Fleshing out a scifi setting (Suggestions/Feedback welcome)

[Lancer]

I'm just fleshing out a semi-generic scifi setting.

Scale:
Everything takes place within a small slice of the galaxy. The established powers have well-established colonies within their solar systems, FTL drive, and oupost-colonies on (relatively) distant worlds. Up and comming powers will have just discovered FTL drive and thus would lack any colonies outside of their own solar system.

General technology:
There is no uniformity of technology, aside from the underlying principals of FTL drive. Basics will still be basics (power transmission via hard lines, reaction drives, electroptical computing), but don't expect any degree of compatibility.

FTL:
FTL works by generating a one-way tunnel through some other dimension, and will be expensive to manufacture and use. Private groups will have to lobby their government for any particular project like a colony ship. Furthermore, FTL is relatively slow, and a long journey will require several FTL jumps. A big empire can try to send out a large fleet to crush a pesky minor power, but doing so would leave it vulnerable to its major rivals. Complicating this is a lack of FTL sensor technology. FTL communications can be sent through these tunnels, but involve either message drones or a network of relay stations. Objects in FTL cannot interact with objects outside of their specific FTL tunnel; however, vessels can "piggypack" in a tunnel generated by a FTL capable vessel, provided they are close enough to follow the FTL vessel in before the tunnel entrance closes. FTL jumps generate a significant amount of EM radiation when entering and exiting.

Power generation:
Different empires will have access to different power generation technologies. The baseline will be fusion power, though there will exist empires with access to exotics such as M/AM annihilation, or even direct mass-energy conversion. Power generation will be proportional to volume.

Sublight drives:
Reaction drives. Everybody but the lucky empire with direct mass-energy conversion will need to carry fuel for their reaction drives as well as fuel to power their reactors. Military vessels will carry inertial dampeners which will only dampen, not negate, the effect of any changes in acceleration.

Weapons & defenses:
Expect many variants on the tried and true mass-driver and laser. Again, the odd exotic (perhaps a disruptor weapon or two) will exist that gives one or more factions an advantage. Defenses will almost exclusively be variations on energy shields, with some armored sections depending on the prevailing school of starship combat in each empire.

Economy:
Power is cheap and abundant, as is basic mineral wealth. Industry will be mostly automated, with the odd exception. However, habitable worlds are not (setting up the source of conflict). Useful technological development is driven primarily by government funding research which will give an empire an edge on the competition.

Biology:
By fiat, all the empires will have a perfectly human populace.

[Imperial Overlord]

The difference in power generation tech will have an enormous impact on the power of the civilizations involved. I can't see the civilization with direct matter conversion being challenged by a fusion civilization, except by things like relativistic planet killers and the like. The difference in power generation and the implications of it are just so tremendous.

[Lancer]

The difference in power generation tech will have an enormous impact on the power of the civilizations involved. I can't see the civilization with direct matter conversion being challenged by a fusion civilization, except by things like relativistic planet killers and the like. The difference in power generation and the implications of it are just so tremendous.

You raise a good point. Perhaps I should revise it so that while they've got an energy-to-matter conversion process reasonably refined, they have yet to develop a practical mass-energy conversion reactor.

[Patrick Degan]

The difference in power generation tech will have an enormous impact on the power of the civilizations involved. I can't see the civilization with direct matter conversion being challenged by a fusion civilization, except by things like relativistic planet killers and the like. The difference in power generation and the implications of it are just so tremendous.

You raise a good point. Perhaps I should revise it so that while they've got an energy-to-matter conversion process reasonably refined, they have yet to develop a practical mass-energy conversion reactor.

Or, you restrict everybody to fusion or M/AM annihilation. There is little need to get too exotic with the power generation technologies. General principles should rule across the board.

Plus, you spare yourself reams of technobabble trying to rationalise the exotic stuff and allow a level playing field for your contending civilisations —not only more plausible but better for dramatic purposes.

As to the "writers' fiat" of making everybody human, this is not so implausible. Each of your empires could have been descended from Earth colonists who went out on sublight craft to their new worlds thousands of years in the past —so long ago that most of them either passed into legend or were forgotten. Plus, you again spare yourself a lot of trouble trying to explain weird biologies and as added benefit have no problem with plausibilities when Capt. Spiff Spacehero wants to fuck Princess Bigtits of Zeta Reticuli IV.

[Ariphaos]

Something to keep in mind, if you have FTL take 'a great deal of energy', is the amount of energy a star puts out. Nothing short of giving everyone direct, complete matter-energy conversion is going to allow individual ships or even an entire fleet to remotely rival the capability of their star.

