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April 1, 2024

Post-poverty SF: Some Reflections on the Vast Inequality in the Star Wars Universe

Posted by faustusnotes under game reports, Gaming material, Metashit, Movies, RPG cosmology, RPG Systems, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: books, movies, return of the jedi, sci-fi, star wars, stars in my pocket like grains of sand |
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I have been playing Star Wars recently with my regular group, first using the Genesys rules and (since yesterday) using a port of the Coriolis rules, because we’re all sick of Genesys. The Star Wars universe is fun and, like D&D or Lord of the Rings, has that particular positive quality that you can settle into it without knowing anything about it – it just feels familiar. Plus, running around on missions for the Hutts is fun, what could go wrong? However, it is beginning to feel like the Star Wars universe suffers the same problem I have identified with the Harry Potter universe – it is fine so long as it is kept within a very specific and narrow narrative framework but once you try exploring it freely as an adult outside its original confines it falls apart fast. I want to try examining how in particular the Star Wars universe is weird, first from the perspective of the weird inconsistencies in the amount of energy available to its denizens, then through a discussion of how we should interpret the inequality of the rim relative to the core in light of these calculations and what we know of its history, and then through some specific examples of how this affects e.g. energy weapons and the existence and behavior of Hutt space.

How Many Dyson Spheres do You Need?

First let’s do some energy and energy density calculations, and introduce some reference values, by way of setting the context[1]. First, from this Forbes article (?) we can establish that the amount of energy required to destroy a planet like Alderaan is about 2e32 Joules[2]. That is, 2×10^32 Joules. Some quick online searches tell me that the sun outputs 4×10^26 Joules. So the Death Star is, to all intents and purposes, a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificially-created star, and because we know from the three original movies what the time frames are, it takes the Empire about 3 years to build one.

From a random and quite wild blog post we can estimate the death star to have a mass of about 2e18 kg, meaning that it has an energy density of an astounding 10^14 Joules per kg, if the whole thing was a giant battery. We will return to this information a little later. Here are some other random bits of information about energy:

The population of the earth consumes about 2×10^20 Joules of energy per year, meaning that if we assume most of that energy is consumed by 100 million rich people, the average energy consumption of the richest societies on earth is about 10^12 Joules in one year
If we assume an X-wing fighter weighs about 20tons, the energy required to accelerate this thing to 10000 x the speed of light (10k C) in one second would be about 10^4x3x10^8x2x10^4 (using energy required as mass times the final speed obtained, i.e. the change in momentum) which is, essentially 6×10^16, let’s say 10^17 Joules
Apparently a star destroyer weighs 40 million tons, which means it would take 10^20 Joules to get to the same speed[3]
A typical nuclear reactor produces a GW of power, which is 10^9 Joules
The original steam engine, the Watt engine, invented 250 years ago, generates 6 horsepower or about 4200 Joules, 4×10^3 Joules. So over 250 years we have improved our energy generation capacity by a factor of a million. But note that nobody in the modern world uses a Watt Engine to do anything!
A modern LIthium-ion battery has an energy density of about 750000 Joules, that is 7.5×10^5 Joules.
A lead-acid car battery has an energy density of about 150000 Joules, which is 1.5×10^5 Joules. I think this means that energy technology has developed much more slowly than energy generation – let’s say at the ln() of the rate of energy generation[4]
The Star Wars galaxy has a population of one hundred quadrillion sentient beings (10^17 people) over 1 billion (10^9) planets. I call bullshit on the latter number, since I’ve seen the map, but let’s go with it
A typical nuclear reactor has a 30-70% energy efficiency, with the rest of the power escaping as waste heat. If this profile applied to the Death Star it would be as hot as the sun, so we have to assume that it has almost perfect efficiency in power generation

So let’s look at how some of those numbers work out. Dividing the energy in the Death Star by the population of the galaxy, we find that every time the Death Star is fired it generates enough energy to enable everyone in the galaxy to have a standard of living 1000 times better than the richest people on earth. During the battle of Yavin the Death Star was fired multiple times. Just to be clear I’m going to put this in quotes:

Every time the Death Star is fired it uses enough energy to maintain the entire sentient population of the galaxy at the standard of living of the richest people on earth for a millenium

So over the 3 years of the original 3 movies the Empire generated and wasted enough energy to maintain the entire population of the galaxy for about five aeons. By way of contrast, the Republic presided over an era of peace for a thousand years.

That’s a lot of energy! Another way to think of this is to imagine that the Death Star has an energy system that is 99.9999999% efficient, that is only 0.0000001% of the energy generated is lost during the firing process. This is obviously necessary, to ensure that the waste heat generated is orders of magnitude less than the temperature of the sun. That number is 10^-8%, or as a decimal, 10^-10. If an enterprising engineer on the Death Star noted this waste, they might be able to tap it, and would thus be able to drain off 10^22 Joules of energy – enough energy to maintain their home planet’s population for 100 years if their planet was as populous as earth. This is very similar to the situation in Harry Potter, where the magical world’s rubbish is valuable enough to muggles that they can use that rubbish to change their entire lives.

Another way to think about the energy differentials involved here is to contemplate the scale of energy required from an X-wing to a star destroyer to the Death Star: we go from 10^16 J for the X-Wing through 10^20 J for the Star Destroyer to 10^32 J for the Death Star, a factor of 10^16. Compare with the ratio of energy generation from the nuclear reactor to the Watt Engine, of 10^6. We are seeing people living in and working with devices with energy density that is so far below that of the peak technology that it is as if people living on earth were using windmills to power every aspect of their lives, as if every day we saw Watt Engines alongside nuclear reactors – but three orders of magnitude greater in difference. More like if there were people living in urban Tokyo who could barely produce fire, while the rest of us cruise by in nuclear-powered cars.

Post-poverty Science Fiction

The implication of this is first and foremost that the Star Wars galaxy has levels of inequality that are staggering by even the worst standards of earth. Every three years the society of Star Wars is able to build a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificial sun, and fly it almost instantly to anywhere in the galaxy, where they can casually blow off enough energy to maintain the entire population of the galaxy at elite standards of living for a millenium, but Luke’s Uncle Owen is struggling to get by on Tatooine as a moisture farmer, pawning broken-down droids off of passing Jawa who live in conditions little better than those of a 19th-century gypsy. Tatooine isn’t the only planet where we see this poverty: the forest-moon of Endor, the planet where we first meet Rei, Jah-Jah Binks’s planet, and pretty much every planet we see in Star Wars is living in conditions little better than or a lot worse than a typical rural area in 1970s earth. In a sense this is similar to how there are people in rural Nigeria who have modern smartphones and a TV but no access to modern health care and unreliable electricity. But the difference is that those of us in the Imperial core on earth do not have access to energy sources 10^16 times better than those people living in Nigeria. In fact the World Population Review suggests a maximum of eight-fold difference in energy use between poorest and richest regions (though it has limited data on Africa). The inequality in the Star Wars universe is staggering, so great that is essentially unmeasurable with any meaningful metric.

And it’s not like this is the fault of the Empire, either. We don’t see any evidence anywhere in the first movie that Tatooine is a once-great, super-rich society reduced to poverty by Imperial neglect or mistreatment – in fact in that movie the Empire has only been around a couple of years (a decade?) and the Republic “presided over a thousand years of peace.” All that inequality and ruin on the edge of the empire is the fault of the Republic, and nothing is presented anywhere to suggest otherwise. Now it could be argued that the Empire has been wastefully using resources on building mobile Dyson Spheres for war, which fair enough, but why wasn’t the Republic investing in these backwaters?

They deserved to be overthrown, didn’t they?

How small can a blaster be?

This also has consequences for in-game mechanics, which could be interesting or alarming depending on how you approach the fantastic scale of energy generation in the galaxy. While converting our system to Coriolis rules we have been discussing the damage blasters do, and trying to distinguish between blaster pistols and blaster rifles – Coriolis and Genesys both have low damage settings, which makes it difficult to easily distinguish weapons from one another since a sword might do 2 damage and a dagger 1. But I noticed, based on the scale of these energy values, that the ridiculous energy densities of the machines in the universe suggest that any blaster of any size would contain so much energy that it could effectively disintegrate a human being with a single shot, and the form and function of any blaster pistol or rifle in the universe is essentially aesthetic. Consider the X-wing, which weighs 20,000 kg and can generate 10^16J of energy. That’s 10^12J per kg, and much higher if you look at just the engines. Or a light saber, which can run forever on a battery the size of the palm of your hand with enough energy to cut through steel or humans. There’s no reason to suppose that a blaster pistol and a blaster rifle would have any noticeable difference in damage from each other. The battery required to provide essentially infinite shots of plasma capable of eviscerating a human would probably weigh a gram in the Star Wars galaxy. It’s entirely possible that a blaster rifle that actually had the Cumbersome-3 quality would have enough energy to collapse skyscrapers. I suggested we price blaster pistols and blaster rifles only by damage done, and that the difference between them was that the greater stability of a rifle configuration allows it to fire at longer range and to use the aim action. If we don’t do that then we are essentially working in a setting where our weapons are the equivalent of police in our own world carrying nothing more effective than pebbles, to fight gangsters driving tanks. If you look even superficially at the energies involved in the Star Wars universe you start to notice a lot of things are wrong!

How much effort is too little?

This stupendous inequality also has implications for the entire concept of Hutt space. In the original movies we don’t see any background information about the Hutts, except to know that Jabba is a notorious gangster lording it over at least one section of a backwater desert planet. But in the games (and I assume the broader canon) Hutt space is a sprawling zone of the galaxy that covers a pretty big wedge of the galaxy and spills over onto at least one major trade route (the Corellan route). This is an area that is supposedly only nominally under Imperial control, a situation that existed before the Empire, and is controlled by competing clans of Hutts who are essentially gangsters, who the Empire attempts to cooperate with but has been “unable” or “unwilling” to completely dominate.

But why? Why would an empire that can build two Dyson spheres in three years give a flying fuck what the Hutts think? Why would an empire that can mobilize soldiers from a population of a hundred quadrillion people, deliver them anywhere in the blink of an eye with spaceships that can generate more energy than most planetary economies, let this happen? One of my fellow players suggested that this is because controlling the Hutts is “too much effort”. But what is “too much effort” to a society that can fire off a millenium of luxury energy in a second, an economy so powerful that the waste energy from one of its flagships could fuel the industrial revolutions of a thousand planets? What, they get tired? It would take them a week to invest every planetary HQ of every Hutt clan, and when the leaders had all fled to Nal Shaddaa it would be the work of a couple of minutes to rock up and vapourize all of them. Or, if your Death Star is out of commission, you blockade that planet and wait 3 years to build another one, then rock up and vapourize them.

The mere thought or conception of rebellion is not even possible in a galaxy where your leaders can rock up with a Death Star on a moment’s notice. It’s not like ancient Rome where you get warning that the bastards are coming months ahead, as they cross rivers and ride over mountains. They just turn up, a couple of minutes or hours or days after they left their last system, riding on a Dyson Sphere wrapped around a star that they built, and you have precisely five seconds to pledge your allegiance, hand over the traitors or get turned to cosmic dust. And all you have in reply is the galactic equivalent of a pen knife.

Another argument for the Hutts is that the resources they ship to the empire in exchange for their nominal independence are a reward in and of themselves, but this makes no sense in a galaxy where you can build a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificial star, that is a weapon. Who is going to deny you anything? And what could you possibly need? The answer of course is Kyber crystals (which are apparently needed for your artificial stars) but what is an easier way to get them? Collaborating with a large criminal network, or rolling out so much energy and luxury goods that the entire galaxy is 100 million times better off than it was just 3 years ago, and everyone is happy to go along with your plans? If they stopped building star destroyers and Death Stars for just one year they would have so much energy that everyone in the galaxy could live in luxury like the Hutts. Who would be a gangster then? It’s inconceivable that the Hutts have anything the Empire would want that they cannot buy or take.

SF’s imaginary failures

It’s very easy when you are developing visions for new worlds to have them be incoherent and inconsistent on closer inspection. Almost all of them are. But it’s very interesting to me when they are incoherent in a way that suggests either that the fundamental social structure of the world is evil, as in Harry Potter, or the game designers really didn’t know much about how the real world works, as in Feng Shui. In this case the broader Star Wars universe seems to reflect both of these properties – I feel like people who understood how the real world works might have noticed the massive inequalities in their imagined world, and I also think they should have noticed that almost all of the social problems we see in the Star Wars galaxy are the Republic’s fault. Apparently George Lucas envisioned the rebellion as the Vietnamese and the Empire as the USA, but I think that’s a flawed vision since the rebellion is happening within the Empire, while the Vietnam war happened outside it (say what you want about the USA’s many bad geo-political practices, but Vietnam was not part of US territory before they started the war). And the inequality between the USA and Vietnam in the 1960s was not in the same order as the inequality between, say, Tatooine (not part of the rebellion!) and Coruscant in the Star Wars galaxy. In fact I would guess that the inequality between the life of a Roman Patrician and the poorest heathen resident of Britannia just by Hadrian’s Wall would have been smaller than the gap between Admiral Ozzel and Luke Skywalker. George Lucas didn’t have to think about this much, just as he didn’t have to waste much time on the structure of Hutt space, because we just got glimpses of all this stuff, fragmentary visions of a world of good and evil laid out before us as we romped through it. Was Jabba the Hutt even a planetary-level gang boss? Who knows! But once you develop the extended universe you have to figure this out, you have to systematize these ideas. I personally think it would have been much better to have the Hutts not be gangsters overall, not have a concept of Hutt space, and have Jabba the Hutt be a unique gangster in command of a single planet’s underworld, as others of other races are in other isolated parts of the edge of the empire. But no amount of careful world-building can overcome the enormous, staggering inequality at the heart of the galaxy, because it’s there in the original canon.

