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Feudal Stars


Steve

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It appears that my Old School Traveller background is showing, in asking about parcelling out the galaxy. Based on my given travel tech, humanity would actually be more like islands in a sea of stars, perhaps a bit like how the Honorverse is divided up.

 

The Navigators Guild and the Communications Guild are not hive minds. They do get involved in plotting and scheming, but I was thinking they might be more like advisors to each feudal lord. Communications are routed through them, but there is also a courier service of starships as a backup. Perhaps the couriers are even part of the Communications Guild.

 

Having ships and drives built by rote is a possibility I had not considered. I was actually thinking there might be some competition for ship and drive designs going on between companies spread out among the Imperium.

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Thinking about shoals:

 

Shoals will arise by chance from stars coming near each other, but these might be quite small (depending on how far apart the stars can be to produce this effect).

 

You'll get shoals that encompass hundreds of stars from open clusters: stars that formed together from the same cloud of interstellar gas, but have not yet drifted apart. The Pleiades and Hyades are the best-known examples. Open clusters typically have masses a few hundred times that of the Sun, in a volume less than 10 parsecs across. The "Double Cluster" is especially large, with 900-1000 solar masses each.

 

Problem: Most open clusters are very young. Some, like the Pleiades, are mere tens of millions of years old. No planets yet! Others are hundreds of millions of years old. Planets are still forming, their orbits might not be stable yet, you might get Late Heavy ombardment episodes as the outer planets sort themselves out, or there might still be spare protoplanets drifiting around. Crusts will still be very thin, with intense vulcanism. Nothing even remotely habitable unless you terraform it. But, humanity's had 10,000+ years for terraforming. Open clusters might be powerful kingdoms due to having so many stars and worlds in such a small space.

 

(There is also at least one open cluster known, called M67, whose estimated age is in the billions of years. It's very rare for an open cluster to last that long, but the Milky Way is so gigantic there are undoubtedly others. Here, you might get dozens of habitable worlds ready to settle.)

 

Open clusters are puny, though, compared to globular clusters. These can have tens or thousands to millions of stars in a volume 10 or so parsecs wide. The globular cluster M22, located 3,100 parsecs from Earth, has an estimated mass 7 million times that of the Sun in a ball just 9 parsecs wide.

 

But globular clusters have the opposit problem from open clusters: They are too old, with an estimated age of around 10 billion years. The stars formed generations before the Sun, when the interstellar gas held much less heavy elements. They might not have any planets except gas giants. Hundreds of thousands of stars... but no place people could live, and not even any resources for building space habitats.

 

Finally, there's the galactic core. Stars are packed pretty tight there, though not as tightly as in a globular cluster. Still, there might be shoal hundreds of parsecs across, containing hundreds of millions of stars!

 

But just like the globular clusters, these are mostly very old stars. Again, there might not be any planets except for gas giants.

 

Though, who knows? This picture might change. Astronomers are getting awfully good at finding planets, and the new data is showing that most of what we used to think about planet formation was wrong.

 

(You also might have problems from the central black hole.)

 

I'd say you can get away with some dramatic license here. The question is, do you want globular clusters and the galactic core to be populous and, consequently, powerful? Or do you want to keep settlement out in the younger, more chaotic disk? An inhabited core tends to suggest an Asimov-style Galactic Empire, or Somtow Sucharitkul's "Inquestor" setting. An uninhabited core suggests a corresponding lack of a center for social or pilitical authority. That might be more appropriate for a quasi-feudal Galaxy with many competing centers of power.

 

Dean Shomshak

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Wow! That's a pretty amazing analysis of shoals. When I was initially considering them, I was thinking somewhat along the lines of how sci-if stories talk about how gravity wells often limit how close to a star you can get in hyperspace.

 

In this setting, each star has its own relatively small shoal, but a cluster of stars causes a more immense shared shoal zone. If you try and travel too deep in the Sea of Dirac and hit a shoal, it's bad. I haven't thought about specific penalties, but damage to the Minovsky Drive would be likely.

 

I think I might have the setting involve the spiral arms instead of the core. With a travel speed limit of about two parsecs per week in a shoal, using the spiral arms would allow feudal holdings of as small as one or two stars and upwards to clusters of dozens of stars for the wealthiest principalities.

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Part of the reason I came up with shoals was my imagining of the Sea of Dirac as a means of FTL travel. There are things within its depths that don't approach stars, so they are safe zones from the monsters there. The idea of monsters in the deep gives it a nice mariner feeling and is also reminiscent of how 40K and Fading Suns present things. It's dangerous in the void between the stars.

