Quick Fire Questions (A Place to Ask and Answer)

[Vertigo]

It would seem to make a lot of sense Springs. The whole fleet could be set up as a network with communications take multiple redundant paths. In a space battle with lots of electronic as well as physical fighting going on such redunancy in communications could be very valuable.

 

[Ursa major]

Just tell them not to purchase any chronometers from TDZ (or her more devious charaters).

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Faints in shock; that's exactly how I'm using it. A scientifically sound possibility; my first. Ty, Vertigo; delighted I am. Can i now nick your post to describe it; it's much better than my attempt. And in about 300 words less.

 

[Vertigo]

Hehe you're very welcome, Springs. Help yourself. It's not often my use of words gets praised!!!

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Aww man, you're cutting into my market now!

 

[hopewrites]

Preface: the reason God didnt put me in charge of growing grass is because I would have spent an eon calculating just how many earthquakes of what magnitude would be needed to get mountains of the precice hight needed to create the weather patterns most likely to grow grass with a nice white strip up the middle.

Question: how far back does the history of a people shape their social structures? my first thought is "before the beginning", and so I've loosely sketched the Origins of my two races and am ready to start nit-picking the details of sub-culture. Would it be best for me to know (i wont trouble my readers with such tedium) every move, split, war, and life of said peoples so that I can craft their cultures accordingly? or would it be more economical of my mental resources to craft them the way I want them to be and trace back the corroborating evidence from said past?

 

[Pyan]

or would it be more economical of my mental resources to craft them the way I want them to be and trace back the corroborating evidence from said past?

I would have thought that one of the great advantages of writing SFF is that you can do exactly that, as opposed to (say) historical fiction where research is actually needed to avoid being nit-picked.

Then if you feel that any particular part of their culture needs to be explained, you can expand on that aspect: but it'll save you an awful lot of time crafting out entire race histories, with the odds being that most of them will never be needed.

Or you can do it the other way, which is basically what JRR Tokien did - but few of us have thirty years available to write one novel...

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I think Pyan's right, Hope; you need to know enough to write it and you may even have it mapped out in your mind, where they came from, how they evolved, but I doubt the reader needs to know the whole detail.

If it's to keep yourself straight in the story so A culture came from X therefore they worship the God of waves, then I'd have a master diagram or something I can refer back to; I have a timeline for mine with the different characters and cultural timelines across if for the three books done out like that.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Okay; ref post 200, this is what I've cobbled together. The book is not hard sci fi, I don't expect the reading demographic to want a lot of detail, so I've tried to precis it, but still make it sound like there's a bit of theory behind it. (think 75 word challenge; very useful for this the practice was!)

"What we’re trying to achieve is real time communications across the fleet, to give full strategic support across all the planetary campaigns. It means you still run campaigns locally but they’re monitored by base, meaning you can interlink campaigns strategically. It’ll roll it out across the army comms as well, but I need it in place for the fleet first; the ships carry the comms and link to each other. The hardest bit is getting the configurations right;"

Make sense?

 

[Abernovo]

Makes perfect sense to me. The ships act like satellite relays, giving near instantaneous comms. Plus, you have the ability to work in a communication delay, say if one of the ships get damaged, tension builder style.

very useful for this the practice was

I did not think 900 years old you were.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I did not think 900 years old you were.

And I don't look a day over 40...

 

[Abernovo]

You're lucky. I do. The problem is I'm not!

 

[Ursa major]

Surely the only problem with this is that it seems to be a simple extrapolation of existing (since the mid-20th century) practice into planetary warfare with orbiting ships. It thus seems to be difficult to justify it as "a system that transforms a futuristic army's capacity".




As for the need for multiple paths/redundancy by the military.... Wasn't this recognised to be an advantage of packet switched networks quite a few decades back (even though it wasn't part of the ARPANET design brief)?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

that's my concern, Ursa; I don't want it to be overtly complex because I really don't want to go down the hard sci fi route, but I do want it to be something credible. I have got it in the book that the opposing army do have, and always have had, something like this, but the smaller rebel army have never had the resources to do it until now.

I might up the resource-expertise argument a little more; that he brings the expertise in one place that they haven't had to date.

 

[Vertigo]

Ursa makes a good point. However since your fleet is a rebel fleet I'm guessing it might be a bit of a hotch potch of different ships whose disparate systems could not be easily integrated. Maybe what your software person has provided is a smart interface that will allow all the different ship systems to integrate transparently into such a network.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Interface, I like that; he's supposed to be some kind of computer whizz kid, so that would work really well. Better than what I have, definitely. And presumably if the base, for the sake of argument, got destroyed and their programmer was captured there would be no easy way to rebuild it?

 

[Vertigo]

Not quite so sure about that one Springs. The thing about a network like this is that it would be very distributed; both hardware and software. By that I mean the necessary hardware and software would exist on each ship in the system. If the main base is destroyed it should not impact the ability of the rest of the fleet to continue to communicate. In fact in these sort of battle networks there is generally a backup control centre that might be located elsewhere on the planet or on one of the ships which could instanly take over in the event of the destruction of the main control centre. In fact in theory any one of the ships in the network could take of the role of central control.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Okay, a tiny rewrite needed then, but it's small, and it might add some bite. TY.

 

[Ökuþórr]

How long would it take for an army of Roman Centurions (i use them as an example because i know they were tough, well trained and used to long marches.) to march about 3200 miles?
I got that number with a distance calculator. It is supposed to be the distance between the Netherlands and Kyrgyzstan, which by comparing a continent on my map to that of our own world is about the same distance my guys need to march.

Some extra things to factor in. My three thousand are in quite a state. They have been betrayed and have lost around seven thousand of their army. Moral is most defiantly low. They wont leave anyone to die (though they may put some out of their misery if and when its needed) and about 5 or 6 hundred of them are injured, alot quite severely. Their leader being one of them. The land they need to march through is hostile; that includes people, terrain and sometimes both. There is forest, plains, mountains, inland sea and desert to get through.

If you need to know more I'll answer if I can.

OK, so that isn't exactly the definition of quick fire.

EDIT: I may round it up to 4000 miles.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

the norm for a roman army would be 15-20 miles per day, so suppose you halved this given the situation and terrain, if would sit anywhere between 320-425 days; erring towards the latter. If there is an urgency I would have thought they may have sent what they could spare ahead, and just kept enough able bodied with the slower contingent to protect them, rather than hold up the whole army. If you want to keep them together then I think you have to allow for at least a half speed; they'll need more time to set up camp in the evening, as well as the slower terrain coverage.