Better examples of how to handle these problems are shown by Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, or in Firefly. In the Culture series we see a society that might be capable of building a Dyson Sphere (they probably would consider it too trashy a thing to bother with), but they don’t hoard the tech – they distribute all energy and wealth freely to whoever wants it, and nobody lacks for anything except by choice. This is the only logical endpoint for a society that has so much spare energy floating around that it can build its own stars and wrap a Dyson Sphere around them every 3 years[5]. There’s no rebellion from within the Culture because nobody needs anything from anyone, there is no inequality or even money. It’s luxury space communism!

In contrast, Firefly also takes place on the edge of the empire, in outlying colonies living in grinding poverty, lawless planets and systems where gangsters control the lives of poor and desperate people while the elites in the centre look the other way or send punitive expeditions to meddle in the lives of these people on the edge who they see as trouble-makers and scoundrels. But the society of Firefly doesn’t have infinite resources, can’t build Dyson Spheres, doesn’t have the power to blow up planets, in fact can’t even properly run a randomized clinical trial of a happiness drug. There is still inequality but it is believable in its magnitude, exists for explicitly social reasons and is the central friction driving the plot. In contrast, in Star Wars we never really find out why there is a rebellion. They don’t like the Empire, something about freedom etc, but we don’t see anything about the material or political structures underlying this rebellion. All we know is that the location of the secret rebel base is in the hands of a Princess. It kind of stands to reason that there would be staggering inequality in a Republic run by Princesses, doesn’t it? But we don’t get to ask any of those questions.

To be clear, it’s fine to me that this happens in the original three movies, I’m down with the Rebellion as soon as the show starts and I don’t need any motivation to be on Luke’s side, I know how to watch a movie. Blowing up Alderaan confirms for me that the Empire are the bad guys, even though I don’t know what the Republic did to people. That’s okay in the movies, but now my character Dita Voss is doing these jobs for the Hutts and I’m having to figure out why in this galaxy we even have Hutts and gangsters and human trafficking and poverty and contract workers in the shadow of a Dyson Sphere. Once I start exploring the broader galaxy of the expanded universe, and thinking about things like how smuggling works, why the Hutts run this system, why these planets are so poor, who I should really be trying to kill, I begin to run into big inconsistencies in the way it’s all laid out. And given the recency of the Empire, and the obvious persistence of these problems, I am starting to think I need to look further back in time to find someone to blame. And Dita Voss is starting to wonder if there is a Quelchrist Falconer she can turn to, who might have a better plan for the future, in which the Death Stars get turned on all the ruling houses, then melted down into ploughshares.

We will need something, after all, to plough all that blood and bone into the soil of our new utopia, once those distant star lords have been dragged out of their towers of infinite energy and down into the dust beside us.

fn1: A word of warning, it has been 30 years since I studied thermodynamics and electromagnetism so I may confuse some measures of total energy and flow of energy. Be patient with me!

fn2: I think that article suggests we can lower the amount if we assume it uses the planets gravitational dynamics against it, but this is inconsistent with the use of the Death Star’s main weapon in Return of the Jedi to blow up spaceships, which have no meaningful gravitational effects.

fn3: Here I’m assuming no special amount of energy required to break the light barrier or do the weird physics of hyperspeed, and assuming that the punch to light speed takes about a second. I chose 10,000 so that an X-wing can travel about 10 light years in half a day, which is consistent with the amount of time it took the pilots in Episode IV to get to the Death Star from their rebel base. An alternative method is to imagine that the hyperdrive converts their mass to energy and then transfers it, in which case the formula would be mass x 10^16 (E=mc^2, a formula originally identified by Chewbacca); in that case an X-wing requires 10^20 J and a star destroyer 10^24. But note if this is the case that the Death Star would require ~10^34 Joules to enter hyperspeed, which is more than is required to blow up Alderaan and is the energy of 100 million suns. I can’t abide those numbers! But feel free to update the wildness of this post with higher figures for hyperspeed if you want.

fn4: You could argue that this is unreasonable since batteries didn’t exist when the Watt Engine was invented, and that in a galaxy a long way away and a long time ago they just have different battery tech. The light saber certainly seems to suggest so

fn5: And remember, once you’ve built one of these bastards the next one is easier. You now have the energy of a million suns at your disposal in one mobile platform that moves faster than the speed of light, you can do anything, build anything. Need resources? Rock up to an inhabitable planet and turn it to rocks, then send in the mining drones …

December 6, 2023

Re-reading the Mists of Avalon: When No Means No

Posted by faustusnotes under book reviews, Fantasy, Reviews, Science Fiction | Tags: arthurian, book-review, fiction, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mists of Avalon, paedophilia, politics |
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I am writing a series of posts about my attempt to re-read The Mists of Avalon in light of the terrible things we know about the author Marion Zimmer Bradley (MZB). The story has now advanced considerably and although it wasn’t my original intention in this re-reading, I feel I am able to glean a little bit of insight into why MZB was able to write a strongly “feminist” story with huge influence, while also being a seemingly deeply committed paedophile. Here i will discuss a little about what I think her story tells us. Past posts in the series:

MZB’s contempt for women
The basic project

I hope to follow up with a discussion of why we liked this story when we were young, a brief discussion of MZB’s intense homophobia, and an assessment of the difference between male and female characters in the story. But for now I will briefly discuss what I think we can learn about MZB’s philosophy on child abuse from between the lines of this story.

Trigger warning: This post is going to discuss the politics, sociology and history of rape, and is necessarily going to have to involve detailed discussion of the topic. I’ll try to keep it dry, but if this seems like it might be a bit much for you, you might want to stop here. For those not reading onward, I give my conclusion first, and then explain the reasoning.

Summary

This is the tl;dr for those who don’t want to read an extended discussion of the history and sociology of sexual abuse. Basically, I think that MZB understands and is fully cognizant of the principle of consent, and thinks that sex without consent is wrong. But in circumstances where the victim either is not capable of understanding consent, or due to social and cultural forces is not able to give consent, she reverses our understanding of the concept. In these circumstances, where consent cannot be given, she believes rape cannot occur. To MZB, for a person to be a victim of rape they have to be capable of resisting or saying no to sex. If they don’t understand sex and consent or society is structured in such a way that consent is not possible, they have not been raped. MZB does not see children as capable of consent – in fact I think she sees them as a kind of animal, under the control of an adult master, and it’s possible she doesn’t think children are even sentient – and so she thinks the sexual abuse of children is a natural consequence of adult desire, which cannot harm children. This explains her long-standing support for her husband’s child abuse, and her victimization of her own children, in which she very much treated them as objects under her control rather than independent living people. Below, I explore the reasons I developed this theory.

Three powerful moments in the story

There are a couple of scenes in the books which either serve to drive the plot forward or give an insight into the sexual politics of the story. Three crucial scenes are:

Arthur’s pagan king-making ritual, in which he and his sister Morgaine are tricked into having sex with each other (even though they’re basically children), and Morgaine becomes pregnant with his child. Neither Arthur nor Morgaine consider this to be rape, and the entire narrative thrust and tone of the story is that the only bad part of this was the fact that they were brother and sister
Gwenhwyfar is married to Arthur in an arranged marriage, after which she spends her life being fucked by him to try and produce heirs, even though her true love is Lancelet. At no point in the story does she or anyone else consider this to be institutionalized or organized rape and her only complaint about it is that maybe Arthur doesn’t love her because she was delivered to him as a secondary consideration to his primary coronation present, which was a hundred horsemen
Gwenhwyfar is raped by her “brother” Meleagrant, who claims rulership of her inherited lands after her father Leodegranz dies, and plans to make her his consort and thus claim the right of kingship. This is physically violent altercation in which he beats her and forces her, everyone in the story considers this to be rape and Morgaine additionally thinks Gwenhwyfar considers it to be her fault because in her christian religious viewpoint women always deserve to be mistreated

I also reported earlier that in the first part of the story there are many scenes in which children are depicted as sexually active and curious, and the basic assumption of the story is that having sex with these children is natural and while lascivious and possibly unsavoury there is nothing about the process which is bad for the children.

From the various accounts of the relationships in the story we can establish some themes of sexual and personal agency in the story. First let’s consider the case of Gwenhwyfar, in the context of how fantasy writers and readers typically interpret the institution of arranged marriage in their medieval worlds.

Arranged marriage and consent in fantasy literature

Most fantasy literature that is set in identifiably medieval settings that are both culturally and technologically medieval establishes a cultural milieu in which, at least among wealthy and noble families, arranged marriage is the norm and women are married into families for political reasons with the sole goal of producing heirs, usually male. Of course there are stories that subvert this fundamental process, and fantasy tales that reject it or – as I think is the case with Game of Thrones, critique it – but this process is common to fantasy stories and I think is put there because it reflects the understanding that a modern liberal audience has of the sexual politics of that period. MZB’s book is no different, and it is very explicit throughout the story that young women are to be married off in politically convenient ways, and their primary role in their new families is to breed. Arthur even expresses this openly in an argument with Gwenhwyfar when, to try and reassure her that he genuinely does love her and doesn’t see her as just some baggage that came with his horsemen, he points out to her that if he really didn’t love her he would put her aside for a “brood mare”. Much of the complexity of the relationship between Arthur, Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet revolves around the fact that Arthur isn’t willing to give up on his wife even though she is not discharging the single purpose of her marriage to him, which is not to love him, or even to give him sexual pleasure, but to give him an heir.

The modern feminist understanding of this system is that it is one of organized, systematic rape, sexual slavery and human trafficking, in which women have no agency or freedom and are essentially chattel to be traded for political gain. At the time MZB was writing the second wave of feminists were critically reassessing the history of marriage, with feminists like Betty Friedan describing modern marriage as a kind of prison or trap for women, and feminists like Kate Millett and some thinkers in anarchist and Marxist feminism linking the institution of marriage to prostitution. While the ordinary, every day lives of women in these medieval marriages were, obviously, characterized by small acts of resistance, the kindness of the men they were married to and various forms of accommodation and acceptance, these human nuances should not be allowed to distract us from the fundamental structure of the medieval institution, at least as it is envisaged in popular fiction and fantasy. It was an organized and systematized form of human trafficking, in which women were sold – often as children – to be used sexually and biologically and discarded if they did not provide at least one of these two services.

I don’t know if MZB was aware of the feminist critique of the modern or primitive institutions of marriage that was becoming widespread and controversial at the time of her writing, but there is no sign in her writing that she has any understanding or concern for this critique. There is no character in her story who speaks the way Cersei does in Game of Thrones[1], for example, who openly criticizes the institution into which she was forced in explicitly feminist terms, and contrasts the agency and freewill of her affair with her brother with the brutality and inhumanity of her marriage to Robert. The primary complaint or concern that any woman in the novels has about her marriage is that she might get a coarse or ugly man, or that she hasn’t got the man she wants. For example when Morgaine conspires with Elaine (young, pretty, ready to marry) to seduce Lancelet, she warns her that marriage isn’t a bed of roses, especially if married to a man who really loves someone else, and Elaine replies that at least if she marries Lancelet she’ll be getting a handsome man. She doesn’t offer any implicit or explicit critique of the institution overall[2], or express any desire not to marry – she just accepts that she must, and since she has access to a witch she decides to make sure her husband is handsome. Morgaine – the primary voice of the author and one of the two main representatives of modernity in this story – also offers no criticism of the institution, only strategies to bend the rules. Gwenhwyfar, who is in love with Lancelet, never complains that she had her agency or sexual consent taken by the decision of her dad to give her away like a horse to Arthur – her only concern is that Arthur doesn’t want her. Morgaine, reflecting on the marriage, observes that Gwenhwyfar has spent her life being ploughed by the man she doesn’t truly love, but just accepts this aspect of the institutions of the time.

Children and consent

There are many instances in the first half of this story of children having sex, either with each other or with adults, and the difference in tone and attitude towards this is noticeable. Children are presented as having just appetites, not really feelings, though these appetites may persist into adulthood and become strong desires (as with Morgaine and Lancelet, for example, or Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet). When children have sex or seek sex they – especially the girls – are the instigators rather than the recipients of the attention, and are presented as voracious and persistent in their appetites. The description of their behaviour makes them seem more like animals than people, and their appetites like fundamental, simple biological urges rather than complex emotional processes. Even when sex happens to the main characters when they’re children – as in when Morgaine and Arthur have sex in the king-making – it is essentially natural and unfettered by emotion or guilt or morality. At the end of the scene, in the morning after their second bout of sex when Arthur realizes he has fucked his own sister there is no concern or anger about the fact that a child was forced to have sex – just despair at having broken the taboo on having sex with a family member. The act of this child losing his virginity is even praised, as he says:

I do not suppose I will ever meet you again … for you are a priestess and dedicated to the Goddess. But I want to say thsi to you – … you were the very first. No matter how many women I may have, for all my life I will always remember you and love you and bless you. I promise you that.

