Expedition

[G. Janssen]

I feel the same about the exchange with Kasham. Like watching an episode of Lower Decks.

Look at it this way: the group met a wagie from a hyper advanced, tech level 15 civilization who went for a drive in his car in the weekend to get away from his nagging wife for a few hours and he's going back home because there's going to be a football match on.

And said wagie casually drops VERY disturbing intel about the Soia, to the point it could put Loroi entire society and even the Union in jeopardy if the learn about it.

Yep. As mentioned in the chapter: his mind has access to the tech level 15, galaxy spanning version of internet. That stuff about the soia is just something that he plucked of its version of Wikipedia. The old races are watching us.

The Bek take their hyper advanced tech completely for granted, just like we do with our tech. Their society is pluriform, peace loving and tolerant. It has left its "We're mysterious" phase behind and entered its "Gee, is this it? Is this all there is?" fase.

Visiting Bek'Arhi, their homeworld, is not a problem. Marvel at the dyson sphere sized honeycomb structure in the solar system (but ignore the graffity), visit Bek'Arhi's hovering cities and see the Wraa, an artificially created, 500 meter long reptilian species (do not feed) that lives on Par'Hevra, the terraformed 4th planet in the system.

Or rent a spaceship and go explore the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy for only 50 million kezelets a day (fuel not included).

It's all normal to the Bek, who got rid of their robot servants long ago, because they discovered that an entire species loitering all day only served to make that species fat, bored, stupid and extinct. As a result, the Bek have jobs and chores (and complain about them. Just like 99.9% of species that have jobs and chores do).

[Bamax]

Just curious... does being the being the 'captain' (because I don't know if you go solo or have any 'crew') of your own ship literally inform your writing at all?

I am only curious since at times it seems you are very familiar with the measurements involved when it comes to travel and that is at least one thing both space and sea travel have in common among other things (like limited supplies/fuel etc).

[G. Janssen]

Just curious... does b eing the being the 'captain' (because I don't know if you go solo or have any 'crew') of your own ship literally inform your writing at all?

I am only curious since at times it seems you are very familiar with the measurements involved when it comes to travel and that is at least one thing both space and sea travel have in common among other things (like limited supplies/fuel etc).

You flatter me. But I'm only a skipper. Or a yachtie, liveaboard, bluewater cruiser, sea gypsy. A captain has 4 bars on his/her shoulders.
I sail solo. I don't mind people, but having one of them (me) aboard my boat is enough. I can still have conversations though. I just have to stay awake for a couple of nights and I will have the most interesting conversations. I had one with my deceased grandmother once and one with a christmas tree. Hallucinations due to sleep deprivation. It's funny how a christmas tree is a very normal person until you realize that you're hallucinating. Then you feel real stupid.

But since the invention of AIS (automatic identification system) this is in the past. I set the alarm and go to sleep. I only stay awake now while sailing along a coast.

Yes, I put some of my experience in the design of the stealth ships and behaviour of the crew in my writings. StarTrek TNG for instance has always annoyed me. There are 3 crews aboard a merchant ship for instance. One's on duty, one's off duty and one is asleep. Yet every single episode of that series has Picard, Riker, LaForge, R2Data2, etc. on duty. And every problem they encounter can be solved by rerouting power from the warpcore through the deflector dish. Blegh.

Oh well.

I see you wrote "ship". I see journalists doing this a lot as well. A submarine is always a boat. A sailing vessel is only a ship if it has at least three masts that are cross rigged. It's enough for a mast to have only a single cross rigged sail to count. As for motor vessels: things are more complicated and we have to distinguish between river vessels and sea going vessels. I'm not going into the river vessel category, because there's no single widely accepted definition and debating it with skippers will get you into fights. But for seagoing vessels: if a vessel's empty weight is at least 500 tonnes it is categorised as a ship.


Only the bottom-left one is a ship.

Trivia: why is a nautical mile 1852 meters, why do we use this ridiculous unit of length, what does it have to do with ancient Sumer and how many minutes form the circumference of the earth?

SpoilerShow

The circumference of the earth is 360 degrees * 60 minutes = 21,600 minutes, which is also the circumference in nautical miles. One minute on a great circle (a great circle divides a sphere in two equal halves) is one nauticaul mile.
This is why Mercator charts are used: measure a minute from the vertical side of the chart and you have 1 nautical mile.
The number 60 (and thus 360) is used because the Sumerians used the sexagesimal system. Something about the number 60 being holy. They passed it on to the Babylonians. Then the Egyptians divided the day in 12 segments (and the night as well). This had to do with the number of constellations (12) in the Egyptian zodiac.
Next come the ancient Greeks. Hipparchus was the one who divided the earth in 360 degrees. Back to the Egyptians: Ptolemy divided an hour in 60 minutes and a minute in 60 seconds. I don't know who devided degrees into minutes and seconds.
Sigh. So much useless information in my head.

