On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > DataPacRat replied to me:
>> One perspective: The original story's setting included several urban >> neighbourhoods in the Good Guys' country that were pretty much >> chock-full of active terrorists; some investigation revealed that most >> of the 'civilians' there were acting as support personnel, with very >> few simply trying to hide in their apartments or otherwise keep out of >> everyone's way and survive. Said terrorists simply didn't surrender - >> at all. Active attacks had dispersed radioactive dust through a number >> of Good-Guy government facilities, and otherwise caused enough ruckus >> to spur the Good Guys to do whatever it takes to get rid of them. > > Remarkably convenient for the attackers. Did they improvise the > pigeons, or did they just happen to have some ready, in case it > ever became moral to use them? The whole story covered around, mm, 5-6 years; I don't recall exactly, but there was about 1-3 years of development time before the Pigeons were deployed. >> Another perspective: The setting I'm actually going to be using is >> only partly based on that story - and, in contrast to how the story >> went, the 'Good Guys' who came up with and used the Flocks ended up >> going the route of (Evil?) Empire, and are now, some years later, the >> main antagonists for my setting's Good Guys, the newly-forged polity >> of 'New Attica' (consisting primarily of several habitats in orbit). >> Since, in orbit, you're already halfway to anywhere, the New Atticans >> could start dropping rocks on anyone they wanted... but they also have >> to deal with the fact that any Earthly nation with access to a fighter >> jet and 1980's missile technology (ie, all of them), could destroy any >> hab it wanted. > > Could they try to lift their habs into higher orbit? An 80s ASAT > may be good against LEO, but not against GEO. Some, yes, and some are already in GEO, a Lagrange point, or lunar orbit. (I've currently drafted out the New Attican Self-Defense Forces as having four main 'branches', or at least areas of focus: 1) physical force, such as classic armed forces, winning by making the enemy unable to fight; 2) intelligence, counter-intelligence, encryption, network analysis, and general computery, winning by getting the enemy to not know how to fight; 3) propaganda, morale, keeping the moral high ground, and convincing the enemy that it doesn't want to fight; and 4) making plans to retreat, surrender, pull the best possible result out of any given defeat, and generally try to counter the positive bias of the planning fallacy. This latter group are, among other things, making whatever plans are possible for any attacks on a hab.) >> So the New Atticans have gone for a policy of armed >> neutrality to try to avoid doing anything (other than simply being >> independent) to antagonize anyone, and the Earthly oligarchs are >> kicking off all the 'interesting' shenanigans that one set of >> governments can do to another short of outright war: espionage, >> attempted sabotage, name-calling, framing for socially-unpalatable >> crimes, and convincing third-parties to do extreme stuff and take the >> rap if it goes wrong. This latter scenario is mainly what I'm fiddling >> with the Pigeons for - as part of the background of materiel on hand >> which could be used by a puppet government in an attempt to take >> control of a New Attican hab without simply destroying it. > > If you are considering to use helicopters in an orbital station, > are they big O'Neill cylinders or something like that? At the least, there's at least one Stanford torus - I've already established that it's possible to experience (centrifugal) full-gravity without going down to Earth, in a hab with plenty of room to walk around in. > And can you use 40d(5) HEDP in a station without wrecking everything? That's a very good question. :) <whistles nonchalantly> >> (The main character is also something of an amateur roboticist, >> putting together junkbots from random bits she's salvaged from her >> day-job (orbital junk clean-up), which is part of why I'm looking at >> military-bots.) > > Military orbital robots at TL8? Tricky. > > * Small unmanned orbital vehicles to maintain solar power > sats, commo sats, etc. > * A top secret stealth variant to place bugs on enemy sats. > * Spiders or crabs to help with the maintenance of ships and > stations. > * A more independent variant of that for SAR. > * An armed variant of that for boarding parties. <sound of bullet-points being copy-and-pasted into setting notes file> >> If such an enemy tank gets within range to lob shells at the base - >> then friendly artillery hasn't been doing its job... <ahem> > > Have you looked at the railgun of my sample tank? You mean the 20-30km range? >> Well, I'm still trying to get the Pigeons /to/ work in a best case >> scenario - if they can't work for even that, then I should drop the >> whole idea. :) > > Rather than introducing all at once, how about this > history? <sound of copy-and-paste again> That matches some other areas I want to push in this setting - the differences between oligarchs who want to control others and freedom-lovers who just want to be able to control themselves and their own property. Surveillance vs sousveillance, copyright/patent watchdog software vs self-replicating 3D printers, wiretapping vs mesh networking, and so on. Maybe before I put together the military Pigeons (of whatever sort), I should try putting together an everyman's version of a distributed drone network: printable on the self-repping 3D printers, can fly, laser-comm mesh network, solar panels, can plug into drone-recharge stations, able to carry a flash-drive... Or, as CStross put it in http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/usenix-2011-keynote-network-se.html : > open access peer to peer mesh networks using DIY remotely piloted drones > whipped up on garage 3D printers as home brew laser relays to span long > distances and fill the fibre gap, for example. Mind you, the security > problems of > a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising > gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust? Such a world > is going to be either crime-ridden or pervasively encrypted and inhabited by > natives who are required to be perfectly spherical cypherpunks – just like my > eighty-something parents. Not! When the oligarchs in charge have to switch gears from merely destroying their enemies abroad to trying to control people in their own territory... things could get rather interesting. Thank you for your time, -- DataPacRat lu .iacu'i ma krinu lo du'u .ei mi krici la'e di'u li'u traji lo ka vajni fo lo preti _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
