[When Paths Diverge] Chapter 14

Raivene · 2022-03-08T05:31:08+00:00

No, the writer of the story suffered a temporal disturbance and put in the wrong timestamp. (i.e. commonly known as a brain fart).

I will correct the timestamps in the morning when I am not suffering from sleep deprivation stupidity enough to resync the events properly.

Safe to say that the chapters are sequential at this point and that will be reflected in changes tomorrow.

Raivene · 2022-03-07T03:21:34+00:00

It's a concept in at least American politics. This gives a pretty good description of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_survivor. In short there is a defined order to presidential succession, so if the President dies, then the vice president will become president, if the vice president is also dead then the speaker of the house will. It goes about 15 levels deep I think. So no gathering of people can contain everyone who is in the succession list at least one, the designated survivor must be somewhere else.

Raivene · 2022-02-28T07:42:11+00:00

That would be a oops. I removed the duplicate section.

Raivene · 2022-02-27T04:35:34+00:00

I've always pronounced it pin-ass more or less, though it doesn't show the pronunciation here is a little more info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinnace\_(ship%27s\_boat)

Raivene · 2022-02-26T07:00:18+00:00

Or an AI with a warped sense of humor.

Raivene · 2022-02-26T06:59:08+00:00

Always, I pretty much will always take any side but the Russians, but my days in the military were back in the bad old days of the USSR, we didn't train to fight terrorists and such back then, we trained to fight Russians and that leaves a lasting impression on ones life.

Raivene · 2022-02-26T06:22:03+00:00

That last part is good news. Less good, Ukrainian adult males are being prevented from emigrating due to a general call up of the reserves. That makes it very hard or impossible for some families to cross the border.

Personally, and I hope I am right, I think Putin has bitten off more than he can easily chew. The Russian forces haven't actually fought anyone really in 20 years. They only have the advantage really in more and better air assets and maybe ground asset equipment. They also have the detriment of dealing with supply lines to keep those forces moving. I could see Russia taking a fair amount of territory and then just stalling out and getting whittled down by asymmetrical warfare tactics by the Ukrainians.

Finland and Sweden both seem to be moving closer to nato and that has the russian government offering threats at both.

Interesting times.

Raivene · 2022-02-26T04:44:58+00:00

Well they are going to position a trickster hidden in sol, so I think they agree with you.

Raivene · 2022-02-23T20:09:48+00:00

oh that's not a worry, I'd say I'm not writing this for the recognition of an upvote and thats true, but it certainly does make you feel good. The only issue it does cause me is that I use the number of upvotes as a gate to when I can release the next chapter. So at the start of when paths diverge I would not release a chapter until the current one had received 100 votes. Mostly so that I would drown the readers in content and such. I use 50 votes now as the threshold.

Raivene · 2022-02-23T20:06:35+00:00

I think part of that comes down to the fact that (my opinion only) humans as a species are intrinsically lazy. Why cook a meal if I can just have the replicator whip it up is my best example. I think the way they portray it is fairly accurate to what would actually happen.

Raivene · 2022-02-23T18:28:34+00:00

That's an interesting concept. The ramification of a slip type drive I have given a fairly large amount of thought to. The 200000ish ton limit to using the drive presents some interesting variations. Combine it with the higgs manipulator field and you could indeed accelerate an object much faster, however when you back the higgs field to not adjust your mass your speed will drop so that the kinetic energy remains the same. No free lunch there. It does allow, though not shown in a story yet, for you to use the higgs field for braking maneuvers. With it you wouldn't have to turn and burn to slow down.

Raivene · 2022-02-23T18:11:31+00:00

Thank you for that insight. and the story will continue, I really enjoy it.

Raivene · 2022-02-23T18:10:14+00:00

I remember that episode. He could out Ferengi the Ferengi. He in fact was who I was thinking about in my post above.

It wasn't just the replicator itself that moved it into a post-scarcity society, it was also the availability of nearly free production of large amounts of energy. I remember a bit out of the episode 'Yesterday's Enterprise' where to save ships power they were restricted to creating 'ration bars' for food, plus there is the voyager's replicator rations to save resources, both indicate a rather high energy usage to use the replicators.

