Do you mind, Muse? I'm trying to eat here.

[elfs]

Muse and I had an argument last night. We're in that prickly stage with each other, the one where writing a book has become an effort, and it's not a sexy book, and Muse spends most of her time thinking about writing sexy stories. I'd turned down her latest idea and she got all mad with me. "I can't believe this. You're throwing away a perfect opportunity for more sex, especially weird, kinky sex! The Sterlings setting is perfect for this kind of thing! You had a fabulous idea with Polestar, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but it hasn't gone anywhere," I said.

"You haven't had time," she said. "I understand that. But really, think about it: such a heavily genderqueered setting. They're under attack by unknown forces. They have a bioconservative outlook. Athena is an 888B-Agro/Ind ST-plus five world, according to your notes; they'd have all the resources they needed, especially if they're not entirely sure they trust their newfound Pendorian friends but they're grabbing up all the Pendorian G-level tech they can find."

"Muse, I don't have time for this either."

"But, but... It's perfect. Under the Shadow of the Big Gun..."

"Is stupid," I said. "Huge gun emplacements, especially surface-based ones, are such a bad idea I don't know where to begin. The last one was the Hochdruckpumpe Cannon, and all it did was make a great big target for Operation Crossbow."

"The Free Worlders don't know that!" Muse said. "Maybe this was all part of a big push to get people involved. They can't ignore the huge gun in their midst, and the reason it's there."

"Maybe," I sighed. "They certainly know the Hochdruckpumpe didn't work. They must have taken a copy of Wikipedia with them."

She said, trying to change the subject, "If you take the ideas you had in Kyama, and transplant them to the Sterling-Dark War, you create a perfect setting for all kinds of illicit genetic engineering hijinks done by people without a lot of depth of experience with gene-e or its unintended consequences." I gave her my best glare. "Look," she says, getting desperate, "The gun doesn't have to work. Maybe it's a fraud. A reminder of what they're up against. Or it's just decrepit. Decaying. You'd like that."

"Muse, really. I don't know if it'll get written..."

"You just don't like my ideas anymore."

"That's not true," I said. "I love your ideas. True, we haven't been building the audience we used to, but that's partially my fault. I haven't been working so hard on the marketing end. I don't know where to put my stuff to pimp it most effectively anymore. It's not like there's just one outlet. And we have other things to take care of these days. Like writing mainstream."

"You mean like... Caprice." She nearly sneered the last word.

"You liked Caprice in the beginning."

"I didn't know it was going to take so long!" she said. She sighed. "Okay, I'm sorry. You'll file it away?"

"Of course I will," I said. "I have good ideas of my own now and then. Maybe there's a Y's-only orgy club in there, and your gene-e experiment goes there."

Her eyes twinkled. "Ooh, ooh, I can see that happening! And the X who loves her and doesn't know she's a gene-e sneaks in to figure out where her girlfriend goes some nights, and... Ooh, ooh. Let me work on this!"

"Yeah," I sighed as she bounded off. "You go work on that. Come back with more for me to do."

Comments

Elf has his own UPC? Sweet!

[pandakahn.livejournal.com]

So you mentioned, in passing, what appears to be a Universal Planet Code that you use: 888B-Agro/Ind ST-plus five world.

Is this yours or from a game? WHat game? How does it work? Do you have the UPC's for all planets listed in your universe? And before you, or anyone else, asks no, I am not running GURPS: Pendor. Not that I would not love to do that, but...

MPK

Re: Elf has his own UPC? Sweet!

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Nah, it's just Traveller (the very original), book 6.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Not that it's helping much, but if it's a planet-based gun to fire out at stuff in space/orbit...

Why not make it an underwater item. Sort of an enormous submarine, can go hide under the oceans all it likes, come up near the surface, configure to fire, unleash blazing atomic hell up at the heavens, and then sink back under the waves in a cloud of steam to go hide under an ice sheet until it's time to fire again. Hell, it could fire from under a polar ice sheet with perfect cover, and only disconcerting a few seal or penguin analogues, who wonder where the big hole in the ice came from, and where bob went.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Well, referring back, as you already have, to Traveller, then factor T (or larger) meson gun emplacements are best sited deep within a planet or planetoid, as they are harder to detect there, and unless being attacked by similar weapons who have their exact co-ordinates, can then use the entire planet as armour.

Under High Guard, a factor T meson embedded in a large moon or planet is basically un-killable without massive losses and a lot of luck to the assaulting space force . While this is obviously a "rules artifact", like un-killable 6G acceleration small ships, that type of weapon does make sense buried deep on a planet or moon.

[xengar.livejournal.com]

Yes, but unless you are firing such a weapon against another planatiod or similar object, aiming becomes a serious problem. The only reason the Death Star was a threat to anyone was that it could move on it's own so that it didn't have a blind spot the size of, well, a planet. Sure it had surface defences all over it's hull, but if it couldn't rotate on it's own all you'd have to do is aim an meteor at its back, something that's easily within the scope of Imperial/Pendorian tech even if not specifically mentioned.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Should point out to Muse that the Babylon Gun, half-built by the Iraqis, would have been much larger and have possessed a longer range than the Hochdruckpompe. Gerald Bull was the designer -- Wikipedia article is very informative.

Am also curious whether Muses are in communication in general. Mine woke me up with an insight about a single-stage to orbit spaceplane boosted by collimated microwaves from a mothership -- we need one of those for a story in progress, and the problem's been figuring out how (believably) to get a reuseable orbiter up there in the first instance.

[stephdray.livejournal.com]

Your muse is funnier than my muse.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, when people ask me "Where do your ideas come from?" I just tell them to look for the Muse tag. Ideas are easy. Actually writing (and rewriting) is the hard part. But you know that. I know that. I know that you know that, and you know that I know that you know that. Writers are a very knowledgeable group.