The opposite of minamalism

[The Yosemite Bear]

not sci-fi but a banned user, Diemious Anomoly deserves mention in this thread for obvious to any of us OLD ASVS types reasons. (he has lots of compensation issues)

Is it worse that I created a planet building "Mothership" known as "Grail" (though I do believe in it's current incarnation Grail can also collect interstellar gasses, build a darkmatter torpedo, and fire them both off together to build a star....

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, but even knocking off five or six zeros from the scale of the whole galaxy still leaves a freaking huge number.

Oh, absolutely. Still starkly incomprehensible, but somewhat less so than if you assume that every star is inhabited by someone.

You can support hundreds of trillions without leaving the inner solar system, and thousands of times more if you use material in the outer system.
Most settings don't go this route, but it is scientifically possible.

On a scale like this, the population will be the limiting factor for once!

Heh, yes.

I'm sometimes a little skeptical of whether these calculations would actually pan out in real life, because it's hard to be sure we aren't missing something about the feasibility of dismantling planets (or, for that matter, asteroids) and turning them into habitat space. Populations in the high trillions strike me as being... not soft science fiction in the classic sense, but getting close, because they make major assumptions about the way such a society would work: among them, the prediction that populations will expand to fill the theoretical limit of the available space, which contradicts the experience of the post-industrial developed world today.

I mean, go to a place like Italy and they aren't even breeding at replacement rate; if the future looks like Europe (which is plausible), the odds that anyone will start tearing apart Ceres to build masses of space habitats is pretty slim.

[Samuel]

If you have immortality than you could get numbers like that. Of course this a large number of individuals to reject uploading and continue civilization, but I suppose that isn't too big of a stretch.

[Bakustra]

the prediction that populations will expand to fill the theoretical limit of the available space, which contradicts the experience of the post-industrial developed world today.

I agree completely with you here. Mathematically, it is easy to show that even a small growth rate will eventually lead to filling it right up, but you're right about the trend in the real world.

I hit this problem when doing my own setting. The problem that hit me was how to keep the population from falling to near zero! I say other technology, like life extension, would help keep the birth rate high enough to give me some growth, allowing some space fun. Life extension alone, of course, doesn't mean long term population growth, but it can enable other factors to bring the rate up.

I figure that for a galactic empire, saying other factors allowed a positive growth rate, multiplied by a few million years, getting you to a big population is one of the smaller handwaves included in the setup.

A significantly positive growth rate seems essential for any galactic colonization (and therefore a galactic empire) to occur, so it's not really a handwave, though it would take millions of years as you said.

[takemeout_totheblack]

There are several reasons why the European birth rate is down! There's no reason to assume this trend will continue into the far future!
For one, Europe is crowded and expensive; children cost so much that it's generally beyond the ability for lower classes to support large families like they used to, places like Canada and America are catching up in low birthrates, unfortunately.

The point of this argument is that long ago this hypothetical Type 2.8-3 civilization established itself in outer space. Past hence. They got out there and they multiplied like crazy because now they could; demanding newer tech breakthroughs to further their species to the stars until you have the Type 3 civ we were talking about. In that preliminary stage, for whatever reason they populated their star system with small colonies and outposts, tech had gotten to the point where they could then ship people off-world due to economic or population pressure. Now, imagine this, the government has set up its first self sustaining colonies and is sending its best young men and women there to work and...what, play chess? No! the whole point of colonies it that they are places for people to live and breed that isn't where they came from, and hopefully be successful enough that other people on the homeworld would want to go and Live The Good Life In The Off-World Colonies.
From my point of view, once space travel and off world habitats get to the point where it's self sustaining many of the breeding constrictions known today will disappear. Space? Lots 'n' lots of space! Food? Self sustaining colonies! Money? You're there because life planet side is too expensive, it's cheaper out here by default!
As such, once life on the older colonies becomes too expensive a la the homeworld, people set out and make new ones. And that's just passive expansion! Imagine an aggressive empire focused on fueling its vast imperial goals with territory and a government imposed breeding cycle?

[adam_grif]

Just ridiculous. The funniest thing I had back then was the "fusion-fission thermokinetic drive". Based just on the name, how badly do you think I butchered physics with that?

See, it took two hydrogen atoms and fused them, getting energy out. Then it immediately took the helium and split it back into hydrogen, getting more energy out. Repeat at an obscene speed and boom, infinite energy.

