The Open Door (megacrossover)

[White Haven]

If they're in a lower-energy plane than BSG, the Galactica should have a significant enough edge over the Praxis to do much of the fighting if and when it comes to war...and that would save the Stiletto's energy reserves for the jump out. Now, convincing the Colonials of that...

[Academia Nut]

They're lower energy than the Galactica but they've been refining longer, although the case could easily be made that the choice of weapons is very intentional on the part of the Galactica given their technology. As evidenced by the Adama manuever its possible to make tactical jumps with nBSG FTL drives so you have to get into knife fighting range to pin someone down for a fight, which means that they probably decided to use more stable weapons like nukes and slug throwers. Their tech could still use some improvement, but they have a completely different tactical consideration from the Praxis.

The primary energy storage technology in the Praxis is antimatter, generated in magnetic accelerators that are part of planetary rings. They use these for propulsion on their ships and for primary weapons as antimatter bombs and missiles. Secondary weapons are positron beams, but that is only for engaging at 'point blank ranges' of about 2-3 light seconds and point defence against missiles. Maximum acceleration of their ships is dependent upon the physical tolerances of the crew, which is to say about 2 to 3 Gs sustained and up to 10 or 20 Gs burst with preparation. They engage at several light minutes to light hours with long range missiles accompanied by 'pinnaces', which are essentially one man fighters that serve as targeteers for the missiles. Also, they have no FTL tech, relying instead on a network of natural wormholes created by the Big Bang.

Why don't they simply upgrade the tracking systems of the missiles? Because the following technologies are punishable by death for researching them, and in some cases the bombardment of the entire planet with antimatter bombs in retaliation. The list is: genetic engineering, AI research, nanotechnology, and mind-machine interfaces. Incidentally the founders of the empire, the Shaa, did all of these and made themselves immortal before realizing that they had made a mistake and decided to ensure no one else would do the same. So they went out to primitive worlds, bombed them into submission, and then established a hidebound, feudal order called the Praxis based on absolute authority to superiors in the hierarchy and the principles, 'everything that can be known is already known' and 'retaliation for a crime must be in excess of the crime to ensure public order'. The names of their warships are lovely things such as 'The Bombardment of Los Angeles', which commemorates them killing millions of people upon arrival at Earth because it was the easiest way to bring humanity into their empire. They then proceeded to brutally crush organized religion with the death camps and such as cults have no place in the order of the Praxis.

Basically, everything from 40k would be an absolute affront to their fundamental laws, but unfortunately for them on minimal acceleration even the orks can outrun their missiles, which actually can do damage to an unshielded ship as they are in the high megaton-gigaton range if I remember correctly.

[Xon]

The Praxis is the secular equivelent of a religious fundamental state, and is just a vile and offensive thing.

Because the following technologies are punishable by death for researching them, and in some cases the bombardment of the entire planet with antimatter bombs in retaliation. The list is: genetic engineering, AI research, nanotechnology, and mind-machine interfaces. Incidentally the founders of the empire, the Shaa, did all of these and made themselves immortal before realizing that they had made a mistake and decided to ensure no one else would do the same.

It is actually quite worse than that, The Shaa had finite memory capacity and once they had saturated thier storage capacity (that is each individual knew practically everything thier race did), they commited suicide because 'everything that can be known is already' and then commanded thier slaves to destroyed all thier memory storage devices.

The Shaa are a bunch of immoral greedy fucks who fucked over everyone they could find, and where only blind 'lucky' humanity didnt have enother 2-5 decades or would have canonically repelled thier assaults and even take the fight back to them.

[Academia Nut]

Technically they only hit their ennui phase a couple thousand years after they started their Empire building when their storage units filled up, but yeah, the Shaa really needed an outside context problem to screw them over big time because the thing that annoyed me the most was their utter arrogance about the universe: if we haven't figured it out then clearly its impossible... but we're going to make sure no one else takes a look at it either. It sounds like they got to the cusp of a technological singularity then chickened out at the last possible second and decided to make sure no one else got their either.

And yeah, they are so hide bound that the first time they met another interstellar civilization, the Lai-own, the only reason they won was not superior technology or infrastructure, but the fact that the Lai-own were physiologically incapable of heavy acceleration, and their big advantages were because as an avian species they have better three-dimensional spatial relationships and they used targeteers for their missiles (the pinnaces). The Shaa and those they rule are that bad at thinking outside the box.

