Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Solid Evidence of the Effect of Australia’s Gun Buyback Laws

    Last week’s Journal of the American Medical Association had an excellent article by Chapman et al giving a robust analysis of the effect of the change in Australia’s gun laws that happened in 1996. These laws (the National Firearms Agreement) were enacted very rapidly after a major mass shooting (the Port Arthur massacre) in which 35 people died. Their major components were banning certain kinds of weapon, and introducing a gun buyback scheme to enable gun owners to hand in their guns and be compensated, provided they did so within an amnesty period. Wikipedia describes the law changes in a short paragraph that shows how wide reaching they were:

    The law, which was originally enforced by then-Prime Minister of Australia John Howard, included a number of provisions. For example, it established a temporary firearm buyback program for firearms that where once legal now made illegal, that according to the Council on Foreign Relations bought over 650,000 firearms. This program, which cost $230 million, was paid for by an increase in the country’s taxes. The law also created a national firearm registry, a 28-day waiting period for firearm sales, and tightened firearm licensing rules. The law also required anyone wishing to possess or use a firearm with some exceptions, be over the age of 12. Owners must be at least 18 years of age, have secure storage for their firearms and provide a “genuine reason” for doing so.

    The laws have been partially evaluated a few times, were the subject of an excellent John Oliver piece, and have been controversial amongst pro-gun activists for some time, with much debate about whether or not they worked. One big problem with analyzing their impact is that the rate of firearm homicides was already in decline when the laws were enacted, and at the same time the rate of non-firearm suicides began to decline in a sharp turnaround from past trends. This has given a lot of room for people concerned about the laws to argue they had no impact.Chapman et al’s article provides a thorough analysis of all the available data on the laws. The analysis uses nationally-available death and population data from 1979 – 2013, so it can analyze two 17 year periods of data to look for changes in rates. It uses the correct analytical method to handle the low numbers of counts (negative binomial regression), and the models are constructed carefully to enable comparison not just of the changes in deaths that occurred at the time the laws were introduced, but to calculate changes in trends at this point in time, and to test if these trends occurred by chance. They conducted the analyses separately for firearm- and non-firearm suicides and homicides, total homicide deaths and gun homicide deaths with mass shooting-related deaths removed. Their key findings were:

      The rate of decline of firearm homicides accelerated, though this acceleration was not statistically significantThe rate of decline of firearm suicides accelerated, and this change was statistically significantThe increase in non-firearm suicides changed to a decrease, and this change was statistically significant

    They conclude that there was no evidence of substitution of suicide methods due to the change in laws. Overall their findings seem to be robust, but actually there is a small flaw of interpretation and modeling in this paper that makes it, in my opinion, a missed opportunity to give a definitive answer to the question of the true effect of these laws.

    Several limitations with the paper

    The big problem with this paper is its failure to directly compare changes in different rates of death. They fitted separate models for the four kinds of death, when in fact they could have fitted a single model for all four kinds of death, plus time and interactions between the four kinds of death with each other, time and the laws. This model would have been slightly nasty to interpret, but would have the benefit of enabling the reader to identify any additional effect of the law on firearm homicides vs. non-firearm homicides, and firearm suicides vs. non-firearm suicides. Statistically significant terms for these parts would imply that the law had a bigger effect on firearm-related deaths than non-firearm-related deaths. This would also have the advantage of giving the model larger numbers of counts, thus reducing confidence intervals. My suspicion, just looking at the data presented in the paper, is that if this more complex model had been fit the authors would have found that the change in laws affected homicide and non-homicide deaths, and suicide and non-suicide deaths. This probably wouldn’t be as interesting a finding, but it would have been more robust.

    The second big problem with the paper is that it doesn’t include a control group. I have previously written a post on this, in which I suggested using New Zealand data as a control group, since NZ is very similar to Australia but didn’t enact gun laws at that time. In that post I found that we would probably need to wait until 2023 to make a definitive conclusion on whether the gun laws prevented mass shootings. I didn’t touch so much on the homicide/suicide analyses but the same rules would apply. By using a control group we can rule out any possible cultural changes that may have happened more broadly at that time.