Then, take some of the heat generated and convert it directly into kinetic energy. Boom, infinite speed without needing that pesky propellant.


Man, I was such a genius back then. Thankfully, I was never published, so it doesn't quite meet the OP's requirements

I dreamed up awesome things that turned out to have fatal flaws many times in my youth.

When I was in year 9 and I first found out about quantum entanglement, I dreamed up some kind of quantum Morse-code thing for instantaneous communications. This was later ruined when I discovered that first, a zillion people already thought of similar things, and second, the No-Communication Theorem says no.

Earlier on I was trying to crack the problem of reactionless propulsion, and I thought of this system where you have like a magnetic levitation thing inside your ship, and it gets propelled forwards and then collides with the front of the ship, imparting momentum ala billiards. Then it would be reset slowly and start all over again.

It wasn't until years later I realized how stupid that is.

[takemeout_totheblack]

I hope aspiring tongue-in-cheek SF writers are reading this post!
(Flash Gordon-esque fanfare)
Now featuring the adventures of Captain Destructionator aboard his trusty Deus Ex Machina The Everything!
Thrills and chills abound as he battles the Unobtainium monsters of Planet 42 and romances the contrived elfen women of Tolkienia IV!!

Could be the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!

[hongi]

Once, when I was in a kid in school, I once wrote a crappy little sci-fi story as part of a creative writing assignment in which I depicted a spaceship 'kilometers' in length fitting 'billions' of fighters and 'millions' of weapons batteries. Now, having recalled this, I'm wondering if this sort of thing is present in any published science-fiction--essentially, figures and numbers that rather being absurdly minamalistic are huge to the point of being ludicrous. Now, Trekkies would claim that the AOTC figures would fall into this, predictably, but is there anything legitimate?

Few science fiction verses can match the absurdity, the sheer grand scale and the cold cosmic wonder of the Xeelee. They fill the visible Universe and probably further beyond. They control a hundred billion galaxies. They were here from the beginning of the Universe. They have time travel. They use cosmic strings as building material. They wage an unfathomable war against opponents who are even more alien (non-baryonic) than they are. The Photino Birds come together and use their combined mass to throw galaxies around as weapons.

[Luzifer's right hand]

William Barton is a fan of "anti-"minimalism:

Spoilers for "Acts of of Conscience" follow Spoiler

Way before the time the book is set a civil war with FTL weapons destroyed a multi-galaxy alliance(galaxies as far away as 17 million light years from the milky way were part of it).

In one scene a member of a surviving race describes the war:

Four hundred million years ago, I sat alone on a warm rock in the middle of the night, looking up at the star-filled sky.
Sat there and waited, while the warm winds of Salieri blew across my skin.
Such a lovely night, a night for ...
Flash
Sudden, brilliant light from a dying sun.
There, then gone again in the twinkling of an eye.
I'd been waiting for it, waiting for years.
Strange to think of them as silent stars.
But we did nothing, said the Kapellmeister.
We let it happen.
A few more years of waiting, then flash, another one fades away.
Silent stars.
Out there, just a few years ago, you see, the weapons were readied, readied and fired and fired again.
Do you call it a war, when it's only five seconds long?
Maybe you just call it the end.
Flash. Than flash again. Then again.
I sat on my rock and waited, wondering just what we should have done, rather then merely let it happen, while the stars twinkled and flashed and died away.
After a few hundred years, you could see dozens of worlds die on any given night.
After a few thousand years, the whole sky seemed to glitter and sparkle and glow as infalling light from the death of all those worlds came our way.
In those days, most of us chose to live in burrows under the ground.
That way we couldn't see it happen.
No way to forget, but you can hide, close your eyes, pretend ...
In time, the light came from stars so far away you needed amplification to see the explosions, of course.
In time, I could sit on my rock and look up at the silent stars, drink in their cold, empty beauty as if nothing had ever happened.
But in the telescopes...
In the telescopes.
Maybe I sat on my warm rock, all alone, and watched the beautiful havens flicker and die for seventeen million years.
Maybe longer.
Whose fault was that?
No one?

The Perry Rhodan series had the alien "Endless Armada" (in issues 1100 to 1299). At one point of its history it consisted of about 500,000 fleets and 1 billion ships, but their real number during their encounter with the people of the Milky Way was never stated.