[Bamax]

Just curious... does b eing the being the 'captain' (because I don't know if you go solo or have any 'crew') of your own ship literally inform your writing at all?

I am only curious since at times it seems you are very familiar with the measurements involved when it comes to travel and that is at least one thing both space and sea travel have in common among other things (like limited supplies/fuel etc).

You flatter me. But I'm only a skipper. Or a yachtie, liveaboard, bluewater cruiser, sea gypsy. A captain has 4 bars on his/her shoulders.
I sail solo. I don't mind people, but having one of them (me) aboard my boat is enough. I can still have conversations though. I just have to stay awake for a couple of nights and I will have the most interesting conversations. I had one with my deceased grandmother once and one with a christmas tree. Hallucinations due to sleep deprivation. It's funny how a christmas tree is a very normal person until you realize that you're hallucinating. Then you feel real stupid.

But since the invention of AIS (automatic identification system) this is in the past. I set the alarm and go to sleep. I only stay awake now while sailing along a coast.

Yes, I put some of my experience in the design of the stealth ships and behaviour of the crew in my writings. StarTrek TNG for instance has always annoyed me. There are 3 crews aboard a merchant ship for instance. One's on duty, one's off duty and one is asleep. Yet every single episode of that series has Picard, Riker, LaForge, R2Data2, etc. on duty. And every problem they encounter can be solved by rerouting power from the warpcore through the deflector dish. Blegh.

Oh well.

I see you wrote "ship". I see journalists doing this a lot as well. A submarine is always a boat. A sailing vessel is only a ship if it has at least three masts that are cross rigged. It's enough for a mast to have only a single cross rigged sail to count. As for motor vessels: things are more complicated and we have to distinguish between river vessels and sea going vessels. I'm not going into the river vessel category, because there's no single widely accepted definition and debating it with skippers will get you into fights. But for seagoing vessels: if a vessel's empty weight is at least 500 tonnes it is categorised as a ship.


Only the bottom-left one is a ship.

Trivia: why is a nautical mile 1852 meters, why do we use this ridiculous unit of length, what does it have to do with ancient Sumer and how many minutes form the circumference of the earth?

SpoilerShow

The circumference of the earth is 360 degrees * 60 minutes = 21,600 minutes, which is also the circumference in nautical miles. One minute on a great circle (a great circle divides a sphere in two equal halves) is one nauticaul mile.
This is why Mercator charts are used: measure a minute from the vertical side of the chart and you have 1 nautical mile.
The number 60 (and thus 360) is used because the Sumerians used the sexagesimal system. Something about the number 60 being holy. They passed it on to the Babylonians. Then the Egyptians divided the day in 12 segments (and the night as well). This had to do with the number of constellations (12) in the Egyptian zodiac.
Next come the ancient Greeks. Hipparchus was the one who divided the earth in 360 degrees. Back to the Egyptians: Ptolemy divided an hour in 60 minutes and a minute in 60 seconds. I don't know who devided degrees into minutes and seconds.
Sigh. So much useless information in my head.

For a writer... I dare say no amount of information is useless since you can share the knowledge.

That is the whole point of information.... to share.

Sure it may be useless on the day to day, but if you ever wanted to use it or employ any of it in fiction you already know it whereas I would have to look all that stuff up first.

[G. Janssen]

Hmm. What tech level would you say that we (real Humanity anno 2022) have and, more importantly, how do you know?

By the simple rule of elimination, we have the highest tech level out of all the known civilizations.

Well, maybe except for the ones which built the vimanas.

I can imagine that contact with an alien civilization will trigger a scientific debate to introduce a formal scale. And since the Kardashev scale is outright bonkers, the science community would be looking for something more realistic.

In my version of the Outsider universe, the science community did after first contact with the Orgus and hearing about other species. And because all scientists are nerds and all nerds play role playing games, it didn't take long for the scientists to suggest to use the systems from role playing games as a base. After many debates they settled on one that uses 12 levels.

Meanwhile the Loroi adopted one that uses 16 levels after contact with the Historians, mainly because they use a base 8 numerical system. Song is using that one.

There, I got out of that predicament.

A formal scale is a bit difficult to implement, since no sane civilization would disclose enough information about them for such an assessment to be anywhere exact. A ranking on the Kardashev scale, however, would be plain to see. Anyway, that's just a tiny nitpick on my part, pay it no further heed.

Damn your criticism! It made me purchase and install Bibisco, get a Grammarly account, exchange enthusiastic for serious and abandon writing on the phone.
Doing so showed me that
- my writing still sucked because of numerous typos and situations that weren't properly constructed
- you were right about the quotation marks
- battalion is spelled "battalion" and not "batallion" (I wish I got a Euro for every time that I misspelled it)
- an American AI is better at getting rid of typos than a Dutch NI (Natural Intelligence)

I'm currently rewriting everything. Will re-upload when ready.

