As Road Warrior style, I imagine the space ships would look industurial with custom parts built from ruin stuff. And the space colonies look like post apocalyptic survivors wearing whatever is left. How about the space colonies are surivivors from a great intergalatic war, but they were left in ruins without law and order?
I don't think it's possible for "refurbished" spaceships built with custom parts and scrap. Because space itself is a deadly environment and takes a lot of expertise of many people to construct spaceship to protect it's occupants from radiation, debris, etc. Now colonists or survivors with gear Road Warrior style on a barren planet? I can say yes. I don't know if you're a video gamer or not but there's a video game series called Borderlands set on a planet called Pandora. It had these mutant prisoners that act like bandits using scrap and junk of what's left on the world from what I've remembered. Post-apocalyptic survivors on another world sounds like a good idea. Whether it was from war or just hard life on a new planet works out well.
A lot of extremely usefull text on these pages www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/stellarempire.php including examples from fiction, RPG materials and sociological theories...
A lot of extremely usefull text on these pages www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/stellarempire.php including examples from fiction, RPG materials and sociological theories...
When you get off Earth, you can get to anywhere else in the solar system with technology a small group could easily build. Reliable high-thrust chemical rockets are hard, low-thrust propulsion is relatively easy, and you can do a lot with tethers; if you're allowed to pre-position them around the solar system, you can theoretically get from planet to planet with no engine at all. With a galactic empire, your technology is basically magic, so you don't have to worry much about the laws of physics or engineering. You can't build a galactic empire unless you can travel at least 10-100,000 times the speed of light, because the Emperor can't boss people around if his orders take 100,000 years to get to the other side of the galaxy by radio. And no-one knows how to do that in this universe. So I'd have few problems with Mad Max finding a crashed warship from the galactic war, pulling out its Whizzo 2000 Warp Drive and stuffing it in his Ford Falcon.
This is a sub genre hard to write in. I think I have seen a book that touches on travel in space. Would it be recommendable to have just one on space colonies? I mean we can't live in space yet, so how has this genre developed? Sorry it is a hard question for me to understand. I think the book-based answer is my approach. I'm reminded of gateway, which I still have to dig up in my basement. I read it out because of the characters. I think though I recommend reading genres on this, without a doubt. Is there a better way to doing this without explaining science? Sounds like a narrative device or technology needs to somewhere in the story. Somewhere it must exist. I must re-read Ender's game I admit. So spaceships, and other devices could be in a space colony story.
I was going to suggest this! Specifically look at the Visigoths I think. In trying to differentiate themselves from Rome, they passed laws against Latin-'Barbarian' Marriage. Ironically, this was derived from a Roman law for the same reasons. Romanised barbarians after Rome were pretty much Romans, with all the customs and whatnot with their own local variations and quirks of culture intact. Whether they try or not to be like the mother country, they invariably end up being nearly indestinguishable from them. I'd suggest the colony would be no different than the homeworld, with a few local dialectical customs.
I read a very interesting history that made the case that the Roman Empire lives today in the ceremonies of the Catholic church.
You can add a little science, but some readers want to understand how it works. They only need enough info to be interested.
Of course they want to know how it works. But you can't give the readers everything they want, nor should you try. Unsatisfied craving can be better than a feast that doesn't taste just right. And bullshit just isn't a lip-smacking morsel. What the reader needs to know is how the technology interacts with the story. Capabilities and limitations.
Just make sure the science is believable enough of you will get too many readers critical of your sci-fi. That would take a lot away from enjoying a story.
I also came up with a unique space travel idea for the star ships. Instead of faster than light speed or worm holes, the ships teleport to diferent locations from one point to the other. It is similar to the basic Star Trek principal; the ship gets broken down into atomic level and gets transfer through faster than light frequency, until it reaches its location and reforms into its basic shape. The ships and everybody a board it basically have to be destoryed and cloned in order to travel faster. However, the ship can only travel to known locations based on its navigation computer, or else it might teleport into an asteroid or another vessel. The Doctor's ship, from Doctor Who, also does that when he travels through time and space.
You might want to revisit the wormhole as a plausible system. Reassembling the human body at a rate of several million atoms per second would still take longer than the projected lifetime of the universe. As Krauss points out in The Physics of Star Trek, if you were to convert a human body into energy, the amount of energy released by that mass would be equivalent to 100,000 1,000 megaton hydrogen bombs. I imagine for a starship the energy would be enough to tear a hole in the universe and let in Cthulhu. This article sums it up in a nicely humerous way http://www.cracked.com/article_19626_6-realities-teleportation-star-trek-didnt-warn-us-about_p2.html Worm holes are a much more plausible alternative and you don't need the power of a thousand suns to make them work.
