SF don'ts

[Nyrath]

Notably, that the girl's death in The Cold Equations is exactly the kind of contrived death-by-morality-play that I dislike in fiction. It may be a "powerful" story, but if you look at it harder you find huge, gaping, unrealistic holes in the plot.

Oh no. Not again.
Please, The Cold Equations flamewars have been done to death already. All the arguments are more or less summed up here:

http://home.tiac.net/~cri_d/cri/1999/coldeq.html

[Nyrath]

The wikipedia article you provided doesn't seem to support your statements. Not saying you're wrong, just that it wasn't the appropriate link to give.

Sorry about that.
I believe I read about Campbell's Human Uber Alles bent in a commentary by Isaac Asimov(?), but it wasn't online. The link was for those who didn't know who John W. Campbell was.

The closest I could find was here:
http://scifipedia.scifi.com/index.php/John_W._Campbell

One of the most successful of these efforts was the series of three short stories called "The Story of the Machine" when they were collected in Cloak of Aesir (1952). They span a period of several hundred years of future history, following the decline of civilization due to automation, the revival of humanity through contact with an alien civilization, and the subsequent decline of the aliens, which is caused by using human beings as slaves. It is worth noting that this was the first time that Campbell suggested that human beings were always going to prevail over alien races.

[Sea Skimmer]

While it’s not always a don’t, I get really sick about reading tales which involve super soldiers raised from birth to fight. Aside from the fact that this would produce a pack of psychopaths, it’s utterly unnecessary and horrendously expensive in the age of firearms+. The more advanced technology gets and the more educated a population, the less and less advantage being trained from birth would possibly have.

Even if do you want absurdly elite warriors, at least followed the IJN pilot training model and wait until they’ve gone into middle school or high school. Then you select them for additional technical education, only after which they start military training. It’s just totally pointless to try to start earlier when you don’t even known how the person is going to mature.

In real life it is quite possible to create an amply elite commando in six months, not counting basic training, and the longest known training course for any ground combatant spans only two years (USAF Pararescue jumpers, whom basically have to run through advanced medical training AND commando training which includes such things as combat diving)

[Teleros]

Well, I'd expect longer training periods in sci-fi settings though, because you've got a great many more environments to deal with. Low / high / zero gravity, vacuum, alien worlds... the list goes on.
I agree though about the stupidity of "trained from birth" soldiers. I'd much rather have a more realistic armed forces (perhaps with a militaristic culture, but I don't think it's necessary), but extend the lifespan of people & medical science etc instead if I want super soldiers.

[General Zod]

Well, I'd expect longer training periods in sci-fi settings though, because you've got a great many more environments to deal with. Low / high / zero gravity, vacuum, alien worlds... the list goes on.

For the most part there won't be that many environments a soldier is likely to fight in that are going to require special training sans maybe temperature. If it deviates enough from being earth-like than nothing short of a massive aid of technology is going to make fighting in it feasible. Unless you're going for uber-wank, limiting different environments to special forces specially trained to handle them is the best way to go.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well, I'd expect longer training periods in sci-fi settings though, because you've got a great many more environments to deal with. Low / high / zero gravity, vacuum, alien worlds... the list goes on.

Most of that would be realistically dealt with via mission specific/pre deployment training once a solider is already in a unit, you cannot expect a solider to come out of formal training as a combat ready jack of all trades. That just doesn’t work. Tack on six weeks for space suit training and that will be the majority of what you can do without having put the man with the men he will actually fight with.

Moronic sci fi writes would address this by having an entire class of child solider trained as a unit from birth… whom in a realistic setting then be massacred because they had no seasoned cadre to learn from.

[General Zod]

Most of that would be realistically dealt with via mission specific/pre deployment training once a solider is already in a unit, you cannot expect a solider to come out of formal training as a combat ready jack of all trades. That just doesn’t work. Tack on six weeks for space suit training and that will be the majority of what you can do without having put the man with the men he will actually fight with.

Plus, unless the nation in question is at war with every alien race in their galaxy, that kind of training in dozens of environments would be a huge waste of time and resources.

