FTL, Politics, And A Wrench
Notepad #4
FTL
We want “medium” FTL, where it’s like taking a steamship to another continent, NOT so easy it’s like flying an airplane to another city. This is cool, and presents us with some unique opportunities.
The mechanisms for “Medium” FTL are a few: I liked
’s idea of the wrinkly-spacetime. The computer game Homeworld leverages “hyperspace gates” at some level.But let’s take a step back for a moment. There are three tiers we have to address.
How do we get from earth to the moon? Earth the mars? Too close to hyperspace, too far for rockets. We need some kind of interplanetary transit system. Getting to Mars on conventional rocket fuel takes like a YEAR, even in optimal conditions. So we need some kind of handwavium powered sub-light drives to make that quick.
Here’s a scale I would like to propose, with the three tiers:
To get to a neighboring planet takes DAYS.
To get from Mercury to Pluto would take WEEK(s?).
To get to Sirius, our closest neighbor, would take MONTHS.
So getting to neighboring planets would have to happen on conventional drives.
System-crossing journeys would use ‘sub-light’ drives, and I like the idea of a jump, a pause to cool, then jumping again. Short range hoppers, great for staying within a system but not great outside of it.
Star-crossing journeys would use FTL drives. If we go jump gates, we need some macguffin that puts them there—that’s a little too much for my tastes. Wrinkly space time makes sense, just need a mechanism for it. A third mechanism could be the same mechanism as sublight hoppers. A limited range jump, but a LOOOONG cooldown on conventional or sublight drives. Like imagine traveling from california to new york, but you can only fly between neighboring states, and after each flight you have to drive to your next state where you get on a plane again. Would it be faster than driving the whole way? Yes. Would it still take a long time? Yes.
I leave this for your consideration.
POLITICS
What we’re establishing so far is a kind of two tiered political system as well as a two-tiered society. There’s Earth politics and society, and there’s space politics and society. This is really interesting to me—it feels very natural but it’s not something I had thought about before.
But both tiers need to exist within something that is TRYING to be the same system.
FOR REFERENCE AND ALSO FULL DISCLOSURE: This tension is what gives rise, in my own sci fi, to the Jovian Union. Space realizes it’s dominant and powerful and just wrestles the earth politics under, and that’s that. But we’re NOT trying to do that, we’re trying to deal with the tension without hand-waving it away.
So here’s my first take at how the political system would look.
Because Indonesia is on earth, and cares—as a starting condition—about earth politics, it would have the accidents of a democratic republic. The executive of Indonesia would be a president/prime minister. TBH I like prime minister better because it affords some fun political games. I don’t know what Indonesia has now.
Let’s say it’s a prime minister. The prime minister would head a legislative body which would be like parliament but would not be called a parliament. Need a good indonesian name for it—like Israel’s Knesset which means assembly but sounds so much cooler than “assembly”.
The indonesian parliament would have as it’s constituents not political parties but polities. Earth/Solar system would be one. Each colony/outpost/kampung would be another.
This would allow each colony/outpost/kampung to be organized imperially/monarchically/authoritarianally, but it would disguise it from Earth because they would participate in a benevolent Parliament system.
The composition of the parliament would depend but probably be weighted heavily in favor of earth, which would chafe the colony/outpost/kampung representatives who have pressing needs.
FOOD would be, in my opinion, the most pressing issue. Unless/until food can be grown in space colonies, there would need to be a constant supply of food from earth into space. Each person, 3 meals a day, every day, forever and ever amen. Even just putting 1,000 people permanently in space without a food supply creates a huge burden. 3,000 meals per day, 1,095,000 meals per year. The problem is exponential.
The prime minister would operate parallel to a, lets call it, Chancellor, whose duties are civil and infrastructural, and detached from political cycles. The Chancellor would be the TRUE executive, and the true source of imperial power. There would be a tension between the faux-democratic pretense of the parliament, and the directly autocratic nature of the chancellor.
Leaving it there for now to see what you think!
A WRENCH
Here’s a wrench in the works that we can either address or ignore.
Planetary gravity.
Being in space in zero G creates heart conditions and bone problems for astronauts who return to earth after mere months. Living permanently on a planet with a different gravity than earth could make earth completely inaccessible to them. Aliens without some invention or adaptation may not be able to survive on earths gravity.
Do we ignore this? Do we lean into it? It could be an interesting plot point to explore—the permanent alienation of far flung peoples who identify with their home of indonesia, yet who can’t return to it. It would create permanent alienation in one generation—the children of indonesians who have never seen indonesia and identify more with their home planet than with Earth.
What say ye? Passing back the torch,
.-Scoot
Scoot,
Here are my thoughts…
FTL
No complaints from me. I actually like the “FTL can only be used outside of a star system” idea. It’s something that I’ve thought about for another fictional universe of mine (this happened years ago, so it’s not something that I’ve published). So I’ll be happy to use that system.