    It’s also worth noting that the study doesn’t adjust for age. As Australia ages we expect to see the rate of homicides decline, since older people don’t shoot each other as much as the crazy young’uns, and this adjustment didn’t happen in the study. Given the conclusion about firearm homicides is primarily one based on trends, and a slowly aging society should see the effect of age through changes in trends, this was a missed opportunity. Similarly, suicide tends to happen in age groups where homicides don’t (above the 30s) and an aging society might be at higher risk of suicide, so adjusting for age might find an even bigger effect of the laws. I think it’s possible that a combination of aging society plus increasing proportions of non-white migrants[1] might explain the sudden cessation in mass shootings, especially if you treat mass shooting as an infectious disease, that is less likely to break out as the period of time between outbreaks increases.

    Finally, the study doesn’t appear to have actually analyzed statistically the decline in numbers of mass shootings. Is this because the result was non-significant? It’s a strange omission…

    Conclusion

    This study provides better evidence than previous studies of the effect of the national firearms agreement on firearms-related deaths in Australia, but it is not conclusive. There is still a possibility that the decline in firearm homicides was non-significant, and that the effect on firearm suicides was coincidental. In the absence of a control group, and without constructing a full interaction model testing differences in trends between suicide methods, it is not possible to definitively conclude that the observed effects were due to the national firearm laws. Also, in the absence of a statistical test of the effect on mass shootings, we also cannot conclude that the national firearms agreement reduced these shootings. Nonetheless, the study provides strong evidence that the laws achieved their intended purpose. A more thorough analysis with proper interaction terms might answer this question definitively, but sadly didn’t happen in this particular paper.

    fn1: This is probably a slightly controversial position but I have a suspicion – purely theorizing – that mass shootings start off as an in-group thing, they’re something that the majority population do to themselves. This appears to have historically been the case in the USA, with most shooters being white, but somehow in the last 10 years the disease broke out of this group and into non-white minorities, first Asian and then black Americans. I suspect this is unusual, and requires a long period of regular exposure to shootings by the in-group before it happens. This isn’t meant to say that any particular racial group is more prone to mass shootings than any other, just that it starts in the mainstream group and, while it remains a very rare event, remains there. So as the proportion of the population that this group fills declines, the rate of mass shootings also declines, leading to less and less social contagion both within the in-group and between the in-group and others. The exception to this is the USA, where the easy availability of guns means that there is no brake on the continued high rate of events, and eventually the infection spreads out of its main host[2].

    fn2: In case it isn’t clear, I think that mass shootings should be seen as a kind of infectious process, spread by media hype, and have suggested changes in media laws to prevent this.

  • Spiral Confederacy 8: The Red Cloud of the Coming Storm

    So you look into the land, it will tell you a story
    Story about a journey ended long ago
    Listen to the motion of the wind in the mountains
    Maybe you can hear them talking like I do
    They’re gonna betray you, they’re gonna forget you
    Are you gonna let them take you over that way?

    • Song of the Path of Tears

    [GM Note: This is a report of a part of session 8 of the Spiral Confederacy campaign. Session 8 covered a lot of different events, which are too much to describe in one post, so I’m breaking the write-up over three or four separate posts to keep them manageable]

    Having successfully recovered what they believed was the Tablet of the Gods, and received a beautiful spaceship in exchange for trading away their dead cargo, the PCs returned from Slainte to The Reach. On the Reach they investigated the Tombspine again, and then they set off to Niscorp 1743 to interview the Oracle Simon Simon had established there. Unfortunately, once they were in jump space their living human cargo woke up.

    Where is she!?
    Where is she!?