Because of its long history (when they arrived in the Milky Way, the fleet was already 100 million years old) there are a some "dead" fleet numbers, confusing the issue further.

They also used a "diffusor field" to conceal their true number and the dimensions of their fleet.

The central control unit (Armada Unit 1 or Armada Heart) is the Loolandre a flying object the size of a solar system created from a brown dwarf.

I personally found the vessels of the Schatt-Armarong way more over the top than the "endless Armada'".
Parsfon had a core with a diameter of 2 lightmonths and spikes with up to 2 lightmonth length.
A comparison between the vessel end to Sol system.

The endless Armada is a large fleet for the setting but there have been other powers with fleets in the many hundred millions and some other settings have fleets which are way bigger.

There are also the swarms mobile star clusters with shields(which can take stars at 0.5 c without a problem) which cruise along at 0.5 c when they are not using their FTL drive, the largest known had 1*10^9 stars in them(the others known are away smaller though, less than a million objects).

[Lord of the Abyss]

From Rescue Party:

The picture on the vision screen was the familiar one of endless star fields, sun beyond sun to the very limits of the Universe. Near the center of the screen a distant nebula made a patch of haze that was difficult for the eye to grasp.

Rugon increased the magnification. The stars flowed out of the field; the little nebula expanded until it filled the screen and then—it was a nebula no longer. A simultaneous gasp of amazement came from all the company at the sight that lay before them.

Lying across league after league of space, ranged in a vast three-dimensional array of rows and columns with the precision of a marching army, were thousands of tiny pencils of light. They were moving swiftly; the whole immense lattice holding its shape as a single unit. Even as Alveron and his comrades watched, the formation began to drift off the screen and Rugon had to recenter the controls.

After a long pause, Rugon started to speak.

"This is the race," he said softly, "that has known radio for only two centuries—the race that we believed had crept to die in the heart of its planet. I have examined those images under the highest possible magnification.

"That is the greatest fleet of which there has ever been a record. Each of those points of light represents a ship larger than our own. Of course, they are very primitive—what you see on the screen are the jets of their rockets. Yes, they dared to use rockets to bridge interstellar space! You realize what that means. It would take them centuries to reach the nearest star. The whole race must have embarked on this journey in the hope that its descendants would complete it, generations later.

The scale is smaller than most of the examples in this thread, but upon consideration I think it deserves mention because of the primitivism of the technology involved. For a single planet, Earth, to build a fleet of generation ships capable of taking apparently the entire species on an interstellar journey is pretty impressive.

[Simon_Jester]

I agree completely with you here. Mathematically, it is easy to show that even a small growth rate will eventually lead to filling it right up, but you're right about the trend in the real world.

What I'd expect is alternating bouts of increase and decrease. In the extremely long term, you might get Darwinian selection favoring people with a really strong impulse to have genetic offspring, even at great inconvenience to themselves, on a level that we don't now have.

And yes, of course, people do want to have children (by and large). But in many cases, that desire is weak enough that they choose not to build their life around it; given reproductive choice, they choose to opt out. If there is any genetic trait that affects that, its frequency in the population will change rapidly now that reproductive choice is possible.

So the obvious way to get huge populations is to assume that after a thousand years of condoms and The Pill (or their futuristic equivalents), the only people left around are the ones who inherited an unusually predisposition to have children from their parents. Strong enough to overcome all the factors arguing against having children in a modern society (cost, lack of economic payoff, various ethical issues with overpopulation, etc.)

I figure that for a galactic empire, saying other factors allowed a positive growth rate, multiplied by a few million years, getting you to a big population is one of the smaller handwaves included in the setup.

True. The question comes when you start talking about dismantling planets for habitat space and that sort of thing. Populations will tend to increase until they fill the available space, but will people start energy-intensive, irreversible construction projects in their own solar system to create more space? Or will they just tend to limit population growth to the resources they can access without having to rewrite the astronomy textbooks?

Me, I'd bet on the latter, so I expect system populations to cap out in the tens of billions- the maximum for sustainable Earthlike environment on, say, one to three terraformed planets. Exceptions will be their galaxy's equivalent of Trantor or Coruscant: a planet that, for whatever reason, has the wealth to import the resources for survival from other planets with a functioning biosphere. In an STL setting, that's not even possible.

And yes, you still get mindblowingly bigly huge* numbers when you multiply that across a galaxy.

