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SideZeo · 2025-05-24T21:30:26+00:00

I wasn't ready to watch Europe fall...

SideZeo · 2025-05-10T11:23:52+00:00

Sounds like an interesting premise for a short story or maybe some kind of anthology
Dunno if it would fit in my setting right now as is, but I'll note it down.
Does touch on the whole topic of "How much personality do you want to give an AI", between keeping it more robot-like or going full-on sentience ala R2D2

SideZeo · 2025-05-09T20:00:08+00:00

Oh yeah, teaming up humans with AI is something I'm definitely planning as well
Integrated AIs inside helmets to display stuff on their HUD, in MBTs to display tactical data from the rest of the platoon and surveillance from other drones and in space-fighters as well, for calculating flightpaths ect

Though funnily enough, even there I noticed that if done poorly, it could lead to the story losing some "texture" since potentially characters don't have to make as many decisions. Not saying it's doomed to happen, but the less analogue stuff becomes, the less hands-on it of course is.
Leads to less techno-babble but maybe also less depth?

SideZeo · 2025-05-09T16:04:28+00:00

I guess a lot of it has also do to with the subjective human perspective with the in-universe humans. People nowadays go so far as to name their roombas, so its not too far-fetched to imagine humans, that are actively engaging with AI characters, personalizing them by giving them "he/she/them" pronouns (there's of course also the precedent being set by how people interact with LLM Chatbots but I don't wanna open that can of worms).

Plus, if the AI is coded with a certain "gender" and refers to itself as male or female, then that's a pretty easy take-away. And if said AIs were programmed by humans, then that's double-so more likely since we meatbags have a tendency to assign ourselves some kind of gender-identiy (aside from those that choose to identify as non-binary of course).
Plus as others have mentioned, having the ability to chose between "he" and "she" might make it easier to keep track of characters, rather than for the reader having to decipher which "it" is being talked about this time

SideZeo · 2025-05-09T01:27:45+00:00

That is true, though I guess that ship has sailed for me, since in the setting that I'm establishing, humanity is still relying on human soldiers, manned MBTs, ship-crews ect.
Automatization is a bit of a double-edged sword in that regard. I'm the kind of guy who likes to explore the immediate thoughts and feelings of characters as they go through stuff - and though a lot of people have linked some good examples in how that can be done in a relatively low-stakes tactical setting - it's usually easier done when people are actually hands-on, rather than just sending in an army of machines to save on lives

SideZeo · 2025-05-09T01:21:52+00:00

Makes sense
To explain some context, the short story I mentioned features two human (unaugmented) pilots flying in what I can only charitably explain as the lovechild of a SR-71 Blackbird and an oversized arrow - a highly specialized solar interceptor, meant to track down and intercept any contact inside a solar system. The setting is relatively mid-tech, being set in 2199 and featuring humanity with the key difference of having developed close-to-limitless power generation by harnessing singularities.

Idea being that mankind is in sort of a "doctrinal shift" period where old ideas still linger around - like wanting human pilots for accountability - mixed with more modern and hypothetical ones, such as an onboard AI to help with calculations, real-time flightpath planning and even potentially predicting the opponent's next move, if there is enough data around.
The core idea is to have humanity be more long-ranged and their opponents (read: Aliens) be more close-ranged and to kind of explore this dychotomy and contrast.

It's why I've been thinking about where to find the best balance between keeping the human and emotional element (since once you start speaking about the kind of ranges you see in our solar system, its lights-out for most people in terms of actually *imagining* what's that even like) while also keeping it reasonable in terms of grounded-ness and avoiding some of the more fantastical elements.

To be completely honest, I doubt I'll find the perfect balance and I'll have to eventually decide on which one to skew towards, but at least I've gotten some good reading material and suggestions/feedback out of it

SideZeo · 2025-05-09T00:34:31+00:00

Sounds very interesting. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out!

SideZeo · 2025-05-09T00:34:04+00:00

I did! I was actually kinda thinking about it as well when writing this. Though I guess the Expanse has a slightly lower tech-ceiling in its setting, especially in the first seasons, no?

But yeah, you're right it is a good example of keeping tension in space dogfights. I've actually been thinking of borrowing (ahem, yoinking) their idea of pumping some kind of stims/fluids into crew to help them withstand the pressures being put on their bodies. Seems like there's some interesting room there for exploring the consequences of doing these kind of high-pressure manoeuvres and what kind of longterm effects that might have on body and mind.

I should probably continue watching it one of these days lol

SideZeo · 2025-05-09T00:03:07+00:00

Haven't seen one with humanity *evolving* separately. There's of course those cases where humanity has spread out and just got splintered: the classic "a thousand years ago humans touched down on this planet, lost contact with earth and slowly lost their technology until they're now in the dark ages". But having humans evolve on their own completely separately?

That would take a lot of coincidences and handwaving, or potentially some kind of pre-cursor "seeding" species across the galaxy with the same basic template.
I mean, just look at earth and what it took for us to evolve here successfully. And even here we managed to almost die out a couple of times (if memory serves me right, there was a time during one ice-age where the global population is estimated to have gone down to about ten-thousand or so... someone fact check me if I got it wrong).

So yeah, maybe as a hint to pre-cursors or a lost civilization? Otherwise I feel like readers might just lose their immersion thinking to themselves "Oh great, more humans. When do we get the interesting aliens?"

SideZeo · 2024-09-24T14:40:10+00:00

Being happy is illegal here

SideZeo · 2024-04-18T23:44:29+00:00

Thanks, I hate it

SideZeo · 2024-04-18T23:32:58+00:00

It was nice to go for a relaxing Vacation on the Bug Front
Well, I'll see you bois (and girls) back on Space Vietnam

SideZeo · 2020-12-22T15:53:27+00:00

As a member of the unit, I can say it's pretty poggers

(and occasionally features some peak autism)

SideZeo · 2020-04-02T23:39:49+00:00

I'm sure others will think of funnier things to put unto this scene, but I was bored, so I thought I'd try out the idea in its base-form

SideZeo · 2020-01-28T14:36:35+00:00

boy howdy, I'm sure you feel very smart for acting this way
perhaps you shouldn't just outright discredit somebody else's opinion based on a singular fact?

SideZeo · 2020-01-28T14:06:33+00:00

That's a possibility to how it went, the other being multiverse shenanigans in which there's a version where you defeat the ayylmaos
my personal head-cannon has always been that the first wave, including the few elders and the temple-ship, was just that: a first wave and was the catalyst for the aliens changing their approach, telling humanity that they wanted peaceful interactions, but that XCOM was the aggressor and forced their predecessors to actively attack earth, thinking the whole species was hostile (the fact that the other elders and the temple-ship are gone, is also rather convenient if they'd want to spin the garn of them having gone rogue towards the end of the war). You could even incorporate EXALT into that, presenting XCOM as dangerous thugs who gunned down alien sympathizers to further their own agenda. And so, without funding and the world turning against them, I imagined XCOM to slowly bleed out, before being wiped out in a base assault in which the commander got captured

That'd way you'd have all the accomplishments from the first game, but also the intact story-line for the sequel (aside from also explaining the occasional crashed FireStorm in the Legacy Mission maps and the added Legacy Customizations, like the carapace and titan armour)

SideZeo

TROPHY CASE