    Red Cloud of the Coming Storm

    They were two days into their jump journey, the sky outside the ship its traditional inky, swirling black, all of them enjoying the luxury of having their own cabins and space to move during the week of idleness. Lam had set up a hammock on the bridge and was sleeping as close to the ship’s controls as she could safely get, while the rest of the crew attended to the activities they usually used to pass the time during the endless boredom of jump. Ahmose set about exploring every nook and cranny of the Left Hand of Darkness, familiarizing herself with every twist and turn of its structure against the inevitable time when they would have to defend it against boarders. She was leaning on a wall of the main deck, thinking of defense plans for the corridor linking the recreation area and the forward officer’s cabins, when the spaceship spoke to her. “Captain Ahmose,” It said in its smooth woman’s voice. “I am sorry to interrupt your tactical planning, but I feel I need to warn you that the patient in the medical bay has awoken, and is damaging my medical equipment. Please come and attend to him.”

    Ahmose ran to the medical bay, calling to the rest of the crew as she went. They gathered outside the medical bay, Lam carrying a laser rifle, and turned on the screen next to the door. The Left Hand of Darkness showed them first the cryogenic tube that their cargo had been stored in; it had slid out of its wall mount and opened, just as if someone had activated it from outside. The cameras panned to show a scene of rampant vandalism, containers and medical supplies smashed and scattered over the floor, a diagnostic tool broken, and a broken batch of chemicals of some kind burning steadily on a bench. Finally the camera panned around to show their cargo, standing in just his loin cloth in front of a bench at the far side of the medical bay from their door. He was looking around wildly, and in one hand he held a huge hammer wreathed in fire. As they watched he began smashing the hammer down on the bench, scattering more medical equipment and sending wildfire flicking across the surface of the bench.

    Ahmose turned on the intercom, and addressed the room.

    “This is captain Ahmose. Please put the hammer down.”

    The man froze at the sound, turned to face the door. Then he began yelling a stream of invective at the ceiling, looking wildly around the room to find the source of the sound. Nothing he yelled made any sense to them. Ahmose asked ‘Darkness if it understood, but the ship replied “I’m sorry Captain, I am familiar in over 70 languages, but this is not one of them.”

    “Fine,” Ahmose grunted. “‘Darkness, please increase the CO2 level in that room until the man passes out. If we can’t speak to him we’ll restrain him.”

    “Very well.” They waited and watched for a few minutes. The fire on the pool of burning chemicals began to dim, but the man’s hammer did not stop burning. At some point he began to look dazed and weak, but then he fell to one knee, whispered something to himself, and surged back to his feet, energy renewed.

    Ahmose turned to Michael, the ocean priest, who had joined them in the hall. “Michael, is this man working some magic like yours?”

    “Perhaps.” The priest was watching the screen intently, as if trying to read the cargo’s mind. “I can work a small invocation to enable us to communicate with him, but I need to be in his physical presence, not merely speaking through one of your technical tricks. Can you let us in?”

    Ahmose nodded to Lam. “Sure, but if it gets out of hand the man goes down. We’ll see if any of his little magics are proof against a laser rifle on stun.”

    They opened the door and Ahmose and Michael stepped through, Lam lurking behind. Michael whispered some small incantation, and suddenly the man’s ranting became coherent.

    “WHERE IS SHE!? WHERE IS THE WITCH!? SHE WAS MINE!!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER?!” He smashed his hammer down on the table, tongues of flame bursting across his hands. He did not charge forward though, perhaps wary at the sight of five people watching him.

    “Please sir, calm yourself. I am Ahmose, captain of this ship. What is your name?”

    He stopped in mid rant and looked askance at her. “Was it you who imprisoned me in yonder coffin!?” He demanded. He had a deep, mellifluous and multi-layered voice, and an imperious look and tone that suggested he was used to giving orders. “Did you take my witch? DID YOU?!”

