Are my Ideas too Wanked Out part 2, sorta...

[Darth Ruinus]

Ok, thanks to you guys, I REALLY toned down the Roar power from this last thread. Thanks for setting my head straight on some of that stuff I wrote back there. Looking back on that, even I laugh at myself....

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=108537

Anyways, I just have a few quick question for you guys. The main thing I want to write about is discrimination. That being said, do you think those types of stories are over used? And, is there any interest in a story centering around riots in another galaxy, due to the mistreatment of Humans in said galaxy? (Will clarify on that if needed.)

Thanks, any comments will be appreciated.

[Ariphaos]

Okay okay, it needs to be said again - why is your setting multigalactic?

It is possible to have a story that requires it. But really, make sure you need it, and when you have one, treat the concept lightly.

[rhoenix]

Okay okay, it needs to be said again - why is your setting multigalactic?

It is possible to have a story that requires it. But really, make sure you need it, and when you have one, treat the concept lightly.

Agreed. Giving yourself too much elbow room as a writer can be just as bad as not giving yourself enough.

[Ford Prefect]

Stories on the multigalactic scale which deal with discrimination can very quickly become unweildy. If there is a galaxy wide riot, you really have to deal with those very, very high up in order to keep everything under control. Ultimately, you could describe one person at the very bottom of this enormous pile, and their experiences through it. It would make the scale positively mindboggling for the reader (much as it would be for the character, what with seas of people and rumours of other riots on other worlds and habitats).

Also, why the mistreatment of humans in another galaxy? Are they being mistreated by their own government (used as colonial labour and more or less hung out to dry?) or is it the usual alien opression type of idea?

[metavac]

I'm still stuck on the glaring mismatch between galaxy-sized megastructures and the civilization responsible for such things still resorting to relatively mundane means of warfare as planting infantry on the ground. You'd have to have a strong ethical predisposition towards preserving life not to be tempted to simply point one of your galaxy guns at an offending planet and blowing it to hell.

[Darth Ruinus]

Ok, to answer some of the questions.

Why another galaxy?
Ok, the backstory, is that human arrived in that galaxy to conquer it, or at the very least get a foothold there. Well, the story then centers around the time when 25 years after humans start a war in that galaxy, they have no way of gettting back home. The story centers around the other galaxy attempting to rebuild itself, and how it would deal with humans, the race responsible for nearly wrecking the galaxy. The government sets up human containment worlds, where humans are allowed to live there, under horrible conditions. The story really centers around a girl and how she attempts to get by in a galaxy that views humans as war mongering brutes.

The riots are not galaxy wide, they are limited to the containment worlds, and a few worlds were political groups that are friendly to humans reside. Though most of the story takes place on the girls planet.

Metavac, you said something about just blowing planets up? Well, how can you conquer a planet if its gone?

[Stark]

Metavac, you said something about just blowing planets up? Well, how can you conquer a planet if its gone?

Oh please. On the scale of a multi-galactic civilisation with tens or hundreds of millions of planets, blowing one up would be less significant than blowing up a single factory in our world. It's that scale thing again, which you've refused to accept raises these kind of problems. In a multigalactic society, hundreds of billions dead would be a footnote in the paper, if anyone outside the galaxy in question ever heard of it. What's that you say? 0.0000002% of the population got a disease and died?

[Connor MacLeod]

Metavac, you said something about just blowing planets up? Well, how can you conquer a planet if its gone?

Oh please. On the scale of a multi-galactic civilisation with tens or hundreds of millions of planets, blowing one up would be less significant than blowing up a single factory in our world. It's that scale thing again, which you've refused to accept raises these kind of problems. In a multigalactic society, hundreds of billions dead would be a footnote in the paper, if anyone outside the galaxy in question ever heard of it. What's that you say? 0.0000002% of the population got a disease and died?

Depends on if you have an ability to replace the planet or not (and the method of destruction, really.)

And are all those "tens/hundreds of millions of planets" neccesarily the same or even vaguely similar? Do they have resources you might not acquire elsewhere (Like Spice in Dune?) How cost effective is it to find a planet suitable for replacement?

I mean to use your "factory" analogy it may not neccesarily be replacable OR efficient/easy to do so. (to draw on 40K, the IoM can blow worlds up at will, but they can't easily replace planets/biospheres they destroy. Humans, on the other hand, are much more easily replaced.)

[Stark]

What I'm saying is that the *need* conquer a planet is pretty low when you've got tens or hundreds of millions of worlds. Unless it's Dune-esque plot magic with the sacred crystals of Antioch or something equally silly. They apparently control multiple whole galaxies, so strategic concerns are going to be minimal (with transgalactic travel intragalactic travel times are going to be low anyway).

It's a good point that they may not be able to create or maintain biospheres, but have uncounted masses of soldiers. The risk:reward ratio might be low enough to waste soldiers trying regardless. This would be an odd gap in their technology, though.

[Patrick Degan]

And are all those "tens/hundreds of millions of planets" neccesarily the same or even vaguely similar? Do they have resources you might not acquire elsewhere (Like Spice in Dune?) How cost effective is it to find a planet suitable for replacement?