[Zor]

A big question lays in the Human Empires. What is the history of these human nation states? Were they created during a previous STL colonial age Alla Terran Sphere, did a great human empire rise to power a century ago and then collapsed, was there a colonial space-race between the major powers of the solar system. Are the majority of them confederations of like minded species, democratic unitary states, oligarchies, authoritarian regiemes, Totallitarian dictatorships, theocracies, monarchies or is their a big diversity of government types. Do many of them have radically diferent/conflicting political ideologies (my Classic Libertarians vs Communists conflict and such)?

Zor

[Lancer]

If I need to eliminate M/AM except at it's most infant stages, I'll do that. A warship that goes explodey of its own accord because somebody fucked up the reactor design wouldn't fly too well in any sense. I'd also prefer to avoid tethering FTL to stars. It would make sense to use them as a source of power though.

Maybe introduce specialized stations which are built in close proximity to a local star. They collect power and beam it to colonies and stations within the system, as well as siphon off some fuel from the star. Visiting friendly vessels will be able to come in, refuel, and recharge via umbilicals, which will speed up the process of charging the extensive banks of capacitors for their jump drives.

I imagine an environment where warships will run off fusion for primary power, but in combat they'll need to tap into previously stored power from capacitor banks to keep shields and weapons fully powered. Of course, using FTL will severely deplete these capacitor banks so a captain will have to strike a balance between catching his/her opponent unaware and having the endurance to disable or destroy the opposition.

I don't expect too many diametrically opposed ideologies, as you can only go so far to any given extreme before you become unable to function (i.e. luddites don't have the techbase to build a car, let alone achieve space travel, Libertaians are unlikely to successfully assume control of planetary governments, etc.). The primary source of conflict will be competition over inhabitable planets; as terraforming non-hospitable locations will be limited to errecting domes or building underground settlements.

[Darth Smiley]

Hmmm....there are a couple of issues I see.

First of all, what are the limitations on FTL?
There are a couple of big issues:
-Does a bigger/more energy draining FTL 'jump' make a bigger or longer hole?
- About how long is the longest Jump possible?
- What is the smallest size an FTL device can fit?
- Can FTL jumps be stopped, jammed, or disrupted (by, say shooting the jump gate? or perhaps just a jammer that stops all FTL within a region?)
- Where does the energy used in the Jump go?
- What's the minimum range of an FTL jump?
- What happens if some one tries to 'tunnel' onto someone/something that's already there (like a planet)
- How Accurate is navigation?
- What's the recharge on an FTL jump?
- What is the largest mass that can fit through a tunnel?
- How long is the jump to those inside it? outside it?
- What happens to a craft's relative momentum during FTL? can a ship alter momentum inside a jump?
- Does FTL require special elements/components that are hard to manufacture, or require special resourses?

The issue I see is that, as it stands, intersellar war is impossible. Lets say empire A attacks empire B (for now we will not worry about C,D,E, etc). Lets suppose A has an overwhelming advantage... 4:1 in terms of forces due to supperior industry, tech base, etc. So he can park his fleet over B's homeworld and demand that B surrender, and there really isn't anything B can do about it. Except there's a tiny issue. B's fleet, seeing A's fleet coming, runs for it. To where? Why, A's homeworld of course. In theory, A outnumbers B 4 to 1, so he can defend his homeworld from hostile takeover AND take over B's homeworld. But there's a catch. B's fleet doesn't have to TAKE OVER A's homeworld, it simply needs to beat the crap out of it. Since B's fleet can appear ANYWHERE in A's system, and A can't stop him, B can jump into orbit around A's homeworld and fire off a nuclear barrage before A can stop him. Even if A's homeworld DOES have heavy defenses, then B just sits an a few lightseconds/minutes of and spams nukes, kinetics, biowarheads, and chucks really large asteroids, and lets gravity do the rest. If A comes after him, he FTLs away, and A can't find him for several minutes/hours/days until the EM radiation from the jump reaches him. Of course, A can do the same to B. And both sides know it.

(Note that you'll probably see spacecraft specifically designed for this style of fighting. In essense, the 'boomers' of the space age)

What heve you created? MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction. In effect, barring some sort of aggreement between powers allowing the use of force but stopping short of planet slagging (ya, right. That is NOT going to happen) you've gotten rid of combat between major powers, and even FTL equipped minor powers. No one can risk pissing off anyone else so bad that they might resort to planet wasting. Of course, no one wants to waste habitable planets. But if an empire's choices are getting conquered or wasting a planet, the planet gets nuked.

And that's not even going into relativistic attacks. That is and entirely different (and possibly larger) can of worms.

Of course, MAD is perfectly fine if you want to focus on diplomacy, negotiation, and planetside guerrilla/spec ops/proxy warfare. But don't count on stand up slugfest battles.