Also, despite the fact that they engage in light minute ranges, Praxis battle doctrine demands that their ships be tightly controlled at all times so they keep within tight formation so that the admirals can continue to micromanage the captains. This also gives them overlapping point defences, but it means when you have dozens of anti-matter missiles streaking in and destroying them cooks them off you quickly get a 'wall' of hard radiation and plasma obscuring the enemy, so after two or three waves missiles start leaking through and the tight formations become a liability. They counter this by at the last possible moment having their formations break away in all directions, but this means that they now have no battlefield coordination and their ships are easily picked off. So basically their idea of space combat is to slug it out until one side breaks.

Also, their ground combat sucks worse. Sure, they have some neat toys like an assault rifle that empties its entire 100 round magazine in one burst ( at the actual use of something like that) and some antimatter weapons fixed emplacements, but its specifically mentioned that they don't have anti-aircraft guns in the... third... book I think as if they had those they could have completely stopped a ground landing during a civil war because the transports into a hostile zone that was not bombardable because of political/cultural importance were unarmed and unarmoured. Space Marines would tear through everything but the antimatter weapons in a slaughter of epic proportions. And that's without using sane tactics.

This will be fun.

[White Haven]

The names of their warships are lovely things such as 'The Bombardment of Los Angeles', which commemorates them killing millions of people upon arrival at Earth because it was the easiest way to bring humanity into their empire.

Oh...shit. Please, PLEASE make that the ship (or one with a similar name) that first responds to the recent arrivals. I want to see both Chaos AND Colonials flip their collective shit over their first contact with a civilization being named after buttfucking Earth. Granted, the Colonials would need the reference explained to them by one or the other faction, but...aww man, that's gonna be messy if we're good enough to get that meeting for Christmas.

[Academia Nut]

Man, I wish I could remember the names of the ships manned by Terrans but I think the big ones were things like 'Bombardment of Los Angeles', 'Bombardment of Beijing', and I think at least one other one was named after the bombardment of an entire planet into ash because a handful of humans there were trying to cook up a bioweapon to exterminate the Shaa. Yeah, they wiped out an entire planet over that. For all their trigger happiness, not even the Inquisition calls down Exterminatus over that little, they need widespread corruption that can't be rooted out with conventional forces before they consider ecocide.

And yes, they are that big of dicks that they name the warships after the battles that conquered the people who will be manning the things.

[Xon]

One major issue is the wormhole network of the Praxis transverses time and space across the galaxy, so FTL isnt going to be very usefully in getting to the otherside of a wormhole portal.

The wormholes should roughly in the same 'now'(plus or minus a few million years maybe?). But no one appears bright enough to use thier time travelling properties or to locate where thier starsystems actually are in the galaxy, so you really can't rule out that they morons just didn't notice all the wormholes terminate within a few dozen lightyears of each other just plus or minus a few hundred/thousand/million years.

[Academia Nut]

Sort of. The problem they had was that I think there was a direct relationship between distance travelled and time travelled and that there was some sort of preferred reference frame that the wormholes existed in. This meant that because they did not have FTL travel, they could never 'get ahead' by using the wormholes to travel through time and then cut across to a different system. So I think if you travelled say twenty light years through a wormhole you would be displaced in time by twenty years, but since c was the limit you couldn't get any warnings or the like back through time. I believe it was specifically mentioned that 'no matter where you went the Shaa were always waiting' which implied that there was no way to take a third path fast enough to trigger an actual causality violation.

Of course, neither the Colonials nor Chaos are restrained to c.

[White Haven]

Have you ever read either Iron Sunrise or Singularity Sky, AN? I'm getting flashbacks to that universe only without the Eschaton to fuck people in the ear for trying to violate causality.

[Academia Nut]

Hmmm... haven't read them, but reading the description on Wiki, I would say they aren't very similar. Those stories appear most human/transhuman centric, while the Praxis is Shaa-centric right up to the point where they all kill themselves off out of boredom at which point its a collective of species originally bound together by the Shaa but who now have their own entrenched reasons to keep their society on a straight track. Humanity was the second on the list of conquered so they were spread fairly far and wide because of that, and by the end of the series the first guys conquered by the Shaa had lost their attempts to become the new Shaa and a lot of industry was moved away from the core worlds because of the fighting towards the periphery, where a human noble family had a lot of interests so humanity might assume a somewhat larger role in the future. Still suppression of new ideas is heavily active. While the lack of external threats keeps it from sucking as much as 40k, the society is more stifling and oppressive than the Imperium for the most part. The Imperium are dicks because they would die if they weren't. The Shaa were dicks because there was nothing better to do. Even Chaos has more reasonable motivations than them in that canon Chaos literally can't help but be evil.

