SYSNES2: On the Lathe of Suns

An Introductory Lecture

Come on now there is still plenty of room at the back!

Now I know this lecture theatre is smaller than the normal one, but there still should be seating for all of you.

What? No when we had to postpone the whole module after the riots we couldn’t reschedule in the normal hall. Your inconvenience is one more thing to thank Mr Hephoi for now isn’t it?

Settle down everyone…thank you.

The lecture materials are available as of…now. There should be at least two hours of additional and interactive content on there for students to review in their own time. For those of you catching the cast of this I’m sorry to say I give priority only to those questioners who could be bothered to show up in person. If you do have questions or issues please contact me after the lecture during normal office hours.

Welcome everyone to Xenoarchaeology A1, I am Honoured Researcher Lin Nuii, though given the number of faces I recognise from Non-Terran Ecology most of you already know that. This module will hopefully give you all a secure grounding in the facts of the archaeological research to date and the most highly verified biological and technological inferences that have been drawn from them. It is not a place where we will discuss cultural, philosophical or theological trappings. If any of you have read my papers and book you’ll know I do have strong opinions on all of the above, and subscribe to the Henyii Hypothesis for my own personal faith. However I will endeavour to present a dispassionate condensation of the facts as they are known and not colour it with theism. Again if you do wish to discuss such things I will be happy to lead discourse outside of the lecture environment when contacted during office hours.

Over the course of this module we will discuss techniques and analysis for xenoarchaeology in tandem with a case by case study of the seven alien civilisations, both absent and extinct, in the Orion Sector. Yes you did hear me correctly when I said seven, with the War over work continued on the investigation of the PRAT89 Oort cloud, and the last data freighter from the core regions contains a number of very interesting papers on how those ruins cannot be correlated to any other know civilisation. We’ll be examining those at the end of the module, and will compare and contrast how the PRAT89 expedition reached that conclusion and if any of you can poke holes in it.

We will begin with the planetbound groupings of Defex’s World and Caltrops V, and how researchers built on top of existing archaeological and paleontological techniques to infer how those species lived and behaved in their respective heyday. We will then move onto methods of vacuum and technological archaeology with a look at the Archweaver’s; their colonisation of ten systems in Segmentum Blatim via C-gate, a comparison with similarly developed historical hominin societies, and their destruction by the supposed -6.7 MUC gravity wave.

Following a review test we will move on to look at those civilisations of known suprahuman capability, conceptualised by Zing Plammer as the Chun, Hatsu, and Haku. We will look at their suspected environmental preferences, their technology, and their architecture and modification of worlds. If you have not read Plammer’s Fingerprints on Creation I would be surprised, disappointed, and insistent you remedy this before the second lecture. Please note we will not be discussing the Seraph itself beyond its existence as possibly unique artefact that drew the various elder civilisations to investigate during their respective periods of maximum activity. Objects beyond the human ability to quantify are better suited to Theology B3, and we will instead discuss Plammer’s and his successor’s examination of the three epochs of technological residue orbiting the modified star.

A question? Oh yes I will use Hatsu as the common term for that civilisations wide spread activity. Though the most revered Ancients are almost certainly drawn the same stock as the grouping Plammer and others describe, they are undoubtedly each different facets of a greater whole distributed across time and space. For example Hatsu artefacts uncovered near the Seraph are not opaque to neutrinos and lack any example of faster than light communicators and date nearly half a million years prior to the oldest ancient touched strata here on Yan. Much as I would use ‘Human’ as an umbrella term for both we Yanii and all human polities that have ever existed, and a more specific demonym for more localised activity. Though of course the word is nothing but a nickname coined by Plammer, it has the advantage of conciseness and common currency. If we do ever uncover what the Ancients and their cousins called themselves, I would be happy to switch to it in an instant!

Again at the end of that section on the advanced civilisations we will have a review and a second set of tests…

This is incorrect. Our statement was intended to express our hope that a cooperative venture between the Praxzen and Standard peoples would be an important, and one might argue necessary, endeavor in light of the mistrust and suspicion leveled at all Standards in light of the events at Torpor.

