god i love railguns

aww thank you! depicting space stations as nice and interesting places to live is one of my passions so the gravity balloon / aerated cavern / hollow asteroid concept really spoke to me. i'm proud of those pieces. yes, it really is quite something how much room there is when you can build cities in 3D instead of on flat ground, right? 2 billion people can live together within the radius of NYC and still have a half kilometer of open air between them and their neighbors on any side. square cube law and all that.

my first brush with hard SF was Allen Steele's Coyote series, then i moved on to transhuman fiction with Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds, but i guess i didn't really grasp the distinction between "realistic" and "soft" SF until about the time i simultaneously discovered tabletop nerds and Atomic Rockets lol. i also got into Kerbal Space Program around that time which really cemented things i suppose. to a large degree i credit AR and KSP with teaching me math and research skills, which ultimately opened my learning horizons immensely, so i have a lot of respect for hard scifi and i was pretty obsessed with it for a long time. i'd still say i'm writing hard SF, or hard science fantasy, though i'm definitely a lot more open to fantasy and soft scifi. ultimately, i think you can come up with the math to justify anything if you think about it long and hard enough.

the "deeper" reason i prefer to draw "hard sf" spaceships that aren't just long tubes and spheres of pure NASAstuff (not that that's bad in itself, mind you), aside from pure aesthetics, is that i think hard SF has a tendency to sort of oversimplify complicated matters of design and strategy out of fear of being seen as unrealistic because of handwaving, due to not having sufficiently advanced specialized knowledge of every possible field (perhaps a possible feat but probably superhumanly difficult) and not being able to know the full details of future breakthroughs (simply impossible unless you invent real warp drives yourself etc). but i kind of think that a degree of handwaving is in itself more realistic than just extrapolating purely from what little i'm capable of learning about modern real science. something something 90 percent science, 10 percent magic i suppose. i don't rule out the possibility of figuring out how to explain it in depth at some point, but i'm not going to limit myself to that either. i think, after a certain point, it's more important to be open to unexplained detail and mystery than to be entirely accurate - real life is complicated and weird, and we certainly don't know anywhere close to everything about it, after all.

building on that, one of my predictions in Standard Candles is that by 3500 years in the future there will be big breakthroughs in manufacturing technology that make building advanced systems a lot easier, so there's a lot more freedom to design high-performance structures like spaceships that are weird and novel instead of hewing fairly close to the most stripped-down conservative platonic shapes possible. (although again, not to say that that's bad in itself.)

i can also always justify it on the basis of alternate physics in the multiverse (where even Magic is Real, after all), or unknown physics yet to be discovered, haha. plenty of hard sf authors already give a big exception to this for superadvanced AIs and aliens - so humans are fair game too.

bonus lore junk

here's the concept sketches i did to develop tazdev's space train / jumptender. i originally based this off of a sketch of what a Q-Drive ship would look like, but then i realized that these would be exclusively using much more speculative warp drive / Krasnikov tube FTL shit to get around for the most part, but the overall design still works i think. big magnets, long slender profile.

(why do the magnet loops look all fucked up and weird? is there a hard sci-fi™ reason for that? well yes sort of. i basically imagine that the magnets are a bit more complicated than a simple loop to help give better control of the field geometry. something like a stellarator i guess, which is what i was riffing off of visually. however i don't really have any "hard numbers" to back up the specifics of this, it's just an idea i feel like has some merit and more importantly i suppose, looks cool.)

if you have no idea what i'm talking about, a Q-Drive is one of a really fascinating family of speculative propulsion technologies called plasmadynamics, ranging from implementable basically tomorrow to stuff that will probably require multiple big breakthroughs. the basic idea of plasmadynamics is that if you have a magnet with a relatively small power source (on the order of a modern-tech fission nuclear reactor), you can use the magnet to attract plasma into a big cloud around your ship, making a much bigger magnet thousands of km wide (as big as a planet, basically) pushing against the ambient plasma in space (solar wind or interstellar medium). because this "plasma magnet / sail / wing" is so huge, it feels a HUGE amount of force from the ambient plasma despite it being so thin, giving you rocket-like acceleration (like, multiple gees are possible as i understand it) and letting you accelerate up to small percentages of the speed of light inside and out of the solar system for basically free. this could be done more or less with existing tech to my knowledge.

i'm still thinking about how to design this into my ships but i think i'm going to have this be the default in-system propulsion tech for Standard Candles vehicles.

Q-Drive lies a lot farther in the future, but basically the idea is that you can use plasmadynamics to make an extremely supercharged kind of rocket. if you have a really efficient particle accelerator, you can hook it up to a series of magnets to draw power from the aerodynamic drag on your plasma sails, meaning you get more power the faster you're moving (faster = more drag). it sounds kind of like troll physics but apparently there's no fundamental reason why this shouldn't work, but a particle accelerator efficient and powerful enough to make it happen is probably quite a ways off into the future. but basically, to sort of put it in videogame terms, unlike regular rockets that only ADD a certain amount of speed per unit fuel, Q-Drive MULTIPLIES your speed, which can give you a pretty crazy boost... especially when you can already sail to multiple percents of lightspeed for free.

as for the FTL stuff, that'll be for another post... keep an eye out perhaps lol