I'm using LibreOffice on my laptop, and then have a BBcode converter plugin replace all italics with the [ i ] [ /i ]

I have LibreOffice, but had no idea that something like a BBcode converter exists. Is it this one?
https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/e ... how/bbkode

[Snoofman]

Hmm. What tech level would you say that we (real Humanity anno 2022) have and, more importantly, how do you know?

By the simple rule of elimination, we have the highest tech level out of all the known civilizations.

Well, maybe except for the ones which built the vimanas.

I can imagine that contact with an alien civilization will trigger a scientific debate to introduce a formal scale. And since the Kardashev scale is outright bonkers, the science community would be looking for something more realistic.

In my version of the Outsider universe, the science community did after first contact with the Orgus and hearing about other species. And because all scientists are nerds and all nerds play role playing games, it didn't take long for the scientists to suggest to use the systems from role playing games as a base. After many debates they settled on one that uses 12 levels.

Meanwhile the Loroi adopted one that uses 16 levels after contact with the Historians, mainly because they use a base 8 numerical system. Song is using that one.

There, I got out of that predicament.

A formal scale is a bit difficult to implement, since no sane civilization would disclose enough information about them for such an assessment to be anywhere exact. A ranking on the Kardashev scale, however, would be plain to see. Anyway, that's just a tiny nitpick on my part, pay it no further heed.

Damn your criticism! It made me purchase and install Bibisco, get a Grammarly account, exchange enthusiastic for serious and abandon writing on the phone.
Doing so showed me that
- my writing sucked
- you were right about many things
- it's "battalion" and not "batallion" (The word that I structurally misspelled the most often)
- an American AI is better at getting rid of typos than a Dutch NI (Natural Intelligence)

I'm currently rewriting everything. Will re-upload when ready.

I'm using LibreOffice on my laptop, and then have a BBcode converter plugin replace all italics with the [ i ] [ /i ]

I have LibreOffice, but had no idea that something like a BBcode converter exists. I'll try finding it.

I’ve thought about getting Grammarly, but I’ve hesitated. For one thing I like to exercise my own grammatical skills because it forces me to think. Sure I make mistakes but there is a chance to learn from them. Shouldn’t a good writer try to construct his narrative on his own first? Learning to write and to write better without smart programs seems part of the process. If I were writing my own original work in the hopes of getting it published, perhaps then I would seek out Grammarly, but it feels like it takes away that human element as well as a human’s capacity to use critical thinking and creativity.

Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but that’s just my two cents.

[G. Janssen]

By the simple rule of elimination, we have the highest tech level out of all the known civilizations.

Well, maybe except for the ones which built the vimanas.

A formal scale is a bit difficult to implement, since no sane civilization would disclose enough information about them for such an assessment to be anywhere exact. A ranking on the Kardashev scale, however, would be plain to see. Anyway, that's just a tiny nitpick on my part, pay it no further heed.

Damn your criticism! It made me purchase and install Bibisco, get a Grammarly account, exchange enthusiastic for serious and abandon writing on the phone.
Doing so showed me that
- my writing sucked
- you were right about many things
- it's "battalion" and not "batallion" (The word that I structurally misspelled the most often)
- an American AI is better at getting rid of typos than a Dutch NI (Natural Intelligence)

I'm currently rewriting everything. Will re-upload when ready.

I'm using LibreOffice on my laptop, and then have a BBcode converter plugin replace all italics with the [ i ] [ /i ]

I have LibreOffice, but had no idea that something like a BBcode converter exists. I'll try finding it.

I’ve thought about getting Grammarly, but I’ve hesitated. For one thing I like to exercise my own grammatical skills because it forces me to think. Sure I make mistakes but there is a chance to learn from them. Shouldn’t a good writer try to construct his narrative on his own first? Learning to write and to write better without smart programs seems part of the process. If I were writing my own original work in the hopes of getting it published, perhaps then I would seek out Grammarly, but it feels like it takes away that human element as well as a human’s capacity to use critical thinking and creativity.

Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but that’s just my two cents.

I paid for Bibisco because it's not a subscription and it lets you enter any amount over 33 euros/dollars. As for Grammarly: I only have a free account. All it does in free mode is correct typos, although sometimes it does propose an alternative sentence. This is something that's normally only available to paying subscribers, but free accounts get to see the feature sometimes to seduce them to get a paid subscription. I noticed that accepting these lines will result in a very generic writing style and I haven't accepted any of thim. It's increased my opinion that a free account is enough.
Grammarly completely lacks the ability to read the mood and doesn't understand that certain words are added to emphasize things. Write "Little Timmy REALLY wanted a cookie." And Grammarly will suggest "Little Timmy wanted a cookie." Perhaps I should write a short text and accept all of Grammarly's suggestions and see how it turns out. It would probably be completely devoid of emotion. And the grammar correction sometimes screws up, resulting in mutilated words, which then get flagged again and, upon accepting the new suggestion, are mutilated even more, etcetera. So far I find that quite funny. But in general I like the grammar correction because the one that's built into Bibisco is very basic. Even words like "nervosity" aren't recognized. Bibisco's organizing features are however quite good.