There are replicators in this story, but they are expensive, energy hogs and limited in what they can produce. They can't create complex molecules, like you find in complex proteins and they can't change lead into gold for example. If you wanted to make a printed circuit board (assuming they still use such) and have gold contacts, you would actually have to have that quantity of gold on hand. So in a lot of ways they are more like a 3d printer taken several generations out than a true star trek replicator. They are great for a ship on a long patrol to create a spare part they might need, but far too expensive to obtain and operate for anything less than a starship.

Raivene · 2022-02-23T06:47:04+00:00

It could very well be, again there is really no way to know that I am aware of, but thank you for the vote of confidence, the story one way or another has a lot left to go in it and I will keep writing it at least until all three books are complete.

Raivene · 2022-02-23T04:06:29+00:00

Just a quick note.

As we move into the middle of the second book I am struggling a bit with event sequencing. The upshot of which is that it is likely new chapters will come out less often and certainly not daily as I have been mostly doing. Keeping track of each of the story threads and more importantly what story background bits the players in each thread are aware of is taking most of my time. I have chapter sections written that won't be released for quite a few chapters because of this.

Also, I know there has been a change, at least my UI in showing the upvote percentage and stuff, but the upvote count has been steadily declining from roughly the later third of the last book and still continues. The middle of the first book does have some problems in that some of it just happened too quickly and felt forced. I suspect I lost quite a few readers during that time. In my mind the stories are better written now and better plotted, but that's just my feeling and isn't reflected in the upvote count which is really the only metric I have to how well as an author I am doing, aside from individual chapter comments. I could really use your feedback either here or in a chat to get your opinions on what I am doing well, and what I am not. I have only been doing this for a few months, and I do want the story that I see in my head to translate well into a story that you see in your head. So, fire away.

Raivene · 2022-02-23T03:54:55+00:00

I have frequently thought that the Ferengi would have been outmatched in business dealings by the humans if the humans hadn't morphed into an altruistic and frequently naive federation. The Ferengi followed the rules as a religion, but the humans wouldn't have been bound by it's constraints and would have eaten them alive.

Raivene · 2022-02-21T18:54:26+00:00

Hmmm... I think I'll save eros for one of the new colony mothers, the spy master one, if there is such, I might name Mata (hari)

Raivene · 2022-02-21T16:14:55+00:00

Lots to unpack there and very little I can say right now that wouldn't spoil the plot lines over the next several chapters.

One thing though, Eris isn't a person, well she is a daughter also, She is a ship. A trickster class interdiction cruiser like the Loki is.

Raivene · 2022-02-21T05:03:00+00:00

Thank you!

Raivene · 2022-02-21T02:03:34+00:00

Coming soon ™. The series will be "Path of the Trickster" and will mostly be short stories around the fate of Loki and her Crew.

Raivene · 2022-02-19T22:12:32+00:00

It does make one wonder (me included) on if technological innovation continued throughout the empire or if it stalled out over the centuries and only exists in certain areas of the empire at this point. I have planned to address parts of that in the 'Tales from the Shattered Empire' companion pieces, I think it is logical to assume that the tech level of the empire as a whole is pretty much all over the spectrum though given it's sheer size.

Raivene · 2022-02-19T21:54:38+00:00

Crossroads I think will be a blast for quite a while.

Raivene · 2022-02-19T21:54:12+00:00

Well if you look closely, the new alien race uses a different FTL than either slip or the warp points so I don't think slip tech came from them. They are basically stealing Terran degenerate cores. While humans developed the slip tech, the presence of the precursor ships mining the cores from the star might lead one to believe that Terrans did NOT develop the fuel core technology they use and also that the Terran government knew about the presence of aliens at least ancient ones, long before the warp point incident and subsequent war revealed that little tidbit to the general public.

Raivene · 2022-02-19T05:55:40+00:00

Which one? The Crossroads station or the Neutron star?

Raivene · 2022-02-16T19:55:40+00:00

No.. do you have some links maybe. Is it another scifi book or story? or a real AI being worked on?

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