[Teleros]

Most of that would be realistically dealt with via mission specific/pre deployment training once a solider is already in a unit, you cannot expect a solider to come out of formal training as a combat ready jack of all trades. That just doesn’t work.

Course not, but Id' be surprised if there weren't some things that you'd want covered in basic training that we wouldn't need now though. For example, zero gravity training is the one that I imagine taking the most time to do, simply because it's so unlike Earth-bound combat. Course, that's assuming your soldiers can expect to face it often enough to add it to basic training and not a mission-specific thing.

[Sea Skimmer]

Actually I can’t see any good reason to make zero g combat a regular part of training, when are you ever going to have infantry fighting under those conditions?

Boarding an enemy warship or deep space installation would be a clear cut suicide mission, and it’s a job for a SEAL team equivalent which conducted extensive rehearsals if you’re even going to try. Any asteroid or planet which is too small to have significantly gravity will also have no atmosphere and thus you really won’t have a reason to fight over its surface. A space warship could just come as close as it wants and blast the surface with as little or much firepower as is required.

Infantry take and hold ground; and in the vastness of space little ground will have any value. Earth has an awfully diverse topography as it is, but we don’t normally train men to fight from small boats or inside undersea caverns or tree top to tree top ect… for similar reasons.

Other hostile environment training would depend heavily on what planets you might ever fight over; and a lot of that training would just consist of getting used to a space suit. Probably a large percentage of all regular training would simply be conducted with suits on, as that would be an excellent way of getting men accustom to using them.

FTL speed would also be a significant factor as it would govern the overall pace of military operations. If you have the ability to cross the galaxy in a month then you might have more up front training then if trips merely between planets take weeks. However at the same time this very high level of strategic mobility would reduce the need for ground fighting. You simply wouldn’t want to get drawn into a big ground battle over any specific place.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I would wonder how to train for fighting in MegaCities. I mean, assume for a moment they get into building to building fights like in Stalingrad or something.

I mean, take like Coruscant for example, where the buildings are like five miles high. Now, inside, you'd probably have habitable areas as big as modern skyscrapers.

"Building to Building" fighting, like in WWII, would be a nightmare, as each building might as well be a city...and there IS a whole city of them to deal with too. It'd be like mountain warfare but in a city.

You probably would need a whole cadre of soldiers specially trained to fight in those conditions. "City-fighters" or something.

[Sea Skimmer]

I think not. You’d need as insanely many warm bodies as you can get to take a place like that, and you’ll be lucky if they have six weeks in basic by the time it’s done. The Germans actually had specialist assault engineer units they sent into Stalingrad, the battalions got butchered just the same as the regular infantry and made virtually progress at all.

Also remember, a large portion of Stalingrad was destroyed in just the first couple days of the battle, one of the reasons the fighting was so protracted was that the resulting heaps of rubble couldn’t be destroyed any further. The same thing would happen in a mega city battle, if you train your men for anything it should probably be for fighting in the equivalent of Ground Zero after the tower collapses, rather then inside massive buildings. Plus at the small unit level, platoons and squads, fighting in a 500 story building isn’t really any different then fighting in normal sized one.

In any case, an attack on a mega city would be such a large undertaking that you should have ample time under the logistical buildup phase before the attack, to conduct mission specific training for your regular units.

Realistically though, I don’t think anyone would ever take a mega city by direct assault; they’ll just bombard and besiege it into submission. The overextended nature of the German position at Stalingrad prevented this and the entire German offensive was a blunder just waiting to turn into a disaster because of it.

I supposed for an attack on Coruscant psychopaths raised from birth might be damn useful though, because any other troops would probably mutiny at the idea

[Adrian Laguna]

The shuttle is supposed to make a return trip. If it has enough fuel to do that, chances are it has enough to make a safe landing, even if that means the pilot gets stranded.

Incorrect, the shuttle has exactly enough fuel to land, and no more. The pilot is supposed to stay on the planet until the cruiser comes to the planet during its scheduled visit. It's stated quite clearly in the story that if the girl is not ejected, the shuttle will run out of fuel partway through the descent and crash. In that event the girl dies, the pilot dies, and the men who need medicine die.

