Some storybuilding help

[Aranfan]

So I'm doing some story building for a story I may or may not write in the future. Basically the setting is Hard SF where most of the cultures in the galaxy are Kardeshev II civs. Then Karhdeshev 1.5 humanity enters the scene with something none of the other cultures have: Alcubierre drives, FTL.


My question is basically how much of an advantage would this give humanity, and what would they have to do to keep that advantage for any length of time.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Advantage in what sense, military?
In those terms, good luck. It would be like a falcon trying to prey on buffalo- vastly superor mobility, but the ability to do only slightly more than bugger all when they get there. Not entirely certain what a type 1.5 is capable of, but it's not civilisation versus civilisation, it's intruding starship versus local civilisation.

Unless the drive field can do neat things like engulf a target planet, of course, there's always that. How the tactics play out is down to how you fine tune the situation, which is the storyteller's call, but I don't think humanity is going to have the economic muscle for a war of conquest for a long time.

Colonisation, there's a potential edge; but again, the defining factor in how fast a species spreads seems to be how long it takes a colony to build up to the point where it's prepared to launch another colonising expedition of it's own. If it takes a millennium to build a local culture capable of sending another seed out into the universe, the difference between ten years and two months' journey time between stars is just a rounding error.

Why a Kardashev II civilisation doesn't have enough power to do that is a question that you may have to answer.


One possibility appears; interstellar trade, interstellar carriage. Do all these cultures communicate with each other, at years' time lag and misunderstandings? Are there slowboats? The human race and it's drives could short circuit the entire glacial process, becoming truckers, couriers, dealmakers, bards and brokers to the universe.

Of course, this might involve reinventing the Polesotechnic League- if not that specific example, somethign like it will have been done before.

[Samuel]

So we have a civilization with several solar systems (Humanity) versus civilizations with whole galaxies. If we get uppity, they can probably used STL weaponary to reduce our systems to rubble.

It is unlikely the attacker will have a military advantage unless they are completely demilitarized and incapable of dual usage tech. After all, mining gear, power plants and the like can easily be used as weaponary in space.

There also seems to be no reason to go to war.

[Aranfan]

So we have a civilization with several solar systems (Humanity) versus civilizations with whole galaxies. If we get uppity, they can probably used STL weaponary to reduce our systems to rubble.

It is unlikely the attacker will have a military advantage unless they are completely demilitarized and incapable of dual usage tech. After all, mining gear, power plants and the like can easily be used as weaponary in space.

There also seems to be no reason to go to war.

I said Kardashev 2, not Kardashev 3!

[Samuel]

Sorry, I thought that 1 is a star, 2 is a galaxy, 3 is a universe. Turns out 1 is a single planet.

Anyway, you will be going up against opponets with the equivalent of a dyson swarm. You can't crack that shell.

[The Romulan Republic]

Sorry, I thought that 1 is a star, 2 is a galaxy, 3 is a universe. Turns out 1 is a single planet.

Anyway, you will be going up against opponets with the equivalent of a dyson swarm. You can't crack that shell.

No, 1 is a planet, 2 is a solar system, 3 is a galaxy. Hypothetically, I suppose a type 4 would be a universe, or at least a galactic cluster.

Though you're probably right about a 2 being too strong for a 1.5.

[Academia Nut]

Well, here's the thing: K2 civilizations without FTL are pretty much confined to one star system. You might have an overall alliance between similar species or such, but the length of time required to move about, and even communicate, means that each star system is in essence a self-contained civilization. With FTL however, a civ can span multiple star systems and pool resources much larger than with just a single one. The limiting factor of resource gathering is the capacity to utilize resources in the first place and the speed of the getting them from point A to point B.

Humanity in this setting is deficient in the first point but excels at the second, while the opposite is true of their neighbours. Thus their first goal is to keep the drive out of the hands of anyone else as it is a critical edge. For one thing, with an FTL drive you can literally outpace anyone else's ability to communicate. In military terms, you can hit a target, loot it, and be gone before confirmation arrives. In economic terms, you can outpace news of the latest stock market results and perform trading that is seemingly clairvoyant.

Thus, there are multiple ways to go about utilizing this advantage to up their tech. The peaceful method is to act as traders, couriers, and messengers for others, carefully hoarding their tech while accepting payment in the technology of others for their services. This could obviously be both direct and indirect, with the indirect method being just buying up things after becoming filthy stinking rich, in whatever methods available for someone in a K2 civ to acquire resources.

The military method is to find outposts of the unfriendly neighbours and drop in on them unexpected. Remember, with an Alcubierre drives are isolated from the rest of the universe and outrun light cones. A raider like that can literally drop in on a target that had no idea they were coming, take out their ability to announce that anything is amiss, and then pillage at their leisure. It will take decades to centuries for help to arrive. The overall objective would be to pick at the weak points and scavenge enough technology to up humanity's tech to a K2 level, at which point it is game over for anyone they don't like.

