The Culture vs the Skylarks

[Darth Hoth]

So, after several threads here piqued my interest in his excellent Lensman series, I have picked up everything "Doc" Smith I could find. One of the series I ran across was the Skylark quadrilogy, one of the first-ever published attempts at space opera, which "Doc" wrote over the span of several decades from the '20s onwards. Normally, I am not much for uberpowered stories (to which category the Skylarks most certainly belong), but there is a certain addictive gusto to it, and I read through the series in a couple of weeks.

More on topic, a search of the archives around here reveals that a) the board presently hosts people knowledgeable about both Skylark and the Culture, and b) this match-up has not been done before. Therefore, I present the following versus scenario for the perusal of our experts:

Some months after the end of Skylark DuQuesne, the eponymous planetoid is still searching the universe for a suitable galaxy in which to set up the beginnings of the new Empire. Then, DuQuesne finds a cluster of galaxies that draws his attention because of its remarkable similarity to that housing the Milky Way. Using his long-range scanners, he explores it, and is appalled at what he finds. Here, in the very Milky Way analogue, is a threat to his ambitions of intergalactic domination that might easily grow orders of magnitude worse than that of the recently exterminated Chlorans! He calls his old arch-rival Seaton for a council of war.

The galaxy is, obviously, the home galaxy of the Culture. After sharing DuQuesne's findings, Seaton agrees with his every conclusion: no American mindset of the 1930s can tolerate an anarchistic, socialistic, morally decayed polity, ruled by Godless Machines and prone to interventionism in other locales, in the same universe as his own beloved Earth! Like the Chlorans and the Fenachrone, it must be dealt with permanently, so as to remove the potential threat to humanity and its morals and free will. So, once again the two enemies team up against a formidable foe.

The Skylarkers believe in wars of extermination and are not picky about the means they use to win them. They will not feel obliged to abide by any laws or conventions of war (which do not apply to aliens that have not signed them, anyway), and while they will not relish civilian casualties, they are Doing What Has To Be Done. As long as a single enemy survives, he can rebuild and return for revenge in a few millennia, and they want to spare their children such threats.

(As noted, the books were written before PC, and those arguments had not yet acquired unpalatable connotations in the public eye . . .)

Since the Culture is fairly logical, it will realise this and pull out its own stops, if any, once it becomes aware of the attack. In other word, there can be no negotiation or limited objectives, on either side. Given that both sides are self-governed post-scarcity space habitats, with no real moral or political limitations on them, this should be fairly close to von Clausewitz's conception of absolute war.


So, which universe has the most uberwank technology that is extremely powerful but internally consistent and entirely appropriate for the setting and the stories the respective authors want to tell? Which one will win this duel of the Titans?

[Teleros]

I know the OP's a month old but given no replies at all I thought I should give it a go and start with some info on the Skylarkers. My Culture knowledge is much sketchier, but the Skylarkers are up there with the Xeelee and Time Lords.

Before I go into more detail, for those not familiar with the Skylark series, bear in mind the science in the series is both out of date (even simple stuff - the Skylark Milky Way is on the order of a million LY across) and quite deliberately ignores stuff like relativity. It's incredibly over-the-top space opera, so not something for the hard sci-fi fans out there.

Skylark Weapons:
-FTL beam weapons (probably more similar to lasers than particle beams) with ranges measured in the tens of thousands of lightyears. Firepower depends on the power supply, but some calcs (that I'm still trying to find) put them into the PT range.
-No missile weapons to speak of, although on several occasions huge matter-to-energy conversion bombs have been created more-or-less instantly on distant planets (500,000 lightyears, give or take) sufficiently powerful to wipe out all life on said planet. Of course the Culture's trapdoor defence might work on this (depending on the size of the bomb I suppose - you could probably wrap one around a GSV or something if you wanted ).
-The ability to teleport planets, stars and such instantly between galaxies, again from ridiculous distances. The mechanism behind it can be summed up with the idea that "the map is the territory" - once the Culture's galaxy has been mapped (from long range), there's nothing to stop the Skylarkers from (say) teleporting a GSV or orbital pretty much wherever they want it. Used in the books to, over several hours (a day or two at most), teleport over 50 billion stars in order to wipe out a hostile galaxy-spanning civilisation, and simultaneously teleport to a safe galaxy the human worlds conquered by said hostile civilisation.
-Personal weapons aren't really developed - Seaton has special "Xplosive" bullets for his pistol that range in power from the Mark 1 "tree stump destroyer" to the Mark 10 "multi-megaton bomb", but there is little beyond these - most of the action was based in space.
-No idea if the Skylarkers can reach Culture ships hiding in hyperspace, but I'm assuming they can't. Well, can't until they get themselves a hyperdrive and reverse-engineer it.

