Prologue
Tarbos, 2356 CE
A tense but long-lasting peace followed the First Galactic War. While diplomatic relations were established between the Confederacy and the Grugell Empire, the relationship remained tentative.
Aided by the newfound ability to calibrate scanners to function during subspace transits, cross-border traffic became somewhat more enthusiastic. In a robust display of market economics, each side swiftly discovered that the other had commodities worth trading for. An illegal but brisk trade developed, with Grugell wines, art, weapons, and other goods coming into the Confederacy, and Confederate electronics, computers, and other high-tech equipment flowing into the Empire. The Confederate Navy set up a regular patrol along the Grugell frontier, but intercepting smugglers along the billions of cubic light-years of space was hopeless. More disturbing, the Navy had for some time suspected that cloaked Grugell ships routinely violated the border.
The Navy still patrolled the area, with Task Force 947 maintaining a presence at “Alpha Station,” an area of space between the closest settled worlds on either side. To support this operation, a major naval base was established on New Wichita, an agricultural world on the Confederate side of the line.
It was a Confederate Navy medical cruiser, the CSS Charity, which was present at the incident that first gave evidence to an ancient, almost forgotten legend, and provided the first hints that there was a guiding influence that may have manipulated events in human society for a thousand years.
The years following the “Ionescu incident” saw the Confederacy distracted by a sharp increase in pirate traffic out of the unaffiliated Rim Worlds, as the human presence in the Galaxy began its second wave of expansion outside the borders of the Confederacy itself.
—Morris/Handel, A History of the First Galactic Confederacy, University Publications, 2804 CE
Following are selected excerpts from Morris/Handel, A History of the First Galactic Confederacy, University Publications, 2804 CE, and selected popular news media from 2350-2354 CE.
Morris/Handel: 2350, Subspace Scanning
Interstellar travel had for years been hampered by the inability to use standard scanning technology while in subspace transit. From 2341 to 2350, the Confederate Navy Department poured billions of Confederate dollars into research, which paid off in 2350 with the development of a series of algorithmic software filters that were able to translate the seeming gibberish of subspace into data that the human mind could comprehend. Ships could now detect other ships in subspace, and while transit speeds made it impossible to identify or interact in any way with ships on tangential courses, the capacity made tight-formation jumps and convoy operations much easier. Ships on parallel trajectories were now able to track and trade messages with each other.
Within three Standard Years, the Navy discovered that the Grugell had managed to steal the technology, swiftly erasing the tactical advantage. Thus, the technology race continued.
Affiliated Galactic Press, Mountain View, Tarbos, January 1, 2354
In a press conference held this morning, Secretary of the Navy Roland Adams revealed that armed and cloaked Grugell frigates have intruded on Confederate space twice in the last Standard Year. Both ships were discovered only due to the partial or complete failure of their cloaking systems.
The transit of armed ships into Confederate space is a direct violation of the Treaty of Honshu, which allows only unarmed ships under diplomatic beacon. The president has issued a formal complaint to the Grugell emperor by hyperphone.
Morris/Handel: Unaffiliated Worlds
Prior to the passage of the Eminent Domain Act in 2408, entrepreneurs were free to open habitable worlds as private corporations. While the Rim Worlds were frequently cited as examples, the three Rim planets of Wilson, Last Chance, and Jinx were not settled in any organized fashion, but rather grew in place as an ad hoc society of smugglers, escaped convicts, Navy deserters, and various other brands of misfits.
Roman Holiday, on the other hand, was opened to settlement as a private corporation, registered as such with the Confederate government. Run by a shadowy cabal of individuals known only as “The Organization,” Roman Holiday’s local laws took the normal libertarian politics of the Confederacy one step farther. The world’s three cities developed rapidly as meccas for gambling, prostitution, and general vice.
Transcribed from the Navy Times, a Confederate Navy internal newspaper, August 23rd, 2354:
Item: Three new ships have been commissioned into active service in the last month: the medical cruiser Charity and the destroyers Robert E. Lee and Polena Tesch.
The Charity is the first in her class, with a crew of four thousand and the latest in medical technology. The new Charity-class ships will provide medical support to major task groups. Three more ships of this class are in construction.
The Charity is currently in shakedown and will be assigned to TF947.
The Robert E. Lee is a Reuben James-class frigate…
To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.
Nothing blew up.
🙁
Clearly this installment is a romance.
Obviously. It’s going to be set on a hospital ship, so there will be a Doctor-Nurse-Spacefighter Jock love triangle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pzKg7IxhNA
Having already read this, I really enjoyed it – very different than the previous stories in this setting but very cool.
cool
thanks again for sharing your stories with us
I second this! Thank you Animal!
They named a war vessel after Robert E. Lee?!
