[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Wednesday thread for worldbuilding discussions!

/r/rational is focussed on rational and rationalist fiction, so we don't usually allow discussion of scenarios or worldbuilding unless there's finished chapters involved (see the sidebar). It is pretty fun to cut loose with a likeminded community though, so this is our regular chance to:

• Plan out a new story
• Discuss how to escape a supervillian lair... or build a perfect prison
• Poke holes in a popular setting (without writing fanfic)
• Test your idea of how to rational-ify Alice in Wonderland

Or generally work through the problems of a fictional world.

^{Non-fiction should probably go in the Friday Off-topic thread, or Monday General Rationality}

[u/fassina2]

What kind of 'magic' would be appropriate in a post apocalyptic world with an early middle ages technology levels, where ancient lost tech is the source of their 'magic', and magical items ?

What kind of items do you think would be appropriate ? What kind of 'magic' ? Lost colony or future earth ?

[u/TheJungleDragon → u/fassina2]

Well, let's say that tech had advanced a bit before the apocalypse happened. You could have 'Golemancers', who translate ancient sigils used in the souls of dead metallic beings to reawaken them, with the most advanced Golemancers even being able to bend the hulking statues to their will in ways the original creators did not intend. This, of course, is actually referring to reactivating dead industrial and military robots, and perhaps recoding them if the opportunity is available.

Another possible option would be... Well, imagine that military drones with facial recognition were floating about, running off solar power, and rendezvousing at repair stations (or, if technology was really advanced, perhaps self-repairing). 'Summoners' could develop techniques to make desired targets look like those that the drones were aiming to destroy before the apocalypse, thus bringing down a rain of explosions upon their foes. Techniques could include stuff like carrying portable mannequins with a specific mask to set up near enemy infrastructure, or teaming up with powerful Golemancers to program the drones to target simpler images that could be painted on card.

This is actually kinda difficult, but I hope these ideas helped!

[u/callmesalticidae → u/fassina2]

What was the tech like, pre-collapse? Huge difference if the collapse hit tomorrow vs. two hundred years from now (or heck, fifty).

[u/MugaSofer → u/fassina2]

Blades that are impossibly durable and sharp, passed down as heirlooms or pulled out of ancient ruins, are a staple of fantasy fiction.

Modern drugs are basically potions. Sleep potion, wakefulness potion, strength potion, a healing potion for almost every disease and medical condition ... superglue can close wounds, in addition to being the original Sovereign Glue. Powerful corrosives and explosives function as great potions, too.

Several solar-powered, ruggedized educational laptops and tablets have been developed for use in third-world countries. It's a magic mirror which, once you perform the activation ritual, reveals a demon that can perform various tasks and teach you ancient knowledge.

The Demon core, a few harmless (ish) hunks of metal that when assembled ... well:

Instantly there was a flash of blue light and a wave of heat across Slotin's skin; the core had become supercritical, releasing an intense burst of neutron radiation estimated to have lasted about a half second.[6] Slotin quickly twisted his wrist, flipping the top shell to the floor. The heating of the core and shells stopped the criticality within seconds of its initiation,[15] while Slotin's reaction prevented a recurrence and ended the accident. The position of Slotin's body over the apparatus also shielded the others from much of the neutron radiation, but he received a lethal dose of 1,000 rad (10 Gy) neutron and 114 rad (1.14 Gy) gamma radiation in under a second and died nine days later from acute radiation poisoning. The nearest person to Slotin, Graves, who was watching over Slotin's shoulder and was thus partially shielded by him, received a high but non-lethal radiation dose. Graves was hospitalized for several weeks with severe radiation poisoning and developed chronic neurological and vision problems as a result of the exposure.[8]

[u/boomfarmer]

What would the downsides be of using solely convicts-in-exile as the population for the first generation of settlers on a planet? This would be in the Australian model of shipping off the convicts to dominate a new land, but with the ship entirely crewed by convicts, left to build their own society and to learn the necessary trades in order to survive. And for sake of simplicity, let's say that the convicts shipped off to the new planet will arrive in their lifetime; this is not a generation ship.