If you DO want stand up battles, put many, many, many, more restrictions on what FTL can do. FTL teleportation also plays havoc with concepts like 'blockade', or 'intercept' or ' pursuit' or 'defense in depth' and removes stratigic concerns that might otherwise exist. Alternatively, make defenses much, much stronger (think planetary shields)



Then there's the issue with shields. You mention that you have shields as the main defense, but say little about what they actually do (it really doesn't matter how they work, shields are pure handwavium anyway).
There are a lot of questions left unanswered, such as:
- what are the shape of the shields? elliptical? planar? other?
- what is the relationship between shield size and energy required? (are bigger or smaller shields more effiecent? or is there a golden mean?) Note that this may give you a justification for fighter craft, if small shields are more effiecent)
- What are the exact effects of the shield? What happens, to, say, a railgun round that tries to penetrate a shield? a laser? a nuke? what happens if I try to walk through a shield?
- What happens if a shield tries to come up an something (like an enemy ship) is in the way. What happens if the shield rams something? or rams another shield?
- Do different races have different shield tech types?
- How do your own weapons get through the shield?
- what are the maximum and minimum sizes of a shield?
- How big are the generators?
- Chart out the energy flow for a shield. Remember thermodynamics...all of the energy has to come from and go to somewhere.

As you can see, this proto-universe has some work cut out for it if it wants to avoid being laughed at (although honestly, you've already doing better than Star Trek, and close to Star Wars)

Here's a hint. Go to this site and also read this

[NecronLord]

(although honestly, you've already doing better than Star Trek, and close to Star Wars)

Considerably better than Star Wars. Star Wars has had twenty or thirty years of secondary authors and even fans plugging the holes.

[Patrick Degan]

If I need to eliminate M/AM except at it's most infant stages, I'll do that. A warship that goes explodey of its own accord because somebody fucked up the reactor design wouldn't fly too well in any sense.

That's why you would incorporate a reliable reactor in your stories. As Darth Wong's suggested in his criticisms of the explodes-if-sneezed-at reactors of Star Trek and a lot of contemporary SF, a real-world M/AM reactor would be designed to feed just enough fuel elements into the core to barely sustain the reaction and to shut off that flow at once if the power fails. A reactor incorporating forcefield protection running off of independent atomic batteries —and automatically set to pinch off the fuel inlets to the core in event of a power interruption— would do this job adequately, and any damage serious enough to take those out would as likely destroy the entire ship anyway. However, this problem is a secondary consideration at best, as there is little need to go into too many mechanical details in writing the actual stories. The assumption should always be that the technology works and lets the characters do what they have to do to advance the plot. Keep it reasonably plausible and you've got no problems and you do that by sticking to a few basic principles.

[Teleros]

Expect many variants on the tried and true mass-driver and laser. Again, the odd exotic (perhaps a disruptor weapon or two) will exist that gives one or more factions an advantage. Defenses will almost exclusively be variations on energy shields, with some armored sections depending on the prevailing school of starship combat in each empire.

Granted this applies to other things as well, but generally it's quite hard to stop a dedicated opponent getting their hands on your new toys eventually. This was one of the major themes in the Lensman books - both sides had all-but-equal levels of technology, so it came down to things like crew training and command & control to win battles without enormous losses (on your side).

However, habitable worlds are not (setting up the source of conflict). Useful technological development is driven primarily by government funding research which will give an empire an edge on the competition.

1. Why don't habitable worlds have much automation?
2. Not also by companies?

What heve you created? MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction. In effect, barring some sort of aggreement between powers allowing the use of force but stopping short of planet slagging (ya, right. That is NOT going to happen) you've gotten rid of combat between major powers, and even FTL equipped minor powers. No one can risk pissing off anyone else so bad that they might resort to planet wasting.

1. You can always go the Honor Harrington route and have some big local hyperpower that has the power to insist on no planet slagging.
2. Planets can generally mount much larger defensive installations than mobile platforms like starships or satellites, so is it not possible that a planet's shields are designed to stand up to bombardments? This then leads to fleets needing to use trickery or massive firepower to overwhelm said defences. And if they want to take over not slag the place... well throwing just enough kinetic energy at a planet to take it's shields out but not waste all of its surface will be a fun task for the fleet commander .

Maybe introduce specialized stations which are built in close proximity to a local star. They collect power and beam it to colonies and stations within the system, as well as siphon off some fuel from the star. Visiting friendly vessels will be able to come in, refuel, and recharge via umbilicals, which will speed up the process of charging the extensive banks of capacitors for their jump drives.

E. E. Smith used both power beams and cosmic energy in both the Skylark and Lensman series. Essentially a forcefield of some sort absorbed all the radiation in nearby space and charged up the ship's power cells (damned if I know how this works in a multi-trillion-ship fleet, but hey ). In the Lensman series the Boskonians had trouble with this at first, as the Galactic Patrol developed a means of cutting off this flow of cosmic energy, so the Boskonian defences eventually ran out of power - and they didn't have enough alternative sources .

