Fighting in the Ether

So, as mentioned in my last post, I’ve lately been reading a book called EW 101, which is an excellent introductory primer on electronic warfare in the modern (give or take a decade, the book was published in 2001, and even then probably wasn’t able to talk about the truly cutting edge of EW world).  It’s impressive how much, even 10 years ago, aerial and naval combat had become extremely EW-centric, but it makes sense – when fights are decided by homing smart missiles and the difference in missile technology between two opposing forces can result in the difference in engagement ranges between them being measured in 10s of miles, the ability to prevent your opponent from locking on to you is an absolute necessity for the side with a shorter range (and, conversely, the ability to penetrate ECM is extremely valuable to the longer-ranged side – i.e. us).

Besides targeting and jamming, EW takes several other, highly-important forms.  For one thing, since everyone is targeting each other with radar, detecting and locating radar emitters is the best and fastest way to figure out where your enemies are before they actually, say, fire a missile at you (at which point it may be a little late).  On its own, direction-finding can be done in a lot of ways – like having multiple directional receivers pointing in different directions, having an extremely directional receiver rotate, or having an omnidirectional receiver rotate and doing clever tricks with doppler shift to figure out when the antenna is moving towards the emitter and when it’s moving away.  Of course, even given direction, finding distance can be a lot trickier – without knowing the initial strength of a signal, we can’t tell how far away it’s coming from.  Triangulation can solve this if you have the luxury of multiple stable receivers at widely spaced points, but for platforms like aircraft, you generally have to rely on trying to figure out what type of equipment is generating the signal and use intelligence about that equipment’s signal strength – which is vulnerable to deception, if an enemy deliberately sends a lower-powered signal to appear farther away than they really are.

Another big application of EW is communications-jamming.  When an aircraft is near a base, it may be relying primarily on intelligence from more powerful and stable antennas on the ground, so removing its ability to communicate by flooding the airwaves with competing signals can deny it a lot of intelligence.  Countermeasures to this are mostly based around the idea of spreading a communication all over the frequency-spectrum fast enough that it’s hard to keep jamming targeted on the correct frequency range – forcing the enemy to jam a much wider spectrum, and thus reducing the effective power of their jamming.

This last type of EW specifically is having a big effect on AI research currently.  As bad as it is for a manned plane to lose contact with the ground, it’s far more disastrous for an unmanned drone, which is being remotely piloted, to lose signal.  Despite movies like Stealth, backup AI systems for automating at least basic defensive protocols for unmanned drones to keep them from being sitting ducks when jammed are slowly being researched.  The future is getting very near now, and it involves robots with missiles.

Still Alive

As you may have noticed, this blog has gotten a little cobwebby, but it’s not quite dead yet!  Between travel and personal commitments, I’ve been low on blogging time, but I should be getting back into the swing of things soon.  I’ve been reading a fascinating book on basic Electronic Warfare for work, so hopefully sometime later this week I’ll have the time to put up a post on it – it really is pretty interesting.

Nuclearpunk

A few months ago, my girlfriend and I went to visit a battleship museum in North Carolina, where you could go aboard the U.S.S. North Carolina and crawl around the insides and the turrets and see all sorts of fascinating stuff (I’m still kicking myself for not taking pictures, but we hadn’t brought a digital camera on the trip).  After the trip, we found ourselves agreeing that there was something amazingly compelling about the structure of these ships – they’re so amazingly densely packed, every cubic centimeter of space used for something – and we started thinking about it in terms of steampunk.

Now, I’m in general a fan of steampunk, even if I’ve had issues with it through the years (my main pet peeve: gears that just don’t do anything), and after seeing something like the North Carolina, I was bound to start thinking about it again through the lens of the steampunk style.  Flying battleships are a setpiece of Steampunk, but admittedly one that’s never made a huge amount of sense to me – I’m not opposed to suspension of disbelief, but I’ve seen enough blimps and other lighter-than-air craft that the concept of a dirigible warship just doesn’t work for me, based solely on size and weight.  Between that and the much more industrial feel of the battleship I’d just seen, we ended up talking about a different kind of aerial battleship, a little more in line with the realities of flight, and settled on the idea of the flying wing designs of WWII and the era following it (like this one, which never made it out of prototyping, but flew at least).