That always bugged me about The Cold Equations; the entire situation comes across as completely contrived. The shuttle carries just enough fuel to get where it's going, and not a jot more? What if...

Like I said, it's a bureaucratic mistake. It's a realistic bureaucratic mistake. The whole thing would have been prevented just by having the pilots run checks for stowaways before launch. But that wasn't procedure, because some dumbass pencil pusher had the brilliant idea of ejecting stowaways and arming the pilots, then declared the matter closed. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have died in real life because of stupid shit like that.

Imagine the following, two airliners crash in mid-air because one air traffic controller had to handle two different consoles at the same time while the radars where in restricted mode, the early collision warning system was offline, the phones were offline, and the back-up phones didn't work. Surely that's completely contrived right? Wrong, it happened in real life a few years ago.

Which also brings up another point; the shuttle has to be able to make orbit again to meet the hyperspace cruiser, (unless the cruiser sends down a second shuttle to fuel up the first which is needlessly wasteful), so the pilot should have had more than enough fuel to land safely. When his carrier returns, he could have just asked for a top-up.

They'll pick-up the pilot and his shuttle (maybe, I think they're actually disposable one use only) using the same cargo shuttles, which are probably gigantic mothers, they use to bring down supplies to the colonists in the planet. This is in no way wasteful because the cargo shuttles have to come back-up anyway.

Even if do you want absurdly elite warriors, at least followed the IJN pilot training model and wait until they’ve gone into middle school or high school. Then you select them for additional technical education, only after which they start military training. It’s just totally pointless to try to start earlier when you don’t even known how the person is going to mature.

That's similar to what 40k's Space Marines do. Far as I know, they don't take them any younger than 10, with most candidates being 12-14. They would probably take full grown adults if they could, but the process for making an Astartes kind of requires hijacking puberty. Though the Space Wolves and Black Templars, at least, can take them in their late teens.

[Academia Nut]

Actually, the Cold Equations is just stupid in that the bureaucrats are wastefully cheap. If they really were that cheap, then the pilot would be in a glorified closet with an acceleration couch and airtight door, and the cargo area would be packed as tight as possible and probably not even pressurized. There would be no airlock to throw someone out because that is just a stupid waste of resources that the engineers would have refused to put in if they were asked to minimize mass and cost.

Simply put, there should have been no physical way for anyone to have stowed away in the first place. This isn't bureaucratic stupidity, this is asking for a ship that is as cheap as possible and then demanding it be increased by an order of magnitude in size and cost with a hundred little extras that only add cost and would have had the engineers rioting in short order. Especially since this is a space craft where the engineers already would have been concerned about minimizing size and mass. Short sighted corruption and greed cutting into safety factors is believable. The design that would allow a stowaway just breaks suspension of disbelief.

[Gullible Jones]

Meanwhile, here's another...

5. "Our teeth grated and my nipples went 'spung!'"

If you don't know how to write something erotic, don't bother trying, okay?

[Ghost Rider]

Meanwhile, here's another...

5. "Our teeth grated and my nipples went 'spung!'"

If you don't know how to write something erotic, don't bother trying, okay?

How is that anything but a regular catch all don't?

I could literally go "If you don't know (insert specific) don't bother trying/faking."

Literally one could use that for sex to car repair and it applies.

[Dooey Jo]

No, it's true, but it applies to all of fiction, not just SF. What in fact is a bad "car repair scene"? There is literally nothing as cringe-inducing as a bad erotic or romantic scene in a book and everyone wanting to write one should think thrice about it. Otherwise one might end up with:
"... and he felt that he no longer had the strength to hold his sperms in his scrotum and splashed all over her shirt..."
Which might be fine comedy material, but in any other type of work? No!

[Ghost Rider]

No, it's true, but it applies to all of fiction, not just SF. What in fact is a bad "car repair scene"? There is literally nothing as cringe-inducing as a bad erotic or romantic scene in a book and everyone wanting to write one should think thrice about it. Otherwise one might end up with:
"... and he felt that he no longer had the strength to hold his sperms in his scrotum and splashed all over her shirt..."
Which might be fine comedy material, but in any other type of work? No!

Except in that case, that's bad description. Literally one can do it on anything.