This is not how a modern writer would summarize an act in which a child was tricked into fucking his sister.

I think the way that MZB writes about sex with children expresses that she does not believe children are able to understand consent, and that to them sex is as natural and normal as any body function, that their desire to express it and enjoy it is natural, and that there is no reason adults should not take advantage of this. In the case of King Lot, he takes advantage of it by fucking any girl he can get his hands on; but he insists on controlling his own children’s natural expression of their sexuality in case they should devalue their virginity or embarrass him in so doing. Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, treats Arthur’s natural sexual expressiveness as an opportunity to bind the two Englands together, and for some cruel adult reason (never properly explained) takes pleasure in making him do this to his own sister – but the only form of cruelty possible in this act is the cruelty of incest, since the idea of an adult having sex with a child or two children having sex with each other is natural and simple. Since they have no independence or adult sentience, they are simply bodies to be played with, and since they are free – as children – of guilt and morality, nothing that they do or that is done to them sexually can be wrong unless it breaks some taboo of the adult world. And the only taboos in the adult world surrounding sex are homosexuality and incest.

The rape of Gwenhwyfar

In contrast, when Gwenhwyfar visits her “brother” Meleagrant, her rape is clearly described as a breach of consent, a violent imposition of one man’s will and body on a woman. He beats her, tears her clothes, and then rapes her, and plans to do it again and again until she is pregnant. She expresses clearly that she does not want it, and when she is rescued by Lancelet he does not doubt that she did not want it and resisted it. No one else who learns about it doubts this either – her ability to consent to any man except her husband is crystal clear, widely understood by men and women alike. The only complication – observed only by Morgaine – is that, since she is a devout christian she believes women are the source of all evil and sin, and that she somehow deserved the rape or brought it upon herself and the only way she could be truly free of blame is if she died resisting it. But this is a side point, a mere detail in the unfolding tragedy of Gwenhwyfar’s rape.

It’s clear, then, that MZB understands and respects the notion of consent, and she extends this even to the adult female villains of her story (as I will describe in another post, I think Gwenhwyfar is the primary villain of this novel). Gwenhwyfar, as an adult, has clear sexual agency, desires and limits – provided she is expressing them with anyone except the man she was sold to, who retains ultimate rights over her body. I think this clear description of adult consent, and the clear excision of that right of consent within the framework of marriage, establishes an important principle underlying MZB’s work: if the social and cultural context strips you completely of the ability to consent, then it is no longer rape, because rape requires the ability to consent. I think this is the clue as to MZB’s paedophilia: a perverse inversion of the modern understanding of consent.

Conclusion: How MZB inverts the concept of consent

I think what this means in total is that for MZB if you are intellectually unable to consent because you are a child; or if the socio-political context has stripped away your right to consent so that from birth you have no right to consent, then you cannot be raped. It is a kind of inversion of how we understand consent – especially as it applies to children – in the modern world. Thanks primarily to the work of feminists, sex workers, the gay rights movement and children’s rights activists, we now understand that if someone is unable to consent because they aren’t old enough to make moral judgements (children) or they have no power over their own circumstances (prisoners, slaves, women in medieval Europe as envisaged in fantasy stories) then any sex with these people must be rape. But MZB flips this: if you cannot understand consent, your ability to consent cannot be taken away from you, and so rape cannot happen. A child cannot be raped, because they don’t understand the morality of sex and they don’t have the ability to say yes or no. If they express an animal desire to explore their body with you, or you can trick them into playing with you, you’ve done nothing wrong because they couldn’t understand their right to say yes or no, and they don’t understand morality. The same is true for a wife in Arthur’s England – since the entire social and political milieu strips away her power to say no to marriage, rape cannot happen in marriage. Rape is only possible when choice can be exercised.

This may sound sick and disturbing to the modern reader but it was actually a pretty common theme running through much of western culture in the 1960s – 1990s. In my post on my experience growing up in Jimmy Savile’s England I describe some of the ways in which British people viewed children and sex, and I think some of this is reflected in MZB’s work. Of course there must be some additional, depraved element to it, since her husband was a voracious, open serial paedophile and she supported him and was to some extent involved in pro-paedophilia activism. But I think at the heart of it must be this principle that where consent is impossible, rape is impossible. You can’t rape animals, children or your wife, because biology, intellectual development, or cultural norms have removed their ability to consent, and rape can only exist when there is a right to consent that can be taken away.

I wonder to what extent this attitude permeated the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution in the USA; I also wonder to what extent it is an exclusively US/UK principle, somehow related to the way that US libertarians cannot conceive of coercion in the absence of violence. A lot of work was done by feminists in the 1960s – 1990s to establish the principle that sexual coercion wasn’t just physical violence: the concept of “date rape” was invented in the 1980s to extend this principle, and activism on marital rape and intimate partner violence was also intended to ensure that people could defend themselves against coercive structures other than those based on outright violence. Now the concept of coercive control and financial abuse arises naturally from this earlier work. A lot of this material was still in its infancy or undeveloped when MZB wrote these novels, but that doesn’t excuse her: lots of people thought sex with children was wrong when she wrote this book and she knew it because they ostracized her and her husband from Californian SF society because her husband insisted on fucking every kid he met. So she must have been committed to these principles beyond just a casual, negligent kind of disrespect for other people’s rights and she must have known roughly what principles she was expressing when she wrote this book.

To be fair to MZB[3], other than these subtle hints I cannot read into this novel any special attempt to describe or defend a principle or morality of paedophilia. But it is clear that she thinks that children are sexual creatures whose sexual desires and interests are the right of adults to exploit, and it is also clear that she only believes adults have the ability to consent within narrower confines than we would think of as normal today. A key difference from modern morality is this implicit principle that if you can’t consent you can’t be raped, and I think part of the reason that so many of us didn’t notice how awful that was when we were reading these books decades ago is that this principle was much more normal in our culture then than it was now. For example, when I read these books as a child my father would openly advocate for the right of men to beat and rape their wives, my mother openly believed children who got raped deserved it (she told me so!) and there was a general sense that girls had a precarious virginity that was precious, difficult to defend to adulthood, and in a sense every adult man’s right to take early if the girl “led him on.” So I think we who read these books as kids then, growing up steeped in that culture, would probably not have noticed how awful it is. But now, having grown up and having worked to change that about our own culture, when we look back on these books and re-read them in the light of all the changes we have worked on the society we were raised in, we are shocked by their callousness. At the time though the principles in this book were in many senses just the water we were swimming in.

I guess the key difference, and the reason that I am re-reading this book, is that MZB and her husband were committed, principled paedophiles, and so she made some effort in the early parts of this book, when the main characters were children or very young adults, to express these principles more explicitly and more openly than many authors steeped in the same culture might have; and at the same time the careful, quite beautiful way she has told the entire story of the Arthurian court from a women’s perspective – coupled with the way the SF community were able to bury her and her husband’s obvious crimes – misled us into thinking these books were a genuinely ground-breaking feminist work.

In retrospect, it’s a mish-mash of conservative and backward-looking morality tales, centred around the value of virginity, the right of men in a world of men to take what they want, and the power of social norms to so completely obliterate some people’s rights to bodily autonomy that it is not even possible to conceive that they have been violated. That’s not feminism – it’s a morality of violence and power, perfumed and wrapped in lace, adorned with a few baubles of paganism but, at its heart, the same old story of lust, power and the right of kings and men to take what they want.

Image note: This picture of Gwenhywfar is by Zooombie Grrl on Deviant Art, check her out!

fn1: Please understand that whenever I reference Game of Thrones I am referencing the tv show, since I haven’t read the book, but assuming that for at least the majority of the show characters like Cersei speak with the voice of the novel, since George RR Martin was involved in writing the show.

fn2: As an aside, it’s interesting to me that this book was so often described as a “feminist retelling of Arthurian legend” when it so consistently failed to offer any feminist critique of the central medieval institution in the story. There are really only two institutions in this story: the church and the family, expressed through christian marriage, and although she offers some relatively stringent critiques of the former, she never makes any effort to identify the terrible sexism of the institution of marriage that creates the legal, political and social context driving all the primary conflicts in this story! I don’t think it can be considered a feminist retelling of the legend if it doesn’t try to grapple with this part of the story!

fn3: This woman was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction/fantasy writers of my youth, but now just to write these few words seems foul and grotesque!

July 8, 2023

Star Wars Character: Dita Voss, Sole Survivor of the Numenorean Argosy

Posted by faustusnotes under Game planning, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: star wars, stars in my pocket like grains of sand |
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Dita Voss was born and raised in the Numenorean Argosy, a large fleet of ships that moved through the galaxy as a caravan, centred around the ancient behemoth called the Numenor. The Argosy was composed of thousands of ships, ranging in size from single-family yachts to kilometre-long hospital ships and resource barges. They traveled approximately together, though at any time a small portion of their number would be away on trade missions separate from the main body of the fleet. The Argosy was in part a self-contained economic entity, its member ships providing services to and producing goods for each other, but its primary means of external trade was the provision of mechanical and computer services to the myriad small, independent starbases, mining colonies and space stations of the galaxy. The Argosy had accreted slowly over thousands of years, and amongst the crumbling engine rooms and cockpits of its ancient ships the fleet held knowledge and expertise on almost every technical system that had ever been used in the galaxy, as well as starmaps detailing the location and complement of mining stations, gas harvesters, deep space research bases and colonies that had been established so long ago that knowledge of their construction methods, components and sometimes even coordinates had been long lost to the majority of the galaxy’s settled societies. The arrival of the Argosy at one of these legacy structures led to an orgy of trade and renewal, as technicians on the bases seized the opportunity to gain access to old blueprints, fashion spare parts for systems that had been held together by jury-rigged components for generations, and restart auxiliary (or sometimes essential) computer and life support systems that had long since been given up for dead. Sometimes they would pay the Argosy to take one of their young onboard as an apprentice, who would travel the galaxy for a decade training in mechanics or computing or electronics, to return to their home base years later with a deep and enduring knowledge of everything that could go wrong in even the most obscure of systems. Droids that had been shutdown for centuries would be repaired and restarted, their long lost knowledge returned to colonies and mining stations, and data storage systems whose access mechanisms had long since ceased working would be turned over to the Argosy, passed from hand to hand through ever-older ships until somewhere someone found a lovingly-maintained device that could read the lost data and return it to its owners. Sometimes a colony that had regressed to almost stone-age technology would have a memory of the last visit of the Argosy, centuries or millenia earlier, a cave painting or a religious fresco, and its return would be the opportunity for the renewal of a society, the overthrow of tyrants, the start of a new renaissance.

Such was the vital role of the Numenorean Argosy at the Edge of the Empire, until the Empire realized its value and completely eradicated every single living member of its polity.

Everyone, that is, except Dita Voss.

Dita Voss

Dita Voss was planetside when the Empire struck the only home she had ever known, helping an obscure religious order to retrieve data from a servitor droid that had crashed an eon earlier, taking with it precious fragments of their religious knowledge. Above her the Imperial SPIDER Unit tore through the myriad ships of the Argosy, destroying any who opposed it and rooting out every byte of information they could, while she worked quietly and earnestly in the chilly crypt of the ancient order’s long-abandoned hilltop shrine, patching together systems that were so old even the language of their manuals was a barely-remembered legend. In galactic terminology Dita is a slicer, someone who can work with computer systems – programming them, breaking into them, subverting them and hacking them to make them do her bidding. She had been trained for years in the manifold computer networks of the relic sites on the empire’s rim, helping to disable rogue defense systems for their owners, reworking neglected mainframes for a new era of information, and sometimes helping mining communities to establish secure uplinks that were protected from spying by big corporations or imperial agents. But she had never been trained in anything except the rudiments of combat, and so when she emerged from the dusty cold of the underground chambers to witness the remains of her ancestral home tumbling flaming from the sky, there was nothing she could do to help. She could only watch in stunned disbelief as the Empire destroyed what, for slicers and mechanics across the galaxy, was the greatest library of knowledge that had ever existed.

The order hid her in their crypts, and kept her identity and location secret when imperial troops came looking for any survivors of the carnage. Fortunately for Dita, her contracted task had been entirely communicated by word of mouth between herself, her grandmother and the order, and there was no record of her presence on the planet. Her grandmother had died in the first assault, the secret of Dita’s mission dying with her, and so she was able to hide and emerge safe from the destruction of the Argosy. The order gave her a little money, an ancient slugthrower, some stun grenades the imperial agents “misplaced”, and some basic survival gear, and helped her to hide until the SPIDER unit was gone. In exchange she promised them that she would exact her revenge, and somehow recover all the knowledge she could that had been taken from the Argosy.

With just this obligation – this oath of revenge – to sustain her, carrying everything she owned on her back, Dita Voss set out into the world, determined to right a great wrong, and to restore the legacy of the Argosy. Dita is young though, and inexperienced in the ways of the world – she will need a team to join if she is to make her way. Once carefree and lighthearted, she is now burdened with the loss of her family and community, and carries this great tragedy with her. Nonetheless she is young, and she remains cheerful and optimistic in the pursuit of her ordinary daily life. She loves all things technical, and never backs down from a challenge, believing she has never met a computer she could not overcome. Now, though, what was once an aimless and joyous pursuit of technological skill for its own sake has become a finely-honed weapon against the Empire, a mission to find and restore the lost knowledge of the Argosy, and to wreak revenge on everyone who was involved in its destruction. Give her a ship, a team and a chance, and she will change the galaxy!

