World-building on a retro-SF universe for a new novel. It is intended to be Earth -- or rather Earth was a part of that history -- but my intent is to down-pedal that.
Still, no matter how unspecific I am, it doesn't change that probably space flight happened while electronics were still primitive and people still smoked. So you could call it alternate history. I'm just shying away from the idea of making it a specific moment or specific cause.
No alien space bats. No "Italy won the second world war" stuff, at least, not as the reason everything looks very different by the time we get to 2001. And it isn't really keyed off the sudden discovery of cheap nuclear fusion or a Dean Drive or something.
Basically, space flight is just...cheaper. Energetically I mean. By a factor of maybe four. And, yes, there is (relatively cheap) FTL that also blows conservation of practically everything out the window. But, for whatever reason, this didn't make history as we know it unrecognizable (or anything else, for that matter; you do not go toying with gravitational constant or inertia or whatever it is you did to allow a one-man flitter with a tank of "Rocket Fuel" to do SSTO and still have plenty left to jaunt off the Mars for a dry martini).
And, no, I'm not intending too much in the way of other scientific violations. You will still need a helmet to breathe in space, even if -- again, somehow -- space radiation isn't as much of an issue as it should. All those clear lexan helmets give us is a manly Space Tan.
My intent is for Earth to be in the background, mentioned glancingly but not often, and even then, somewhat inconsistently. And as is the rule for your basic Rocky Jones adventure, nobody is getting Atomic Rocket deep with what exactly is the ISP of "Rocket fuel." It is just space trucking, things working like familiar cargo ships and pickup trucks In Space.
***
Oh, and I mentioned to a friend at work I was tempted to mount a throttle quadrant or something on my desk so I could play-act Rocket Jockey while I was getting into the mood. A few days later he popped up with an old Wingman and after a dive into such places as the Internet Wayback Machine and the always-spicy Hackaday I found a project on github complete with a BOM with Digikey parts numbers, a PCB already loaded in the community area of OSHpark (a fabhouse I'd used before) and even the STL for a housing at Thingiverse. This DB-15 to USB adaptor already has a profile for this stick in the software and it is an Arduino family device.
Which all made me so nostalgic I went and opened my old accounts and ordered the parts. And I don't even need a flight controller.
No comments:
Post a Comment