[White Haven]

Wasn't so much referring to the overall story as a whole, just the interaction of FTL transit with time travel. The only difference between the settings (unless you read up and then introduce the Eschaton, which makes my mind hurt) in that respect is that in Stross's universe, it's entirely possible to violate causality. One problem: The Eschaton will probably fuck you up in a truly spectacular fashion just before you try, simply because the Eschaton wants a monopoly on causality-violation. And when someone with an agenda like that gets there first, dislodging them is a somewhat fruitless endeavor.

[Deadpan29]

Some more typos:

“It bears repeating in any case. Where we’re headed the highest form of energy storage is probably anti-matter. Ugh… artificial gravity without forward or rotational acceleration, not for me thanks,” Rong-Arya replied.

I think that should be, "no artificial gravity without forward or rotational acceleration"

Tzintchi was fucking with them… somehow. Somehow the bastard was sitting on his throne back on Earth, fingers bridged under such that his mouth was concealed, and he was cackling while proclaiming, “Just as planned.”

"under his nose," I think.

They did not however miss the sudden high powered scans that began to bounce off their sensor arrays, announcing the arrival of the something with potent electromagnetic sensors into their system.

I'm not the best on proper comma use, but I think there should be some around "however" in this sentence.

And now for some personal questions and insights:

Do the Colonials understand that the Earth they are going towards is actually in an entirely different universe? I suspect they don't and think the jump they just made was only an FTL jump with somewhat different technology, which leaves me a bit unclear on how they made the jump with the Stiletto, but I don't actually care about the technobabble in this case.

I haven't read the books, but on the Wiki listing of races I did find:

Daimong
Expressionless faces, melodic voices and perpetually decaying flesh are the main points of note about the Daimong. They are often used as news presenters due to their natural inability to display emotion on their faces and as choirs due to the natural harmony their voices offer, though their colleagues are often eager to avoid them when necessary due to the smell of rot that spreads across rooms when one is near.

This sounds like a race literally born to follow Reigle. For that matter, the listing describes vice-ridden humans as prime candidates for Mislaato and carnivorous teddy bears who like their food at blood-temperature for Asukhon.

[Robo Jesus]

Fuck, can't believe I missed those typos.>< Thanks Deadpan29.

Anyways, I'm wondering exactly when Chaos has found themselves in this universe. As in, are the Shaa still around at this point, even if their numbers are dwindling, or are the Shaa already dead and gone by this point in time?

[Skyfox120]

Fuck, can't believe I missed those typos.>< Thanks Deadpan29.

Anyways, I'm wondering exactly when Chaos has found themselves in this universe. As in, are the Shaa still around at this point, even if their numbers are dwindling, or are the Shaa already dead and gone by this point in time?

I just keep pictureing the Colonials visiting the stilleto and wondering why its so damp..

Random Space Marine: OUr Daemon machines are drooling over the fresh meat of this universe.

Seriously as annoyed as Chaos was over hte prime Directive, they are going to be livid over the Shaa empire. At least the Federation still advanced as a society!

[Garlak]

Hmmm... question: what particular point is there to having the Praxis in The Open Door?

Also, why didn't the Stiletto figure out where Earth was in the nBSG universe, and move to THAT Earth? Not quite sure about why they apparently moved to a new universe...

[Aranfan]

So wait, the Praxis force stagnation on others? That is not going to go over well at all.

[White Haven]

Hmmm... question: what particular point is there to having the Praxis in The Open Door?

Also, why didn't the Stiletto figure out where Earth was in the nBSG universe, and move to THAT Earth? Not quite sure about why they apparently moved to a new universe...

Because why the hell would they have any interest in moving to someone else's Earth? Seriously. Do you expect them to fly to some completely foreign planet and say 'Sweet! We're home, guys!' to whoever is or isn't living there? No. AS HAS BEEN EXPLAINED, they're heading down the energy gradient in an effort to find a point of reference so they can get HOME.

