___ __ __ __ //|| //==\\ || || __ ___ __ _ SPEAR-CARRIERS //_|| \\__ ||__|| / / / ) Frequenty "Asked" Questions //==|| ==\\ ||==|| _) / _) /_ v1.0 - 12/5/98 // || \\__// || || ===============================]===> == == == == == copyright 1998 by Dave Van Domelen ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Actually, not a whole lot of questions have been asked about the Spear-Carriers setting. Maybe a half-dozen questions posed by three people total in the past year and a half. But thinking about the questions brought up a number of other questions, so I figured I'd put this file together as much to fix my thoughts on the matter as to actually answer questions that were posed to me by others. 1) Okay, what's the basic idea behind this? Maybe if you tell me that, it'll answer my questions by default. 2) How big is the region of space under contention? 3) How fast does this Twist drive thing go? 4) Why isn't technology a lot more advanced? 5) What about a big threat from outside? Will we see one of those soon? 6) Where's all the aliens? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) Okay, what's the basic idea behind this? The basic idea is that I wanted to set up a situation where warfare had stagnated for a while in a sort of "battleship paradigm," and then introduce a way out of it. I also wanted to be able to post it to rec.arts.comics. creative, so I decided to tie it into the future of my ASH universe. So...to set up a long-running stalemate, I needed to set it pretty far in the future, to give the stalemate time to set up on a grand enough scale to suit the kind of story I wanted to tell. A war between the United Worlds and a revitalized Santari Imperium seemed to fit the bill for a number of reasons, not the least being that I knew that the Santari were essentially time-and-space-displaced humans (something I hadn't revealed in continuity yet when I started Spear-Carriers, but which I wrote "Undone" later on to explain). Having similar mindsets and basic drives, it was easier to envision a stalemate, since both sides would come up with reasonably similar solutions to the same situation. A totally alien opponent would be difficult to get into a dynamic stalemate, one where the front lines move back and forth over time, but never enough to win the war. Why? Well, one reason is that there's less incentive to try and conquer a totally alien population. Instead you'd wipe out the entire population and replace it with your own. Since doing this two or three times would very quickly discourage any repopulation, you'd end up with a dead zone between opponents and a total "sitzkrieg" where no one moves at all. But if the population is about the same on both sides, it might get left alive and encourage a fluid front line, since there might still be resources worth getting on border worlds. Nearly human aliens are a common enough cliche, I just decided to make them completely human. }-> Also, they fit best of all the races I had available in ASH. I suppose I could have introduced an entirely new humanlike race, or had a human civil war, but I liked this option. Everything else has to be looked at with an eye towards setting up the situation, rather than simply extrapolating things into the future and seeing what happens. Maybe the future I ended up with isn't the most likely one, but I try to make sure it's not an impossible one. Well, not an impossible one given the "present" of the ASH universe in 2024. 2) How big is the region of space under contention? The original sphere of Santari influence was about 250 lightyears across, with Earth near the fringes. This limit was imposed by the fairly slow hyperdrive ships the Santari had access to, which moved at about two lightyears per day. When the Planetary Confederation disintegrated in the early Third Millenium (Earth date), it left a large number of worlds waiting to be absorbed into the United Worlds as it started to expand a few centuries later. Eventually the Santari gained access to the much faster Twist drives and this sparked a new imperial age for them. The United Worlds and Santari Imperium have largely expanded in opposite directions, but they continue to battle over the area of the old Planetary Confederation, which is a melting pot of Terran and Santari peoples and cultures. Sometimes the "war" is no more than glaring angrily across the border, other times it's quite hot. In 3732, most of the old Plantary Confederation space is under active contention. Assitionally, swaths about 40-50 lightyears thick and 500 lightyears out to either side of the old PC space are part of the front lines, allowing for a few inter-spiral-arm gaps. The actual size of each side's territory is roughly a triangle 5000 lightyears on a side, with points touching and forming the front lines. Thus, very little of each faction's space is in danger of attack, and it's often difficult to justify increased military spending. Only the fact that each side's homeworlds are in the danger zone has kept the war from totally ending. 