With such a large sampling of worlds all formed by the same laws of physics, it's hard to conceive that one and only one out of several hundred million planets has the one resource which no other world has. Nor that the ullodium phosdex would be beyond analysis and synthesising —which a multigalactic civilisation should be capable of doing given the tech level they must be at in order to cross intergalactic distances in very short timeframes to start with. It is appallingly illogical to consider that any world could be that unique.

[metavac]

Not to pile on here, Ruinus, but generally put your galactic civilization is now able to plug into not only stars, but a whole shitload of'em, and presumably mine millions of stellar masses and transmute it into building material for a galactic megastructure. If you can do that, you pretty much have the means to access and use the energy densities of stars at the very least. Not only would you need to go to quasar, neutron star and maybe even black hole densities to find furnaces for more exotic materials, you'd have to distribute that material across a huge chunk of your inhabited planets for it make sense for a galactic civilization to maintain an infantry. Otherwise, your poor planet-bounded peons have zilch to offer that you can't simply extract from or synthesize in their own sun.

[Ariphaos]

Why another galaxy?
Ok, the backstory, is that human arrived in that galaxy to conquer it, or at the very least get a foothold there. Well, the story then centers around the time when 25 years after humans start a war in that galaxy, they have no way of gettting back home. The story centers around the other galaxy attempting to rebuild itself, and how it would deal with humans, the race responsible for nearly wrecking the galaxy. The government sets up human containment worlds, where humans are allowed to live there, under horrible conditions. The story really centers around a girl and how she attempts to get by in a galaxy that views humans as war mongering brutes.

And this needs to be another Galaxy why?

You could have this exact same story played out in the Orion arm, on a few thousand or million worlds that have long ago been recaptured from extensive human aggression. Humans and an alien confederacy locked within a massive cold war, easily dwarfing Star Wars in scope yet only taking up a few percent of our own galaxy.

In such a setting, your girl could get lost even well within the confines of the 'human containment zone', who are not kept so much for their slavery potential but because they're hostages...

I'll stop, I'm not sure if you get my point... Basically, though, I honestly don't get the impression that you comprehend this. I get that impression from most authors, of course, but still - write what you know.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Metavac touched on a good point, which i'd like to expand on. If you control multiple galaxies, and have such (obviously required) insanely fast FTL to do so then you can surely utilize the resources of innumerable uninhabited worlds. Surely there must be literally billions, or tens of billions, of planets and moons with nary a soul living on them filled to the bursting point with resources to exploit. There would be no gain in risking time and resources to invade an inhabited world with a fleet of mining ships can tear apart an uninhabited star system and cart it back through Hyperspace to the heartland of the Empire. There is no need to even harness stars, planets are easier to get a hold of, easier to mine, and thus easier to utilize.

[metavac]

Metavac touched on a good point, which i'd like to expand on. If you control multiple galaxies, and have such (obviously required) insanely fast FTL to do so then you can surely utilize the resources of innumerable uninhabited worlds. Surely there must be literally billions, or tens of billions, of planets and moons with nary a soul living on them filled to the bursting point with resources to exploit. There would be no gain in risking time and resources to invade an inhabited world with a fleet of mining ships can tear apart an uninhabited star system and cart it back through Hyperspace to the heartland of the Empire. There is no need to even harness stars, planets are easier to get a hold of, easier to mine, and thus easier to utilize.

And, if you have the capacity to stand-up galactic-scale megastructures, you have the capacity to tear apart and put together stars from bulk to particle (you'll have to, simply to get the necessary mass). Since star stuff is the source of damn near anything you'll find on an inhabited world, you basically just gave your civilizations stellar furnaces that can produce whatever elements they need. Everything after that is chemistry.

If you need more exotic subatomic materials bred in interesting cosmic conditions (i.e., black holes, MACHOs, cosmic strings, whatever), then the likelihood that it's going deposit in quantity on just any world at all is going to be pretty damn low. And if it does, will that world really be habitable by humans? And if it is, laying that planet to waste isn't going to blow away the material you're looking for. It'd be the cosmic equivalent of cracking a lobster shell to get the meat.

What you have here is a story begging to be told under certain limits blown away by the setting and background. Intergalactic space opera can be extremely entertaining, even ones that feature run of the mill humans like you and me. But to be credible, you have to keep a sense of scale. Annie might still have her hair in pigtails and she might fly around the universe in a Chevy Space Nova, but there's no way in hell that the civilization that built galactic-scale guns is going to give a crap about conquering planets, let alone maintain some wanked out Master Chiefs to do it.

[Durandal]

With a name like "Darth Ruinus", I'd be surprised if your ideas weren't wanked out.

[Covenant]

You need to remember, setting something at a multigalactic scale is not inherently cooler. It's bigger, sure, but since when do people act as a single unified body at even the level of a small town, let alone at a galactic scale?