The point I am saying is going "Don't write bad erotic scence if you don't know what it is." is fucking stupid. Just do not write or fake writing about shit you do not know. Just gloss over it. If you're dumb enough to find yourself trapped into writing it, well...you're an idiot.

This whole idiotic thought that erotic is seperate is inane given that SEX is silly in itself. We percieve it as erotic through a lot more then mere words and describing two people humping in words is hilarious not matter how much experience or gravity you want to try and use.

[Stuart]

Meanwhile, here's another...

5. "Our teeth grated and my nipples went 'spung!'"

If you don't know how to write something erotic, don't bother trying, okay?

That's an in-joke by Heinlein. That section of "The Number of the Beast" is a parody of the original pulp fictions that were around in the 1930s and were where Heinlein got his start as an author. It's an intentional piece of appalling writing, typical of the standard of the pulps.

In fact, the whole of The Number of the Beast can be read as a Heinlein autobiography with each section of the story relating to a period of Heinlein's career. Read another way, its a writing tool-kit, if a reader looks carefully, for every (deliberately) grimly aweful piece of writing, nearby is an example of the same idea done right.

The Number of the Beast is a much more complex and multi-levelled story that it appears to be.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I supposed for an attack on Coruscant psychopaths raised from birth might be damn useful though, because any other troops would probably mutiny at the idea

Actually, you have hit on a reason why a society would raise soldiers from birth, however inefficient and expensive that would be. Soldiers willing to follow the most absurd or suicidal orders, because they've been raised and probably brainwashed from birth to do just that.

Now, how well it would actually work, I don't know; but I could certainly see some totalitarian culture doing so, whether it's a good idea or not. It sounds rather like something one of the more hardcore real world Communist regimes might have tried to me. I have a vague memory of some Communist country trying something similar with some of it's security forces; raising orphans to me loyal to the State from infancy, but can't nail down the memory enough for a cite.

[Norseman]

I supposed for an attack on Coruscant psychopaths raised from birth might be damn useful though, because any other troops would probably mutiny at the idea

Actually, you have hit on a reason why a society would raise soldiers from birth, however inefficient and expensive that would be. Soldiers willing to follow the most absurd or suicidal orders, because they've been raised and probably brainwashed from birth to do just that.

Now, how well it would actually work, I don't know; but I could certainly see some totalitarian culture doing so, whether it's a good idea or not. It sounds rather like something one of the more hardcore real world Communist regimes might have tried to me. I have a vague memory of some Communist country trying something similar with some of it's security forces; raising orphans to me loyal to the State from infancy, but can't nail down the memory enough for a cite.

Supposedly the Romanian Securitate did just that, but they didn't raise them from birth they picked the biggest most aggressive children from orphanages.

I had some idea to try something similar in DrakaFic, e.g. give the USSR "Trotsky's Children" a group of kids trained from very young age (6 or so) to meet or exceed the standards of the Draka. Totally indoctrinated with Krasnovite propaganda, given highly competent NCOs, etc etc. Then deployed on the battlefield like the 12.SS-Panzer-Division Hitlerjugend were in OTL. Apparently they were very effective on the battlefield, but racked up very heavy casualties.

My inspiration was sort of a mixture of the Securitate, the SS Hitlerjugend, and the Draka themselves. I thought it was the kind of whacky idea that could be tried.

That said I'll probably run with them being deployed two or three times, achieve impressive results, but be so attrited that they're withdrawn from the frontlines. Good propaganda, possibly good loyal bodyguards / party cadre troops, but not so good as frontline troops.

But I digress...

Super-Soldiers annoy me in general, especially the part where they're all either:
* Trained since birth! Even medieval knights were only trained since they were six.
* Created through a sophisticated eugenics program that makes them the BEST SOLDIERS EVAH!
* Put through training that makes Navy SEAL Hellweek look like a teaparty.
* Come from a world that is so poor and backwards that the people there hire out as Elite Mercenaries.

Sometimes all of these are combined for Mega-Wank Mercenary Powers!

you know the books I'm on about

[Adrian Laguna]

I think super-soldiers can be done well. The key is to treat them with a degree of realism as well as understand that everything has limitations. I think Warhammer 40,000 manages to have believable super-soldiers. Notably, though, as far as I know none of their organizations train people from birth. Nor do they engage in sophisticated eugenics programs.