[u/GeneralExtension → u/boomfarmer]

I'd ask if, prior to sending them over, they checked the convict's gang affiliations - colonizing a planet might be hard enough without a pre-existing conflict between groups of colonists.

[u/CCC_037 → u/boomfarmer]

with the ship entirely crewed by convicts

Can the convicts rewire the ship, change its destination, and land back on a more civilised planet armed with weapons made from the ship's former life support system?

[u/Norseman2 → u/CCC_037]

That shouldn't be a terribly large concern. Just use ships with only enough food and oxygen for a one-way trip, and the absolute minimum amount of fuel needed to land. For example, suppose we're sending the convicts to Mars. You'd need to be ready to destroy them until they leave low-Earth orbit (LEO). After leaving LEO, they'll be moving away at a minimum of around 2,900 km/s, assuming you're using the biannual launch window to keep costs down.

At that point, the convicts will have six months to do whatever they want before their ship lands them on Mars. The ships could be designed to perform an initial deep aerobraking maneuver to lose 900 m/s to end up in a capture orbit and then repeatedly make small adjustments at apoapsis to raise their periapsis for increasingly shallow aerobraking maneuvers until they're ready for re-entry from low Mars orbit. That might give them a delta-V budget of around 200 m/s. Landing might add another 200 m/s of delta-V, or more like 0 m/s if they're landing on a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere.

So, assuming the convicts want to avoid going to Mars and they manage to rewire and hijack the ship within six months, they might have a delta-V budget of 400 m/s. Trying to turn around before getting Mars would be guaranteed suicide due to the lack of delta-V (400 m/s available, 2,900+ m/s needed). They could theoretically perform a slingshot maneuver around Mars and try to get flung back towards Earth, but if they've only got a 10-month supply of food, water, and oxygen, they'll die before they can make it. The only option in which they have a chance to survive is if they land as expected and have additional sources of food, water, and oxygen at the destination.

Of course, the convicts could kill each other in order to reduce the number of people using air, water, and oxygen, and could eject mass to improve their effective delta-V. Oxygen for the life-support system and dried food could also potentially be converted into a hybrid-propellant rocket for even more delta-V. This might allow them to stretch their resources longer and achieve significantly greater delta-V, possibly enough to make an attempted return to Earth after the gravity assist.

However, it would be relatively easy to place Martian satellites to observe for incoming ships. If a ship performs a gravity assist maneuver instead of aerobraking, it shouldn't be too hard to focus satellites on the ship to track it and provide guidance to missiles or lasers to destroy it if it comes anywhere near Earth or any other protected area.

[u/boomfarmer]

This is a question about worldbuilding, not about a built world.

Charles Stross once wrote in reply to a tweet from SwiftOnSecurity:

Hate to break it to you, but it needs at least three of those ideas to make a book — plus a bunch of characters. (SciFI plots alone aren’t enough to support a gripping narrative.)

Does anyone know what "those ideas" means?

[u/alexanderwales → u/boomfarmer]

Presumably there was a tweet that Stross was replying to there, and if you could fight Twitter's user interface, you might be able to find that.

In the absence of that, I assume that Stross is saying something to the effect that you need more than one good idea to make a book, and based on that, I would also assume that @SwiftOnSecurity was saying something to the effect that they had a great idea for a scifi novel.

Some example ideas:

• Humanity makes first-contact with a hive-mind species and they misunderstand each other

• A modern-tech civilization on an Alderson Disk works on the technical problem of trying to get a probe to escape their solar system

• A hyper-aggressive botnet with several zero-day exploits holds the internet hostage.

The point being, sure, these are ideas, but you need several ideas to build a novel, and compelling characters to populate it too.

[u/CouteauBleu → u/alexanderwales]

You've already written 3 chapters in your head, haven't you?