sci-fi creative writting tips?

[saint of m]

I'd say "craft."

Craft it is.

Still, you need something for the small buggers, and maybe in between loading the big guns.

[Michael]

I'd say "craft."

Craft it is.

Still, you need something for the small buggers, and maybe in between loading the big guns.

Fighters or Fighter craft is the norm

[manticore7]

In the book series "Star Carrier" by Ian Douglas, the second book had a station armed with small guns that fired canisters of metal sand at fighters and missiles.

[discord]

should have been sand of whatever was cheapest and non magnetic(too damn easy to deflect) silica would be my first guess.

[saint of m]

Sand makes sense in a way. Anything going fast enough can cause serious damage.

There is space junk the size of marbles and yet singlehandily cause major repair problems for NASA (even a small thing going the speed the average object in Earth's orbit will be insainly fast, and fast needs alot of force to stop).

[Michael]

Sand makes sense in a way. Anything going fast enough can cause serious damage.

There is space junk the size of marbles and yet singlehandily cause major repair problems for NASA (even a small thing going the speed the average object in Earth's orbit will be insainly fast, and fast needs alot of force to stop).

I think they had a problem with something about the size of the nail of you're small finger going through a wall on the ISS a while back

[bunnyboy]

Even dust particle size of 0.1 mm can ruin your day. It wouldn't kill you immadetialy, but it could punch a small hole in your spacesuit or precise equipment and gives lot of extra work to repair.

[junk]

Yeah ... how soft/hard you want your universe will be is a major factor on evaluating the viability of various systems.

If you're going with a harder universe, mass drivers, barring specific tech constraints, are likely to be largely ineffective, and require extremely short ranges to be viable.

Let's be honest - if you're going for hard universe, anything that isn't missile spam with the explosion fueling a laser, graser, xaser something is largely moot.

As the missle can get close, evade, and doesn't actually have to hit the enemy directly.

[Cy83r]

Lasers: I tend to assume they fill a wide range of target engagement parameters, but at a certain point whatever array you're using to get so much single-hit output from will become fairly large. By and far away the most accurate.

Mass Drivers: the faster the slugs need to go, the smaller you need to make them until you hit particle cannons; in the sense of EMGs firing rounds you can physically handle or touch without a mediating device (i.e. magnetic bottles, etc), they're useful for bombardment and combat mining operations (assuming your targets still need to use transfer orbits to get places and can be expected to come through specified and predictable insertion windows). Velocity determines accuracy, but holds some of the highest overall killing power and greatest potential for variable munitions deployment.

Missiles and remote platforms: overall, not very useful unless deployed en masse or where your target is within knife-murder range; independent weapons platforms are also restricted to this arena, though their use in Zone Air Defence/Interception operations could be tactically sound. Accurate only while it still has fuel to expend with a variety of warhead/munitions operations, potential only limited by its range and survivability.

[Michael]

Oh god the spam bot found it's way here too!!

[junk]

@fredgiblet:
How about firing pellets in volleys, like a musket? It would be more difficult to dodge them all. Even more so in multi-ship battles if you have the unfortunate privilege of being the primary target.

Volleys like a musket? Musket volleys are fired by a bunch of different people, so you're talking about a ton of mass drivers which gets ridiculously expensive REAL fast. I think broadsides are assumed anyway.

Do you mean like a shotgun? If so then there's several problems, you would need something to contain them in the barrel which would need to break apart on leaving the barrel but be strong enough to withstand the pressures inside the barrel, which would be difficult. Without atmospheric/gravitational interference the actual spread would be reduced (though even a few degrees at thousands of miles would give a decent spread). Another problem I see is that you are drastically reducing the hitting power of individual pellets, reality isn't like a game where you can chip away at health or armor until it fails, you have to actually hit hard enough to have an immediate effect.

You could always fire "shells" which have minimal explosives packed in them that go off and allow the itto disperse over the area.

The problem with that though is, that you'll be dealing with stuff that a ship should be able to shrug off, as they have to be able to plow trough micrometeorites anyway.

That is unless you actually start doing some design work on your submunition. If you can do that, than we're talking again.