[Aranfan]

The political landscape I'm currently looking at has two or more alliances who don't go to war with each other only because the distances make it impractical.

[Ford Prefect]

An important question to ask is 'how are these alien civillisations type 2?'. I mean, automatically you assume 'Dyson sphere', but one wonders if they're using most planetary mass to build their swarm of collectors, what are they living on? Also, while having an honest to god FTL engine is pretty good, militarily, it should be noted that any civillisation which does have a Dyson sphere also happens to have the giantest ass laser on hand to cook you at a distance of a couple of tens of lightyears.

Of course, with FTL you can outrun the beam and evacuate your citizens (as it will takes tens of years for the beam to arrive). Of course, this does leave you at a disadvantage when you're invading, as they can use smaller fractions of their suns energy to melt your ships; I imagine that the FTL drive in this situation is not unlimited in usage. It's just important to keep in mind that the Kardashev scale is not linear; there is a huge gulf in power here.

[B5B7]

One needs to have a real good reason for the ETIs not quickly getting their own FTL drives. Why? Because knowing a thing can be done is a great motivation, and also any observations they make of working of the FTL drive wil provide huge clues.
Remember, you are basically positing that they are more advanced than humans.
So, how do the humans keep the advantage - by staying away from their systems, so that the aliens do not know about the FTL drive - there are plenty of other systems humans can occupy and then develop a massive civilization before make any contact.

If humans do want to make contact, one way to do it is to use FTL ship to carry a standard STL ship near alien system and then make contact. However, have to be cautious - the aliens may have some type of tech that enables them to subvert human brain, so need lots of security precautions. In a realistic universe setting races are partially paranoid, not carefree just rock up and say hello (& give away all your secrets).

[Samuel]

Any limits to the drive? If you are in a fun mood, you can turn the Moon into a spacecraft (although Asimov already did it- as well as others ).

[Aranfan]

The Moon will not be leaving the Solar System. Thank you very much. Also, I'm thinking of upping the K-level of humans. Maybe have the Alpha Centauri colony be K1.5 and have the Sol system be K1.8 or something.

[Samuel]

The Moon will not be leaving the Solar System. Thank you very much. Also, I'm thinking of upping the K-level of humans. Maybe have the Alpha Centauri colony be K1.5 and have the Sol system be K1.8 or something.

Give us details for the drive so we can exploit it!

Also, is the K scale logarithmic? Because that would make your boosted numbers "only" about one two hundredth the size of our neighbors.

[Formless]

The K scale is exponential. Its actually based on the energy output of the civilization, see? Level one is having access to the power output of a single planet (even if you actually have access to multiple planets), the next is having access to the total output of a star, and the last is having access to all the power of a fucking galaxy. The numbers are more specific, but it amounts to about a square more power every level then the last, IIRC. That's a shitload of difference. A type two civilization is going to look at a type one like you look at insects on the sidewalk. A type three will look at the both of you and only see an ant and a slime mold. Really makes interstellar relations more interesting, doesn't it?

[Aranfan]

Hmm, how should I deal with AI? I have some ideas but I want to hear some thoughts first.

[The Romulan Republic]

Hmm, how should I deal with AI? I have some ideas but I want to hear some thoughts first.

Well, wouldn't a sufficiently advanced AI render humans obsolete? If you want human characters, you might want to limit the AI. For example, their could have been an AI revolt in the past so that they banned advanced AIs, or perhaps their are religious reasons for such a ban.

[Formless]

Or you could go some kind of transhumanist middle-rout. Integrate humans with machines on some level. They are still human, and outwardly you cannot tell the difference- until someone does something obviously and impressively superhuman.

[Samuel]

Hmm, how should I deal with AI? I have some ideas but I want to hear some thoughts first.

Sadly, humans were incapable of building supersmart AIs that didn't immediately resort to law suits in order to be payed for their services.

[Sky Captain]

I have question how a breakthrough in power generation tech may affect civilization`s placement in K scale. Currently human K number is around 0.7, now let`s say we make a breakthrough and invent some kind of unlimited power generator. Only limiting factor is how much power materials the generator is made of can handle before melting down so better cooling, better materials = more power out of the same size generator.

How such discovery may affect human placement in K scale when there is no need to bother with solar power satellites and the like. Let`s say generator with size of average family house can produce 1 TW of power, also this technology can be scaled up if necessary with bigger generator producing more power per volume than smaller one.

[speaker-to-trolls]

So militarily, it is mostly useless. Can you do anything with it? Maybe trade, though I fail to see the point in physical items, since each civ could just make their own. Exchange of knowledge is the only one that comes to mind. Warp in somewhere, fill up your hard drives with data about that civ, warp somewhere else and drop it off. Sounds like a job for robot spacecraft.

Yeah, pretty boring.