::faints::
That’s not right. Lee was an Army man, not Navy.
“…the three Rim planets of Wilson, Last Chance, and Jinx were not settled in any organized fashion, but rather grew in place as an ad hoc society of smugglers, escaped convicts, Navy deserters, and various other brands of misfits.”
Dunham in Spaaaaaaaaace!
So it is not only a romance, but a doorstopper too
OT – came across videos by a guy talking about sources of error in genome interpretation of ancient populations and what effect sample distribution and comparison models have on how a particular genome gets interpreted. Seems like a reasonable fellow, but he’s only been doing content since august and I don’t know enough to interpret the secondary information.
On one hand, I want to believe the work presented because it answers some of the “That doesn’t add up” claims of popular archeogenetics, and actually sounds supportable by the data, if the statements are true.
On the other hand, I recognize I can’t directly vet the work, and I discovered it by way of an interview given in a video the algorithm puked up on another channel I’d never heard of that turns out to be full of psuedoscientific garbage.
How do you measure “Actual science disagreeing with the concensus view” versus “crackpot” metrics with so litle sample size? It’s possible that the guy gave an honest interview with someone willing to hear him out without realizing “oh hey, this guy’s a bit unhinged”. It’s also possilbe he gave an interview with someone whose views he agrees with. Problem is the subject of the interview was the guy’s work and did not approach the psuedoscience topics the interviewers channel focuses on, so no data there.
Would I have believed the guy if I had directly discovered one of his two videos instead? Probably. Because it skews in favor of my interpretations of the available information (of which I am an admitted non-expert)
From the movie No Way Out –
“If we had programmed this to come out a car instead of a monkey, you’d be looking at a hairy Buick.”
I don’t get the reference.
It’s the same with genetics – we share 98-99% of DNA (with over 95% of base pairs matching exactly). Essentially, you could make the data come out any way that suits you and still claim the model performs well.
Still need to figure out this example.
Try this:
Scientists have been trying to cross a donkey with an onion. Most of the time they get a long-eared onion. But every once in a while they will get a piece of ass that will bring tears to your eyes.
No.
I am faaaar too lazy to start a philosophy column, but the Skeptics had a solution to this problem which was to determine if there was a point to believing or making decision in the first place.
Relatedly, and perhaps of interest to Bro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bO7ZAiqsCY
Well, the reason I want to assess the veracity of his content is because it determines whether I’d share it, or if I’d simply view it as entertainment.
From the am thread: Justin Amash has posted an explanation for his support of El-Sayed over Rogers:
“I have no soft spot for either of these guys.
I also don’t vote for ‘the lesser of two evils.’
I believe you should support a candidate only if you truly want the person to hold that office.
I’ve already voted, and consistent with the above principle, I didn’t vote for Rogers or El-Sayed [Note: I assume he voted for the LP candidate but he doesn’t say]. But I do know which one would be more dangerous in the U.S. Senate—and it’s not even close.”
That’s pretty clear. But the rest of the post is an evaluation of why Rogers is worse than El-Sayed. The reasoning is not totally clear to me, but it seems like some of it comes down to El-Sayed is maybe worse on a lot of things but he has no chance of getting those things passed into law. So Rogers is worse.
Dr Commu-Jihadi will vote for crap that would make this country objectively worse. He also stands for principles opposed to the foundational precepts of this civilization. He does not belong in office.
How is that working out in NYC, Justin?
Yeah, KMW managed to take that position too. She said she was voting against Trump in 2024 because he as an existential threat to liberty. Mamdami, OTOH, got a shrug from her: NYC, she said, would survive Mamdami.
Amash is full-throated open borders. There was a very brief period after he lost his house seat where he tried to play “level-headed libertarian” and said the L’s should acknowledge immigration trade-offs, but was clear the benefits far exceed the negatives.
That’s…pretty profoundly stupid from a systems engineering standpoint. It’s like saying, “I shouldn’t be concerned about running an old unsupported version of OpenSSL on my server, because the firewall will keep anyone from being able to exploit it.”
To think I used to rather admire Amash. Now he’s just another empty vessel, driven nuts by Trump and COVID.
he always struck me as a stalking horse for liberaltarinism.
A true poo member of the Reason staff, if you will.
If enough people took the “I’ll vote for the real wacko because he won’t be able to get anything done” route, the wackos might be able to get things done.
Yup.
And if enough people truly embraced real communism, we could finally have our Worker’s Utopia!
I’m sympathetic to your argument, but really anything that begins with, “If enough people…” should just be written off as fantasy. There will *never* be enough people.
real communism just needs to get rid of the wreckers and kulacks, then it will work as planned
And sooner than you think.
But the rest of the post is an evaluation of why Rogers is worse than El-Sayed.
He’s a Trumpublican, duh.