Missiles and remote platforms: overall, not very useful unless deployed en masse or where your target is within knife-murder range; independent weapons platforms are also restricted to this arena, though their use in Zone Air Defence/Interception operations could be tactically sound. Accurate only while it still has fuel to expend with a variety of warhead/munitions operations, potential only limited by its range and survivability.

TO be honest missiles should be viable in about all situations. At knife range the fuel is great for an additional punch and it's so close tht countermeasures have a hard time picking them all up.

At long ranges you have a higher to hit chance and you can also mix and match it with CCM rounds, additional scanner equipment, CM rounds and a lot of other ugly little tricks.

Plus remember you don't need a direct hit. You'll most likely be using the explosion as a power source for a single high powered energy weapon shot at knife range. Which again improves your hit chances.

[fredgiblet]

You could always fire "shells" which have minimal explosives packed in them that go off and allow the itto disperse over the area.

Like Flak then. That runs into issues with structural integrity again, making a shell that will come apart AFTER you fire it, but not come apart when you subject it to tens or hundreds of thousands of gs will be a challenge. Plus you have the dead weight of the filler, plus the explosive range of a shell isn't going to be that big when you take the distances involved into account.

[discord]

keeping the round 'together' during acceleration is dead easy, just take a tip out of the inca building handbook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_architecture

basically you make it so that it falls in on itself, so gravity(or muzzle acceleration in this case) holds it together, the stronger the force to pull it the stronger it sticks together.

but, and there is a but involved, ANY projectile gun is going to be VERY range limited(given a powerful railgun and perhaps 10km/s projectile speed which is very fast the effective range will probably be under 100km) and 'flak' style(even if flechette is probably a better term or buckshot or maybe cannister shot?) is only going to help a very little bit, missiles and beam/pulse weapons is where it's at.

why? range and accuracy. missiles will probably have a bell curve accuracy in regards for range whereas ray guns will have a pretty linear 'curve' with a sharp dip VERY close(tracking speed being insufficient) going up to maximum quickly and after that falling down as range increases depending on targeting ability(where target is NOW and movement speed and direction), target placement uncertainty(how much the target can generate difference from where it was when sensors hit it and where it is when the weapon gets there) and platform precision(duh).

why a bell curve for missiles? simple, at close range they will move pretty slowly and be easy to pick off and at extreme range on board sensors are the only thing it can rely on making it less accurate when accuracy is ever more important(higher speed).

that about sums up my views on the matter.

[Paragon]

The simple answer to your question is "Don't have them be Mass Drivers." Have them be something else. New tech, different tech, whatever, so long as it gets the job done. If they simply must be Mass Drivers for some reason, then make something up. Maybe the enemy they expect to fight use highly armored slow moving craft that fire lots of missiles or something? Don't let yourself get bogged down in technical details, nobody but the most insanely hardcore hard sci-fi nerd will care. YOU might need to know what every craft can do and how it does it, but the audience doesn't. They don't care. They're going to (hopefully) care about your characters.

I mean, I don't think anyone reads Outsider for detailed engine diagrams. They read it for the fish out of water story of Ensign Jardin, and because blue space babes are hot. When it comes right down to it, the tech in your sci-fi story can do whatever you want it to do, it's how that affects your characters that matters.

As for the Abh, that's what happens when the writing is that clumsy. They mostly steamrolled everyone else by way of authorial fiat.

This is true of literally every fiction ever written ever. What happens is what the writer wants to happen. Whether that is plausible based on what the author has already shown us and our own experience is another matter. I find it entirely plausible that an empire that rules half of humanity and has tech on par with their opponents could win a war against them. And it isn't like the Abh don't take losses. I REALLY don't understand what you mean by "clumsy writing", can you provide an example?

Banner/Crest owns. The Abh own.

[Absalom]

As for the Abh, that's what happens when the writing is that clumsy. They mostly steamrolled everyone else by way of authorial fiat.

This is true of literally every fiction ever written ever. What happens is what the writer wants to happen. Whether that is plausible based on what the author has already shown us and our own experience is another matter. I find it entirely plausible that an empire that rules half of humanity and has tech on par with their opponents could win a war against them. And it isn't like the Abh don't take losses. I REALLY don't understand what you mean by "clumsy writing", can you provide an example?

Banner/Crest owns. The Abh own.

It's been too long since I read the stuff to go into detail, but my complaints boil down to authorial failure.