[Academia Nut]

Yes, as White Haven said, they're bringing the Colonials to their Earth, where they know they will be safe (for certain values of safe) and where they can guarantee them a new life on a stable (for certain values of stable) world, plus they can add their expertise to their own, particularly in ship construction. Chaos Earth is still new at building ships and while the technologies are different, getting a second opinion on the processes could prove valuable.

And the reason they are in the Praxis is because by random chance that was the universe they are hopping through in order to find their way home.

[TheClueless]

So wait, the Praxis force stagnation on others? That is not going to go over well at all.

In regards to your question, and your comment: Oh, yes indead.

Remember, the key to the Praxis (the philosophy) is that everything that *can* be known is *already* known. (And if you don't know it, you either aren't cleared to know it or the Shaa have - in their wisdom - decided not to burden their subordinate races with the knowledge in question. )

Even if research in a certain scientific field wasn't banned - on pain of death - by the Shaa, they certainly wouldn't encourage it. Or fund it. And if the Shaa disapprove of something, even mildly, do you think that a Peer (or rich merchant) of one of their subordinate races will provide any funding either?

Remember, everyone is supposed to follow the Praxis. Or else. While I doubt that *every* potential violation of the Praxis carries the same penalty of worshiping a/the god(s) (namely death), I wouldn't bet money against it either.

(BTW, It was pretty clearly stated in the novels, if I recall correctly, that the *only* reason why the Shaa - or, given the timeline, their subordinate races - continued to explore their galaxy was due to the fact that their beliefs *required* them to force all sentient life to follow the Praxis.)

While some of members - even among the peers - of the subordinate races have a more pragmatic mindset, in regards to the Praxis, more than a few of them are best described as fanatics.

Here's an example:

At the start of the civil war that took place just months afte the last Shaa committed suicide, the "bad side" (the Praxis as the Shaa wanted it) had a lot fewer warships than the "worse side" (the Praxis, with the race in question replacing the Shaa as the "first among equals").

So the two human protagonists - both of them at least partially in the pragmatic camp - come up with new starship tactics. (Since the existing ones - being a mix of Napoleanic and WWI trench warfare - strongly favor the side with the most ships and missiles.) And for rest of the civil war they have to fight an uphill battle against many of their own superiors. Even after it became clear that their ideas worked. Why? Because it wasn't a set of tactics that was approved by the Praxis.

At the end of the civil war, one of the superiors in question - now the equivalent of the head of the navy - passed down orders that these new tactics weren't to be even *talked about*, let alone taught. Or used.

[Robo Jesus]

Well, at least the Colonials will have a few more ships to use after the Stiletto tears through the majority (if not entirety) of The Praxis fleet(s). Plus, if this is logical at all, there will be looting involved, so more foodstuffs and random assorted goods as well for the Colonials and the Stiletto.

[Losonti Tokash]

Ah, good. I was wondering when you'd come back and upload a new chapter.

[Murazor]

Given that literature is starting to show up... any chance of a short visit to the Foundation universe?

I'm sincerely unsure of how this Chaos would react to the existence of the Trantorian Empire, R. Daneel, the Foundations and whatnot... And it'd be particularly interesting to know Hari Seldon's reaction to their society (in the surprisingly compelling portrayal of the character done by David Brim, we are told that Seldon absofuckinglutely hates chaotic scenarios, but that he sincerely hopes that the First Foundation as he originally conceived it will somehow "evolve" beyond the eternal stability that Daneel plans to reach through the Galaxia groupmind).

[LadyTevar]

Can we stop adding Universes, and get the storyline moving? PLEASE?

Geesh, guys, the point of a Story is to tell a tale from beginning to end, not twist all over the universe and never resolve problems.

[Skyfox120]

Can we stop adding Universes, and get the storyline moving? PLEASE?

Geesh, guys, the point of a Story is to tell a tale from beginning to end, not twist all over the universe and never resolve problems.

*scratchs head* I kind of thought Nut said the purpose for Open Door was to have CHaos rampage across and completely screw up whatever fictional universe struck his fancy?

[Singular Quartet]

Can we stop adding Universes, and get the storyline moving? PLEASE?

Geesh, guys, the point of a Story is to tell a tale from beginning to end, not twist all over the universe and never resolve problems.

There's a plot?