Now, part of the reason why aerial battleships are so much more romantic and cool-seeming than plain old massive bombers, I decided, was the idea of their extended deployment.  Sea vessels like the North Carolina would be out on the ocean for months at a time, their own little self-contained cities that were fertile ground for stories of all sorts, between the stresses of war and the oddly prosaic nature of life on them (one plaque in the North Carolina related one sailor’s explanation of the various ways one could get around the strict regulation haircuts by unofficially tipping the barbers).  A few months previously I had been reading Charles Stross’ novella A Colder War (available online here), which had introduced me to the Cold War era Project Pluto and it suddenly came back to me with the idea of massive flying wing-shaped nuclear powered aerial battleships.

I think of this setting-seed as nuclearpunk – after all, nuclear power was as mysterious and magical when it first showed up as steam power was in its day – but in reality, given the way some nuclear plants generate power, it could honestly still be considered a subset of steam-powered sci-fi.  Stephanie and I haven’t really developed it beyond the mental picture of those flying battleships and the ideas of the social and ecological consequences of something like WWI fought with a massive number of nuclear-powered vessels and tanks, but I think it has some potential, and I’m going to try to flesh it out later.

Wars, terminology, and some thoughts on writing settings

Wars

Depending on whether you ask in Syndicate or TCA territory, the First Terran-Syndicate War either refers to the three-year-long guerrilla war in the Syndicate’s home system against the forces of the Colonial Fleet ‘Goldrush’, or the twenty-year-long war that began when Syndicate forces attacked Earth eleven years later.  The difference in opinion on naming conventions is based on a more fundamental disagreement between the two interstellar powers on who, precisely, started what.  The TCA holds that the actions of the Goldrush fleet were in violation of colonization law and taken without the sanction of the Colonization Authority, the bureau that, in time, became the heart of the new Colonial Alliance.  The Syndicate, on the other hand, holds the TCA responsible for the actions of Goldrush and thus considers their war against it their first war against Terra.

Whatever name it goes by, the war between the Horizon Syndicate and the newly founded Colonial Alliance (renamed the Terran Colonial Alliance after the destruction of Earth) remains arguably the most profound influence on Terran-Syndicate relations to this day.  Though initially outnumbered and behind on military technology, the Syndicate had the advantage of striking first, and their initial attack on Earth had the effect of severing lines of communication between many of its colonies – but also of galvanizing the colonies, which otherwise had little in common, into alliance.

It’s unclear precisely what chain of events led up to the infamous orbital strike, but by the time the hastily-coordinated counterattack by colonial forces arrived in the Sol system, Earth was already a burnt-out cinder, entirely devoid of life.

Terminology, and some thoughts on writing settings

When I’m trying to write up the background for a new setting, the temptation to work out precisely what happened and write it up as an unbiased, factual history is pretty hard to avoid.  The problem is, in my experience, doing that never actually results in a setting that ‘feels right’, and this is doubly so when dealing with two competing factions that disagree with each other over some key point of history.  Instead, I’m now trying to stick to not actually laying out for the players (or GMs, if someone else is running in a setting I came up with) any factual truth that isn’t available to some resident of the world somewhere.  Yes, I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking of various possible scenarios that account for the first war between the Syndicate and the colonization fleet, and others that explain why Earth got destroyed, but ultimately if I picked one and wrote it down, then unavoidably someone would be right, and someone would be wrong (and I think it’s always a bit of a cop-out when a setting falls back on the atrocity having actually been a blameless mistake, or the result of one monstrous person’s actions without any sort of back-up from home).

This ties in to something that I think is a basic part of writing a setting, which is deciding when you’re going to write forwards, and when you’re going to write backwards.  Writing forwards is when you start with a root cause, and you ask yourself ‘what happened because of this’ – this is the sort of thing you see in alternate history novels a lot, where the premise of the setting is ‘the South won the civil war, what happens to everything else’ or something.  The big advantage of this sort of writing is that you always have a fairly logical reason for things that happen in your setting – you generally won’t end up with the situation of having people say ‘this galactic empire doesn’t make any sense’, or ‘but why do the orcs hate the elves?’  On the other hand, you have the downside that, well, everything has to have a reason (and I explained my issues with that above), and on top of that, everything has to have a reason that you came up with, and that can be daunting for even the most creative writer.