Skylark Defences:
-Due to the funky physics involved, mere light- and matter- based weapons (lasers, x-ray lasers, CAM missiles etc) would have absolutely bugger all effect on either the Skylark of Valeron or the Skylark DuQuesne - and in fact might even recharge it. The effect is something of a "no-limits" defence against anything not of the same "order" as the shield itself (put simply, gravity and EM radiation is 3rd or 4th order, whilst the shields are 6th order). Against weapons of the same order as the shields, things work fairly normally (ie shields require power to negate the incoming firepower, and can have local failures).
-The material used to make the ships is the theoretical ultimate in terms of physical matter. A beam weapon powered by a 400lb matter-to-energy reactor (see below) takes 5 minutes to cut through less than half an inch of this stuff. Upper limit for the firepower of that beam is 4.54e19J, or 10.8GT of TNT per second, assuming that the entirety of the reactor's output was going into it (quite possible, as the ship involved wasn't doing much else at the time). I can't find a quote for how thick the armour is, but based on a passage in "Skylark Three" I expect it would be hundreds of feet thick at least.
-I'm not aware of any defence against Culture displacers.
-The only two personal defences mentioned are a 4th order shield Seaton tests out, and a suit of transparent metal armour proof against even tank rounds (although the force of impact would be lethal of course).

Skylark Ranges & Speeds:
-The two final Skylark ships were able to zip around the universe with an acceleration of 127 times the speed of light (in real space, without time travel issues, and no infinite energy either - like I said, VERY different physics).
-Battles took place across hundreds of thousands of lightyears by the end with FTL beam weapons that seem to cross such distances fast enough that manoeuvring to avoid incoming fire isn't really an option (unless you're going so fast that a battle is impossible anyway of course).
-They use the ultimate in inertial dampeners - their FTL drive acts on every particle within its area of effect, such that they don't feel any acceleration despite going at 127c.
-Reaction times are probably faster than those of the Culture, as the ships are using FTL signals for the Brains (read: computers) rather than mere electricity or light. That said, most of the automated stuff used in battle is for defences (eg to raise shields when attacked, long before the human crew realise it) - most of the offensive operations seem to use either human controllers or at least human oversight.

Skylark Power Generation:
-Uses a combination of 100% efficient matter to energy conversion and cosmic energy - think lightyears-wide energy fields that function as highly efficient solar panels, although whether it absorbs radiation from stars and such or something more akin to zero point energy is something I'm not certain of.


TLDR Version: Unless my Culture knowledge is horribly wrong, the Culture get comprehensively flattened without even realising who was attacking them, where they came from, or how they were doing it.

[18-Till-I-Die]

The armor maybe much thicker than even hundreds of feet. Both of the finalized Skylark vessels were significantly larger in size than the Death Star II. Like large enough to fit the DS2 inside of them, two or three times.

They'd be closer, in size, to the Battle Planetoids used by the Imperium in the Dahak novels.