Really, what you seem to want to write is a story that has a relatively mundane focus in a huge world. I recommend you use all that stuff as backdrop and focus on a single group on a single planet. There are going to be so many wildly different types of 'humans' across a galactic scale that I really find it somewhat hard to imagine that they would be 'discriminated' against and yet still control such a vast swath of space (at least, enough to start riots across it)

You seem to be tacking on these extra elements almost just to outwank something that already exists, which is fine to an extent, but you're not dealing with that. If you want to add in multiple galaxies worth of people, you need a more careful handling of the stresses that puts on a society.

[Darth Ruinus]

You need to remember, setting something at a multigalactic scale is not inherently cooler. It's bigger, sure, but since when do people act as a single unified body at even the level of a small town, let alone at a galactic scale?

Really, what you seem to want to write is a story that has a relatively mundane focus in a huge world. I recommend you use all that stuff as backdrop and focus on a single group on a single planet. There are going to be so many wildly different types of 'humans' across a galactic scale that I really find it somewhat hard to imagine that they would be 'discriminated' against and yet still control such a vast swath of space (at least, enough to start riots across it)

You seem to be tacking on these extra elements almost just to outwank something that already exists, which is fine to an extent, but you're not dealing with that. If you want to add in multiple galaxies worth of people, you need a more careful handling of the stresses that puts on a society.

Uh, I already said that the story takes place in one planet, all the new of riots on other planets will be given through news reports and people talking.

The humans are discriminated against because they are in another galaxy. Humans already control this galaxy, but like I said, the story takes place in the enemy galaxy a few years after Human initially arrived there.

And, if you have the capacity to stand-up galactic-scale megastructures,

In the earlier thread I said I dropped the Idea of galaxy sized structures. the Galaxy Bases as I called them, are now just really big mobile space stations.

They apparently control multiple whole galaxies, so strategic concerns are going to be minimal (with transgalactic travel intragalactic travel times are going to be low anyway).

No, I also dropped that idea. Like I said near the end of the first thread, they have recently begun sending ships to other galaxies.

[metavac]

Tell me more about these Galaxy bases.

[Darth Ruinus]

Tell me more about these Galaxy bases.

Ok, uh, appearance wise, they look like upside down pyramids with cities at its base. That pretty much covers it.

They are ridiculously armored, having enough firepower to be able to ward off attacks by a small fleet. They are self-sufficient, generating its own supplies and repair parts thanks to various onboard factories and such. At the tip of the pyramid, there is a large cannon that creates curvature singularities and fires them at extremely high speeds.

Somethng like that, though I may change it if it sound too ridiculous.

[metavac]

Tell me more about these Galaxy bases.

Ok, uh, appearance wise, they look like upside down pyramids with cities at its base. That pretty much covers it.

They are ridiculously armored, having enough firepower to be able to ward off attacks by a small fleet. They are self-sufficient, generating its own supplies and repair parts thanks to various onboard factories and such. At the tip of the pyramid, there is a large cannon that creates curvature singularities and fires them at extremely high speeds.

Somethng like that, though I may change it if it sound too ridiculous.

How big is it? And what scale do you envision for the size and speed of these soliton projectiles?

[Darth Ruinus]

Tell me more about these Galaxy bases.

Ok, uh, appearance wise, they look like upside down pyramids with cities at its base. That pretty much covers it.

They are ridiculously armored, having enough firepower to be able to ward off attacks by a small fleet. They are self-sufficient, generating its own supplies and repair parts thanks to various onboard factories and such. At the tip of the pyramid, there is a large cannon that creates curvature singularities and fires them at extremely high speeds.

Somethng like that, though I may change it if it sound too ridiculous.

How big is it? And what scale do you envision for the size and speed of these soliton projectiles?

The singularities move close or at c.

Well, I dont know the exact measurements yet, since I havent gotten around to drawing them yet, but put it this way, they could cover North America if they landed on it.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

So they have about a 25 million square kilometer footprint?

[18-Till-I-Die]

Thats not TOO unrealistic, if they're a truly galactic civilization like Star Wars or something. They'd have billions of worlds and stars to supply energy and material to build such a battleship, probably many such battleships. Also, one can speculate, the device used to generate the singularity may take up most of the structure like the Death Star's main weapon and it's reactor was a good portion of the ship itself.

Thats if he means the top part is as big as NA.

Though if he means the POINT at the bottom covers north America...i guess that'd be more of a warplanet than a warship.

[Patrick Degan]

Tell me more about these Galaxy bases.

Ok, uh, appearance wise, they look like upside down pyramids with cities at its base. That pretty much covers it.

They are ridiculously armored, having enough firepower to be able to ward off attacks by a small fleet. They are self-sufficient, generating its own supplies and repair parts thanks to various onboard factories and such. At the tip of the pyramid, there is a large cannon that creates curvature singularities and fires them at extremely high speeds.

Somethng like that, though I may change it if it sound too ridiculous....
The singularities move close or at c.

You hardly need generated singularities as projectiles. You can use any object massing about 1500 metric tons accelerated up to .8c or better to wreak planetary destruction on the scale of the asteroid strike that killed off the dinosaurs in one stroke. Or very many objects accelerated up to any reasonable relativistic velocity to subject the target world to a mass bombardment.

The best thing you can do if you really want to improve your writing is to drop the wanketeering cold and start applying some basic thinking to your story problems.