[Lancer]

I'm doing a fairly significant rewrite of the premise. To address the questions raised for now though:

The FTL drive mechanism has been explained in further detail.

Those solar-tapping stations are a definite, and the disparity in power generation means that in any direct confrontation the odds will heavily favor the defenders. To successfully conquer a system, you'd first need to isolate and destroy the solar-tapping station (very hard to do given the sheer power they have available), then move in to sweep out any other defending installations (which would still have local power generation). This establishes one of the major sources of conflict.

Anyways, the thing stopping a dedicated opponent from getting their hands on your toys in any meaningful time frame is the lack of captured specimens. Weapons power here readily outstrips what protection armor-based defenses could reasonably offer; thus any chunk of starship that survives (in a meaningful sense) the destruction of the rest of the vessel is unlikely to be anything other than a chunk of reactor shielding or reinforced hull plating. Surrender involves scuttleing the ship then jumping onto lifeboats precisely to prevent capture of sensitive material. Espionage doesn't really work when insertions would be detected and the empires are economically and diplomatically isolated from each-other.

Habitable worlds will have automation; they just won't be a plentiful resource (when compared to raw mineral wealth and energy). Mass and indiscriminate nuking to render planets uninhabitable is prevented by both the massive power behind planetary shields, and the fact that the established empires are competing to gain control over those planets, not to destroy them. The backstory will explain why there are far fewer usable planets / systems than would otherwise be expected.

[Teleros]

Surrender involves scuttleing the ship then jumping onto lifeboats precisely to prevent capture of sensitive material. Espionage doesn't really work when insertions would be detected and the empires are economically and diplomatically isolated from each-other.

Well that still leaves crewmembers waiting to be picked up and interrogated, and you can't realistically have a chief engineer who doesn't know how the engine works .
As for espionage, well I imagine the easiest way to get someone in would be to slip them into any refugee traffic - I can't imagine you wouldn't get some of that from the poorly defended colonies etc. Plus of course there are other means of getting something planetside - how about a device designed to appear as a harmless meteorite?

[Lancer]

Stupid brain-bug...chief engineers would know how something works enough to repair it with the assistance of an on-board machine shop, but that doesn't mean that they're capable of completely recreating and explaining every little detail in (to them) a complete vacuum. They're not Col. Carter or Geordie La Forge (both of whom should be given leadership of an entire R&D lab complex). Perhaps if you somehow managed to capture the original design team and have them walk you through it step-by-step, alongside a huge staff of engineers to translate any designs to be compatible with your own technology.

Colonies and outposts are anything but poorly defended. Inhabitable worlds are incredibly rare; there's no excuse for not having a full-fledged planetary defense grid as soon as you can manage; and no reason why the establishment of such an important settlement wouldn't be done under armed escort. The fall of any such colony would easily involve the destruction of the local garrison and the capture of the colonists (and their relocation to isolated quarantine-camps throughout the territory of the conquering empire). In the event that any refugees are "permitted" to return to their people; they'd still be placed under quarantined until they could be examined, treated, and debriefed.

[Darth Smiley]

When I said that MAD would probably be the option, I was thinking more of inhabited worlds rather than simply habitable ones. Obviously, one wouldn't slag a freshly planted colony, but the enemy's homeworld? The point was that you could stop outright conquest by threatening to slag the other side. Brinksmanship would be the name of the game - how far do you dare the other guy to go?

With planetary shields and defenses, though, things get more interesting. However, I still think your 'universe' is still a little bit hazy. You mention new colonies 'not having any excuse' for not having a fully functional planetary defense grid (with shields), but that leaves the question of how many people are neccesary to maintain the grid, and how exactly the (undoubtedly large) equipment gets to the planet. You really need to but some numbers to it before you can have anything make sense. So far, we know FTL is 'expensive to manufacture and use', takes 'a lot of energy', and 'relatively slow'. There's really no perspective. For example, how much mass can we sling through a single FTL jump? How much equipment do we need to generate a planetary shield? And we still know nothing about what the shield actually does. If you want to leave it more or less undefined, that's up to you as the author, but its nice to have a better shield principle than the Star Trek principle: "The strength of the shield is inversely proportional the the dramatic tension required in that scene".

Try and think like a mssion planner rather than an author. If there's a better way than how you want your characters to do things, find at least SOME reason they don't. You can do that by tweaking what the handwavium in your universe (shields and FTL) can and can't do.

[Teleros]

Stupid brain-bug...chief engineers would know how something works enough to repair it with the assistance of an on-board machine shop, but that doesn't mean that they're capable of completely recreating and explaining every little detail in (to them) a complete vacuum.

I wasn't quite thinking of taking it that far, but point is, if the technological gap isn't too large, then maintaining a technological lead over an opponent will be difficult without very good counter-espionage.