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Your admission of gross incompetence at diplomatic entreaties is noted.

What we are specifically protesting, in fact, is the intent to establish a base in Buxe system without the type of private consultations which you consider to be essential to a working partnership.

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The PGST's continued aggressive territoriality and delusions to ownership of the entirety of Buxe system are also noted.

Furthermore, we are protesting the opaque nature of the research to be done, and the charitable activities to be carried out.

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We don't answer to you, but for your information, it is a pilot program to increase habitable living space within the Forest.

If the object of such charity is the Provisional Government of the Standard Territories, we would like to be informed as such. If the object of such charity is Mernt groups who are hostile to our existence, we would consider this to be a threat to the integrity of the Standard state.

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The PGST's continued regard of the Mernt, a long-suffering people most in need of charity of any in the subsector, as a clear and present danger against their state, purely by the fact of their proximal existence, has been noted.

My office has already completed the training of a team of Planetologists to address the most pressing ecological concerns on Mern. I welcome your interest in our domestic affairs if it is productive, but the Standard people will not be stereotyped as primitives unworthy of knowledge or unwilling to make use of it.

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Interesting then that no such record of any team exists. We were unaware it was possible to dig by shooting at the ground. Your innovation is to be praised.

We will make the effort to advance our sciences, in cooperation with what academic resources we do have, and we will continue to levy those with greater scientific knowledge than our own to come to our aid if necessary. The Council of Commodores might have gained a reputation for barbarism, but I will not have it extended to the Standard people at large.

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You're doing a damn fine job of it by continuing to demand, demand, demand.

In what position are you to criticize us for adventurism? Your economy is shrinking, thousands of Praxzen hostages have been taken, and your space station in Torpor is slowly collapsing into the atmosphere. Clearly the Praxzen Republic faces the existence of other "pressing economic, environmental, organizational, and societal concerns" along these lines, and is also capable of establishing a scientific research facility.

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Ah, yes, our economy, which outmasses yours by some 3 to 15 times depending upon the metrics in question, which has a stable governmental system, is truly in every bit the crisis yours is, a barely functional state one tier above failed. Your predilection for hyperbole has been noted.

To assume that the Praxzen are capable of multitasking and the Standards are not is an unfair and biased accusation.

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Indeed, history is nothing but a consensual pack of lies!

I will state clearly that the Provisional Government of the Standard Territories has not stated exclusive control over Buxe System. Perhaps you are confusing our policy with that of the Council of Commodores, which made such a statement. If you examine all our diplomatic communiques, you will not find any statement where our government has made such a claim. What initially alarmed my government was the hypothetical existence of a base which could potentially threaten the Standard people. And we have since accepted your assurances that such a threat is unlikely.

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News to us, given you keep acting like any operation to be carried out in Buxe system must meet with your express notification, approval, and inclusion. Tell us, what is the difference between a de jure statement of total ownership and a de facto one?

We ask the Praxzen to step back from making unfair accusations and to work with the PGST as partners. If you are truly unwilling to share the cost of such a facility with us, or to share the data from it, at least provide us with more detail on the scientific and charitable actions to be taken. That will satisfy my government for the time being.

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We ask the PGST to cease believing that incessant whining and demanding will get it anywhere in international relations, and furthermore note with great amusement its "for the time being," as an obvious prelude to yet further whining and demanding in the future. We are willing to work with your state but we are not willing to coddle its infantile demands for "me too."

This conversation is over.

OOC: You need to look at the specialist reference sheet more carefully.

dis, I have a question for when you wake up. If we don't hear back from the FEFB before the update, then our orders are going to be filled with contingencies, which you hate. The shipping situation alone is going to be a mess for you. Maybe it would be better if we could get preliminary information back, privately if necessary?