The next FTL-related question is this, “how did humanity come across this?” The easy answer would be “recovered alien artifact” or whatever. That might seem a little too convenient (even cliche), but it can be used as a story fodder. I’ll leave that for your consideration.
Politics
I do like how there’s a sort of two parallel systems going on, one on Earth and the other in space. I think one way this can be solved would be like the Spanish or the Portuguese. IIRC, the Spanish Empire doesn’t consider “New Spain” as a colony in a sense like the British considered the 13 colonies. Rather, they are kingdoms (or viceroyalties) with the same rights as peninsular Spain itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceroyalty#Spanish_Empire
With Bima Sakti, this could be the status of the space colonies, at least in theory. The colonists have rights as Indonesian citizens (like to vote, etc.). Though the fact that they live in some far flung planets meant that these rights are at times theoretical.
Back to the present day…
Right now, Indonesia has a President. If we’re going to keep it as a democratic republic, then that should also stay that way. However, it is also important to keep in mind that for most of its history, modern Indonesia had been ruled by strongmen (first Sukarno, then Suharto). Indonesia as a “modern democracy” only happened in the 2000s (!).
What does this mean for Bima Sakti? Well, history isn’t necessarily destiny but I honestly can see a strongman figure who has real power behind the accidents of a ‘democratic republic’. That doesn’t mean that the legislative is useless or that there couldn’t be some political intrigue but I think it would be more interesting if the President is basically a king in all but name.
For the moment, Indonesia also has political parties but it’s not more like a coalition type instead of the two-party system in the US. Just putting this out there for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Indonesia
Another thing about Indonesia is that right now the country is playing with decentralization. This makes sense since the country has a lot of ethnic groups that don’t really have a lot in common with one another. The most blatant is Aceh which has Sharia Law but there’s also Yogyakarta which is a monarchy with a Sultan.
On the other hand, Indonesia had historically used its military to keep order. You can see this in Papua where some of the people there wants independence (the Indonesian government considers the Papuan independence movement as terrorists so it’s not just kumbaya).
I remember back when I was in high school I heard Bali (of all places) agitating for independence. It’s probably just some loud minority, but I do think the government takes the threat of separatists seriously.
To extrapolate this to space (aka Bima Sakti), I can see Indonesia being relatively off-hand with its colonies, but then when the colonists started doing things that the Central Government doesn’t like (agitating for independence, starting wars against each other, provoking the aliens, etc.), that’s when the National Army gets sent in.
So I do like the idea of the Chancellor that you brought up. I’m not sure if it should be the President, or maybe it’s someone from the Military. Maybe there could be some sort of ‘dwifungsi’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwifungsi
The food thing, I’m not sure to be honest. I would say that space stations definitely need food. But once we get into habitable planets, then the colonies could be the ones providing food. I’ll leave that to you for now.
Wrech
Finally we get to the issue of gravity. Honestly, this is something that I don’t think too much about, because I tend to lean towards the ‘soft sci-fi’. But this could be an interesting road to go to in some stories. Let’s say an ethnic Batak whose family had lived in a low-gravity planet for over three generations decided to visit his ancestral land in Sumatra. But because of the gravity, he has to wear a specialized suit so the gravity doesn’t kill him (or something like that).
OTOH, I’m open to just ignore the whole thing and say that ‘alien technology’ helps with space stations and the only place fully colonized are planets whose gravity are not too different from Earth. There’s probably an argument to be made that space is not meant to be inhabited anyways, so there’s probably only a select few planets that actually have population in the thousands, less still millions.
I just like the idea of Jakarta being a hodgepodge of ethnic groups which include aliens. As the location of the space elevator, I think it should embody the empire at large. Maybe some ‘gravity-sensitive’ folks could live in the space elevator (which is technically part of Jakarta) but idk. Some food for thoughts, lol.
This also segways into a factor in Earth’s importance: population. Right now, the population of Southeast Asia (according to Wikipedia lol) is about 675 million, of that Indonesia takes about a third of that, at about 274 million. And population growth of the late 20th century happened even with anti-natalist social programs all around the world, including Indonesia itself with ‘keluarga berencana’ (‘family planning’ in Indonesian) basically psyopping Indonesian families into having only two children. I’m not an expert in demographic patterns, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to see 23erd century (Earth) Indonesia having a population in the billions.
All this is my way of saying that in the 23rd century, I see Earth Indonesia as “lots of people but little land” while Bima Sakti is “lots of land but little people”. I think that should be the edge Earth has over the colonies, and why the Assembly (what we call the Parliament/Congress in Indonesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Consultative_Assembly) would be weighed heavily towards Earth.
I mean sure, the Tyranids are invading New Aceh, but that’s just 2 million people, at most. There are at least 20 million starving children in Jakarta in need of rice!
Battlestar Galactica (2004-09) has jump drives which are similar to what you describe. Jump a limited distance, cooldown, jump again. There's weird things too like performing shorter jumps resulting in lower cooldowns. Been awhile since I watched it though but I remember an episode where they jumped a lot back to back to outrun the cylons, can't remember how though.