1) The Abh are stated to be genetically customized for space. Yay. Why is it that they seem to be the only ones? This is supposed to be how many thousands of years in the future? Most of human space should be teeming with genetic engineering (the biggest non-Abh empire opposing it is laughable), and the Abh's poor starting point (a single ship crewed by slaves, vs whole civilizations) should have resulted in them being subsumed by a more powerful organization quite a bit earlier. If nothing else, the day that a single-ship empire goes to war with a space-faring multi-planet empire is the day the single-ship empire dies (time-dilation plays nicer with the stationary empire, so they get better 'AI' weapons, so the Abh lose every time they attack).

2) However far in the future, and the best that they have is still mass-drivers, lasers, and anti-matter?

3) The entire story is just a vehicle for Lafiel & Jinto, but neither of them is particularly interesting. Jinto barely shows the personality to fill a cup, Lafiel's personality reliably comes across as a shallow attempt to show pride, and neither are enthralling. In contrast, Vampire Hunter D's protaganist barely even speaks, yet those books still manage to carry plenty of personality via the narrator and the other characters.

4) The writing in general just isn't interesting. There's no interesting displays of technology, no signs of interesting depictions of battles, and what verbal sparing I saw was either boring (I'm willing to chalk this up to the translation) or entirely at the hands of side-characters. If Lafiel's father had been a main character then it might have been more interesting, though I suspect that it still would have been limited by the author.

5) We are told that the Abh are on par or technologically superior to the other powers, but the setting is underdeveloped, so we never get any perspective on it. Martine is so far from Earth that even though the ship that settled it was sent out quite a bit in the past, only a few generations passed between it's arrival and the Abh invasion. This implies a lot of space in between the locations of sords, but there never seems to be any human presence from out in those regions. All of the thousand or more years of expansion with sords, and FROM sords, and no-one spread out further when they arrived? Highly unlikely.

In short, once I got over the novelty of seeing an anime space-opera (I don't think I'd seen one for quite some time) the whole series fell flat. It's main characters are barely there, it's technology is the minimium imaginable, and it's setting is on par with a wide but shallow puddle. Go watch Macross, Tytania, or Mouretsu Pirates instead (I would suggest the other space-opera by the author of Tytania, but I haven't actually seen or read it).


I also have a set of complaints about various other things that I don't actually count against the writing.

1) Like some other Japanese fiction, the entire thing comes across a little like nationalist-self-indulgence fiction (I'm referring to the Abh's origin). This places it in the same group as the movie Independence Day for me. The whole 'setting the Abh apart from all others' thing really just furthers this impression for me.

2) Supposedly Morioka resurected sci-fi in Japan when he started writing Crest/Banner. I don't believe this. He might have been the only one writing space-opera in Japan, but I'm dubious about that, and I'm quite certain that others were writing other genres of sci-fi at the time.

3) I've read better. The Lt. Leary stuff is of dubious level, but the writing is decent. Risen Empire/Killing Of Worlds are better at conveying interactions with 'distant powers'. BRIAN Herbert might not get much respect, but the Dune books he's done with Anderson certainly have better writing than I've seen in the translations (which is what I suspect you've read as well).


Finally, I got into sci-fi before I got into anime or manga. I was a forum member of the Abh Nation for a while. I actually watched Crest/Banner while they were on TechTV, and bought some DVDs. Crest/Banner didn't have staying power. I've read better, some by Japanese writers (Shirow's stuff doesn't always make for good fiction, but he doesn't skip out on the tech, and sometimes his writing does more than provide an excuse for the tech), some not, and Crest/Banner just doesn't measure up for me.

[Absalom]

Oh, yeah, also: melodrama.

[discord]

i personally found crest of the stars quite enjoyable because the characters were not 'over the top' not really special, just people in extraordinary situations, the love interest between the two basically shy personalities slowly develops(or not at all as it may be a lot of the time).

and a great deal of the good stuff was pacing and music, the overall picture was something well done but very different(and i have only read a small part of it, in text i admit it was less then stellar which could have been a suboptimal translation, but i found the anime enjoyable).

actually it reminds me of the man from earth.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/
in that it SHOULD be pretty damn boring and suck based on story, genre, etc, but it somehow manages to become quite brilliant.

