Another historical influence that can be applied would be the Range Wars. The cattle barons and their drivers (cowboys), thought they too had a perfect trade system going on. The cattle were self replenishing and both feeding and watering them was free on the open ranges.
In a broad sweep, we can say that barbed wire [...]
I’m starting to get a sense for Abby Brill. (No idea where the name Abby came from, but the Brill is from Super DJ Dmitri aka Dmitri Brill. “Groove is In the Heart” happened to be playing and Kirby was too American.) She was supposed to die, but now I’m not too sure.
I focused heavily [...]
The fallacies about the Spacer ACC turning directly into Clan traders are:
Time loss (on the order of years)
10,000 crew is a town or small-city
Manufacturing, not trading
Distilleries are still a cool idea
Manufacturing product while traveling?
I think I mentioned it before, but the ACC at first have to be explorers and the life lines between colonies.
As the [...]
The distance is what is eating me up. That and the fact that I’ve set up the ACCs to be self-sufficient.
Say that the drive technology is lost to the Terrans (so they are limited to 0.25c) and the Spacers just do not have the infrastructure. Still no reason to trade - what would they [...]
One thing that could be a factor would be to have the technology lost for making the engines for the Asteroid Ships. They know how to soup them up, but they don’t know how to make them. Or they don’t know how to make the machines to make them.
The impact would be that the total [...]
One of the things floating back in my head is that while sub-FTL time dilation effects are well understood, perhaps the slingshot effects are not.
Consider that you go in and come out in one of three states:
Classic time dilation - ignore the fact that we can’t predict what would happen here.
No dilation at all - [...]
Ignore how many Spacers there are before 2089. Once we reach it, 3,000 people are emigrating daily - which is 1 million a year.
25 years of emigration would put the population at least at 25 million. Which is still a drop in the bucket compared to 12 billion on the planet. Either something happens to [...]
It may end up looking more like a timeline, but that outline was the hardest writing exercise to date. I can typically think in terms of short stories - in this case the opening ones for Jenny and Dagar. But putting down the rough outline of a novel in one sitting is both exhilarating and [...]
2075 - In response to repeated accidents at research universities and laboratories, legislation is passed to severely curtail Earth based research. Fearing regulation even in space, companies start launching deep space research labs. Some of these are launched as survey ships to Alpha Centauri and Bernard’s Star. The crews range from 30 - 100 [...]
I want a matriarchal system for the Clans, which means that the needs of women in the workforce can not be overruled by their need to bear and rear children. In the Atares series by McCollum, Alta women did not serve in the Navy because during the frontier days, they needed to have 10 children [...]