    Lam made to speak, but Ahmose silenced her with a gesture. “Give me your name first, sir, then we can speak of this ‘witch.’ You are a guest on my ship, and should behave accordingly.”

    The man lowered his hammer a little. With his free hand he touched his belly. “I am Red Cloud of the Coming Storm, priest of the Eternal Sun. Are you my captor?”

    Somewhere behind Ahmose, Alva sighed the sigh of a man deeply disappointed. Everyone knew his opinion of priests.

    “That depends on your behavior, Red Cloud. We rescued you from a …” Remembering she was speaking to a priest of a remnant planet, Ahmose stopped herself from saying things he could not understand, or that Michael’s strange incantation could not translate. “… a bad situation. The ‘witch’ was dead when we found you.”

    “What? Rescued me?!” His voice began to rise, and he hit himself on the chest with his free hand. Now that he was in motion, not lying in the cold cryotube, they could see that his body was a lithe mass of rippling muscle, smooth gold-toned skin drawn taut across a young warrior’s body. “What lie is this? I was in battle with the witch, I almost had her, and then suddenly I lost consciousness. You ambushed me in that battle and stole my prey! She was mine! I had the license!!” His voice rose higher, eyes wide with rage. “SHE WAS MINE! MY WITCH TO DESTROY! WHERE IS SHE!?”

    “We did not ambush you! We found you in the … coffin … and rescued you from certain death. The witch was already dead.”

    “Words – lies? SPEAK THE TRUTH!” After a moment he lowered the hammer, eyes narrowing. “Ah, I see that you are. So you found me already in my coffin, and put me into this dungeon…” He gestured around him. “Why? What is your purpose, woman?”

    “Well, we hoped in time to find a way to return you to your … um … lands. But we did not expect you to awake from the … coffin. Please, Red Cloud, put the hammer down. We can speak calmly.”

    He did not lower the hammer.

    At that moment Lam pushed forward a little, so that Red Cloud could see her, and helpfully declared loudly, “You’re on a space ship, priest man, flying between the stars, and we rescued you from a burning station. You should thank us!”

    Ahmose turned to glare at the foolish pilot, but before she could speak Red Cloud had his hammer up again, flaring brilliant orange. “Silence, you PALE WORM!” He looked at Ahmose. “You say you are captain here! But you let this PALE WORM speak!? It is an abomination! It should be killed and its body rendered down for magical components!”

    Everyone looked in stunned silence at the gold-skinned man. He stared back at them furiously, almost quivering in rage. Only Lam moved, looking around at her friends in shock.

    Simon Simon spoke first. “That’s a bit unreasonable, Red Cloud Storming, don’t you think – ”

    “SILENCE, PALE WORM!” He took a step forward, and Lam raised the rifle. Ahmose raised a hand to stop him.

    “Stop! No one here is being rendered into magical parts!” She held out her open hand. “These are my crew and you will speak to them respectfully, or by all the gods of the underworld I will stuff you back into that coffin myself, and shove that hammer into your mouth until you SHUT. UP.”

    Red Cloud came to a sudden stop. He looked at the group of five, and the angry captain, and the room, and realized that perhaps his situation was not the best. The flames wreathing the hammer faded, and then the hammer itself began to fade, dissipating into nothing after a couple of seconds. Lam gasped in amazement, but had the good sense not to speak.

    A moment later, exhaustion from months of cryosleep overtook the priest, and he fell to the floor in a daze.

    There cargo was awake. They didn’t know what to do with him. They could not even speak to him if Michael were not present to work his strange magic. They could not return him to Dune, since the Navy required him for a task and they could not break the blockade; but they could not put him back in his cryochamber, not now that he was conscious. They simply had to fit him into the routine of the ship, even though he did not understand anything about it – indeed he came from a desert planet that had no oceans, and might have no concept of a ship at all. After a few hours of thought, once they had fed him and checked his health, Ahmose realized that maybe, if his planet had magic, they might have flying ships, and when she asked him, carefully, she was able to confirm that yes they did, though these vessels were exceedingly rare. She tried to explain that he was on a ship like that, only bigger, that flew between the stars.