For example, the Catachan jungle fighters. Their planet produces only one thing: soldiers. This is because the place is a massive jungle where every single thing is actively trying to kill the human population. Naturally said soldiers are hardass elite bastards who are better than anyone else. Sound pretty cliche, right? It's not, they're only good at fighting in dense vegetation. Put them in any other terrain and you'll at least have an even fight, if not a merciless slaughter of the Catachan force.

[NecronLord]

I think super-soldiers can be done well. The key is to treat them with a degree of realism as well as understand that everything has limitations. I think Warhammer 40,000 manages to have believable super-soldiers. Notably, though, as far as I know none of their organizations train people from birth.

The Schola takes them in at a very young age, and a major (plot wise) world (Cadia) is said to have children who can fire and field strip (admittedly, idiot-proof)guns before they can walk.

For super-soldiers done well, I'd say Kull Warriors from Stargate. Sure, they're mighty hard, fast, skilled, and equipped. But no one in their right mind would want to be one. Magnaguards, or Terminators, too. Basically, if you're going to do super soldiers, to my mind, it works best if you remove the humanity from the equation.

[Sea Skimmer]

Actually, you have hit on a reason why a society would raise soldiers from birth, however inefficient and expensive that would be. Soldiers willing to follow the most absurd or suicidal orders, because they've been raised and probably brainwashed from birth to do just that.

Actually, no that’s still no real reason to do it. If you actually considered suicidal stupidity to be a generally useful thing, and I sure don’t given the costs involved in training, equipping and transporting an effective solider across interstellar distances; then you could simply copy the school system of Imperial Japan. The Japanese didn’t train ground troops any longer then anyone else and yet the good old power of religious indoctrination in school made them into quite reliable fanatics. No inefficient military specific training from birth required, and it meant that the entire young adult population would made equally good candidates should you need a mass mobilization.

This is an absurdly better way of doing things then simply making a small segment of the population into especially crazy fanatics whom will quickly be annihilated in combat.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Meh. It depends on how it's handled.

I admit, i've used all of the Super-Soldier cliches here at one time or another in my stories, sometimes more than one in the same universe.

That being said...they're not shown to be outright GODS of warfare, but still massively superior to any normal human soldiers. However they can be, and many times are, defeated by such things as massive firepower, overwhelming numbers, equal forces or the like.

Like Master Chief may be superior to any normal human soldier by a vast degree, but against a Space Marine he'd be outmatched.

[Adrian Laguna]

I think super-soldiers can be done well. The key is to treat them with a degree of realism as well as understand that everything has limitations. I think Warhammer 40,000 manages to have believable super-soldiers. Notably, though, as far as I know none of their organizations train people from birth.

The Schola takes them in at a very young age, and a major (plot wise) world (Cadia) is said to have children who can fire and field strip (admittedly, idiot-proof)guns before they can walk.

The Schola Progenium is a system of church run orphanages. Of course they take children very young. It is after they graduate that they are sent for further training to serve in sensitive positions in the Empire, such as in the Comissariat or the Officio Assassinorum.

As for the Cadia thing, it's likely exaggeration. They are Space Spartans, but like the real Spartans they don't start training anyone until a certain age. Still, the Cadias are not portrayed as being super-human. They are two levels above the average Imperial Guard formation and one above the more professional ones like the Iron Guard or Steel Legion, but they're not leaps and bounds better.

For super-soldiers done well, I'd say Kull Warriors from Stargate. Sure, they're mighty hard, fast, skilled, and equipped. But no one in their right mind would want to be one. Magnaguards, or Terminators, too. Basically, if you're going to do super soldiers, to my mind, it works best if you remove the humanity from the equation.

There's the Cadian elite, the Kasrkin, are like that. They have to be issued guns that won't fire if there's a (high value) friendly in the sights. They might be some of the most badass soldiers in existance, but the lot of them are also extremely dangerous psychopaths unfit for anything other than fighting. At least the normal Cadians can retire and become grumpy old fishermen.