*Thank you, Bill Nye...
______________

There are several reasons why the European birth rate is down! There's no reason to assume this trend will continue into the far future!
For one, Europe is crowded and expensive; children cost so much that it's generally beyond the ability for lower classes to support large families like they used to, places like Canada and America are catching up in low birthrates, unfortunately.

Unfortunate? I'm not so sure; I think we need to wait for our infrastructure to catch up before we start trying to sustain many more people at this level. Otherwise we're going to wind up strip-mining the planet of stuff we will need later.

Having the birth rate fall to replacement or so in the developed world has been a godsend; it's the only reason we've got any chance of getting our shit together and building a sustainable high-tech, high standard of living society instead of all having to live off algae bricks in tiny little cubicles in giant tenements, the way some SF writers in the '60s and '70s predicted.

The point of this argument is that long ago this hypothetical Type 2.8-3 civilization established itself in outer space. Past hence. They got out there and they multiplied like crazy because now they could; demanding newer tech breakthroughs to further their species to the stars until you have the Type 3 civ we were talking about. In that preliminary stage, for whatever reason they populated their star system with small colonies and outposts, tech had gotten to the point where they could then ship people off-world due to economic or population pressure. Now, imagine this, the government has set up its first self sustaining colonies and is sending its best young men and women there to work and...what, play chess? No! the whole point of colonies it that they are places for people to live and breed that isn't where they came from, and hopefully be successful enough that other people on the homeworld would want to go and Live The Good Life In The Off-World Colonies.
From my point of view, once space travel and off world habitats get to the point where it's self sustaining many of the breeding constrictions known today will disappear. Space? Lots 'n' lots of space! Food? Self sustaining colonies! Money? You're there because life planet side is too expensive, it's cheaper out here by default!
As such, once life on the older colonies becomes too expensive a la the homeworld, people set out and make new ones. And that's just passive expansion! Imagine an aggressive empire focused on fueling its vast imperial goals with territory and a government imposed breeding cycle?

The real question is: where does this process stop? Does it stop when planets reach their peak carrying capacity? When they reach the peak capacity that can be maintained at the cost of wrecking the biosphere? How inhospitable a planet will this civilization consider it worthwhile to terraform to make room for another 1/10/100/1000 billion people? Will they build space habitats just to give themselves more breeding room? Will they dismantle asteroids for materials to make more habitats? What about planets?

Depending on the answers to those questions you get very different estimates for the population the Type 2.8/3 civilization will have.
______________

From Rescue Party:

The picture on the vision screen was the familiar one of endless star fields, sun beyond sun to the very limits of the Universe. Near the center of the screen a distant nebula made a patch of haze that was difficult for the eye to grasp.

Rugon increased the magnification. The stars flowed out of the field; the little nebula expanded until it filled the screen and then—it was a nebula no longer. A simultaneous gasp of amazement came from all the company at the sight that lay before them.

Lying across league after league of space, ranged in a vast three-dimensional array of rows and columns with the precision of a marching army, were thousands of tiny pencils of light. They were moving swiftly; the whole immense lattice holding its shape as a single unit. Even as Alveron and his comrades watched, the formation began to drift off the screen and Rugon had to recenter the controls.

After a long pause, Rugon started to speak.

"This is the race," he said softly, "that has known radio for only two centuries—the race that we believed had crept to die in the heart of its planet. I have examined those images under the highest possible magnification.

"That is the greatest fleet of which there has ever been a record. Each of those points of light represents a ship larger than our own. Of course, they are very primitive—what you see on the screen are the jets of their rockets. Yes, they dared to use rockets to bridge interstellar space! You realize what that means. It would take them centuries to reach the nearest star. The whole race must have embarked on this journey in the hope that its descendants would complete it, generations later.

The scale is smaller than most of the examples in this thread, but upon consideration I think it deserves mention because of the primitivism of the technology involved. For a single planet, Earth, to build a fleet of generation ships capable of taking apparently the entire species on an interstellar journey is pretty impressive.

Oh, God. I love that story and that ending so much.

What's really impressive is that we're supposed to have done it by 2130 or so. Building a fleet of generation ships capable of 0.01c by then... I honestly can't see it happening at this point, though if we'd already figured out that the Sun was going to explode we might be a tad more motivated.