Illustrator note: The top image is by The UncannyKen on DeviantArt. The second picture is from the Coriolis Last Cyclade book

November 23, 2022

How Much do SpaceX Rocket Launches Really Cost?

Posted by faustusnotes under Crime Fiction, Meat Life, Nerd Culture, off-topic ranting, Science, Science Fiction | Tags: SpaceX, stars in my pocket like grains of sand |
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Recently in conversation with one of my players I was led to ponder whether or not SpaceX is revolutionizing space travel, and whether it has driven costs down to new record levels. My initial response was skeptical, but upon reflection I thought there should be data on this, and it should be possible to make some judgements about whether SpaceX is really doing what people claim. This post is an attempt to understand whether SpaceX rockets, in particular the Falcon 9, really are as cheap as people say, whether SpaceX has revolutionized space travel, and what we can expect in the future from this country or from rocketry in general. The key objectives are to:

Determine the truth of the claims about the cost of SpaceX rockets
Compare these claims with historical trends in rocket prices
Examine the role of reusable rockets in these trends

I hope by the end of this post to penetrate some of the hype around this company’s work, and understand a little more about the economics of space travel generally. A warning: this post is likely to be long, involves lots of dry figures, and is predicated on the assumption that Musk is a dishonest businessman.

Why do this?

First of all, why do this at all? Partly because it’s a rainy public holiday here and I have nothing better to do, but mostly because I think Elon Musk is an utter and complete fraud, who lies about all his companies’ activity, over-hypes his products, delivers dangerous, over-priced or poor quality goods, and wrecks the companies he runs. This is obvious for Tesla, Solar City and (now) Twitter, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable that the same would be true of SpaceX. But unlike Tesla and Twitter, SpaceX does seem to be delivering an actual usable product to high performance standards, so maybe its achievements buck the general Musk trend towards hyperbole and failure? However, on the flip side, Musk has spent a lot of time hyping his plans to go to Mars with SpaceX and everything about that project is obvious vapourware, hype and bullshit. The Youtube Common Sense Skeptic channel goes through this in great detail, showing how every aspect of everything Musk says about his Mars plans is completely and insanely untrue. So why should we assume the rest of his SpaceX plans are anything different? Remember, the first rule about liars is that if you know someone has lied repeatedly and consistently in the past, you should not trust anything they tell you now.

So actually I think it is possible SpaceX is burning money hand over fist, lying about the price of its launches and losing money on them. It’s a “disruptive start up” and it’s not uncommon for this kind of business to over-hype its product while burning through huge amounts of venture capital money. They do this either because they’re built on a completely unrealistic business model and refuse to admit it (Uber, Wework, and Theranos are examples of this); or they hope to smash regulatory hurdles to reduce costs and become profitable (AirBNB, Uber, Lyft); they’re straight-out fraud and hoping to burn through the money and no-one will notice (Theranos); they’re hoping to drive down the price so far that their competitors go bust and then they can ramp up prices before the venture capital runs out (Uber); they’re a business idea that depends on hype and people not noticing how awful the actual product is (AirBNB); or they’re hoping for a breakthrough that will suddenly render their business model profitable, or is the secret reason they’re doing it all (Uber’s self-driving taxi idea). It’s possible that this is what SpaceX is doing – keeping prices low and burning through venture capital in hopes of pushing out its opposition so that it can start charging monopoly rates, and/or hoping for a breakthrough in tech that will lower prices so much it can actually compete.

The history of rocket prices

Launching stuff into space doesn’t come cheap, and getting stuff up there is a big technological challenge. Humans have been launching rockets into space since 1957, and the general trend has been to see lower costs over time, with a noticeable hiccup in costs during the Space Shuttle era when the price of re-using the vehicle itself considerably inflated costs. Figure 1 shows the long-term pattern of prices for major rockets, and is divided into approximately four stages of development, characterised as Vanguard (when the first rockets were developed), Saturn V (when non-reusable rocket technology matured), Shuttle (when prices rose for the use of this orbital vehicle) and Falcon, when SpaceX started dropping prices. I took Figure 1 from a paper by Harry Jones, entitled The Recent Large Reduction in Space Launch Cost. I will recreate figure 1 with some changes later in this post.

Figure 1: Historical trend in rocket launch prices

Rocket launch prices are typically given in dollars per kg; figure 1 shows them in current 2018 prices (so early prices have been adjusted for inflation) but not, as far as I know, in purchase-power-parity prices (a few of the data points in the picture are from non-US sources; we’ll come back to that). Most rockets last for long periods of time, and the prices given in the figure are for the first launch date, not for example the last date, or tracking price over time. A good rule of thumb for a rocket launch is to assume it might cost about $10,000 per kg, and a typical rocket will launch 4000 – 20000 kg into space at a cost of between 50-200 million dollars. It’s not cheap to get shit up there!

But note the extremely low price of Falcon 9: it is listed as $2,700 per kg in Figure 1, which is enormously cheaper than the nearest competitor. Figure 2, which I took from a reddit post, shows different prices alongside the price of other rocket companies currently in operation – there are now a lot of startups in the commercial space industry, since Obama deregulated it in 2010, and these have been pushing their own prices down. In Figure 2 you can see a different set of figures for Falcon 9, with the reusable having a price of $4,133 per kg, and Falcon 9 divided into two kinds of launch (reusable and expendable). Figure 2 puts Falcon 9 prices to low earth orbit in a similar range to the Russian Proton M, or the US Vulcan rocket.

Figure 2: Launch prices for various rockets from a Reddit SpaceX forum

But as I will show, the prices listed in these figures are dishonest, and we will discuss the true price of launching Falcon 9. We will also analyze the data from Figure 1 in a little more detail, and see what we can learn from it.

Claims about SpaceX

The common claims made about how SpaceX has “revolutionized” space travel are available at booster sites like Space.com, which lists 8 mostly bullshit ways in which SpaceX has completely transformed space travel. For an example of bullshit consider their claim that it has made the uniforms fashionable … also note the uncritical reference to “German-American” rocket pioneer Werner von Braun (spoiler: he was a Nazi). In amongst the various nonsense we can find two main claims:

SpaceX has reduced the cost of space travel, typically people giving unsourced claims that it has driven prices down, or using phrases that Musk himself constantly uses but clearly doesn’t understand like “by an order of magnitude”.
SpaceX has developed completely new technology like reusable rockets which have both helped to push down the price of star travel and opened up new fields

Neither of these claims, as we will see, has any basis in reality. Incidentally, during this search for claims about SpaceX, I learnt that Musk claims to have spent 350 million dollars developing Falcon 9 and 750 million developing Falcon Heavy. I will use these numbers even though I don’t believe anything Musk says.

Methods

For this post I have performed three main analyses:

Analysis of SpaceX funding sources and costs
Analysis of SpaceX launch activity and prices
Analysis of the history of rocket launch prices

Here I briefly describe the methods I used for each of these analyses.

SpaceX Funding and costs

SpaceX obtains funding from launching rockets, Starlink subscriptions, government contracts, and venture capital. For launch prices I used the stated prices on the SpaceX website and associated forums, generally given at 62 million for a new Falcon 9 rocket and 50 million for a recycled one. Data on Starlink subscriptions I obtained from a website called nextbigfuture, for what that’s worth. I obtained contract information from a search on the govconwire.com website, which lists contracts and funding. Venture capital information I obtained from crunchbase.com. I put this data in mostly for 2017 onward (government contracts), 2010 onward (launches), 2016 onward (Starlink) and 2002 onward (venture capital). Note that some contract data is for “potential” contracts, which may vary in detail on delivery, but I wasn’t able to work out exactly how and when the money was delivered. For some obvious future contracts I did not include them as a funding source, but my numbers on government contracts are definitely shaky because of this.

For costs I used information on the total number of Starlink satellites launched from Wikipedia, cost of a satellite from nextbigfuture, and vague reports on Falcon 9 launch costs sourced around the web – about 50 million dollars for a launch of a new rocket, and 15 million for a reused rocket (these figures are attributed to Musk in interviews but seem dodgy to me). I used google to get the total number of current employees and their average salary (11,000 or so, at an average salary of $90,000) and assumed on-costs of 30%.

Note that SpaceX is not a public company and it is difficult to identify exactly how much money it has or is using. I do not know if it pays dividends on the shares it sold, what its rental or real estate costs are, how much money it is burning in fines and compensation, and any interest repayments on loans. This is only a blog post, after all!

SpaceX launch activity and prices

I obtained Falcon 9 launch data from Kaggle, though I think it’s just a scrape from the Wikipedia website. This data contains the date of the launch, the booster used, the client, the payload and its weight, whether the booster was new or used, and the result of both the launch itself and the attempt to recycle the booster. A small number of launches were classified launches for US government defense contractors, with no information on the weight or type of payload.

I also visited the SpaceX website and put in data on small payloads for their Rideshare plan, which confirmed that for all payload weights up to 800kg SpaceX charges $6000/kg, much higher than the sticker price and generally consistent with the prices in Figure 2 for other mature competitors. Not quite revolutionary is it …

Once I downloaded this data and did some unpleasant work importing it to Stata I produced some basic summaries of the data, such as mean payload weights, maximum weights, proportion of flights that were government contracts, etc. I also calculated a price/kg for each flight based on the sticker price of 62 million for a new rocket or 50 million for a recycled one, and also attempted to identify rockets that were new on launch and were not recycled (these would be “expendable” rockets).

Analysis of the history of rocket prices

I imported data from the Jones paper (it is provided in the Appendix) and added some additional information: I categorized rockets as communist or non-communist, and added some additional data for Falcon 9 launches based on the analysis of launch prices to give some more reasonable numbers for these launch prices. I deleted Falcon Heavy (which I don’t have launch data on and which seems largely to be vapourware at the moment) and made a fake data point for Communist launches in 2018 (these are still happening – China has a whole communist space station now!).

I then fitted a regression model of natural log of launch price per kg by year, with a term for communist/non-communist, generated the predicted values of price per kg from this model, and plotted curves for communist and non-communist launches. I plotted these against the observed price data and added Falcon 9 data separately. I ran the models and plotted for launches after 1961, because the first 4 years of the rocket program were, obviously, slightly special.

This gives a reproduction of Figure 1 with a little more detailed statistical analysis, with very different implications.

Results

The first thing I want to say before we get into details is that the sticker price everyone reports for Falcon 9, of $2700 / kg to launch into low earth orbit, is a lie, or at least very dishonest. This is taken from the SpaceX website description of Falcon 9, which states that it has a payload of 22,800 kg, and the common price of 62 million dollars for a launch of a new rocket. This is dishonest because it gives the payload for a fully expendable Falcon 9 rocket, but this rocket does not exist. No Falcon 9 is intended to be fully expendable, and if such a rocket existed it would need a separate production line to the current Falcon 9s in use. Reusable rockets need to be more robust and stronger than expendable ones, which means they have a different frame and fairings. This discussion of reusability makes clear that up to 40% of the payload can be lost in a reusable rocket due to the need to have a stronger structure and to keep some fuel for re-entry. You can’t just build a reusable rocket and use it as if it were expendable! This is backed up by the data – in 165 flights on which I have data, no flight ever flew at full payload, but there are multiple flights at a maximum value of 16,250 kg. The true maximum payload of the Falcon 9 rocket is 16,250 kg, not 22,800kg, and it will never fly at this value. In case you doubt me, note that all the max payload flights were Starlink deliveries, and it is just inconceivable that SpaceX would never use the full payload of their rockets to deliver their own satellites to orbit. The hard limit on a Falcon 9 rocket is 16,250kg, and the website is lying.

As we will see, this sticker price is also dishonest because in reality the rockets only ever fly fully laden when they are delivering Starlink satellites, and often the price paid by commercial buyers is much higher than 62 million. We will explore this below.

SpaceX funding and costs

SpaceX has been burning through money at a staggering rate. Here are my estimates of its income streams:

Approximately $7.5 billion in venture capital since 2017
Approximately $15 billion in government contracts since 2016
Approximately $3 billion in commerical launch fees since 2016
Approximately $3.75 billion in Starlink subscriptions since 2016

This amounts to about $4.8 billion in income per year. Its annual costs over the same period appear to be about $3.7 billion if we assume a recycled rocket costs 15 million to launch, a new rocket 50 million, and a starlink satellite costs $250,000 to build.

From this we should assume that SpaceX is making $1 billion per year in profit, if it has no dividend payment, interest or other expenses. Obviously this isn’t true (someone probably has to buy some stationery!) and maybe its other operating costs overrun this spare billion. But I think the story is likely dire. Why is SpaceX raising venture capital worth a billion a year if it is also getting enormous amounts of money in government contracts? I would suggest it is because it is losing money hand over fist on launches, which actually cost a half billion more than Musk is letting on, and/or rocket development (particularly Falcon Heavy and the Starship project) are costing an enormous amount more than he has let on.

Let’s also note that more than half of SpaceX’s revenue is government contracts. Without those government contracts, it would be dead in the water. Note that some of these contracts cover specific launch tasks, and almost always pay much more per launch than the SpaceX sticker price. For example, the Heliosphere contract pays 109 million to launch a satellite for NASA in 2024, while the cargo resupply mission to the ISS covers 32 flights for $14 billion (about $400 million per flight). Nobody in NASA seems to believe that the cost of a single mission is a mere $50 million!

