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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1902 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I rather enjoyed Theft of Fire: https://www.amazon.com/Theft-Fire-Orbital-Space-1-ebook/dp/B0CJHQ4LZN

Rich gene-modded anime girl kidnaps tough Spacer Pirate in his own ship for a secret quest. An enormous amount of sexual tension.

Pros:

  1. Engaging from the get-go. I drop a lot of writing early on, this novel caught me and kept me. That's the most important thing a book can do, IMO.

  2. Author dunks on leftists on twitter but they're not really screeds so much as long well-written, impassioned pleas and thoughtful statements that sound that they could belong here, albeit toned down from twitter norms of hostility. The ultimate political tone of the novel is right-libertarian: holding to one's promises, anti-monopolistic capitalism. The setting is right-libertarian, there are no state govts in space and Earth is an irrelevant basketcase. No strawmen ideologies amongst the main cast though, characters are treated with dignity and the setting has the flaws you'd expect of ancapistan. I think the author only actually got noticed because he was dunking on leftists on twitter, some of the people I followed retweeted him and that's how I found out about the novel.

  3. Thematically clear and interesting, it had a variant on the Frog and the Scorpion that made me think 'this guy is somewhat thoughtful'.

Cons:

  1. It's not what I'd call 'hard' sci-fi, taking a few too many liberties with stealth-in-space, though the no-stealth-in-space principle isn't totally violated. AI is of the pre-GPT tropes of 'artificial stupidity' or 'completely human-personality tech-genius in a box' kind, which I found slightly irksome. I hope this trope is finally going to die soon. There's some implausible evasive flying later on.

  2. Some of the combat writing became a bit hard to follow but this was rather minor.

  3. Ending somewhat weaker than the middle. When I was half-way through I wished 'why can't this book be longer' and I still want to see a sequel, I just don't want it quite so desperately.

Ooo, looks interesting.

"The no-stealth-in-space" principle isnt totally violated.

Which is a shame, because that "principle" needs to be violated, since it simply isn't true. I love Project Rho as much as any sci-fi nerd, but the entire "no stealth in space" article boils down to a claim that it is trivially easy to deploy and coordinate sufficient numbers of sufficiently sensitive IR sensor platforms around any given system that any incoherent IR emissions from malicious spacecraft can be detected, picked out of all of the other emissions that are around, interpreted as a hostile craft, all in a reasonable timeframe. This to me is a significantly high dose of handwavium critically compromised by such facts as: IR emissions need not be incoherent- IR lasers are very much a thing and can make (admittedly not particularly efficient) closed-loop radiators, and also liquid hydrogen propellent happens to make one heck of a good heat sink which by the way can be expanded in a rocket nozzle to background-cryogenic temperatures whose IR emissions are indistinguishable from all the other hydrogen atoms bouncing around.

I presume you're talking about Hydrogen/Helium steamers that work through keeping hull temperatures below the noise limit for IR detectors, and potentially even at CMB levels?

In my own hard scifi novel, the K3 aliens have those, as well as far faster craft that manage to hide emissions via using neutrinos as their reaction mass in their drives, beaming them tightly and nigh-undetectably away from watching sensors, but that's a tier far above current speculative space craft (well, they're K3!).

Yes, reducing hull temperatures to background levels would be an essential component of minimizing IR signature, but this is something we do today on things like telescopes to avoid thermal distortions, its not even sci-fi tech. And highly expanded exhaust nozzles with cryogenic final exhaust temperatures are again already something that exists for simple efficiency reasons.

I think the "there is no stealth in space" meme comes from the fact that at least to public knowledge, no one has tried to build a stealthy spacecraft so there is no countervailing data to present against detector technology, wheres terrestrial stealth technologies (such as vs radar) has popped up almost as quickly as the detectors did.

Is your novel out? Im always looking for more good reading material.

I was referring to the directed neutrino emissions for heat dissipation and as reaction mass as the outright scifi part, the Steamers are just short of proof of concept!

If you want to take a look, here it is:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65211/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum-original-hard-scifi-with

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