The alternate approach is instead to start with what you want the world to look like, and go backwards, asking yourself ‘why might this have happened’.  If you do this, you have the advantage of being allowed to leave a few blank spots in the chain of reasoning, and also of keeping an eye on arguably the most important part of the setting – which is to say the final product that people are playing in.  The downside is that you may end up with exceedingly tenuous chains of logic trying to justify what seemed cool at the time.

Now, it’s a misrepresentation to say that I or anyone else writes a setting in one of these two ways and not the other – the actual process, in my experience, is more about bouncing back and forth between the two approaches as the setting develops.  For example, in the Terran-Syndicate setting, I started with the idea of the Syndicate as a theocracy run by the Church of Humanity’s Progress – and a lot more Warhammer 40K than it is now – opposed by the disparate and clannish forces of the Colonial Alliance.  After I wrote a first pass at a backwards history from there, I started going forwards from what I had again, and more and more I found the concept of a church-run theocracy being displaced by the new version of the Syndicate – a business-venture-turned-government with a strong religious component.

Any given setting I work on will go through two or three of these back-and-forth passes.  Usually I start with the final result I want, and start backfilling explanations, but before long I’ll start thinking about how the backfilled history implies new things in the ‘present day’ of the setting, and then I’m off again.  By now, the Terran-Syndicate setting is almost unrecognizably different from the first version I started with (which had three alien races, none of which were the one that exists in the current setting, which I haven’t talked about yet, and a much more Alliance-vs-Empire feel), but on the whole I think it’s a much more natural-feeling one.

Horizon Syndicate: Part 2

Religion

“The largest mineral deposits, the purest conditions to pursue new discoveries, the most profound natural beauties, none of these are found within the confines of a planetary gravity well.  Just as Homo sapiens evolved from those first sea-going creatures who ventured out onto the land, so shall Homo stellarum evolve from those of use brave enough to forsake the planetary cradle.  The universe awaits us.”

-Charles Sanchez, first CEO of the New Horizon Space Exploration Syndicate

The Church of Humanity’s Progress – the predominant religion of the Horizon Syndicate and most common religion in all human space – is a belief system centered around the precept that man’s place is among the stars.  The church as it is known today was born during the long deep-space trip of the original Syndicate colonists, and quickly took hold among a group self-selected for a strong belief in space exploration.  It was this new group that was behind the votes on 10 of the original 14 ships to slow and eventually halt the rotation that created artificial gravity in the colonist living quarters, and that led to the decision, upon arrival at the system that was to be the colonists’ new home, to largely forgo settling the human-habitable planet, in favor of using the colony ships as seeds for the construction of orbital habitats and factories out in the range of the asteroid belts.

It was as a result of this philosophy that when Commander Richard Cannon of the the Terran Colonization Fleet ‘Goldrush’ attempted to seize the system by force in the opening of the first Terran-Syndicate War, he found himself fighting a guerrilla war against an enemy with no fixed bases of operation and a large number of intra-system vessels that, while not designed for war, could be quickly repurposed.  During this war, it was also the Church hierarchy that served as the only centralized authority that a majority of the Holdings could agree on, a precedent which paved the way for the role of the Church in the Syndicate today.

Culture

The society modern Syndicate is a two-tiered structure, divided into the Heavyside and the Lightside (those living on planets and those in habitats).  While movement between these two groups is no longer as restricted as it was initially – when the heavysiders were primarily made up of the captive populations of conquered TCA colonies, kept in control by threat of orbital strike – it is nevertheless non-trivial.  Due to the prejudices of the lightside population and the simple fact that lightsiders are generally better-suited to life and work in zero-g environments, it is very difficult for a heavysider to find work in a station habitat unless they are truly exception or have a particularly rare skill.  The upshot of this is that generally only the most skilled heavysiders (and the most powerful, who can either afford not to work, or who are themselves employers) can hope to become part of the lightside – a situation which does nothing to reduce the prejudices of the lightsiders against those who remain on the surface.