3) How fast does this Twist drive thing go? Pretty damn fast. About five lightyears per HOUR on your average dreadnaught. Courier ships can do about twice that or more, but lack the power reserves to stay in Twistspace for as long as a dreadnaught. Twisted communications beams can span 5000 lightyears in about a day, making it possible for the far-flung United Worlds and Santari Imperium to hold together. Power requirements for staying in Twistspace increase exponentially. Thus, a quick combat-twist of a few light-minutes barely puts a dent in a Dreadnaught's power supply, but you'd have to drain a small star completely to keep a Dreadnaught in Twistspace long enough to travel 5000 lightyears. A single skip of about 100 lightyears is about as much as a Dreadnaught can handle, and that totally drains it, leaving it an easy target. Commercial ships and couriers tend to travel in 10 lightyear skips, pausing a few hours between jumps to re-energize or refuel at a port. Except in the hinterlands, there's usually a starbase less than 10 lightyears from any location within a spiral arm. Dreadnaughts also tend to be clustered less than 10 lightyears apart in the front lines, so reinforcements can arrive in under two hours if the commander of the reinforcing ship decides it's not a feint to draw him out of position. It's worth noting that entering or leaving Twistspace sends out a distinctive energy pulse or "twist signature," which can be analyzed to get some idea of the size of the ship. Both factions maintain a network of sensors around sensitive areas to detect incoming ships. Because of the vastness of space, it's not possible to seed the front lines with enough detectors to track all movements, since the twist signature only travels at the speed of light...a sensor that tells you someone arrived last year isn't too useful. However, the coverage is good enough around starsystems that it's very difficult to get too far beyond the front lines without being detected. Hence, the front itself needs to be moved before targets deeper in enemy space can be seriously assaulted, although the occasional terror raid does get carried out. 4) Why isn't technology a lot more advanced? Fair question. People seem to still be people, pretty much. Ships still have controls, instead of being cyberlinked to the pilots. Where's all the far-future whiz-bang? Well, there's a lot of things that contribute to this. First, we live in an era where technology is expanding rather rapidly, which makes it easy to assume that it will always do so, barring disasters and the like. But this may not be a correct assumption, and a number of stagnation periods are quite possible. Centuries where nothing happens but minor refinements of existing science and technology. Things get a little cheaper, a little faster, a little more reliable, but that's about it. The major hurdles on the way to the next level don't get jumped. Second, there *have* been some disasters. The Planetary Confederation collapsed, wiping out any head start the Santari may have had on the Terrans. With no war for the first few centuries of the United World's expansion, military technology wasn't improved as quickly as it might have been. Also, the war has seen much more brutal periods than 3732 faces, resulting in some backslides. Third, who says there's not whiz-bang elsewhere? The current conventional wisdom in both space navies is to emphasize the reliable, durable and easy to replace. There's a LOT of heavy-duty advanced tech in the factories and design rooms, but it churns out better, tougher versions of last century's weapons. Consider the M-16 assault rifle in real life, which has been largely unchanged in decades, but is now more rugged, less prone to fouling and generally more user-friendly than it was in the 1960s. It's still a slugthrower, it's not a particle beam or electro zapper or anything like that. The space navies want ships that can run around for years on their own without any serious spacedock time. There's also places where the technology is so advanced it's no longer visible. To pick one notable example, people in 3732 don't have cybernetic replacement parts because they can simply have new limbs or organs grown for them. The Santari distaste for artificial body parts has also spread to many of the United World planets, reducing the demand for cyborging. The navies occasionally go through periods of cyberlinking their pilots to the ship, but there's always inhernet drawbacks which eventually get exploited to the point that cyberlinking falls out of fashion. Finally, as pointed out in the previous paragraph, there's always social pressures against the widespread use of certain advanced technologies. Massive genetic alteration to produce superhumans might be possible, but frowned on. Or maybe it has had unpleasant side-effects