Never heard of this, but it does sound interesting. Is it remotely editable - as long as the host PC is on, can you sign in and edit it from anywhere? Or is it just an editing & organizing tool on the host machine?

In essence, “You can’t.” Or rather, at “present” in the setting, the technology for turning a planet that is unsuited for Earth life into one that is, doesn’t exist. Things like “Doesn’t have a magnetosphere”, “gravity too high”, “too close to the star”, or “404 Oxygen not found” just aren’t things humans can change yet in a reasonable timeframe.

Turning basically-human-livable but barren planets into ones with an active biosphere is a much different story, however. In those cases, it’s more or less just a case of seeding life in already-primed conditions, maybe with specially-tailored “pioneer” organisms. Unfortunately, out of hundreds of millions of surveyed worlds, we’ve found only a mere handful like this.

Instead, humanity has gotten pretty good at building our own biospheres inside vast cylinder space stations, which are much easier to control. Frankly, long-term terraforming projects (those able to do something over multiple centuries or millennia) might be more heavily pursued if we weren’t so good at building space habitats.

That said, a persistent conspiracy theory suggests the United Nations Human Alliance has a way to FTL jump entire planets to different orbits. Some flavors of the theory even posit using stable FTL conduits to add or remove planetary atmospheres.

It sounds like, for almost-Earthlike worlds, I’m using something similar to your “Rockeater” mixture. For the UNHA, where bio-engineering is viewed cautiously, this is the riskiest step. How do your cultures view the use of such? Is it basically a non-issue, since their goal was to create life in the first place?

Besides this one, the Discord server of a more military-focused Worldbuilding community that spun off a Subreddit a while back, and a couple fiction writing communities which guess kinda count?

I do kind of thing a lot of these are more predicated on the specific setting or polity within the setting than issues with the intrinsic technology itself. For instance, the idea that they would be externally-interfacing and so vulnerable to cyberattack.

But also, yeah: Cybernetics are also one of those sci-fi techs which comes with a lot of “hidden” technologies “built in” (for instance, the ability to perform reliable low-risk surgeries, or creating materials which are reliably not rejected by body tissue). Some of these, to me, are actually kind of feasible (minimally invasive surgery today is practically a miracle, compared to how it was even 20 or 30 years ago).

Tornadoes, I think, suffer from “reality is unrealistic”.

Especially for those who aren’t from Tornado-prone regions or nations, they seem paradoxically impossible. They’re too perfect a disaster, almost literary in everything about them. I think that’s why we often see (in fiction) Tornadoes as something called down by a malicious force or singular event. They’re something which feels like it must have some sort of an intelligence or purpose behind it.

Not that I’m disagreeing with you - it would be interesting to take a fresh look at them from a worldbuilding perspective too, particularly on non-Earthlike worlds or examining how cultures respond to them.

The thing to remember is that we have, practically, a mere instant’s worth of solar data. We’ve only been really engaging in serious solar astronomy for what, a few centuries? And geological records are only really solid data for extremely strong events and trends.

The way I heard someone put it is, that’s like saying “We’re going to predict hurricanes mostly based on a single afternoon.”

Yep, I had in fact completely forgotten about that. My bad. Unless whatever did all this species-swapping also implanted cultural behavior into them, this is in fact just really cruddy writing.

EDIT: Actually new question then: When did Spock’s parentage being a source of discrimination first appear? Because if Vulcan logic is truly a cultural thing, not a biological one, then discrimination makes no sense. Any “pure”, “logical” vulcan could recognize that parentage did not reflect on personal philosophy?

Admittedly I haven’t seen this episode, however…

Isn’t “bioessentialist” a little absurd in the context actual different species? Much less individuals who have just actually had their bodies abruptly rewritten into an entirely different species - and all the hormonal and neurological impacts that would imply?

I get wanting to reject bioessentialism in the context of real-world ethnic groups. But we’re also talking about species who - from the start - have been represented as having fundamentally non-human views on the universe… and then we’re surprised those bubble to the fore when people are unexpectedly dealing with a massive hormonal cocktail dumped straight into them?