SpaceX launch costs

The data on SpaceX launches covers Falcon 9 launches from 2002 to mid-2022, for a total of 165 launches. Of these 45 (26.5%) are aerospace/military contracts, and 52 (30.6%) are SpaceX flights, mostly delivering starlink satellites to low earth orbit (LEO) were they can vandalize the night sky in service of a poor-quality internet supply. Most of the flights (80.6%) used recycled boosters, and only in 12 flights (7.1%) was a new rocket used with no attempt to recover the booster – these 12 flights are the only ones that potentially used an “expendable” rocket. Of these 12 flights, seven were to GTO, which has a sticker payload of 8,300 kg. The maximum payload in those 7 flights was only 5600 kg, well below the sticker payload.

In fact most flights of the Falcon 9 have been far below its maximum payload. Figure 3 shows the mean, median, minimum and maximum payload by orbital destination for the 153 launches on which this data is available. No GTO flight has reached the sticker payload of 8300 kg, and the largest payload for LEO is 16250kg (all these flights were starlink deliveries, when the incentive and opportunity to use the maximum payload was greatest). Note the LEO(ISS) weights – these are deliveries to the International Space Station. Under the contract linked above, these flights are being paid for at somewhere between 100 and 400 million dollars per flight, giving a ludicrously high cost of – on average – between $20,000 and $85,000 per kg. This is potentially more expensive than the space shuttle, depending on the content and nature of the contract.

Figure 3: Mean, median, minimum and maximum payload weights by orbital destination, Falcon 9 flights to mid-2022

Figure 4 converts the values in Figure 3 to price/kg, assuming a price of $62 million for a new rocket or $50 million for a reusable rocket and ignoring higher prices for NASA or NRO contracts. These are to the best of my ability to tell the minimum price charged by SpaceX – in reality it is probably charging a lot more. For example on 30th June 2021 a Falcon 9 was launched that carried 88 rideshare payloads – this probably cost $6000/kg, judging from the website, and so the whole flight could have cost as much as $98 million. Even then, this figure is low compared to some of the low earth orbit launches, which could have cost as much as $360,000 per kg.

Figure 4: Mean, median, minimum and maximum price per kg, in thousands of dollars, for Falcon 9 launches to 2022

Figure 4 makes very clear that the sticker or theoretical price of rocket launches has almost no relationship to the actual costs, which can be much larger depending on the type of cargo shipped and the nature of the orbit it is sent to. This should be borne in mind in the next section.

Analysis of the history of launch prices

Figure 5 shows the price/kg of rocket launches from 1962 to 2018, with launches coloured blue for non-communist and red for communist states. Corresponding lines of best fit from the regression model are shown in the same colour, and some indicative Falcon 9 launch prices are plotted at the end in green. For indicative Falcon 9 prices I chose a) the median LEO price of $3210/kg; b) the optimum true LEO price of $3030/kg; c) a likely ISS supply price of $7,880/kg based on a $134 million contract; and d) the dishonest website price everyone quotes of $2,700/kg. We could also include $6000/kg, which is cited on the website for rideshares, but I forgot to, and can’t be bothered making this figure again.

Figure 5: Historical launch prices and modeled trends for communist and non-communist states, 1962 – 2018

As can be seen, the Falcon 9 optimum and some of its median launch costs are on the curve for communist systems, while the optimum ISS launch contract price lies just above the historical trend for US rockets. In fact, the predicted price for 2022 for the US system would be about $6000/kg, which is exactly the rideshare price that SpaceX cites on their website.

So in fact, far from revolutionizing the cost of launching rockets, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is exactly consistent with the long-term historical decline in prices observed for launches from the US or its allies (mostly Japan). SpaceX have done nothing to advance the price of launches except to be there, commercializing a mature technology.

Conclusion

The final conclusion of all of this is that SpaceX are lying about the price to launch stuff into space on their rockets, and the media are uncritically repeating their fabricated price without checking its validity, comparing it with other prices available on the SpaceX website, comparing it with the prices that would be implied by SpaceX’s government contracts, or looking at the evidence from actual SpaceX flight data. The true price of launching stuff into space on a SpaceX rocket is likely more like $6,000/kg, more than twice the number they are citing.

Furthermore, this price is not a revolutionary drop in the cost of launching, and is in fact entirely consistent with the historical trend in US rocket launch prices. The best prices Falcon X manages to achieve are also not unusual, being simply normal prices for a Chinese or Russian rocket. The claim that SpaceX is doing anything special to drive down rocket prices is just more Muskrat hype, with no basis in reality at all.

It is also clear that reusability has not driven down the price of launches. Reusability incurs a payload penalty, since the rocket needs to be stronger and some fuel needs to be reserved for re-entry. Reusability is also not a radical new idea: the space shuttle’s booster rockets were reusable, and SpaceX’s sole advance on this 1980s technology has been to land them on a barge rather than beside one. This likely speeds up the time to return them to use, and slightly reduces the penalty incurred for robustness (since the rockets don’t need to resist the crash into the water) but it also significantly increases the amount of reserve fuel needed for re-entry. In fact United Launch Alliance (ULA), a SpaceX competitor, analysed reusability and found that it does not necessarily deliver much cost benefit for these reasons. There are formulae for the calculation of how many re-uses are needed for a recyclable rocket to be cheaper than an expendable one, available at the documents linked in this discussion board, and they suggest that in general it only reduces costs in the long-run by about 5%. So no, SpaceX has not revolutionized anything in this regard either.

So in conclusion, SpaceX is not revolutionizing space travel, it has not driven prices down at all relative to the long-term trend, launches with SpaceX cost considerably more than their PR suggests, and SpaceX is essentially a low-quality internet service provider with a side-hustle in military contracting, being heavily propped up by murky venture capital. Elon Musk is not, and never will be, anything except a scammer, and in future decades people will look back on how he was viewed in this period with confusion, scorn and disbelief.

September 20, 2022

Everything Everywhere All at Once is Trash pro-Family Propaganda

Posted by faustusnotes under Movies, Reviews, Science Fiction
[37] Comments

Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO) is a weird “absurdist” science-fiction in which a multiverse-hopping Michelle Yeoh attempts to deal with her family issues while saving the universe from destruction. It was released in 2022, gained plaudits at some random US film festival, and has been making a killing in its public release. It has received generally very good reviews: it got 95% at rotten tomatoes and 81% at metacritic, as well as winning a bunch of awards. It seems to have stirred a lot of passion, with most critics seeing its science fiction as clever and original, its acting as great, and the emotional component of its story as deep and genuine. Of 339 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, for example, only 18 rated it as rotten and many said it was “profound and moving” or “made you think and cry” (see below).

To me it was ordinary SF and trash pro-family propaganda. My review has a few light spoilers, but here instead of dwelling on its failed science fiction I want to talk a little about how much I hate pro-family propaganda in art, and how socially destructive it is.

The premise and the ordinary science fiction

The movie is about an Asian-American family, headed by migrants Evelyn Wang and Waymond Wang, who run a failing laundromat and have a college-age daughter, Joy, who is a lesbian. They have also recently had to bring Evelyn’s father over from their home country (it’s not clear if it’s Malaysia, or one of the provinces of China, but since Evelyn and Waymond speak a mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin it is probably either Guangdong/HK or Malaysia). Granddad is old and sick, and Evelyn is an incredibly stressed, hyper-active, and extremely unpleasant mother, who refuses to engage properly with either her daughter or her husband and is basically an abusive bully. She refuses to respect her daughter’s relationship, calls her girlfriend “he” and then blames this lapse on her bad English (Chinese speakers of English often mix up genders because in Chinese it’s all ta), refuses to tell her father the truth about Joy’s relationship, refuses to listen to any of either her daughter’s or her husband’s concerns, opinions or emotions, and when she appears to be about to be kind to her simply tells her “You’re fat”. She also reacts very badly to any attempts to change or improve the working of the shop, has an incredibly poor management style (for e.g. receipts) and gets angry whenever anyone tries to improve it, but is always stressed about it. She’s a classic manipulative and abusive parent.

When the show starts she is being audited by the tax office, and trying to organize a party for her father. We learn later that she was basically kicked out of home by her father for choosing to marry Waymond, and he has come back to her because his wife (her mother) died and she needs to look after him. Most reviews don’t mention that Waymond is spending the first half of the movie trying to get Evelyn to agree to divorce, but she is so dismissive of her husband that she refuses to make time to talk to him or look at the papers, and only finds out by accident. What a nice mother and wife!

So anyway it turns out that there are infinite multi-verses, and someone who looks exactly like Evelyn’s husband is racing through all of them, at the behest of a parallel-universe version of her father, looking for the specific Evelyn who is best able to fight off an evil being that is attempting to destroy all the multi-verses. This evil being, of course, is a parallel universe version of her daughter, Joy, who is building a singularity thing that will destroy all the universes. Joy’s reason for doing this is that nothing matters, a nihilistic destructive urge that ultimately looks a lot like suicidality, when we get to find out what makes her tick. Eventually the parallel-universe team realize that the Evelyn in our universe is the correct Evelyn to take on Joy, because she’s so hopelessly shit that she must be perfect for the task (this is logic). Because this is “absurdist” SF these alternative universes are full of dumb things like people with sausages for fingers (through which they have sex), a universe where Evelyn is a rock, a universe where she can fight with a pizza sign, etc. By imagining such a universe and pressing a button a special magic headset, Evelyn can go to that universe, grab the skills of the person in that universe, and then use them in this universe. Sometimes this leads to personality swapping and sometimes it doesn’t, because the movie has no rules, and the only useful person Evelyn gets is an alternative universe Evelyn who is basically actual Michelle Yeoh. So she can do some martial arts. Also to jump between universes you need to do something improbable or weird in this one, so chewing discarded gum, sticking a butt-plug up your arse, telling your enemy you love them (and meaning it).

It’s not absurdist, it’s shit. For about 30 minutes it’s funny and then it’s just boring and dumb, with escalating levels of weird as the directors try to milk this for all it’s worth (and it’s a very long movie!) Finally there’s a big, overly long showdown between Evelyn and Joy, during which we somehow learn that useless Waymond (who was trying to divorce his wife) is the hero of the movie, and if we all just be “kind” we can save the world, so Evelyn (who is a horrible person) starts trying to be kind like Waymond, who she now suddenly looks up to and admires, and fighting enemies with (martial arts based) kindness. Then there are long and supposedly moving interchanges between Evelyn and Joy about how Evelyn is a bad mother but Joy should just accept it, because Joy is Evelyn’s daughter. At this point reviewers will tell you that the movie is about how family are the people we really love, and they may not be perfect but we should stick by them and respect them because they’re there when everyone else isn’t, and this is very moving and the way Evelyn tries to draw Joy back is very deep and powerful. Actually Joy is suicidal, and this is because she was raised in a loveless and cruel family, and her belief that everything is pointless and empty is their fault, but the movie wants us to think she should accept them and forgive them anyway.

There is a brief period where Joy returns to her family and they live happily, with Joy and her girlfriend’s relationship being accepted, but Evelyn still telling Joy she is fat and lazy. Which is meant to validate all the battles or something. And Joy and her girl are overjoyed that her mother has accepted them, because this is all the validation they wanted all along.

Fuck that. This is pro-family propaganda, it’s dangerous, it’s wrong, and we should be ditching it from our culture. We can start by not over-hyping shoddy, ordinary SF movies that fail at a multiverse story in order to get us to believe that forgiving and going back to your family is the right thing to do, because it’s not, and anyone who tells you it is is a liar who means you ill.

The dangerous illusion of the “Asian Family” stereotype

Before we go on to discuss pro-family propaganda, let’s just briefly digress to discuss the stereotype of the unforgiving Asian family, the mother and father who never have any flattery or kindness for their kids but only unrelenting demands. American Born Chinese (ABC) commentators and comedians are full of stories about this idea, and would like you to believe that this is some unique trait of Asian families. But here’s the thing: it’s not. My father never had any flattery or kindness for his kids, but he also didn’t ever encourage or demand anything from us. Homer Simpson is based on a real type of Western father, who can’t stand his own kids, doesn’t care to understand them, and always encourages them not to bother being special or seeking to make themselves better. Isn’t that worse? I think some ABC wear the meanness of their family like a badge of honour (look how I suffered) and have turned normal abusive family dynamics into some kind of cultural iconography. It’s not! And to try and make it so at this time is a dangerous tactic. As anti-Asian hate has grown, a lot of ABC journalists and comedians have tried to use these narratives to get onside with white society, to try and weather the backlash. Don’t do it! And don’t laud the depiction of Evelyn in this movie as somehow an especially perfect depiction of a Chinese immigrant family or intergenerational trauma. Her behavior is just bog-standard Arsehole Parent.