The Hank-Sobor Consortium suggests to the Provisional Government of the Standard Territories that, should they be willing to embrace the ideals of the Black Charter Agreements, this would be an excellent time to begin reinventing the general impression that much of our region holds of the Standards. Cessation of your ongoing hostile behaviour against the Mernt would be one excellent first step to take.

The Consortium recognizes that providing economic assistance to the Standards is most likely the optimal path to ensuring that the Provisional Government does not fall back into violent and aggressive behaviour patterns, like those seen amongst the Commodores.

Thlayli said:

OOC: You need to look at the specialist reference sheet more carefully.

dis, I have a question for when you wake up. If we don't hear back from the FEFB before the update, then our orders are going to be filled with contingencies, which you hate. The shipping situation alone is going to be a mess for you. Maybe it would be better if we could get preliminary information back, privately if necessary?

Click to expand...

No thy, because its meant to be effing additional stuff you're applying for/tax substitution. If you have a conditional in regards to this that is more than a sentence YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

Notes on Transcendent Drives for Story purposes

All IS drives work via the same essential mechanism; the generation of a ship’s anomaly by the drive array, a bubble of altered space time that the ship ‘transcends’ into. To the outer universe the anomaly is a massless abstraction and propagates away at the speed of light along the ships former vector, inside the anomaly the physical and quantum functions are smeared and do experience entropy. Also crucial is the much lower power flaw inducer device (FID, Inducer, etc. the nomenclature varies by designer) that creates an imperfection in the anomaly as it is formed. The flaw is tailored so that when a certain gradient in curvature occurs across the anomaly, such as when approaching a star, the anomaly collapses and the ship reintegrates into normal space.

As the anomaly propagates it loses coherence and drifts, as drift increases the chances of a successful reintegration into reality. IS rating is effectively a measure of how tightly drift is being controlled – in theory an IS 1 craft could cross the entire galaxy, but will reintegrate at the far end with each of its baryonic particles kilometres apart. When a ship pushes the absolute high end of its rating the following effects can result depending on increasing levels of drift:

1. Pain, memory loss, cell damage, damage to data storage
2. Necrosis, circuit damage, structural damage
3. Instant Death, fires, structural melting
4. Molecular disintegration

Setting the Flaw inducer to a lower gradient can also control drift, which is why jumping to giant stars and other large masses is easier than jumping to smaller masses.

Burst Drive

Outside view: the beginning of the anomaly will manifest as a torus of distortion wherever the drive spike/nacelle geometry dictates (forward, aft and amidships all are used). The distortion will be a dark lensed view of the background peppered with sparkles of extremely bright photon emission similar to those produced by synchrotrons. These are bit unhealthy to be around and it is generally advised to maintain some distance between yourself and a powering up ship. The quality of the anomaly being generated can be observed by the tightness of the torus being generated – better drives will typically be sharper and anything other than a perfect circle is pretty serious bling. This generation state can last quite a while. In the seconds before transcendence the torus will expand into a cylindrical field encompassing and obscuring the entire ship. When transcendence occurs the synchrotron sparkles will be Doppler shifted for a millisecond, red or blue depending on the observer’s position relative the ships vector. Reintegration at the destination will produce a similar Doppler shifted sparkle in reverse, and is very easy to detect.

Interior experience: except for the mechanical effects the ship might involve in powering the drive array. The formation of the anomaly would distort direct observation of the surrounding starfield whilst it was being generated, and they would dim and ripple as if in a heat haze.

Manifold Drive

Outside View: the anomaly field is generated all at once over the course of a few minutes. The ship would appear to dim and blur beneath a spherical or ovoid heat haze, marked with the same sparkle as the burst drive (the sparkle is gas particles caught in the outer horizon of the anomaly). Quality of engineering can be inferred from the smoothness and evenness of the dimming, a shoddy job would roil and distort. Unlike Burst Drives the creation of the field cannot be stopped once started. An identical red- and blue-shifting effect can be seen on the particles when transcendent is initiated.