It should be noted that the Skylarkers weren't the only ones with this technology, it was perfectly in place in their universe. The Chlorians, a race who inhabited a galaxy-spanning empire of presumably vast size, (since they had to destroy fifty billion stars to get them all) had technology that was in many ways the equal of the Skylark humans, at least in terms of their energy weapon output. One could argue that the Chlorians could probably fight the Culture on a one-on-one basis and win, as they were not shown to be THAT much less powerful than Skylark of Valeron and Skylark DuQuesne. At the very least, the Chlorians may be able to use their WMDs against the Culture from intergalactic ranges, since we know they can reach out at least that far in canon.

[Teleros]

The armor maybe much thicker than even hundreds of feet.

True, but a (very) quick scan of the last two books didn't give me a figure. Likely it was several miles thick, but I don't have a source to back that up.

Both of the finalized Skylark vessels were significantly larger in size than the Death Star II. Like large enough to fit the DS2 inside of them, two or three times.

It was around 1,000km across, so you'd only be able to fit one DS2 inside.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I'm almost sure it was 1000 miles? Are you sure they said kilometers? You may be right mind you, it's been over two years since I last read those books. Well, whatever the case, there is no reason at that size (either size) it wouldn't be miles thick.

[Starglider]

Skylark is in a fundamentally different class from the Culture, SW etc. Both of the later are soft sci-fi that use a lot of invented physics, but in both cases the fundamentals are still the same as reality. The energies are tremendous, the efficiencies are implausible and relativity is ignored, but matter behaves like matter, gravity still applies, lasers and KE impactors are still perfectly effective ways of putting energy into targets etc. As Teleros notes, Skylark uses imaginary physics that effectively replaces conventional physics, and is structured such that any technology still stuck using conventional matter and energy is pretty much useless. The late Skylark setting has enormous power levels as well, which would ensure a near instant victory in a naive analysis (both universe's technology magically works as normal, neither combatant has any access to their opponent's technology). Really they'd still win even if they didn't already have mega-ships; it would just take longer (either through attrition or to mobilise and gear up for a shock assault).

I can't think of much in Skylark's general class that would give it a decent fight. The Xeelee aren't in the same league, they only look comparable because of the vast timescales they work over. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann perhaps? The two things that would trivially beat them are time travel (the destructive kind, not the alternate-universe kind) and reality hacking; the Time Lords or the Schild's Ladder posthumans could wipe them out as effortlessly as they could destroy the Culture. Again, this is a class stratification; there's usually nothing a civilisation (or universe) that doesn't have these things can do against an opponent that does.

That said, the problems with overlapping two universes with completely different physics are more severe in this case than usual, if you are considering a realistic as opposed to notional scenario. The Skylark technology was developed in a few decades by a small number of early 20th century humans, based on a single chance discovery. That's an incredibly quick and easy advance compared to most sci-fi timelines (or indeed anything approaching reality). If that physics somehow becomes applicable in the Culture universe in parallel with the existing physics, I would expect all societies with Mind-level intelligences to be at the late-Skylark level of advancement in a few days, taking a few weeks to fab new ships (maybe months for really huge ones), and they won't stop there. Who knows what the sublimed civilisations and other godlike entities will do with it - with at least Mind-like thinking speeds (billions of times human norm minimum) and no reliance on physical appartus or vessels they may adopt the new physics within seconds, and while they may not care if the Culture goes down they are highly unlikely to sit around and let the galaxy they're in be destroyed. In a realistic scenario, if the Skylarks are ready to strike immediately upon the two universes becoming connected they will certainly win the initial engagement, but if you give the Culture galaxy any warning (seconds for sublimed civs, a few hours for the Culture) they will have a fight on their hands, and if you give them a month or more of warning the Skylarks will likely lose. However it's a lot worse than that if the universes have been permenantly merged; even an immediate BDZ of the Culture galaxy is highly unlikely to get every ship and habitat, and almost certain to leave the majority of sublimed civilisations unaffected. They will follow the same technological advancement path the Skylarks did, except much quicker and much further, build a few billion ships and come gunning for the Skylarks as soon as they have secured the remains of their own galaxy. Of course the Culture are nice people, not genocidial maniacs, so I'm sure they'd spare Skylark-earth and Culture-ise it if at all possible. That would certainly be ironic.