Oh, neat! I didn’t even know this was a thing. Thanks for the heads up!

Lagrange points may provide ideal “regions of economic authority” for planet-based civilizations - both because they are natural sites for orbital industry and because military forces can be pre-positioned there. The rest of the orbit is mostly meaningless space; there’s nothing special about Earth’s orbit away from the lagrange points, compared to an arbitrary empty spot between Earth and Mars.

What polities might want to enforce, however, is control over the best trajectories between their worlds. There might be rules against placing large objects within those trajectories, or otherwise obstructing and disrupting them. This would be especially true if there was regular traffic along those trajectories.

Listening to the actual Apollo 13 communications recordings is wild. Maybe it’s just the recording, but they sound so focused and professional that the film characters seem panicky by comparison!

Looks reasonable enough! A couple thoughts:

• I assume you need to fire the main thrusters as landing brakes in order to set the craft down softly. It might be necessary to have some kind of lighter-weight discardable heat shielding around the craft to protect against rebounding thruster gas as it sets down. This could be recovered and recycled into habitation material if it isn’t too badly damaged.
• You may also wish to consider what goods could be stored in external pods anchored around the outside of the craft. These might be removed by crane once the whole thing has been set up.
• Once landed, which do you imagine having the better quarters - people living in buildings on the surface within the wall, or inside the actual lander itself?

Not to be that guy, but it’s tailstone.

Oooooh. Whoops. I totally misread that.

But, since the gesture is a rough equivalent to a dismissive wave of the hand, the word can be translated “handwavium”.

Hah! I do like that.

Ah, well. It was a good idea!

What constitutes “misuse”?

The big fears are trying to use one as a weapon is the big fear - slamming a barge at FTL into a colony-station or planet would ruin either - or theft by a foreign power. But since any misjump could be catastrophically deadly, any jump which does not match a planned and expected course is treated as potentially dangerous.

There have been attempts at using them for smuggling, quick business opportunities, petty theft, and - in one infamous incident - a crewmember attempting to evacuate his family.

Notes on tallstone production and implications of cybersecurity

Interesting. There’s no way to “ping” the “network” and - by physics or other means - determine how many other cards are on that “network”?

Also, depending on how difficult it is to create Tallstone, this creates the possibility that there would be “certified secure” tallstone from well-regarded manufacturers, and riskier-but-cheaper options if you don’t care. It also raises the possibility that beyond individual bad actors, governments or criminal groups could set up entire fabs producing batches with access for them.

Refreshing that the defining system characteristic … seems to be that it isn’t a system.

Exactly. One of the themes I’m aiming for in this world is that magic is something intrinsically of the heart and soul; it’s not something which can be objectively studied. You can still try and loosely categorize it and observe similarities, but magic can’t be completely separated from the person.

fast travel being inherently scary

Really, I just wanted to cut down on the ‘easy fast travel’ trope and make the world seem bigger… but it’s also a cool idea to play with thematically! I like what you’re doing with the social angle as well.

Has anybody looked at using automated transport and power-up ships to set up the gates? Or is it a process that is sufficiently complex that it can’t be carried out by an automated system?

…conversely, if your explorer ship is bringing a gate with it, can you turn on the gate mid-trip and rotate crews in and out by passing them back through the gate?

From the sci-fi setting, it’s your pretty standard “bend space until both destination and departure points are actually nominally close to each other” kind of drive.

• Time between jumps usually bottoms out at around 15-20 minutes for most drives, but increases exponentially as a function of distance traveled and desired accuracy of your destination point.

• This is because the pre-calculation to compute a successful bend in space-time grows massively more complex the more gravity fields are involved. Extremely long-distance jumps can take hours or days to calculate, but inter-system jumps can be carried out rapidly.

• Intersecting the event horizon of a fold in progress is bad. “You’re reduced to a fine relativistic spray” bad. So far accidents have been “minor”, as in they didn’t kill thousands.