[takemeout_totheblack]

The real question is: where does this process stop? Does it stop when planets reach their peak carrying capacity? When they reach the peak capacity that can be maintained at the cost of wrecking the biosphere? How inhospitable a planet will this civilization consider it worthwhile to terraform to make room for another 1/10/100/1000 billion people? Will they build space habitats just to give themselves more breeding room? Will they dismantle asteroids for materials to make more habitats? What about planets?

Depending on the answers to those questions you get very different estimates for the population the Type 2.8/3 civilization will have.

The idea is that you may never have to stop. The Type 2.8/3 civ I was talking about has access to decidedly unrealistic tech like long range and reliable FTL/communications, ArtiGrav and such to make wide spread expansion possible. Dismantling asteroids for habitation isn't too outside the realm of possibility today and we're a .78 civ or something! As for making space habitats 'just' to have more breeding room, sure why not? Imagine how many people could live in a structure similar in size to the Death Star? Millions? Billions? Actually, how many people could live on the Death Star is they removed that planet busting core/laser dealy? You know, make a similar structure but with habitation in mind rather than death? A few billion I imagine... hmmm...
...Anyway...
Remember, a Type 2.8/3 civilization on the Kardashev scale is quite literally a step down from god (kind of), there's almost nothing they couldn't do!

[Simon_Jester]

The idea is that you may never have to stop.

But one thing we're learning as we become a more capable civilization within our own limits is that the fact that you can do something doesn't mean you will.

Thought experiment:
Imagine describing every piece of technology we now possess to a European from the year 1200 A.D. Imagine he gets it all- really gets it, and can think through the implications of what that says about our engineering capability. Imagine not explaining the social context. What do you think he'd predict that we do with that technology?

Among other things, I bet he'd expect us to build mile high cathedrals. After all, we probably could. It would be difficult, extremely so, but in relative terms it would hardly be more difficult than building the medieval cathedrals was to the medievals. If we had the same social priorities they did, we almost certainly would build mile high cathedrals using modern technology. At the very least, churches would be the size of existing skyscrapers, running from five hundred to a thousand feet. That would be... easy, almost.

But even though we can do it without an undue expenditure of resources, and even though there are supposedly lots of very religious people around... we don't. Our priorities have changed; we don't feel the need to make temples the biggest buildings in our communities any more.

Our predicting that in the future people will dismantle their solar systems' asteroid belts to build apartment blocks and have big families to fill them may seem equally absurd in hindsight, and there are at least preliminary reasons to expect it to be so.

Imagine how many people could live in a structure similar in size to the Death Star? Millions? Billions? Actually, how many people could live on the Death Star is they removed that planet busting core/laser dealy? You know, make a similar structure but with habitation in mind rather than death? A few billion I imagine... hmmm...

Trillions, I'd expect; you can inhabit the entire interior, after all. Try calculating how many people live in a city per cubic kilometer, and multiply by the volume of the Death Star... it's pretty impressive.

Fascinating. I like that, and it is plausible enough for fiction at least.

You may not think so when I tell you who I got it from:
John Ringo.

Yah, I'm not so sure about dismantling planets. But just mining asteroids still lets you get up into hundreds of trillions of potential population living comfortable. Mining asteroids can be financially attractive, even outside habitats so it might be happening anyway (indeed, it would already be profitable today if there was a big enough market in orbit; the cost of capturing an asteroid is much less per pound than launching the same material from Earth - but the chicken and egg problem kinda kills it).

Once you have the mining infrastructure set up, which might include some smaller habitats for workers or tourists, it just takes someone saying "I'd like to live there" with some money to make it happen. It can grow from there; building a new habitat would be seen like building a new house.

In principle it could, but I'm not sure it would. See above.

Blargh, terraforming is pretty silly. If you can solve the technical problems involved there, building orbital habitats out of asteroids looks easy. And since the orbital habs are much closer to home, it is a much smaller step for people to move there. Living in Earth orbit puts you a few hours or days flight away from relatives on the surface. Living on terraformed Mars puts you several months away. An incremental change would be easier to swallow than a giant leap.

There's a real logic to that, but there's also a flip side: asteroid habitats (or synthetic ones where the original rock has been processed as ore already and you built it all from the metal) are extremely controlled environments. Living on a planet has a lot of selling points compared to living in a habitat: there's more margin of error in the event of an accident or a crime. Moreover, the carrying capacity of a planet is a bit more flexible, and the total population is larger, so individuals living on a planet are less likely to have to keep their lifestyles tightly constrained in order to stay there.