For example, the story of Evelyn’s father not being able to accept his granddaughter’s lesbianism is presented by some reviewers and, I think, by Evelyn herself within the movie, as being reflective of his conservative Chinese upbringing. This serves a nice role for the audience, mostly white, to imagine that their own community hasn’t produced this kind of bullshit, but it’s misleading propaganda intended to allay white concerns about white problems. Western men the same age as the grandfather in this movie are just as fucked, don’t pretend it’s because this old dude is Chinese. This is like the classic “if you think it’s racist here, you should see how Japanese treat foreigners!” Actually, I live here, I know how they do, and the west is far worse. White people love telling themselves these little comfortable lies to enable them to pretend their own society isn’t a cesspit. Don’t do it! If there is anything in this world that is Everywhere All at Once, it’s the universal form of arseholery on display in Evelyn and her dad’s personality in this show.

What is pro-family propaganda and why is it bad?

Western movies play many propaganda roles, but two of their deepest and most powerful roles, which are related to each other, are:

To show that sub-standard white men can be heroes and winners, that what goes wrong is never their fault, and that even if you are an ugly, boring, useless whining loser who is propped up by the women and foreigners around you, you are still the hero of your story. Jackson Oz in Zoo, Brandon Stark and John Snow in Game of Thrones, pretty much every male character in a Disney cartoon, and to a certain extent James Holden in The Expanse all play this role.
to remind you that you have an obligation to uphold family loyalty and ties even when your family are cruel, negligent, neglectful and/or openly abusive. The absolute classic canonical example of this is Rick & Morty, in which there is an obvious, openly abusive relationship between the grandfather and the grandchild, the parents don’t care or interfere in the abuse, and the viewer is sucked in as an accomplice to an incredibly abusive relationship. Incidentally a lot of people compare R&M to EEAO, which should tell you all you need to know…

One day I will devote an entire blog post to 1), the “It’s not your fault white man” genre of social reinforcement for boring losers, but a more common theme and a much more destructive one is 2), the idea that you need to stick by your family and get their approval no matter what. Some movies cover both themes (e.g the first Guardian of the Galaxy movie with its obssessive focus on helping a callow dude find his lost mummy) and in American movies the pro-family propaganda saturates almost every production in the form of their ubiquitous daddy issues, but it’s more widespread than just this.

And let’s make no bones about it, this story is destructive. I’ve written before about how we have an obligation to hold our family to account for their misdeeds, but I’ll summarize it again here: The only reason that parents feel that they can treat their children like shit for years is that they know, without any doubt, that their children will stick around and won’t abandon them when they become adults. Most shit parents even have a pretty strong inkling that they can keep treating their adult children like shit, and their adult children will keep coming back and licking that shit up. In contrast, the reason we don’t get away with the same levels of abuse towards our friends (in general) is that we know our friends will cut us loose if we keep that shit up. Similarly, for a lot of us, with partners: people are much more likely to divorce than to cut off their parents.

And how do parents know this? Because they read books, read magazines, and watch TV shows and movies that constantly, over and over, tell us that sticking with our parents is an absolutely essential role for us as adults, that we should tolerate their crap, that it’s the kids who need to bend and adapt not the adults, and that we need to be understanding of our parents’ “shortcomings” (which are actually, generally, just abuse) and accept that they won’t change or adapt for us. Movies about kids shaking off their parents and fucking them off are much, much rarer than movies about the kids struggling to find common ground with their parents and eventually learning to deal with, tolerate, or adapt to their parents’ bullshit. Often in these movies the parents throw out a fig-leaf to the kid – accepting their choice of partner or job or moving to Paris or whatever – but they never, ever admit they were wrong and they don’t usually do anything to change the other suite of awful behaviors they have inflicted for decades on their kids.

This movie is just another example of that propaganda. Joy just has to accept, forgive, and stand by her stupid mother, she gives a wild speech about how her mother has ruined her life and then just … gives up. Evelyn changes nothing about herself and just wins.

If these movies weren’t made, or if they were properly balanced with stories about kids getting their vengeance, kids refusing to seek approval, or even – imagine this – parents seeking out and earning their children’s forgiveness through real changes and growth, then we might see people who become parents understanding that their children’s love for them is conditional on their behavior, rather than unconditional acceptance of their faults, cruelty and violence. Then they might modify their behavior accordingly. But they don’t see any reason to do this because all of society keeps telling them they don’t have to, and keeps telling their children that it’s their responsibility to do all the giving in the relationship.

This movie is just another cog in that machine, and not a very interesting one.

Conclusion

As someone who actually made the decision to cut off my parents and abandon them to wallow in their own bullshit, I get angry when I am forced to watch a movie about 親孝行, about having to respect your parents no matter what. This movie started off looking like an interesting insight into a difficult family, with Michelle Yeoh playing a very convincing unpleasant mother figure who I was waiting to be forced to adapt to her family and the outside world by the SF circumstances. Instead I was betrayed – again – by a movie that recited all the same old pro-family propaganda and gave me the same old nonsense about how parents are good no matter what, and we’ll never find anyone like them.

This propaganda is nonsense, and it’s dangerous. People need to stop making it, and reviewers need to stop pretending it’s “deep” or “profound” or “thoughtful”, and start recognizing it as valorization of abuse, cruelty and arrogance. Please stop making these movies! And if this thing bothers you, don’t waste your time on this movie.

I swear every movie should come with a sticker that tells you if it has daddy issues, pro-family propaganda, copaganda, or military-industrial complex war-porn. Fuck Tipper-stickers, I don’t care about “adult themes” and swearing, I want movies that don’t tell me cops are cool, the US is a force for good, and you should stick by your parents no matter what. We can’t build a better world if everyone believes that their wife-beating ex-marine dad is just a misunderstood guy who is traumatized by murdering foreign babies, and will get better if we just stand by him no matter what he did or what he does.

Don’t stand by that man, and don’t stand by this movie!

January 18, 2021

Campaign Ideas: The QAnon World

Posted by faustusnotes under Crime Fiction, cyberpunk, DMing, Game planning, Gaming material, Horror, Old Campaigns, RPG aids, Science Fiction | Tags: USA!USA!USA! |
[6] Comments

Some years ago now I played in a World of Darkness campaign set in a near-future world where McCain was president and a secret conspiracy was slowly pulling the world into an evil and hellish future. I played a washed-up communist called John Micksen, who served the Winter Queen and had found magic (he eventually tried to retire from service to the Winter Queen, but failed). We fought our way through many obstacles until eventually we reset the world and ended the evil god’s plan, although ultimately the ending of the campaign had a somewhat unsatisfactory “we woke up and it was all just a dream” feeling. We laughed at much of the world that we were adventuring in: the comic book proto-fascism of the McCain regime (complete with martial law and Starship Troopers style propaganda); the similarities to the Butcher books (which our GM swore were a coincidence); the vast and expansive nature of the plot and what we were up against (gods, angels, vampires; we had the helldog Cerberus as our guard dog by the end); the comical paedophilia and satanism of our enemies; the incredibly complex conspiracy theory we were unraveling. But in retrospect we were playing in a foreboding of the world to come. Not the real world, of course, but the strange fantasy world that so many QAnon lovers have fallen into over the past four years. But for all its awful real-world consequences, as a campaign world the fantastic visions of the QAnon conspiracists leave my World of Darkness campaign for dead. On the still slightly optimistic hope that by Wednesday their figurehead will be out of the white house, we can begin to shrug off Qanon as just a particularly weird and unpleasant cultural movement of these weird times, and then maybe we can begin to think about what an excellent gaming world their insane conspiracy theories have left us.

In the Qanon world a cabal of satanists have taken over the US government and are using their power to commit horrible deeds, including harvesting “adrenochrome” from tortured children, and attempting to make a world government where a small cabal of freaky people control every aspect of our lives. Almost every major institution in the US and much of the world is in on it, and only a small group of aware people are in a position to stop it. In this insane view of the world Trump is going to sweep the conspiracy away and save the universe, but the conspiracy itself goes all the way back to when Clinton was in the white house, with the tentacles of the evil organization involved slowly stretching out through all the organs of the state. This means that there are various stages of the Qanon world that could be used as a setting, probably starting with some period in the 1960s (QAnon believe the Kennedy conspiracy, and also seem to see a connection between MK Ultra and what they think is happening now). It blends Stranger Things, the X Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer seamlessly with every one of Dan Brown’s craziest stories to make an all-encompassing and absorbing world of evil to take on. Really, it’s an ideal campaign world. Let us consider some of its special features.

Demonology and magic: The whole thing is run by a cabal of very rich satanists, who could easily be into devil worship and black magic, or could be some kind of elite and ancient force of magic users, holdovers from the Knights Templar or some weird actual mediaeval cult (a lot of Qanon seem to think the Vatican is involved) or Vampires. Given the far right’s newfound interest in organic food, tarot and inspirational Instagram posts it’s also possible there could be forces of good aligned behind other forms of magic: religious and spiritual magic, norse witchcraft and religion, etc. The sky is the limit! There’s a lot of scope to merge the Qanon conspiracy with a Gaiman-esque American Gods scenario, in which the strings are being pulled by old gods and what is happening in the USA is actually a puppet play with the strings being pulled by fallen gods seeking temporal power. Why not chuck in the Annunaki? (The Facebook Annunaki History group has a thread with 156 comments discussing their link to Qanon!) Maybe John Dee was one of the original cabal? So much to play with!
Lots of guns: Most of the action takes place in America, where gun control is now a complete loss, and the PCs can walk around freely as heavily armed as they like. This is always a problem with modern-era games – how to enable the PCs to pack the kind of firepower they need to take down an Annunaki-worshipping paedophile deep state operative with an APC – but in Qanon world that’s no problem, open carry is completely cool and you’re always free to stand your ground where the paedophiles are concerned.
All the secret organizations scale: Because almost everyone and almost anyone can be part of the conspiracy, you can start at low level organizations – the paedophile scheme of your local pizza parlour, deep state connections in the local girl guides group, bizarre rituals under the primary school – and scale up to national or international super agencies. You can go from snooping on your pizza parlour to fully armed raids on the UNESCO HQ. The sky is the limit!
False flags everywhere: Almost any component of modern history can be turned into a Qanon conspiracy, which opens the potential for the PCs to be present at – or stop – any one of a range of horrible recent events. 9/11, Columbine, pretty much any war, Jonestown, the El Paso shootings, Fukushima, whatever – you can be there to stop it, to investigate who really did it and hold them to account, or to do it. And similar to the City of Mist RPG, if you do get caught in a firefight you know it won’t be news for what it actually was, but will be swung by the deep state media into another school shooting or drug bust, so your investigative and retributive activities don’t need the kind of scrupulous attention to detail that would be required in, say, a Rivers of London -based magic/reality campaign, where even the police don’t have guns.
Viral apocalpyse: The whole thing of course can come to a head in 2020, when the deep state unleashes a virus that will overwhelm the world unless Bill Gates gets to inject you with chips. The PCs can be working to stop this happening, or they can be working to prevent the vaccine from being deployed, or protecting an organization developing a real vaccine for true believers (maybe it’s magical – maybe it’s not!), or racing to find the origins of the virus before it mutates and turns even on its creators, or maybe the game starts as everything is really falling apart and they have to stop the apocalypse. What are Iran and North Korea doing anyway? There’s so much at stake!
Obvious character classes: The Hacker, the Veteran, the Survivalist, the Scientist, the Occultist, the Criminal, the Private Investigator, the Corporate Dropout, the Activist, the Politician, the Entertainer, the Lion Tamer, the Agent, the Podcaster … the profiles and rules just write themselves in this world, and the ideal party will be a mix of all of them, with their combat skills, science background, occult background and street contacts. We aren’t going to bust this conspiracy open and less we can cover all the bases!
Obvious enemies: Forget Blue Lives Matter, recent events have shown us that if you’re a Qultist you need to be flexible about how you deal with the legal representatives of the state, and the agents of the deep state are everywhere – they can be in congress (even the Republican party), on TV (suddenly even in Fox News), in the military (look at all those generals who refused to back the Qult!), and of course scattered all through the corporate world (don’t forget to turn off location services before you storm congress in the campaign finale!) And who doesn’t like raiding the homes, luxury yachts and secret underground paedophile bunkers of the super rich? There is a pantomime list of evil-doers to take on, and no need to feel bad about killing them – after all, they’re all paedophile satanists!

The QAnon conspiracy offers a rich and intense world of conspiracies and dangers that provides a GM a perfect balance of investigation, negotiation, fighting and stealth to keep players constantly entertained. Being set in the real world, maps and settings are easy to produce and use, and inspiration is all around you (just like the conspiracy!) You don’t even need to be balanced – no matter how outrageous and outlandish your story, it will still pale in comparison the fantasies that actual Qultists wallow in, just as X-Files looks lame compared to the QAnon story, and just as my World of Darkness campaign looked kind of tame when compared with what actually happened after 2016. You can go to town!

Of course there is one small problem with the QAnon conspiracy as a world setting: the good guys in this conspiracy are Nazis. That is a slightly unpleasant downside. But there are obvious simple solutions to this plan: you can move the setting back in time a little, to when conspiracy theories were the domain of a wide array of kooks and weirdos and hadn’t been cornered by gun-toting white supremacists. You could simply retrofit the setting so that the Nazis are the paedophile satanists (with conservatives every accusation is really a confession, after all) and keep the entire QAnon world with just the sides switched (there are so many false flags wrapped within schemes hidden inside disguises that who knows, anyway?) or you could play non-Americans who have to deal with the torrent of racism and fascism coming from their American comrades, with associated schisms and additional challenges to fighting through to the heart of the problem. Could it be that Q himself is a double agent, a double negative intended to discredit anyone acting against the conspiracy by wrapping it all up in Nazism, just as at some point in the decline of the X-Files we find out that all of Mulder’s conspiracies had been planted by the government to keep people distracted from the truth of Alien contact[1]?