Interior experience: Similar to Burst Drive

Twist Drive

Outside View: Unlike the former two the time between the appearance of the anomaly field and transcendence is measured in microseconds. To the outside observer it appears as if the ship literally rips and explodes whilst surrounded by pillars of blinding light. In actuality this is a visual effect cause by the uneven expansion of the anomaly through the ships fabric, as the field is an extremely ragged urchin-sphere centred on the central drive node. The increased surface area and rapid movement gives a great deal more surface area for the particle effect, and unlike the previous two the light is orientated perpendicular to the anomaly producing lines of light. The quality of the twist drive can be determined by the speed and evenness of the eruption, with better drives being faster and more homogenous in spike formation. The edge of the field is in motion as transcension occurs, and although Doppler shifting occurs, working out a twist drive ships vector is a task for advanced algorithms.

Interior experience: As the anomaly expands throughout the ship it is kept at a low enough energy level to avoid particle interactions, but it will cause vision to blur and every element of the ship to resonate (most metal parts ringing like a bell). The visual effect is due to distortion within the observers own optics rather than large scale alterations. Also note that conscious experience of these effects means that transcension has already taken place and a destination has been arrived at.

Charm Drive

Outside View: Perhaps the most visually subdued of all the transcendence initiations, a charm drive will spend anything up to few hours calculating a pre-anomaly field and then just fade away over the course of a second or so. The sparkling effect remains but at a much lower level and issues from the structure of the ship itself rather than a boundary outside the ship. The sparkles here are actually highly dangerous as they represent atoms of the ships mass that have been poorly formatted and flung around producing radiation. A brighter aura represents a worse job of formatting and is potentially even damaging to ship microstructures (like the cells of its crew). The Doppler shift still occurs in the last moments but is pretty dim compared to the other drive types.

Note a master ship will assist in the formatting of slaved ships one at a time, and the slaves need to depart first with the master following.

Interior experience: The sparkles of light permeate the entirety of the ships mass, and even closing your eyes can’t keep it out due to photon events occurring in your vitreous humour itself. A shoddy charm drive can even be actively painful or damaging to its crew. To minimise the unpleasantness of this, crew sections are typically the last area of ship to be formatted with the pre-anomaly outside the computer core itself. Completion of the transcension can be easily observed when the annoying lights stop. Unlike with other drive types which are insensitive to crew activity, crew of charm drive ships are instructed to remain still during formatting to reduce the computational loads of moving masses.

Abandoned Technology: C-gates

As well as creating a flaw in the anomaly that causes it to collapse in certain environs you can induce its collapse externally. Cages of inducers would alter their interior space to reintegrate ships, and you could even send packages at light speed with no internal drive components by wrapping them in an externally generated anomaly and flinging them at a cage. Due to drift and accuracy concerns the receiving cages had to be colossal; hundred and thousand kilometre across lattices of material, but they did enable you to move fast as light within a planetary system.

During the Commonality Era many human civilisations used these for interplanetary travel, and the surviving delicate but Jupiter-volumed constructions of the Archweaver’s half completed interstellar cages still astound today. However they fell out of favour due their vulnerability to gravity waves and the massive resultant damage they cause when hit (no planets remains in the Archweaver suspected home system, only dust), their enormous resource costs and the increasing efficiency of interplanetary drives compounding their demise in human space.

Memorandum of the Provisional Government of the Standard Territories

The Provisional Government of the Standard Territories is seeking a loan of 250e for a distinct non-military endeavor. The PGST is willing to pay a rate of 5% compounded annually. We are prepared to offer significant collateral.

Interested parties may inquire for details.

The Unincorporated Township of Jeffords Agreement

The Provisional Government of the Standard Territories [and any constitutionally designated successor body] agrees to place the services of a Planetologist team at the disposal of the Hank-Sobor Consortium in UC 4977, to begin work at Sigma Relay, Hearthfire, Hanksville, no later than UC 4980 dependent on transport availability.

The Hank-Sobor Consortium agrees to provide 10v and 5e to the Provisional Government of the Standard Territories [and any constitutionally designated successor body] in UC 4977, and in each subsequent year to provide the PGST or designated successor 10e, until such a time as the contract is terminated. Parties will give one year's warning before contract termination.