[Michael]

Missiles and remote platforms: overall, not very useful unless deployed en masse or where your target is within knife-murder range; independent weapons platforms are also restricted to this arena, though their use in Zone Air Defence/Interception operations could be tactically sound. Accurate only while it still has fuel to expend with a variety of warhead/munitions operations, potential only limited by its range and survivability.

TO be honest missiles should be viable in about all situations. At knife range the fuel is great for an additional punch and it's so close tht countermeasures have a hard time picking them all up.

At long ranges you have a higher to hit chance and you can also mix and match it with CCM rounds, additional scanner equipment, CM rounds and a lot of other ugly little tricks.

Plus remember you don't need a direct hit. You'll most likely be using the explosion as a power source for a single high powered energy weapon shot at knife range. Which again improves your hit chances.

Yeah, but at knife range most missiles can't get a lock, or if they can, the amount of time it takes for them to be "kicked" lose of the ship ('cos the missile can't just go straight to main drive too close to the ship) means that the target has moved and it takes time for the missile to select a new vector to attack, easier at knife range to use a knife than shotgun is what I'm saying really.

At long rang, yeah you can get a good lock, see where their going and pre-program the missile to get the best results, BUT no only is it a double edged sword, as the enemy can easily track the missile and counter measures will be more effective the longer it takes for the missile to reach them.

The next problem is fuel, in space all missiles will have an "effective range" a range at which they are most likely to hit their target because they will still have powered flight, after the leave the effective range their going ballistic, no fuel no manoeuvring.

I don't know if you've read them, but in David Webber's "Honour Harrington" series of books this problem crops up quite a lot and I recommend that you all read them, not just because their good books in of them selves, but despite being more hard science, it does appeal to soft as well, and it might help in coming up with ideas.

[fredgiblet]

Yeah, but at knife range most missiles can't get a lock

What? If the sensors of the ship are even half-way decent short-range shouldn't be any sort of limitation, in fact shorter-range should make it EASIER to acquire a target lock.

or if they can, the amount of time it takes for them to be "kicked" lose of the ship ('cos the missile can't just go straight to main drive too close to the ship)

That's been solved for decades, it's called proportional pursuit.
http://www.wisegeek.com/how-does-a-side ... e-work.htm

At long rang, yeah you can get a good lock, see where their going and pre-program the missile to get the best results, BUT no only is it a double edged sword, as the enemy can easily track the missile and counter measures will be more effective the longer it takes for the missile to reach them.

Not necessarily. While countermeasures would be more effective you can also have mid-course updates like the AMRAAM missiles of today where they continually receive updates from the launching craft, meaning you have to fool the missile AND the ship.

The next problem is fuel, in space all missiles will have an "effective range" a range at which they are most likely to hit their target because they will still have powered flight, after the leave the effective range their going ballistic, no fuel no manoeuvring.

That's not a problem, every weapon has a max effective range. The effective range can very easily be as long or longer than beam weapons and WILL be longer than mass drivers that aren't ultra-tech.

[Paragon]

It's been too long since I read the stuff to go into detail, but my complaints boil down to authorial failure.

1) The Abh are stated to be genetically customized for space. Yay. Why is it that they seem to be the only ones? This is supposed to be how many thousands of years in the future? Most of human space should be teeming with genetic engineering (the biggest non-Abh empire opposing it is laughable), and the Abh's poor starting point (a single ship crewed by slaves, vs whole civilizations) should have resulted in them being subsumed by a more powerful organization quite a bit earlier. If nothing else, the day that a single-ship empire goes to war with a space-faring multi-planet empire is the day the single-ship empire dies (time-dilation plays nicer with the stationary empire, so they get better 'AI' weapons, so the Abh lose every time they attack).

2) However far in the future, and the best that they have is still mass-drivers, lasers, and anti-matter?

3) The entire story is just a vehicle for Lafiel & Jinto, but neither of them is particularly interesting. Jinto barely shows the personality to fill a cup, Lafiel's personality reliably comes across as a shallow attempt to show pride, and neither are enthralling. In contrast, Vampire Hunter D's protaganist barely even speaks, yet those books still manage to carry plenty of personality via the narrator and the other characters.