If Trump manages to cling on past Wednesday, or there is another attempt at insurrection that is actually successful, we’ll be living in the QAnon world and there’ll be no point in playing make-believe games based on it. But hopefully on Wednesday this entire shitshow will fall apart and some degree of normality will return to US politics, after which we can begin to look on QAnon as a hilarious and awful moment of mass hysteria, that provided a rich and complete setting for a modern-era role-playing game with guns and magic. Let’s hope that it will all soon pass into the realms of fiction, so that we can turn it into the fodder of day dreams, and no longer have to give it sly side-eye while wondering if it will soon become the substance of our waking nightmares.

fn1: I could be misremembering this, but there were so many twists and turns in the dismal end of that story that who can say?

July 16, 2020

Coriolis Final Session: The Legacy of the Dancer

Posted by faustusnotes under Coriolis, game reports, Horror, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: Coriolis campaign |
1 Comment

Distance Separation
Leaving Terra Firma

Darkness Ringing empty
Lights out Resurrection

Burn it down and start over
I want to leave this all behind
Abandon all the trepidation
Weighing heavy on my mind

– Catechism of the Cult of the Dancer

Our heroes have ground their way through waves of soldiers defending the secret base of Samina’s Corsairs. Having destroyed more than 40 enemies, they stand in control of the elevator hall that leads to all levels of the remote star base, ready to descend to their final confrontation with Samina and her few remaining soldiers. The roster for this (last) session:

Clementine, technologist
Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
Dr. Banu Delecta, medic
Al Hamra, captain and mystic
Adam, soldier and gunner
Saqr, pilot
Kaarlina, mystic and technologist

Oliver Greenstar remains on the Beast of Burden, ready to leave and warn the world of the corsairs’ location if the rest of the party are killed.

The PCs had been given floorplans for the corsair base, so they knew that the level above their current location was a public area, gardens and a few rest spaces. Immediately below them was the station’s main hangar, a space 100m long, 200m wide and 40m deep. Below that was a residential level, almost certainly mostly empty now they had killed nearly all the station’s guards, and below that the secret prison and medical level where Samina herself lived and worked. They needed to get down there, but only one elevator went all the way down and they could not fit their whole team into it. Two other elevators descended to the level below the hangar, and they could fit their whole squad into those two, then transfer to the elevator that went all the way down, and travel to the last level in two trips. They decided that Kaarlina would use her technomancy skills to control all the lifts, sending them down to the sub-level but sending signals to the central computer to indicate they were going up. They would skip the hangar and head down to surprise Samina in her lair while she thought they were heading up.

The monster in the hangar

Unfortunately their strategy failed, because Samina took control of all the elevators over Kaarlina’s mystic powers, and opened them all one level down, in the hangar. The doors opened into darkness, lit only by the faint red emergency lights in the elevators, and by one or two of the party’s suit lights. In the faint glow of these lights they saw a huge hall stretching out into darkness, scattered with crates and equipment in seemingly random piles around the elevator shafts. Somewhere nearby they could hear sounds of sniffling and desperate breathing, and the air of the room seemed to be faintly misty or suffused with a fine smoke.

This fine mist saved their lives. Adam saw it first, a beam of laser light questing towards them through the mist, and in the last moment realized there was a sniper about to target them. Since he was in overwatch he immediately opened fire, sending a wave of automatic fire in the direction of the laser. Clementine followed him but neither could hit their target, and a moment later a wave of thermal energy struck Adam in the head, almost shredding his remaining ear. Saqr, also in overwatch and carrying an accelerator rifle, fired along the line of the beam and killed the sniper with a single shot as the rest of the crew piled out of the elevator and into cover.

It was as the first of them began to emerge from the elevator that they saw it: a huge, hulking figure in the darkness just beyond their vision, charging towards them. It stopped and raised an arm and a moment later one of their entire teams of support marines died, cut down by a wave of thermal energy. Moments later the beast rushed into the light, and they saw what it was: an automaton constructed out of the twisted, still-bleeding and twitching bodies of Samina’s remaining soldiers. Two men in battle exos had been slaughtered and draggd into the mess of flesh, to be surrounded by the twisted bodies of 12 other men. It had misshapen, thick legs and arms wielding huge thermal rifles, with two more arms holding massive axes compiled from all the crew’s dura swords. Lights flickered inside the frame of its twisted flesh, and strange machine noises came from its joints and chest. It roared and stumbled forward.

Out of the elevator to meet it came Siladan, walking now in his own battle exo and eager to put its powers to the test. He surged forward and hit the thing in the chest, stopping it in its tracks, and the two began a monumental battle on the floor of the hangar. As they fought Adam, Clementine and Kaarlina poured rifle fire into the beast, seemingly doing nothing. Saqr could not join the battle, however, because moments after the marines in front of him were cooked to death by the beast’s weapons they reanimated as darkbound, undead humans bound by the Dark between the stars, and turned to attack him. Though they struck at him only with fists, they blocked his exit from the elevator and he was forced to deal with them before he could leave.

As the battle raged Al Hamra moved away from the elevator to the source of the sniffling, finding one of Samina’s soldiers crouched behind a crate, weapon at his side, panting heavily. Al Hamra wasted no time in conversation, going straight to mind reading using his mystic powers. The images that poured from the distressed soldier’s mind confirmed his suspicions: Samina had gathered all the soldiers in the hangar and enacted some horrific ritual that had slain them all and drawn them and their equipment together into the monster before them. Two of her soldiers, seeing the deaths begin and realizing they were betrayed by their own master, managed to break her mental control and flee, hopeless though this act was; now they crouched in the dark of the hangar, waiting to see which side would prevail in the battle and who would hunt them down and kill them.

Al Hamra saved this man the wait: he dominated his mind and sent him in to melee against the beast, in support of Siladan. The monster had been briefly stunned by Siladan’s first attack but soon recovered, unleashing some kind of mental blast that staggered Siladan and stunned him. It then smashed him once with one fist and marched past him to kill more marines. By the time Siladan could come back to melee the beast had beaten down the remaining marines and was in melee combat with Adam, smashing him with its fists as he tried to stab it with his dura knife. Fortunately Kaarlina had disabled its dura axes, so it could not cut through his armour the way it wanted. Adam had done furious damage on it with his machine gun, and in its rage it tried desperately to kill it as Siladan struck it with his dura halberd, Saqr fought off the darkbound that trapped him in the elevator, and the others poured fire into the beast’s heavily-armoured back. At the same time Samina poured healing magic into it from her remote location, somehow keeping it upright despite all the damage it endured.

Finally, however, Dr. Delekta was able to put a bullet into its back somewhere vulnerable. A battery pack from one of the absorbed battle exos exploded and the thing fell dead to the ground. They quickly killed the darkbound attacking Saqr, and the battle was done. All of Samina’s remaining soldiers lay in a rotting heap on the hangar floor, along with most of the party’s marines and almost all of their remaining sanity.

The Cadaver Clock

They rested briefly, Dr. Delekta providing medical care to the injured members and Saqr easing their wounds with his mystic powers. Al Hamra gathered the two corsairs who had escaped the ritual and gave them a choice: join their sole remaining marine in helping them clear out the base, or die. They took the better part of the choice, and once everyone had restocked and taken a breather they took the elevator down to the bottom level.

Following the marines’ instructions they passed a prison, where they found four starving victims of a past raid, who they released. They moved on to Samina’s personal quarters, at the back of which they found a tunnel leading down through the rock. They followed it, and at the bottom rushed into Samina’s lair.

Their three marines died as they entered the room, brought down by Samina’s mystic powers, but the rest of them were able to break into the room before she could act again. She stood in the centre of a terrifying construction of cogs and chains, arranged in a large rough-cut stone chamber. The cogs were ancient iron, embedded in the wall and connected with a complex network of heavy old chains. At points around the network of chains dead bodies were hung from the chains by meat hooks, slowly rotting and suppurating in the slightly stuffy air of the room. On one side of the room stood an ancient stone altar, covered in dried blood. In the middle of the room, under the dripping corpses, stood a collection of plinths of different heights. On two of these plinths stood the strange ugly statuettes of the dancer, and between them stood Samina. She was tall, impossibly skinny, obviously old but not worn or wrinkled. She wore simple silk robes, her hands empty and free, and looked at them from dark, deep-set eyes.

As they came to a halt in the room facing her, the collection of cogs and chains shuddered and the entire apparatus took a single, lurching movement according to some strange geometry. A loud tick! rang around the room as all the cogs turned over once, the bodies shuddered and jolted on their hooks, and a drop of rotting gore fell onto Samina’s cheek.

She ignored it, and said to them, “I am your only way out of this darkness.”

They ignored her, and opened fire.

The battle was short but almost deadly for them. At her waist Samina had a gravitic sink, which absorbed the first four shots from their weapons. She unleashed a dark mystical energy from her cadaver clock, which wracked their bodies with pain and, had she had a second chance to unleash it, would surely have killed them all[1]. Fortunately before she could do so her gravitic sink expired, and they slaughtered her where she stood.

Epilogue

They searched the base and found a huge stock of money and artifacts, which they stole. They should have rushed to escape before the portal out of the area degraded, but Al Hamra announced that since he had died twice and his soul was trapped inside a machine, he chose to end his time here. He would use the cadaver clock to hold the gate open until they all could flee, and then wait in the dark until his batteries powered down. He gave a stirring speech that convinced all the PCs that their captain would choose to die in this dark and lonely rock, but all the players knew that Al Hamra was going to use the cadaver clock to become the next Samina.

They left, having destroyed the corsairs that had plagued the Horizon for 30 years, and became fabulously rich and famous selling off their story and success across the Horizon. All that remained was to recapture the space station they had lost to an Efrit, and to establish their new Order, a movement committed to hunting down and killing evil mystics.

Here the Coriolis campaign ended, after 41 sessions. A challenging, bloody and sinister ending to an excellent 18 months of gaming!

fn1: The first wave of the attack did 7 damage I think, though I rolled very well, and it was pretty likely that the second one – due after three more actions – would finish the job. I rolled randomly for the gravitic sink’s charges and got 4. Had it held two more, things would have been dire, especially since her dancer’s talent guaranteed she could evade Siladan’s halberd. I did warn the group that I was happy to end the campaign on a TPK, but actually that was a lie: Oliver Greenstar was going to rescue them at the last if Samina prevailed.

July 6, 2020

Coriolis 40: But Bring Here Those Enemies of Mine

Posted by faustusnotes under Coriolis, game reports, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: Coriolis campaign |
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Give yourself unto your god
Sacrifice yourself again
Burn your thoughts, erase your will
To gods of suffering and tears
Tie hallowed bonds around your hands
Kneel before this seat of shame
To gods as lost, gods as blind
Gods of suffering and pain

– Catechism of the Dancer Cult

Our heroes have invaded the sanctum of Samina’s Corsairs, which is the home of an ancient, vile and long lost cult to a degraded form of the dancer. At its heart is Samina, a powerful mystic who possesses all the secrets of her long lost and abominable cult, and uses them to guide a vicious lair of pirates in raids across all of the Third Horizon, striking safe from within their asteroid base far outside of any star system. Our heroes have found this base and aim to kill Samina and tear down her cult; between them and her stand her last few score soldiers, their leaders and champions in battle exos. Dominated by Samina’s mystical powers, they feel no fear and throw themselves into the defense of their leader, which is why the PCs have already slaughtered 36 of them in a vicious battle at the docking station where they entered the station. Now they must move on, and begin to penetrate the base. There remain 32 soldiers, with 4 leader and 4 champions in battle exos. The roster for today’s mission:

Clementine, technologist
Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
Dr. Banu Delecta, medic
Al Hamra, captain and mystic
Adam, soldier and gunner
Saqr, pilot
Kaarlina, mystic and technologist

In the docking station battle Al Hamra had taken control of the mind of two of the leaders, and used their voice to tell the station’s central command lies necessary to buy the team a little time. Now they stood among the ruins of the battle, in a smoking and bullet-scarred welcome area, injured and exhausted. On one side of the room Al Hamra’s droid body lay smoking and sparking, shattered beyond repair. They had perhaps one hour to transfer Al Hamra’s consciousness to their last remaining drone, attach a weapon to it, repair several jammed weapons, rest, and heal minor injuries.

They set about this task with resigned exhaustion, catching their breath as they cleaned up, reloaded, and repaired. Al Hamra successfully transferred to a new droid, to which Siladan attached a thermal cricket pistol, with a spare reload; further reloads would require someone to attend to the machine. Dr. Delekta provided medical care, and Saqr risked the Dark between the stars to heal a groin injury on Adam that threatened to wear him down before they had traveled too much further. They all rested, recovered their wind, and prepared to push on.

From the docking station a corridor ran perhaps 100m to a central elevator shaft. They guessed a large contingent of soldiers would be waiting for them there, and they were right: a brief scouting excursion by Al Hamra confirmed 8 soldiers, a leader and a champion in a battle exo. Kaarlina took control of the blast doors facing them using her mystic powers, they prepared their moves, and triggered the battle.