Hey, at the very least you'd get human researchers and adventurous souls taking the opportunity to go out and study about the new life and new civilisations they've discovered.

Besides that I can think of a number of things that might be worth trading; Curiosities such as alien artifacts and life forms, sure you can get information on those things beamed to you by laser message, but humans can get them to you faster, and they can get you a living, breathing Varangian Wrathbeast to study/keep in your garden. Similarly they can get you a working model of alien tech you could only get the blueprints for otherwise.
Second; humans can not only get information about other cultures for you, they can interpret it. Granted humans will need a bit of experience dealing with aliens before this becomes viable, but I can imagine humans becoming ambassador-anthropologists, collecting information about one species and working on rewriting into a form that other species would better be able to grasp.
Third: humans can act as explorers, heading out into the unknown and coming back with maps of the far stars and information about which ones could be good colony sites and which ones are inhabited by species that get tetchy about their property rights.
Fourth: OK, this really needs there to be some kind of animosity between two K2 civilisations, which may be unlikely, but humans could get in, do a bit of espionage and then get back out and sell the information to their employers. Perhaps more feasibly, they could be privateers, take down a Zorkon spaceship, gut it, take any parts of interest back to Varangia Major for them to comb over for anything they might have missed. Might strain Earth-Zorkonian relations as there's only so many times the Solar League can protest this is the work of rogue factions before people stop listening.
Five: Tourism! This depends entirely on how good virtual reality is and the attitudes of aliens to travel in general, but humans could run a service whereby they take paying customers to exotic stars to see strange sights.

So, as I see it humans could do pretty well out of this, at least until one of the K2 civilisations reverse engineers their warp drive. I'd advise them to spread out and colonise as many systems as they can as fast as they can against the day when that happens. In any case it sounds like a great idea for a setting, lots of possibilities.

[Samuel]

I have question how a breakthrough in power generation tech may affect civilization`s placement in K scale. Currently human K number is around 0.7, now let`s say we make a breakthrough and invent some kind of unlimited power generator. Only limiting factor is how much power materials the generator is made of can handle before melting down so better cooling, better materials = more power out of the same size generator.

How such discovery may affect human placement in K scale when there is no need to bother with solar power satellites and the like. Let`s say generator with size of average family house can produce 1 TW of power, also this technology can be scaled up if necessary with bigger generator producing more power per volume than smaller one.

So basically a perpetual motion machine? I don't think adding something that blatantly violates the laws of physics is a good idea.

speakers idea is good- nice space opera with intrigue and trade and a new system every other week... and each system large enough so that you can be lost in its depth.

[Sky Captain]

I have question how a breakthrough in power generation tech may affect civilization`s placement in K scale. Currently human K number is around 0.7, now let`s say we make a breakthrough and invent some kind of unlimited power generator. Only limiting factor is how much power materials the generator is made of can handle before melting down so better cooling, better materials = more power out of the same size generator.

How such discovery may affect human placement in K scale when there is no need to bother with solar power satellites and the like. Let`s say generator with size of average family house can produce 1 TW of power, also this technology can be scaled up if necessary with bigger generator producing more power per volume than smaller one.

So basically a perpetual motion machine? I don't think adding something that blatantly violates the laws of physics is a good idea.

speakers idea is good- nice space opera with intrigue and trade and a new system every other week... and each system large enough so that you can be lost in its depth.

I know that I`m just thinking of hypothetical what if scenario and how it may affect our K number when there is practically free unlimited power available at will.

[Formless]

I have question how a breakthrough in power generation tech may affect civilization`s placement in K scale. Currently human K number is around 0.7, now let`s say we make a breakthrough and invent some kind of unlimited power generator. Only limiting factor is how much power materials the generator is made of can handle before melting down so better cooling, better materials = more power out of the same size generator.

How such discovery may affect human placement in K scale when there is no need to bother with solar power satellites and the like. Let`s say generator with size of average family house can produce 1 TW of power, also this technology can be scaled up if necessary with bigger generator producing more power per volume than smaller one.

This effectively makes all energy distinctions between the different K scale civilizations moot. The only thing that would matter at that point is territory and efficiency of technological development. If that is the kind of story you are after...

These humans are getting pretty powerful pretty fast. How is it that civilizations that are older and more powerful then humanity haven't discovered both your FTL drive AND this magic energy maker before us?

[Aranfan]

Okay, No magic energy maker (this isn't Cthulhutech). And as for the FTL, I'm thinking that while all the technologically advanced species have STL physics down pretty well, humans got lucky and their guesses were right (read as: Least wrong) when it came to the possibility/application of FTL.


Edit: Also, while none of the local species other than humanity have FTL, the Galaxy is a big place and the parts that the various powers near humanity have mapped out isn't all that big comparatively.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Something else to consider, your humans are not going to want anyone else to get their hands on this fantastic ace in the hole they've got. Think about how they may try to stop other pwople from developing their own magic warp engine.