in the past, so further research is forbidden (or at least frowned upon). Artificial intelligence might have reached the point where it's indistinguishable from natural intelligence, but it has been banned for most uses. That sort of thing. The particular reason a certain bit of neato technology isn't available may be a combination of several of the above reasons. Since I find it more important to let the story premise lead the technology than vice-versa, I don't want to nail down everything right now...I could be keeping myself from writing a future story in which I come up with a better explanation. One notable exception to this all is an arm of the military which hasn't been shown in Spear-Carriers, but might be worth doing a separate series on (any takers?): the ground troops. Because a standard tactic in the process of taking a planet is to bombard all military installations from orbit, ground forces need to be as non-centralized as possible. Simple robot garrisons sit around and keep the population under control, one of the few uses of autonomous robots. But it's necessary, since the garrison always goes up in a cloud of metal vapors when the bombardment starts...it's a suicide job. Hence, robots. Scattered about the world, ready to intervene against anything the robots can't handle and hidden from easy orbital attack, are the Marines (a generic term for now, their official titles will be presented if and when they appear in a story). There are numerous stylistic differences between the Marines of each side, but they share the following characteristics in common: A: They're walking arsenals, one man army corps. Still no match against a dreadnaught, but murder on occupying forces and just about anything capable of safely entering the atmosphere. B: They're loaded with all sorts of advanced technology. They need every edge they can get, and since they have so many weapons they can afford to have one or two decide to stop working. Ethical squeamishness that a pilot can afford to indulge in has no place in a Marine, and a lot of otherwise "forbidden" tech finds its way into a Marine's arsenal. They may even have personal Twist drives, used mainly to get up into orbit and do mischief upon a ship before running away to be picked up. Twisting into an atmosphere is Not Recommended. C: They're probably cyborgs, less flesh than metal and plastic. Santari Marines tend more toward powersuits with cybernetic interfaces to minimize the amount of flesh they must sacrifice, but the United World Marines are often indistinguishable from really mean robots. D: When they DO group together, it's to put together something really nasty. Sometimes, if left alone, they can devise a way to knock an orbiting Dreadnaught out of the sky. 5) What about a big threat from outside? Will we see one of those soon? You mean like the Dominion, the Shadows, the Swarm, the other Swarm, Unicron, a Sun-Eater, the Clans, the unnamed extragalactic aliens in Blake's 7, yet another Swarm (there's a lot of them), etc? Probably not. Mainly because it's something of a cheat, given the premise outlined in item 1. I want the stalemate to be broken up from inside, not from outside. An external threat would feel like a cheap ratings ploy to me, and if I can't maintain interest (my own or that of the readers) in Spear-Carriers without one, then I'll just let the series fade away. This is not to say that there won't ever emerge some third force that threatens both sides. But it'll come from within, not from without. And yes, I do have one in mind, I've even started putting the pieces for it into place. 6) Where's all the aliens? Most of the minor races like the Pranir, Deltans, Scytharians and so forth are still around in some form. The T!rir are essentially a dead race by the 38th Century...while there's a few alive here and there, they no longer wield any power or have any real chance of rising to a position of importance again. All their technological superiority has been erased by advances like the Twist drive. But all the nonhuman races in the combined United Worlds and Santari Imperium space are secondary, client races. They may serve in the government or even reach positions of reasonably high power, but they're subordinate to the humanoids in numbers, if nothing else. They tend to get better treatment in the United Worlds, but are still discouraged from having independent fleets. Discouraged at gunpoint, sometimes. There might be powerful races on the other side of the galaxy, but it'll be centuries before UW or Santari space starts to overlap with any alien powers. The fairly empty space between spiral arms also keeps the one other known alien power, the Thartons (near the galactic core), from interfering with UW/Santari conflicts, or even really caring about them. Presuming the Thartons haven't wiped themselves out yet in the nearly two millenia since the original Solar Max visited their space, of course.