Al Hamra used his droid movements to trigger the door to open, and used his mystic powers to take control of the mind of the exo champion, forcing it to fire on the soldiers’ leader. Saqr threw in a grenade and Adam fired a rocket at the main team of soldiers.

At least that was the plan, except that everyone in the room was on overwatch, and as soon as Al Hamra triggred the door a nightmare storm of vulcan shells, thermal blast and accelerator slugs poured through the door. One of their teams of soldiers was eviscerated and several of them took damage before Adam could squeeze off his rocket, which eliminated several of the soldiers. They charged into the room to find cover where they could while Al Hamra dominated the champion in the exo suit, and the battle began. Reinforcements immediately began rising up one elevator, which Kaarlina stopped with her mystic powers, but they were not able to stop another elevator, which arrived after a short time bearing the Oracle, the old man they had fought in Hamurabi station. He dominated their other marine team and turned it on them, but fortunately the dominated exo champion was there, and was able to immediately melt the Oracle to slag with its thermal rifle.

By the time they had dealt with the remaining soldiers in the room more reinforcements had arrived in a third elevator, but by now they were ready. They set a careful cordon around the elevator and destroyed the entire team as it rushed to emerge. Within seconds the entire team lay smoking and bleeding on the floor, and by Siladan’s count they had slain another 16 soldiers, two champions in battle exos, and all but two remaining leaders. Very few of Samina’s fearsome corsairs remained.

They checked their weapons, tended to their wounds, and prepared to head down to the final showdown. They would burn this whole cult and destroy all its hideous ancient secrets, or die trying.

June 30, 2020

Some House Rules for Coriolis

Posted by faustusnotes under Coriolis, Game planning, RPG aids, RPG Systems, Science Fiction, Space Opera
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I have been running a Coriolis campaign for 39 sessions now, with the PCs having accrued a lot of experience and a large number of talents and skills. The Coriolis rules are generally very tight and have been very easy to work with (except perhaps the space combat rules), but some parts of the basic rules lack a little depth as you gain levels, and there have been some ways in which my group and I have worked together to enhance the rules and in some ways to change them. Here I list some of those changes, and one change I should have implemented but didn’t.

Talent tiers

Pretty early on we realized that talents should have tiers, with more powerful and versatile effects at higher tiers. So we have made some additional talents that apply beyond the first tier. They still only cost 5xp to buy, but they require the previous talent in the tier first. Here are three examples of these tiers in action.

Tenth life: This is absolutely fundamental to enjoying this game. Once you’ve invested 50 xp in your pc you want some way to cheat death, and this is it. It’s the second tier of Nine Lives, and it has one purpose: you burn the talent to nullify a critical roll of 66. This is the game’s only one use talent, meaning you have to buy it again every time you used it. In our most recent session the PC Al Hamra used this to nullify a 66, and then got hit later in the same battle with another 66, which he could not nullify, and two other PCs (I think) have been forced to use their Tenth Life (then immediately bought it again). This talent is tier 2, with Nine Lives at Tier 1, but I think actually Nine Lives is a massively over-powered talent and should itself be Tier 2 – Tier 1 of this talent tree should be something like rerolling a crit and being forced to take the second roll, or being able to use Nine Lives only once a combat or something. But given how lethal this game is we haven’t quibbled with it: Nine Lives is basically a mandatory talent.

Machine gunner: The Machine Gunner talent now has two additional tiers. The first enables the PC to ignore the bulky quality of weapons (enabling them to carry vulcan machine guns as if they were carbines) and the second to fire full auto using 2AP. Adam has all three tiers, which means he can ignore an extra 1 when he fires his machine gun, he can carry a full vulcan machine gun as if it were a normal weapon, and can reload and fire in one round (he has rapid reload too). This makes Adam absolutely lethal when he rolls well, since he can ignore the first two 1s in an auto fire attack and do it every round even if he exhausts his ammunition. This is just as well since Adam’s player always rolls really badly.

Executioner: Tier 2 of the executioner allows the player to roll a second critical and choose the best one before reversing the dice. It partially nullifies Nine Lives and is used by Siladan, who is a melee fighter and consistently suffers the disadvantage of having to charge through a round of missile fire before he can engage. This is a very bad disadvantage in melee! I suspect that if combined with machine gunner this talent would be horrific.

Combat medic: Tier 2 of the combat medic talent enables the PC to heal damage when stabilizing a crit (but only when stabilizing a crit) so that each additional success grants one wound. Until we expanded mystic powers this was the only way that the PCs could recover damage during combat if they weren’t broken, and avoided this weird and unholy ping pong in which Dr Delekta had to wait for a player to be broken, heal them up a few wounds, and then let them be broken again (I think this ping pong happened in the first few sessions because we misunderstood the healing rules). In any case it’s super important because things spiral down the tube really fast if you can’t heal wounds along with stabilizing criticals. I think this system is far more lethal than even Rolemaster and a lot of our house rules were developed to make it survivable[1].

Expanded mystic powers

These have been described before but I include them here for completeness. In particular the higher levels of the Stop power (which give domination ability with almost no resistance) and the healing powers have been very useful. One of our mystics, Saqr, usually keeps an action point spare for a reaction that increases his armour. Another PC, Kaarlina, has all the levels of technomage and has found them very useful in a lot of situations, and of course Al Hamra loves both the second tier of the mind reading power and his domination abilities. I haven’t really deployed these powers to great effect against the PCs yet but I feel this will come soon.

Enhanced minion powers

I have been following the rule that minions add one die to their attack for each extra member of the group, but I have further enhanced the rules to make them a little more dangerous, enabling extra dice in additional situations.

Observation checks: Obviously with more people looking the chance of success should increase
Dexterity and force checks: When an entire team tries to get out of combat someone should be able to break through, so I increase dexterity checks accordingly; similarly for force checks, even in grappling-type situations (it’s hard to grapple one mook when three others are whaling on you).
Auto-fire: This is the key enhancement. Every extra minion in a group increases the number of 1s that need to be rolled to exhaust their weapons’ ammunition, so for example if there are four minions in a team they need to roll four 1s (the first 1, plus 3 more) in order to exhaust their weapons ammunition when using auto-fire. This makes minions with vulcan carbines absolutely lethal and ensures that my PCs are forced to take minions seriously, especially if I have enough darkness points to pray…

Group and individual skill checks

I follow a ruthless rule for adjudicating skill checks now: if the entire group fails from a single failure, everyone must roll separately; if the entire group benefits from a single success, the person with the highest pool rolls once and gains a +1 for each supporting person. This is done to ensure that the PCs do not basically automatically succeed at everything just from luck, and is something I learnt in D&D. Basically even if an observation check is super hard, if everyone rolls for it one of the group is likely to roll high. So I force the players to roll a single pool for observation checks, research, negotiations and the like – anything where even a single success from one PC is sufficient. In contrast, for stealth checks, where even one failure affects the whole group, I require everyone to roll separately and the entire group suffers from the worst roll. I recommend everyone apply this rule to a party with a fighter in plate mail!

You can really take this rule to new heights of nastiness by rolling some of the players’ dice pool secretly, yourself, so that they don’t know the exact result. I tried this a few times but the uproar led me to give it up. In this embellishment you roll perhaps a third of the dice yourself, so that if the players get no successes they don’t know whether to pray or not (since you might have rolled the one success they need); and if they don’t pray, they cannot guess whether the information they have received is untrue. It also means they cannot tell if they have got a critical success unless they see three dice in their part of the pool.

This is a real dick move, but if you like that sort of thing I strongly recommend it.

Strain from armour

When I played in a long (and excellent) Cyberpunk campaign we had to make a lot of house rules, and one modification we had to make was to armour, which proved invincible once you had more than a certain amount. We house-ruled there that if your armour fully absorbs damage you still take a point of stun damage, to ensure that no one can stay in combat for an infinite period of time just absorbing damage, because armour was so obviously over-powered in those rules[2]. Armour is not over-powered in Coriolis, but I think it would still be good to have a rule that if your armour absorbs all physical damage you still take a point of mental damage. Since absorbing physical damage often means avoiding a potentially lethal[3] critical, it seems reasonable that this should be a stressful experience. This also means that if you’re crouching behind cover absorbing huge amounts of incoming fire without taking damage, you will slowly lose your shit, which also seems reasonable. Unfortunately, however, I forgot this rule until recently and it’s definitely too late to implement it[4]. I recommend that you do!

Final comment on the rules

I have found the Coriolis rules to be very smooth, enjoyable and easy to use, with very little need for house ruling beyond judgements about positives and negatives, and winging it a bit with the use of darkness points. It’s a really well-designed and smooth system that is very fun to use. My only criticism would be that the talents and mystic powers are a bit superficial, and don’t allow the richness and depth of character creation that players demand over a long campaign. But this is a very minor criticism, and embellishing rules is much more fun than hacking them because they don’t work. So I present these rule modifications in that spirit, with the clear qualification that the system works completely fine as it is. Nonetheless, I hope you will consider using some of these rules in your own campaign, and even if you decide to ignore all of them, I strongly recommend the enhanced auto-fire rules for minions. Because, let’s face it, your players deserve the best!

fn1: Perhaps if my players were less reckless this wouldn’t be an issue … but they would argue I’m an arsehole GM and they have no choice. There were good people on both sides of the debate …

fn2: Don’t play Cyberpunk, the rules are thoroughly broken.

fn3: 50% of the time!

fn4: I suspect if my players read this they’ll be clamouring for me to implement the rule, since they’re about to face off with four guys in battle exos.

June 30, 2020

Coriolis 39: On the Killing Floor

Posted by faustusnotes under Coriolis, game reports, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: Coriolis campaign |
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Inert flesh
A bloody tomb
A decorated splatter brightens the room
An execution, a sadist ritual
Mad intervals of mind residuals

Close your eyes
Look deep in your soul
Step outside yourself
And let your mind go

– Catechism of the Dancer cult

Our heroes have invaded a docking station of Samina’s Corsairs’ main base, and having broken through the inner door are about to begin their final assault. Inside the station are 60-something soldiers, a small number of leaders and some elite fighters in exo armour. Our roster for this session:

Clementine, technologist
Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
Dr. Banu Delecta, medic
Al Hamra, captain and mystic
Adam, soldier and gunner
Saqr, pilot

They are accompanied by two teams of four mercenaries. As ever they burst into the station without a plan, hoping to prevail by superior grit and better weapons. They were, of course, right, though the battle was a close call[1].

Beyond the docking station was the standard entry chamber, perhaps 10m in diameter and interspersed with standing steel defensive barriers, behind which two teams of corsairs and a leader hid. Two of the PCs ran into the room to take cover behind the closest barrier and were immediately fired upon by all the teams in the room, to little avail. Behind them Saqr threw a thermal grenade over the barriers, failing to do much damage to the defenders, and their back-up mercenaries laid down covering fire as the rest of them moved slowly into the room. Adam used one of his only two rockets to clear the back of the room, and they soon overwhelmed the first defenders.

They had no chance at respite though, because no sooner had the first team died than a second entered the room, laying down a carpet of automatic fire as they came[2]: 8 more soldiers with their leader. Fortunately however, as soon as the group arrived Al Hamra used a dominate spell on their leader, forcing him to attack his own team, and the squad broken down into internecine combat as one team of soldiers traded fire with their own leader. The others, however, were in cover, and the PCs did not deal with the second wave as well – some were still barely alive when the third wave hit.

The third wave walked straight into the full fury of Adam’s machine gun, and were cut down viciously. As soon as the second wave’s leader had been put down by his own men Al Hamra dominated the third wave’s leader and forced him to attack his own men, and also to tell the station’s central command that the intruders had been killed. This strategy only partially worked; the fourth wave hit while they were cleaning up the remains of the third wave, and finally they were forced into a pitched battle with the remaining troops. By this time Siladan had been disarmed of his dura halberd and was fighting with his hand fan, several of the team’s weapons had overheated or malfunctioned (including Clementine’s meson pistol, which they needed intact to fight the exo armours), and finally Al Hamra took a hit from a vulcan carbine that completely destroyed his droid casing, killing his robot shell and forcing his consciousness back to the ship.

When the battle was over they had severely depleted their ammunition and reloads, taken several light criticals, lost their Firstcome battle droid and one mercenary, and ground out quite a few wounds across the party, but they had prevailed. A total of 36 men – 32 soldiers and 4 leaders – lay dead in the small room, which was coated with blood, smoke stains and bullet holes. Al Hamra’s domination of the leaders meant that for a short time the corsair’s central command believed they had been neutralized and their ship was being searched, so that they had bought themselves perhaps an hour of rest time. During this time they had much to do: restocking ammunition, repairing weapons, restoring Al Hamra’s consciousness to a floating camera drone (the only freely mobile drone remaining in their arsenal) and attaching a weapon to it, and some basic medical care.

And after that one hour of breathing space, on to the next charnel house …

fn1: In fact Al Hamra used his 10th life talent and then got a second 66 crit, so he has gone from storing his soul in a Firstcome defense droid to using a simple camera drone. How the mighty have fallen!

fn2: I set this up so that the number of successes on Saqr’s piloting roll to deceive the defenders determined the speed at which reinforcements arrived: Saqr got 1 success, so this meant that there would be 1 round of respite between new waves of 8 soldiers and 1 leader. Given that these teams of soldiers are all able to use automatic fire, and I have significantly beefed up the auto-fire rules for groups of minions, this is a pretty challenging battle.

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