catalysed designs to reach that speed, pure fusion peaks at 0.18 c with staging and mass fractions like modern chemical rockets, common Solar System traveling speed is more in the thousands of km/s ballpack. I spent hours at ProjectRho and Orion's Arm for that matter
4. It's as "secret" as the Manhatten project was. Meaning, it's supposed to be secret, but it's really an open secret at this point, and something others are interested in too. Kuiper Hegemony are pirates and fascists and have no interest in airing this secret as they like to "harvest" their source and not share with others, plus, what they say is taken about as seriously as what ISIS says. Imagine ISIS saying "USA has secret antimatter weaponry", nobody but the lunatic fringe would believe it. Furthermore, Mercury is ran in a very minarchist/libertarian manner, so they aren't exactly protecting it the best and yes, all in all, the situation in the Solar system is a powder keg, that's the point.
5. They steal technology and wealth of the inner polities because their economic system is about as "efficient" as USSRs or fascist war economies. Why did USSR last 70 years and could run the largest empire in the world, send people to space, amass a thermonuclear arsenal while it couldn't even maintain a regular delivery of sausages in the shops? Based on your logic, USSR was an "unrealistic polity". I'm not making "rational" polities limited by raw resources, I'm making polities as actually existed, crippled by ideology, short sighteness and self-sabotaging economic systems. Plus, a lot of it is ideologically motivated, they want to keep their people in a state of constant tension and warfare to achieve their goal of eventually reconquering Earth and restoring it to its former glory while punishing all those who rebelled against it. Why did Stalin promote Lysenko or Mao kill sparrows and told peasants to melt down farm tools? How could 35 million people starve in a nation that was among the first practicers of agriculture on Earth and had a lot of fertile soil?
6. They aren't afraid to do stuff like trying to create a black hole by massive lasers or focused thermonuclear explosions because they don't care about things like "civilian safety" much. Think early 1950s Soviet nuclear program (safety level "let's put unfiltered plutonium waste into the nearest lake, this cannot go wrong, ever").
7. Callisto barely gets any radiation from the belt and nearly every human in the system has some tweaks, pretty much everyone has some radiation resistance just to cover the general radiation risk of living in space, the people in especially radiated places just have extra tweaks. The domes are fairly thick, they're not plexiglass. A lot of the housing is deep underground and this actually applies to nearly every world in the setting. Callisto is freely exploited because it's a super-stable undifferentiated mix of rock, organics and ice (= all you really need to sustain life) and because Europa and Io are off-limits and Ganymede is a little too alive and irradiated for comfort.
8. It's an experimental technology, I was inspired by Isaac Arthur, and keep in mind this is not an OA clone.
9. Really? Because I did clearly imply that it destroyed the whole beamrider infrastructure of Solar System. One of the reasons why the Solar System is so "irrational" is that it's effectively post-apocalyptic. However also, at that point, Earth wasn't some life-giving center of the human world, but a hated, parasitic, totalitarian polity. It was nuked for a reason, and there's a reason why Kuiperians, descended from a group of Earth refugees, are perhaps the nastiest human faction in the settings.
2. Doesn't feel long enough? Compare 2020 to 1390, which is as far in the past as 2650 is in the future. There's plenty of time, especially considering no Great Expulsion or Nanodisaster. I personally don't believe "Singularity" or transsapienthood will be a thing, which is why I don't incorporate it into my setting - humans are already Turing complete universal intelligences, really advanced AI can do the same faster, but that's a quantitative, not qualitative difference.
3. I actually included radiator mass in my ship masses and it's implied that for example the Kuiperian's Persecutor radiators running at max power glow white hot and risk melting down. I'd put in far higher thrust power values if I didn't care about that. Their thrust powers aren't really much greater than those of some crazier 1950s Orion designs, for instance. Where do you see pure fusion designs stated to reach 0.4 c? I stated antimatter catalysed designs to reach that speed, pure fusion peaks at 0.18 c with staging and mass fractions like modern chemical rockets, common Solar System traveling speed is more in the thousands of km/s ballpack. I spent hours at ProjectRho and Orion's Arm for that matter
4. It's as "secret" as the Manhatten project was. Meaning, it's supposed to be secret, but it's really an open secret at this point, and something others are interested in too. Kuiper Hegemony are pirates and fascists and have no interest in airing this secret as they like to "harvest" their source and not share with others, plus, what they say is taken about as seriously as what ISIS says. Imagine ISIS saying "USA has secret antimatter weaponry", nobody but the lunatic fringe would believe it. Furthermore, Mercury is ran in a very minarchist/libertarian manner, so they aren't exactly protecting it the best and yes, all in all, the situation in the Solar system is a powder keg, that's the point.
5. They steal technology and wealth of the inner polities because their economic system is about as "efficient" as USSRs or fascist war economies. Why did USSR last 70 years and could run the largest empire in the world, send people to space, amass a thermonuclear arsenal while it couldn't even maintain a regular delivery of sausages in the shops? Based on your logic, USSR was an "unrealistic polity". I'm not making "rational" polities limited by raw resources, I'm making polities as actually existed, crippled by ideology, short sighteness and self-sabotaging economic systems. Plus, a lot of it is ideologically motivated, they want to keep their people in a state of constant tension and warfare to achieve their goal of eventually reconquering Earth and restoring it to its former glory while punishing all those who rebelled against it. Why did Stalin promote Lysenko or Mao kill sparrows and told peasants to melt down farm tools? How could 35 million people starve in a nation that was among the first practicers of agriculture on Earth and had a lot of fertile soil?
6. They aren't afraid to do stuff like trying to create a black hole by massive lasers or focused thermonuclear explosions because they don't care about things like "civilian safety" much. Think early 1950s Soviet nuclear program (safety level "let's put unfiltered plutonium waste into the nearest lake, this cannot go wrong, ever").
7. Callisto barely gets any radiation from the belt and nearly every human in the system has some tweaks, pretty much everyone has some radiation resistance just to cover the general radiation risk of living in space, the people in especially radiated places just have extra tweaks. The domes are fairly thick, they're not plexiglass. A lot of the housing is deep underground and this actually applies to nearly every world in the setting. Callisto is freely exploited because it's a super-stable undifferentiated mix of rock, organics and ice (= all you really need to sustain life) and because Europa and Io are off-limits and Ganymede is a little too alive and irradiated for comfort.
8. It's an experimental technology, I was inspired by Isaac Arthur, and keep in mind this is not an OA clone.
9. Really? Because I did clearly imply that it destroyed the whole beamrider infrastructure of Solar System. One of the reasons why the Solar System is so "irrational" is that it's effectively post-apocalyptic. However also, at that point, Earth wasn't some life-giving center of the human world, but a hated, parasitic, totalitarian polity. It was nuked for a reason, and there's a reason why Kuiperians, descended from a group of Earth refugees, are perhaps the nastiest human faction in the settings.