The Heavyside

The major industry of the heavyside is agriculture, which tends to be more efficient than the hydroponic solutions used by the lightsiders, who are generally more concerned with oxygen production than food anyways.  The original heavyside population was made up of the captive TCA colonists during the second Terran-Syndicate war, who were used a labor body to produce food for the expanding Syndicate fleet and orbital installations, freeing up space previously used for hydroponics to be pressed into service for military production.  When the Treaty of Sol officially ended the second war, the Horizon Syndicate officially retained ownership of a large number of Terran colonies, but was required to offer free emigration for any former TCA citizens who wished to depart.  In order to prevent mass exodus, the Syndicate offered large land grants to any TCA citizen – in the conquered territories or not – willing to sign a contract to live on a Syndicate planet for a period of 20 years.  Many of the poorer members of the TCA, faced with the prospect of finding work in a labor force swelled both by the return of members of the military to civilian life and by the influx of emigres from the captured colonies, elected to take the offer.  The Syndicate has since repeated this pattern each time they have settled a new planet, offering substantial land grants to those willing to emigrate to the new territory.  The need to maintain the heavyside population in order to keep food production high has resulted in a reasonably high quality of life among the heavyside population even if they do find their career choices fairly limited.

Despite – or perhaps because of – this, the younger portions of the heavyside population show high levels of disaffection, caused in large part by the extreme difficulty of upward mobility in a place where wealth is measured almost entirely in land and land is all owned by the older elements of heavyside society.  While this pressure drives new colonization efforts, it also produces an extremely high rate of cybercrime, viewed by many as the only route out of a life of agricultural work.  This has served to widen the divide between heavyside and lightside, as lightside corporations are the most common targets for such criminals.

The Lightside

Within lightside society, additional stratification is found.  The working class is made of corporate employees, whose fates rise and fall with their employers.  Competition within this class is fairly cutthroat, if rarely actually violent, and aggressive headhunting and corporate espionage is the rule of the day.  The ultimate dream of almost every lightsider in this class is to be the self-employed owner of a new corporation, but only a rare few actually succeed at this aspiration.  The most common form of this dream is the idea of the Captain-Owner – a lightsider who owns their own hyper-capable vessel and lives off the profits of trading, transport and mercenary work.  While the life of an actual Captain-Owner is almost always a razor’s edge of only barely managing to keep ahead of costs and hoping to save enough money for retirement, there have been enough fabulous success stories that the ideal is kept alive.

Standing above this working class are the Holding Families.  More commonly known as the first families (except among those families that actually do trace their lineage back to the original shareholders and captain-owners of the original colonization fleet, who reserve the term for themselves), these aristocratic families rule over the economics of the Syndicate.  Within the actual power-structures of the massive conglomerations that own almost 90% of all corporate stock in the Syndicate territory, the bonds of family and marriage are often held to be more important than mere positions – most corporations employ in some seemingly minor position a member of the Holding Family that backed their IPO, and though these advisers rarely intervene in corporate matters, when they do, their suggestions are listened to even by Presidents and CEOs.  This is not the rules for every Holding, but 11 of the 14 function on this model (of the remaining three, two are still run on a system similar to a corporation, and the last is entirely held and owned by a single person).  While some think of the Holding Families as aristocratic parasites sitting on top of the production of the corporations, it is unwise to discount the danger of their members.  In addition to enjoying the highest levels of education in the Syndicate, the Holding Families also coopt the cream of the corporate crop into their ranks via adoption and marriage, and competition between members of a family can reach a level of byzantine viciousness and complexity only dreamed of by those in the working class.

Competition between the Holdings themselves is extremely slow and reserved compared to the pace of smaller corporations, but when they do take it upon themselves to crush a competitor, it’s generally done with the dispassionate thoroughness that comes from the sheer size of the holdings.

Building a World the AI Way (Part Two)

I’ve been derelict in getting this blog updated, but I’m back now, with the much-anticipated (disclaimer: not actually much-anticipated) PART TWO!