I'm not saying that habitats aren't viable, but I don't know if they're viable.

[Samuel]

Living on a planet has a lot of selling points compared to living in a habitat: there's more margin of error in the event of an accident or a crime.

If you build it large enough that isn't a major worry. It isn't like a hole will make all the air escape. And being controlled makes certain things easier- no slums, no unstated individuals, no natural disasters, no weather when you don't want it, etc.

[hunter5]

on the mecha maximize we have the Destroy from gundam seed destiny

[takemeout_totheblack]

The idea is that you may never have to stop.

But one thing we're learning as we become a more capable civilization within our own limits is that the fact that you can do something doesn't mean you will.

Your operating under the presumption that the expansion and habitat building is for elaborate S'n'G!
No, what I'm suggesting here is that people in the future will continue to reproduce at an exponential rate once the resources and opportunities are made available. Part of the reason the population growth in western countries is decreasing is because children are becoming prohibitively expensive (sure, there's other reasons, but lets not get into personal choices or the VHEM)
Once actual limitless expansion is made a reality, there will be population increase, slow increase, but increase nonetheless. A powerful instinct to reproduce is practically guaranteed in a species capable of becoming sentient and therefore space-borne, the population will increase quickly once the tech for easily constructed and self-contained habitats become available. I know what you're going to say 'the population will be constrained by their habitats' and while that's true, the very essence of a lifeform is to move to where you can eat, sleep, and reproduce without too much trouble, it's in our DNA. The people who can't reproduce because of restrictions will inevitably want to move to somewhere they can, hence further construction of habitats and expansion of territory. It will take a while, boy will it ever, but we're looking at inevitable expansion and increase of population once effectively infinite resources are made available. And, barring any massive setbacks, a million years later you have a Type 2.8/3 civ with a vast population and fearsome technology.

If the theory at work here is 'the government prohibits excessive expansion' well, that's a bit silly isn't it? If the resources are there (and they are, 'cause, you know space!) why not take them? Why limit your species?

For newer readers, I'll spare you having to go back to read my older posts to figure out what the sam-hell I'm gibbering on about! The Type 2.8/3 civilization that I'm ranting about exists within the softer side of scifi, about a 5 on the scale of 1-10 of scifi hardness, and therefore the more bothersome aspects of physics like 'no artificial gravity' and 'no FTL' are not figured into my projections. I'm pretty sure forming a coherent government would be difficult when it takes thousands of years to talk to the more distant citizens!
So I concede that in harder scifi a human governing body would be limited to an area of influence of a few light-months, not even close to the nearest star. That would conceivably hamper their enthusiasm for expansion, lack of possible control and all that.

[The Yosemite Bear]

may I also suggest Larry Niven, and his cool thing?

[Simon_Jester]

Living on a planet has a lot of selling points compared to living in a habitat: there's more margin of error in the event of an accident or a crime.

If you build it large enough that isn't a major worry. It isn't like a hole will make all the air escape. And being controlled makes certain things easier- no slums, no unstated individuals, no natural disasters, no weather when you don't want it, etc.

OK, true. Make the habitat big and spacious enough and it becomes more competitive with living on a planet. On the other hand, that also greatly increases the initial capital outlay to build the place.

Can it be done? Hell yes. Will it be done? Maybe, but I'm not so certain that it will be that I see any deficiency in a work that doesn't show it happening.

You may not think so when I tell you who I got it from:
John Ringo.

I don't know him, and the wikipedia page doesn't help. (Yeah, I don't read often.) Why would this change things?

He's... well, as a science fiction writer, he's kind of lowest common denominator. Wears disagreeable political opinions on his sleeve, that sort of thing.

Never mind; nothing important to worry about here.

[takemeout_totheblack]

You may not think so when I tell you who I got it from:
John Ringo.

I don't know him, and the wikipedia page doesn't help. (Yeah, I don't read often.) Why would this change things?

It's a shame really, I liked the Posleen Wars. But then he got all... douchey a la Paladin of Shadows. I don't know what's scarier, the fact that it reads like a self-insert fic or the fact that John Ringo doesn't seem to deny this!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JohnRingo

There's a bit more info on his public opinion on this website.