 

I'm trying to figure out now how to calculate it. My current thought is to base it on our Sun's mass and volume, and that maybe the Oort Cloud is the edge of Sol's shoal. I'll have to look up its distance in AUs and some stellar masses to see if I can come up with something. It might be that even in a cluster there could be narrow paths of travel at deeper levels, but a much greater risk of "running aground" on a shoal.

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The Oort Cloud turned out to be further away from the sun than I thought. At one light-year distant, that might work as a shoal zone. I suppose I could simply multiply the size by a star's mass when compared to our sun. FTL travel is still possible within a shoal, but the speed is limited to about a light-year per day. In clear space away from stellar shoals, it goes up significantly, to about a light-year every thirty seconds.

 

There are even theories that speeds could go much higher when traveling between galaxies, but no one has tested this yet. Given the terrors lurking in the depths of the Sea of Dirac in our own galaxy, it is unknown what behemoths might exist between galaxies.

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The Oort Cloud turned out to be further away from the sun than I thought. At one light-year distant, that might work as a shoal zone. I suppose I could simply multiply the size by a star's mass when compared to our sun. FTL travel is still possible within a shoal, but the speed is limited to about a light-year per day. In clear space away from stellar shoals, it goes up significantly, to about a light-year every thirty seconds.

 

There are even theories that speeds could go much higher when traveling between galaxies, but no one has tested this yet. Given the terrors lurking in the depths of the Sea of Dirac in our own galaxy, it is unknown what behemoths might exist between galaxies.

You could use the kuiper belt. orbit is a bit beyond pluto so quite a ways out without being too far out using sub-light speeds.

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I'm actually okay with using a light-year as the edge of the Sun's shoal. A ship could run up to it at full FTL then have to slow down to  the safe speed in a shoal and take a day to cruise in system to Earth. Stars that are larger or smaller than Sol would have corresponding shoal zones. Clusters of stars that were close enough to each other would have a shared shoal, making travel slow in that region.

 

I might have an expedition to the Magellenic Cloud in the histories, showing the journey is possible. The Sea of Dirac might be even easier to navigate in the void between galaxies, although such a journey would take months and run the risk of unknown perils in such lonely darkness, thousands of parsecs from the Milky Way.

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Probably a better way to set political boundaries in a time when power matters at least as much as legal niceties is to have boundaries set by what a single political entity can control effectively (or at least not have any contest about who owns what). Given navigation times that are not simple functions of distance then you can have principalities that are scattered in a way that looks nonsensical when examined on a purely physical star map, but are actually unions of points that are easiest to get from one to another.

 

Then, frankly, you can have whatever associations you want between named stars and political entities, as long as you maintain consistency in terms of where the easy roads are and where the hazardous or difficult routes are.

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RE: Shoals

 

In John Ringo's Vorpal Blade series, they found a pocket of space where the gravitic pull of four stars in close proximity created an area of Standing Gravity Waves and debris was entering but unable to exit (so it was getting flung around at VERY high velocity). As the ship was using a Warp Drive, they had a devil of a time getting out.

 

Don't know if that helps

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Cancer raises the point of military force projection, which is a good one. One of the feudal nations could send vessels far from their home star(s) relatively quickly with the right path through the Sea of Dirac. Distance is not a factor, but speed of fleet movement is.

 

Can a vessel be detected before leaving FTL? I'm inclined to say yes, but only when it reaches a shoal. It's then at a "shallow enough" level to leave a wake of sorts that could be detected, but it would require picket ships at the edge of the shoal to report it. That would also require telepaths to transmit the report, since the invading vessel would outrun a radio or laser signal.

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Ah -- I missed that shoals also block access to the deeper/faster levels of the Sea of Dirac (though I should have figured that from the name). In that case, the Core is not just uninhabitable: It's less accessible, too, because ships are limited to the slowest rate of FTL.

 

As for what might luk in the super-deep levels made accessible between galaxies, I remember the warning from the Chaldean Oracles:

 

Step not down, therefore, to the Darkly-Shaining World: Beneath is spread the Deep, forever formless, lightless, foul, joying in illusion, irrational, precipitous and sinuous, ceaselessly whirling around its own maimed depth, eternally wed to a shape inert, not breathing, and Void.

 

The ancient tale of the Magellanic expedition might be a horror story!

 

On a more practical level, I did some calculations about star density in open clusters. The Pleiades has an estimated mass of c. 350 solar masses in a volume 4 parsecs wide: That works out to an average of 1 solar mass per 3.3 cubic light-years. The Pleiades are a young and dense cluster, though. For M67, the oldest known open cluster, the density is only 1 solar mass per 7.7 cubic light-years. Other clusters have even lower densities. Though, stars aren't arranged homogeneously in a cluster, either. (Denser in the center, sparser at the fringe.)

