List of nearest stars, but not what is close to them
SolStation.com allows you to determine which stars are close to a given star - i.e., it is not Sol centric.
Stars and planetary systems in fiction lets you know how other authors have used the systems.
I was trying to decide where the first interstellar probe would [...]
Title says it all. I got in all of the notes and I now have a good grasp on where some of the ideas fit and where some do not.
I have several one line story pitches, but no clue as to where to go. I seem to have a detailed culture, economic battle ground, etc [...]
Also, in the back of my mind is the thought that the Sol system does not have a slingshot. So to trade with Earth, you need to first travel a short distance to another system.
The implications are huge:
The Earth could be very isolationist, much like America in the first half of the 21st Century.
I want [...]
A slingshot is the act of using a Congruency Hole to travel from one system to another.
The twist to a using a slingshot (congruency hole is the technical term and slingshot is the popular usage) is that unlike a jump point, it can take you to two fixed destinations instead of just one.
Each slingshot has [...]
So a title just came to me, Pandora’s Boxes. I was on my way to bed and realized it wouldn’t keep until the morning.
The premise of the research ships is that they are sent out into space to explore. But the project is secretly funded to conduct dangerous and unethical research. As these floating derelicts [...]
So I just re-read the Antares Dawn and Antares Passage by Michael McCollum and to my dismay I realized my idea of having an event disrupt the transit points between systems. Only in the case of Antares, it is a supernova, and in my universe, it would be the work of a civilization.
Oh, I need [...]
In fiction, holes in space between two systems are called:
Gates
Jumpgates
Stargates
Wormgate
Wormholes
Portals
Subspace tunnels
Boom tubes
Fold space
In looking through my notes, I see I’ve used the acronym of CH. I scoured my notes trying to figure out what it stood for and found I started calling them slingshots.
I also found that I called the natives Grubbers and at [...]
In January 2005, we vacationed in Maui. In Lahaina, there is a mall called Whaler’s Village. It has a small museum - the Whalers Village Museum - which provides a pretty bleak overview of a whaler’s life.
I’ve taken notes from that trip and a couple of others. I was struck by how easily we could [...]
I started a webcomic today - Scoundrals on Inner Dialog Workshop. Since I can’t draw, the idea is to use cut and paste head shots and work on dialog. I find dialog hard because of the whole ‘he said’ thing. I did an exercise back in my high school creative writing class where I treated [...]
There was a recent Pearls Before Swine comic (11/28/2007) that touched on blogging in general and how it related to writing. To paraphrase it, Rat thought Goat blogged because he was frustrated that he was not a good enough of a writer to get published.
I’ve struggled with trying to get published, which doesn’t mean I [...]