    This didn’t work, as he burst into an angry stream of rhetoric – the stars were tears cast across the fabric of the universe by an ancient sleeper woken by a nightmare, or some such, and to fly between them was blasphemy. Indeed, to think anything else was a sure sign that the person was a heretic witch, such as the one he had been hunting.

    Ahmose calmed him down and managed to learn about the witch he had been chasing, who was apparently an adherent of a secret sect of heretics who believed that the stars were not tears on the fabric of reality, but other worlds, or maybe dreams, and maybe his world was a part of a bigger dream and the stars were all parts of it. This was apparently a great heresy, and anyone who believed it needed to be hunted down and killed. Red Cloud of the Coming Storm made a mission of this, and had been in battle with the witch when suddenly everything went dark and he had gone unconscious. He knew nothing about how or why he had been knocked out. He was obviously used to winning battles and being listened to, and couldn’t comprehend having been ambushed and captured.

    He also could not understand much of the ship’s basic functions. Running water shocked him, and they could not speak to him clearly about the eternal night outside the ship, or about their destination or how the ship flew. When they tried to explain anything in too much detail, he would become confused and then angry. He was very quick to anger, and obstinate in his beliefs. Only Ahmose had any understanding of this – to her Red Cloud was like one of her oldest and most rural relatives back on her home planet, people who were so old they could almost remember the world before uplift, and could not understand all the modern changes that had come over her planet in the past century. But they were old and fatalistic; Red Cloud was young and vigorous, and refused to accommodate anything into his beliefs if it did not make sense.

    He also had a deep hatred of pale-skinned people, who were apparently an abomination on his planet, very rare, and treated exactly as he had said. Ahmose was a rich dusky brown, but Simon Simon, Alva and Lam were all pale-skinned space dwellers – and not only were they anathema to him, but they refused to show him any respect or deference. For the first two days of their shared journey he would only refer to them as “Pale Worm” and would lose his temper if they spoke to easily to him.

    After two days the effort of adaptation became too much for Red Cloud, and he retired in a state of near-depression to hide in his cabin. They set ‘Darkness to monitor him, and began investigating the means by which his cryochamber had opened. ‘Darkness kept detailed logs of the function of everything on the ship, but there was no evidence of any kind of glitch or bug – the records simply showed that the cryochamber spontaneously began its awakening cycle. Simon Simon spent days delving carefully into the deepest possible recesses of ‘Darkness’s coding to see if he could find any bugs, viruses or sleeper programs inserted by DK, the man who sold them their ship, but he found nothing. They looked at video footage of the tube and saw no one tampering with it. Finally, paranoid that the priest had an invisible ally on board, they locked everyone in the ready room and flushed air out of all the rest of the ship, hoping to kill any invisible intruders.

    Nothing. There was no explanation, technological or sentient, for what had happened. Their super high-technology brand new ship had simply suffered an inconceivable malfunction that had wakened their cargo.

    Only Ahmose had an explanation: “Perhaps his god woke him?”

    Nobody else wanted to credit that explanation.

    They could think of nothing. They could do nothing except welcome Red Cloud of the Coming Storm onto their crew, and hope their mission was not now ruined.

    Red Cloud sulked in his room, and they sped through hyperspace towards Niscorp 1743, and the Oracle. The crew had no faith in gods or spirits, though they had seen plenty of evidence of both, but they could place faith in an AI. Perhaps the Oracle could tell them what had happened.

    But secretly they all dreaded it. What if the Oracle could not answer their questions? What if Ahmose was right?