• The exotic matter required for drives is stupendously expensive. As a result, almost no ships have internal drives, but require a “drive barge” or “FTL barge” to exploit FTL. Despite this, barges are common enough that most families can afford to take an FTL trip if needed.

• In UNHA operations, all drives are legally owned by the government and crewed by a detachment of naval personnel, with explicit orders to scuttle a drive rather than allow it to be misused.

In the fantasy setting, it’s a little bit different. For one thing, no two fast travel castings work entirely alike. This is because it is a key tenet that magic is a deeply and intrinsically personal thing, and while casters than study concepts to gain inspiration, there’s no such thing as a “standardized” casting which can be moved between casters.

For instance, some casters port you through an alternate dimension, and some bend space. Some open a gateway, some transmute you into photons then back, and some encapsulate you in a bubble which moves rapidly.

Even within a broad category, there are subsets: For instance, if they use an alternate dimension, is it one in which points are simply “closer together”, or where time flows differently?

It’s important to know these things, because different species or other casters being brought along can have… unexpected reactions to different methods.

I suppose it depends on what you consider “interesting” - I tend to find relatively “conventional” sci-fi stuff like coilguns or advanced missiles, so long as they’re fairly well designed! But with that in mind, let me discuss a few relatively unique ones:

• C+ Artillery is… exactly what it sounds like. Actually predating FTL travel by a fair bit (humans… go figure), C+ artillery hurls a massive slug through a sequence of faster-than-light spacefolds, like skipping a stone off a pond. The results are utterly catastrophic: Not only does the projectile bypass armor and interceptors as it “skips”, but the target is subject to the unspeakable gravitational shear forces at the event horizon of the final fold… and that’s before the enormous slug at .99C slams into it. They’re used for cracking fortress-stations and dreadnoughts, and thankfully have never been fired against a planet.

• The typical infantry armor can be outfitted with the SPG-22, a 60mm, box-fed semi-automatic coilgun mortar. This system is mounted pointing vertically on the back, and is fed from a 4-round box magazine. It’s most notable for the lack of need for emplacement: If necessary, the operator can kneel, the armor braces itself in place, and the mortar fires as necessary. Typically the user is actually aiming the system using an onboard firing computer, while an assistant operator keeps the weapon fed. In this way, rapid firepower can be pushed down to a platoon level.

• The AGS-202 ‘Easifa’ (‘Storm’) is a monstrous cluster munition: Weighing in at over 3,000kg, it fragments into several individually-guided petals, which in turn try to arrange themselves for maximum coverage of an area… before they in turn disperse a mix of pyrophoric incendiaries, high-explosive fragmentation, and guided armor-penetrating bomblets by the hundreds. They’re meant to erase entire defensive lines, although if you can disperse one over a base, the results are equally terrifying.

Really interesting stuff;it’s always neat to see familiar things redesigned for unfamiliar species and biology (plus all the cultural notes as well). Two questions that stick in my mind:

• Given the use of the tail to wipe, is there need to wash the tail as well? If so, is this also done in the washing pool?

• Given the “chattiness”, as you describe it, what’s the cultural approach to parallel conversations? Do you politely ignore the conversation going on next to you, or do individuals drop in or out of running conversations as they cycle through the bathroom?

Are we talking about currently-as-it-exists “AI” (i.e., highly sophisticated pattern matching)? Then we pretty much already know the best uses - some data analyses for scientific purposes, leading to new discoveries or better predictive models. You can mix in some sci-fi flavor for it, but really the base use cases doesn’t change. Just remember to have a human monitoring the whole mess.

…though honestly, I’d be interested to see a sci-fi space empire deploy AIs trained to be as disruptive and awful as possible into an enemy social space, then just sit back and watch the fireworks.

But if we’re talking about fictional AI as it is popularly conceived (i.e., a near-human intelligence minimum) - Star Wars’ droids, Star Trek’s androids, BSG’s Cylons, etc - well, now we’re talking pure fiction, so what uses do you want to do with it?