 

You could have wiggly shoals and "channels" interpenetrating in a cluster, but that might be more complication than you want. It might be easier just to say that the stars being so closely packed "spreads out" the shoaling effect to suffuse the entire cluster, even if not every star is close enough to other stars to share a shoal if they were alone. It's rubber science, you can make up the rules you want. (And the stars in a cluster are still much closer together than is usual, judging by the map I made of stars within 25 LY of Sol. Especially given all the red dwarf stars, it's more like 1 solar mass per some hundreds of cubic LY.)

 

Dean Shomshak

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As things develop in my thinking, the Sea of Dirac is making for a good mariner way of looking at star travel. Around each star is a shoal of roughly one light-year in radius per solar mass, although I might modify this calculation in the case of stars over five-ten times the mass of Sol. In that shoal zone, FTL speed tops out at about a light-year per day.

 

In the case of clusters, I could see smugglers and pirates making use of risky passages that allow for faster travel. Other vessels would limit themselves to the slower rate, so passage through a cluster would be very slow.

 

Once away from the shoals, the next region would be something like the "galactic shelf" instead of the continental shelf in Earth's oceans. Much higher rates of speed are possible, and moving between the spiral arms of the galaxy would probably be the fastest zones. Things swim in those depths, dangerous things that star travelers need to be wary of.

 

Away from the galaxy, the true deeps of the Sea of Dirac become accessible as the gravity plane drops off immeasurably. Behemoths and dark things lurk in those depths, far from the light of the distant stars.

 

Yes, the expedition to the Magellenic Cloud was probably a horror story. If they took telepaths with them to report back, I could imagine fearful cries about things in the deep being the last transmissions and then silence.

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I find myself very tempted to have the Imperium lacking an Emperor but not devolved into civil war, so that it more resembles post-Roman Europe than the days of Imperial Rome. Instead of an Emperor, a Council of Lords runs things, negotiating with each other and keeping a relative peace, perhaps acting as an interim regency of sorts, maybe one that has been going on for some time.

 

Each Lord is a Prince that controls a significant portion of the Imperium. Below them are their vassals: Dukes, Barons, Counts, etc. Below them are the yeoman class, peasantry and serfs.

 

Perhaps to make it easier on myself, I could take a page from the Hyborean Age and use existing Earth cultures as the basis for the various interstellar kingdoms.

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I think I'm going to steal a notion from 40K and (I think) Fading Suns on the origins of humanity's psionics. Exposure to FTL space changed mankind, especially in 40K.

 

In the universe of Feudal Stars, psionics had its birth after mankind was exposed to the Sea of Dirac. The earliest expeditions outwards from Sol stayed close to the Sea's surface due to the limits of electronic navigation. Moving at one light-year per day, humanity expanded into the galaxy.

 

After a few generations, the descendants of these early pioneers began exhibiting extra abilities. Telepathy and Clairsentience were by far the most common gifts, but limited forms of Telekinesis were also displayed. The source of the abilities appeared to be an unexplored gene sequence that had been mutated somehow by exposure to the Sea of Dirac and the energies of the Minovsky Drive. Over time, such people learned to control their gifts and established institutions to teach those possessing such powers.

 

One such institution was the Communications Guild, originally founded under another name and begun to help young telepaths control their abilities. Another was the Navigator Guild, started by a corporation existing then as a means of improving FTL speeds.

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I'm thinking the two guilds would want to maintain their monopolies, so I think it would probably be a requirement. However, they would also give their protection to individual psionics, so it's not without benefits.

 

The only exception I could see might be one of the nobility exhibiting psionic powers. In that case, perhaps they have a treatment to remove such abilities as another way to maintain their monopolies.

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The other possibility is forced induction, even for nobility. Depending on how I present the guilds, they could be like the Old Republic's Jedi Order or Dune's Spacing Guild. Giving the two guilds the trappings of religion might not be out of place, given the feudal setting.

 

I always liked SpaceMaster's Truthsybils, an all-female order that worked for the Galactic Court of Humanity in that setting.

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It'd be more interesting if noble offspring with psionics had to be executed to maintain the status quo with the guilds.  Then once in a while when a noble kid manifests psionic powers, the family tries to hide him or flee to the colonies...

It gets more interesting if the psionic is the sole heir. Normally, the guilds would not interfere with succession, but what happens in this case?  :think:

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Actually, you could handwave it away, saying that if both genes are active the person doesn't survive puberty; there's always an unconscious attempt to navigate to the location of someone you "hear" from, which is invariably lethal.

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