4) The writing in general just isn't interesting. There's no interesting displays of technology, no signs of interesting depictions of battles, and what verbal sparing I saw was either boring (I'm willing to chalk this up to the translation) or entirely at the hands of side-characters. If Lafiel's father had been a main character then it might have been more interesting, though I suspect that it still would have been limited by the author.

5) We are told that the Abh are on par or technologically superior to the other powers, but the setting is underdeveloped, so we never get any perspective on it. Martine is so far from Earth that even though the ship that settled it was sent out quite a bit in the past, only a few generations passed between it's arrival and the Abh invasion. This implies a lot of space in between the locations of sords, but there never seems to be any human presence from out in those regions. All of the thousand or more years of expansion with sords, and FROM sords, and no-one spread out further when they arrived? Highly unlikely.

In short, once I got over the novelty of seeing an anime space-opera (I don't think I'd seen one for quite some time) the whole series fell flat. It's main characters are barely there, it's technology is the minimium imaginable, and it's setting is on par with a wide but shallow puddle. Go watch Macross, Tytania, or Mouretsu Pirates instead (I would suggest the other space-opera by the author of Tytania, but I haven't actually seen or read it).


I also have a set of complaints about various other things that I don't actually count against the writing.

1) Like some other Japanese fiction, the entire thing comes across a little like nationalist-self-indulgence fiction (I'm referring to the Abh's origin). This places it in the same group as the movie Independence Day for me. The whole 'setting the Abh apart from all others' thing really just furthers this impression for me.

2) Supposedly Morioka resurected sci-fi in Japan when he started writing Crest/Banner. I don't believe this. He might have been the only one writing space-opera in Japan, but I'm dubious about that, and I'm quite certain that others were writing other genres of sci-fi at the time.

3) I've read better. The Lt. Leary stuff is of dubious level, but the writing is decent. Risen Empire/Killing Of Worlds are better at conveying interactions with 'distant powers'. BRIAN Herbert might not get much respect, but the Dune books he's done with Anderson certainly have better writing than I've seen in the translations (which is what I suspect you've read as well).
[/quote]

Okay, I've got some answers for you since you seem to like asking questions.

1) Because the other powers banned genetic manipulation for whatever reason. Hell, we meet a character who is borderline psychotic from the discrimination he faced.

2. Pointless complaining, it's a space opera. The ships are the way they are because they're supposed to be acting like wind-powered tall ships. It's the Age of Expoloration/ Colonialism except FUTURE. What were you expecting?

3.Your just so hilariously wrong. I don't even know where to start. It doesn't look like we've even read the same material. Vampire Hunter D, fucking really?

4. The battles were generally tense as hell. And the one big one in the second season is fucking huge. The dialogue is excellent and watching these characters made the show for me. Maybe you got a bad translation? Some of the fan shit I've seen for the show is awful. Try to find some of the officially released stuff (I've only watched the DVDs and read the Manga, btw). Fan translators rarely make any effort to localize, so a lot gets lost along with the whole thing just being a pain to read.

5.Because they were one of the first groups to start, and they cracked FTL first? This is explicitly stated. Martine was founded by a sleeper ship. They didn't travel by Sord. Travel by Sord is much faster. It probably also helps that they got their start as an actual empire by conquering colonies with no or little capacity for space travel. I actually have watched Macross (which is a whole different genre) and Pirates (which isn't even TRYING to be the same thing). They're both pretty good! As is Banner/Crest. Have you seen Legend of Galactic Heroes? People tend to compare the two.

6. I assume your referring to the Abh being created as slaves to radical Japanese nationalists or something right? Didn't they, you know, murder the shit out of those guys at the outset? And they're characterized as being incredibly hands off later on. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Japanese foreign policy. They don't even really act anything like Japanese people, yet for some reason people always bring it up when they want to criticize it. It smacks of grasping for straws to me.

7. I don't really know much about that. "They say he revitalized his genre, but I don't believe them!" What?

8.Brian Herbert is a hack and your delusional if you think otherwise. It's just terrible. I've read things I like better than Crest/Banner as well. So what?

A lot of your complaints seem to stem from you having a bad translation that probably hasn't been localized at all (an assumption on my part) , and expecting it to be high concept science fiction when it is a space opera.