Hello everyone,
Been back among those stars again. I had more thoughts too but first … will this be the thumbnail !
The pondering is because the thumbnail system seems to have a few Interesting Quirk things to it. Last time, it showed the Star Trek Online pic as the thumbnail, instead of it being the first pic. But I think that was down to the first two not coming out of my Google Photo bank properly. I wonder …
Nope. Didn’t work that time. I added in another widget that lets me choose pictures from that Google Photo Bank without intermediary steps. Looks like it might need more work.
I need to add in a lists widget too so that I can copy over the lists from Blog Mk 1. And I need to tidy up all of the extra things added in with the import. Later 🙂
There may also have been Star Trek happening. I left it last time with the Sylvia Tilly … Since then there’s been the Amna Patel :
Watchers of Voyager may recognise that as a Prometheus class ship. The name comes from one of the earlier episodes of Star Trek Online, Amna Patel appears in (spoiler deleted). The latest ship is the Drake :
Looks a bit ugly doesn’t it … Should be pretty punchy though. This one arrived yesterday and because I’m having to heavily ration my game time at the moment, not much happened with this one.
What’s happening outside of the games ? Bit of catching up with series like Away, The Witcher. Actually watched Avengers Endgame again tonight, it’s just finishing up at the moment. A suitable conclusion to that particular saga.
Plus I’m making my way through Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds as well. That future universe has spaceships too and the biggest ones belonging to humans are the lighthuggers, starships that cross the interstellar gaps at near light speed (faster than light isn’t something they do in that universe). Objectively, it takes years but subjectively, only weeks or months. Hopefully that’s the right way round for the way that works.
Anyway, the lighthuggers feel like they’d look like massively scaled up versions of the Imperial Cutter … a cylinder, tapering at the ends, with a pair of engines mounted on spars to each side of the hull.
There we go from another angle. It’s a pretty ship. The lighthuggers would be scaled up considerably from there. The Elite Imperial Cutter is a chunky 192.6m long. The lighthuggers would vary in size but would typically be 3-4km long, with space for crew, weapons, cargo, parasitic craft (bigger than the Cutter) and room for all sorts of other shenanigans in there too. Way too big for landing on planets like the Elite ships.
One random thought that got in though would be … if I were actually living in these science fiction universes, what would I be doing ?
If it were Elite, I’d follow the player path and start in the cheap loaned ship before making my way up the scale. I’d be living by my wits, travelling from place to place, following the trade and missions. I’d be chief engineer, pilot, captain, CEO. Unless someone came along who would share that captain, CEO role.
It feels kinda like it might if I switched to living on a Dutch Barge here, although I don’t think going from place to place, trading out of a Barge is particularly viable economically any more. Perhaps you might get some niche out of videoing trips and monetising that … but I’m not convinced that would gain a significant enough audience.
In the Alastair Reynolds universe, I’d probably end up as a starship mechanic. I’d be quite happy with that. Same for Elite too, it’d be good working on the various spaceships out there.
Star Trek ? Probably an engineer on a starship again.
One difference would be the connectivity. We benefit hugely in our time from the internet, although even that is perhaps in the last 10, maybe 12 years or so. The internet in its current shape has been around for decades now but the big change for me has been the increase in video and streaming media. Youtube took a while to take off, the oldest subscriptions I tend to see on Twitch go back about a little over 6 years. Netflix didn’t start streaming until maybe 2007.
Things have changed a fair bit. The internet model works for our planet, as lightspeed delay isn’t a factor. But when you have an interstellar civilisation, or even interplanetary, that light speed delay would cut into the immediacy of communications. If the Netflix server were on Earth and you were on Mars, it would be between 3 and 22 minutes for the “I want to watch The Witcher!” command to be received and the same time for the signal to come back, depending on whether Earth and Mars are on the same or different sides of the Sun. Or it would be years for a lightspeed message to go between stars.
Maybe that pilot, chief engineer, captain, CEO set of roles would expand to become interstellar postman.
You’d file a flight plan to say that you’re going through a sequence of interstellar jumps and they’d load you up with the mail, to be sent on at each jump.
Might well work too ! Back to an interstellar equivalent of the Stagecoaches.
On that note, time to dive into book again after hitting publish and doing the necessary on the various sites. (Actually – time to dip into Star Trek Online to do today’s daily mission !)