In part one, I talked about how, given a dynamic social network of NPCs, you can generate an arbitrary number of quests for an RPG that will all be internally consistent and make a certain amount of sense.  This left the question of: how do we come up with a network like that?  This question is especially tricky for a large, MMO-style game, because if you want a world with the apparent scope of, say EVE Online, there’s no way one person can sit down and come up with a master list of NPCs and how everyone knows each other, the task is just too big.

Once again, however, science comes to the rescue.  In a 2009 conference on simulation, the Network Dynamics and Simulation lab at Virginia Tech demonstrated a method for taking census data and using it to create an entirely artificial social network for a city, state or even country (available here).  Their approach was a new one, and interesting in its relatively low amount abstraction.  They started by generating a population of people from the demographic data available in the census, each part of a household living in a specific location.  Each of the people then got a set of activity templates, where activities take place in other locations probabilistically generated from the demographic data.  Based on all the locations the household does activities in, trips are planned – maybe one person has a trip from Home to Work starting a 8:30am, and another from Work to Home at 5pm.

With this data generated, connections are generated from simple proximity and time – whenever two people coexist in the same place at the same time, they have a chance of creating a connection.  People who spend more time near each other are more likely to forge a social connection.  The idea is simple, but that’s really where its power lies – this really is one of the big ways people get to know each other, and any model that doesn’t take it into account is going to have serious trouble.  Overall, from what I’ve seen, this method shows serious promise, especially if it were extended to handle the concept of a person’s activities changing over the course of their life.

Obviously, we don’t have access to census data for a fantasy or sci-fi universe (or at least, I don’t), but that doesn’t need to stop us.  The important information from the census data, as far as this generation method is concerned, is the demographic data, which means that all you need to do is make some authorial decisions about what the social structure and living conditions of your new setting are and you can apply this technique to create a fully-realized map of millions of NPCs, with information on who knows who and why they do.  And that’s pretty cool.

Building a World the AI Way (Part One)

When you’re trying to build an online role-playing game, one of the biggest hurdles is putting in content – what, precisely, will your players actually be doing?  This is a big issue because unlike, say, writing the setting or building the game engine, there’s no real end to content-creation.  When people run out of content, they’ll stop playing, which means that the amount of content you have provides a pretty hard upper bound on how much people will play your game.  Now, there are ways to extend how long your content lasts – some missions could be repeatable, as long as there’s some sort of reward at the end of each iteration to keep people doing it, or missions can be made increasingly difficult, requiring (on average) more attempts before you achieve success – but done poorly, these are fairly transparent, and detract from the fun of the game.

But what if you didn’t have to write all the content yourself?  A new article by Young-Seol Lee and Sung-Bae Cho (abstract available here) proposes using a form of non-deterministic state machine called a ‘petri net’ to automatically generate quests in a role-playing game based on a population of NPCs and information about a player’s history of playing the game.  The basic idea is this: we make a network consisting of two kinds of nodes, traditionally called places and transitions.  The places are all the NPCs of the game – anything that a character can interact with, really.  The transitions are ways a PC can interact with them – kill them, bring them an item, talk to them, protect them, etc.  Places and events are linked by edges, called arcs, which represent that a given transition can be done in a given place – or to a given NPC, in our case.  The state of the network is tracked by placing ‘tokens’ on the different places.  A transition can fire when a place that has an edge leading to it has a token on it, and it puts the token on a place that it has an edge leading to.  In the case of RPG quests, we can think of the tokens as flow of the narrative – if we activate the ‘kill a person for me’ arc, then we move the target of the quest from the person we’re talking to to the person we’re trying to kill.  Since a Petri net is non-deterministic, it can generate a vast number of plots without any changes, so long as there is a basic library that it can use to write each transition.

Unfortunately, this method will produce somewhat nonsensical or random-seeming plots if all NPCs are connected to all others, because the players will see no motivation behind the quests they’re undertaking, and no real changes in the world based on their actions.  What this really needs to make it all come together is a way of generating a ‘real-seeming’ network of people connected to each other in understandable ways that will evolve as PCs take action.  Fortunately, we can do this, and I’ll explain it in part two.