The Provisional Government of the Standard Territories and the Hank-Sobor Consortium reaffirm their commitment to the mutual resupply of ships at all spaceports, spacedocks, and shipyards controlled by either party.

Signed,

Provisioner-General Kia Common

Signed,

Morley Dennens, Hankish Ambassador to the Provisional Government of the Standard Territories

Masada said:

But let's not kind ourselves: Standards are stupid.

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The phrase in question is 'kid ourselves'. Perhaps long-distance interstellar travel has caused some minor cognitive issues in the minds of our slightly-unhinged banker friends?

Not that we needed proof of that.

We had to scrape the slums for a translator.

Masada said:

We had to scrape the slums for a translator.

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Insults are horrible capital endeavors.

Almost as bad as lending to factions with 0e income.

I'm a bank branch. I report to a board. Not to genocidaires.

FEFB Application Approval

Having duly considered your applications, the members of the board have decided to fund the following budget applications. No further requests will be accepted this year.

Standards (Total 108)
Treaty-Mandated Infrastructural Development (6x Social Infrastructure) (108e)

Csserians (Total 322e)
2x Suburbs (63e)
Solar Plant (60e)
2x Suburbs (64e)
Suburb (21e)
Torpor Space Facilities (48e)
2x Social Infrastructure (44e)
Social Infrastructure (22e)

Praxzen (255e)
Space Frame (30e)
Space Dock (50e)
Ecology Matrix (50e)
Ground Base (80e)
Economic Assistance (70e 35e) due to lack of specifics we are only willing to give half of the request in the current fiscal year.

Masada said:

WHY DO YOU HATE MY GROUP?

The Lesser Orion Group wishes goodwill on all groups regardless of distance from baseline.

WHO DO YOU LEND TO?

The Lesser Orion Group can arrange flexible plans for all groups.

YOU WOULDN'T LEND TO US THOUGH?

There are a number of reasons that the Lesser Orion Financial Group will not lend.

BUT WE DIDN'T ATTACK THAT STATION, THREATEN OTHERS, START ENDLESS WARS!

The Lesser Orion Financial Group is aware of all things. However, hypothetical customer we lend at appropriate commercial rates.

BUT YOU'RE LENDING AT 5% TO EVERYONE ELSE!

Yes that is true. But those others we lend might just be able to repay their debts with us.

BUT YOU WOULDN'T LEND TO US!

That's not the case. The Lesser Orion Financial Group lends to all humans but at appropriate commercial rates.

WHAT'S AN APPROPRIATE RATE FOR US THEN?

While the Lesser Orion Financial Group cannot divulge how we calculate rates, we can suggest some factors that influence our calculations. These include:

War
Terrorism
Genocide
Capacity to pay
Willingness to pay
Ability to pay

QUOTE US A RATE THEN!

25% p.a.

WE THINK THAT'S A BIT HIGH!

The Lesser Orion Financial is not a charity.

YOU JUST HATE US!

You hate capitalism. So there.

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The Pavonis Bank thinks the LOFG are being dreadfully unfair to the Standards integrity and their ability to pay, and would like to make an offer that we think is fair and reasonable:

15% pa on a 100e loan
OR
18% pa on a 200e loan

Both repayments would start immediately.

[OoC: :3]

Given that the FEFB considers the PGST worthy of a 108e loan at 3%, when we succeed in paying back that loan, hopefully it will improve our credit rating with those financial institutions laboring under false (and might I add, racist) impressions.

Thlayli said:

Given that the FEFB considers the PGST worthy of a 108e loan at 3%, when we succeed in paying back that loan, hopefully it will improve our credit rating with those financial institutions laboring under false (and might I add, racist) impressions.

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You do realise the FEFB is financed by the Banks in large part right? Money thrown at a problem to prevent econageddon might be disbursed differently to money lent out on for-profit risk-assessment terms.

You think Libya is getting great loan rates right now?

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