     

     

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  • Independence Day Resurgence: Everything that is Wrong with Modern Action Movies

    Today I saw Independence Day: Resurgence, because I wanted to watch something stupid with big explosions and I have forgotten enough of the original to make it feel like I was doing something novel. Of course it was fun – big things got blown up, there were tidal waves and monstrous destruction, heroic fighter pilots taking on the behemoth, etc. But it was also, pretty much from the start, a showcase for everything that is wrong with modern action movies. Except that it’s fun to watch shit blow up, this movie was a completely execrable effort.

    It had the usual problems one learns to live with in modern action movies: speeches that are meant to be stirring end-of-the-world heroic efforts but are actually just kind of lame; random shifts in timing that mean that a 4 minute countdown to human extinction takes an hour, but a day-long trip to the moon happens at the speed of plot; American triumphalism that is so common and boring now that it might as well be part of the scenery; and military dialogue that is meant to be snappy and jocular but just comes across as wooden (everyone wants their soldiers to be like Aliens or Dog Soldiers but they just come across as macho try-hards). This movie struggled under the additional burden of occasionally being a bit top-gun like, and having a bunch of relationships between male leads that were way too closet-homosexual (a problem since Top Gun, I guess). I’m pretty sure that two scientists were meant to be gay (one gets killed of course because that’s the rule for same sex relationships) but I don’t want to impugn the actors – they may just have been terrible actors whose ineptitude came across as camp.

    But one learns to live with this kind of thing. This movie was weighed down by bigger problems than these – the kind of problems that are too common in modern action movies, and really ruin them. Here are some of these problems, with spoilers (which I hardly think you need to care about – if you go into this movie thinking any of the non-gay heroes are going to die, or that the human race was ever under any real threat, you really do deserve a medal for your naivete).

    The pointless alarms: I think there were at least three points in the movie where a major character has a breakthrough of some kind – usually, in this movie, because they have some deep connection to the alien mind – that enables them to realize that there is a big problem coming up, such as a major attack or a trap. Their discovery/revelation of this big issue is a major scene in the movie, and they rush to tell everyone, but in every instance they’re too late. Everyone finds out at exactly the point that the character reveals the issue, because the issue happens right then. There’s a whole subplot of this movie about how some humans were affected by contact with the alien hive-mind and they get insights into the alien’s plans from this contact, but every single time they rush into the control room to yell “it’s a trap!” or appear on the podium to say “they’re coming!” or whatever, it’s irrelevant – the trap springs a moment later, or the shadow of the spaceship is already overhead, or the top secret weapon is activated by someone else who has no connection with the aliens whatsoever. But of course none of our heroes (except the gay one) are allowed to die, so then we are treated to this ridiculous series of complications and implausible events that enable the heroes to escape the trap, or survive the sudden arrival of the alien spaceship, or whatever. The movie would be so much simpler and less irritating and more coherent if these realizations – and all the backstory necessary to support them – were stripped away; or, so much more tense and self-consistent if the warnings came in time to change the course of the story. Instead, since the story writers are complete idiots, the plot is constantly annoying you with this irrelevant backstory to justify urgent warnings that make no difference.

    The bad guy’s plans are just dumb: All too often this kind of movie has a bad guy who could win everything by sticking to a simple plan that works, like flying a 3000 km long spaceship over the Atlantic Ocean, blowing up everything in your way, and then sucking all the molten metal out of the earth’s core. Instead, the bad guy does stupid shit that doesn’t make any sense, either from a practical planning point of view or within the framework of the particular form of implacable evil that the bad guy represents. Sometimes the problem is just that the bad guy’s overall plan for world domination is such obvious bullshit that it should be comedy, like when the Joker (or was it the Penguin?) planned to put hallucinogens in the Gotham City water supply and then rule the world (?!). In this movie though it’s the more common problem that the evil bad guy has a simple plan that doesn’t require any embellishment, and so the embellishments don’t make any sense; and then at the end the bad guy does something completely irrational that obviously is high-risk and doesn’t match the bad guy’s personality at all. In this case, having proven that the 3000km long spaceship can destroy every orbital defense in a second, control gravity sufficient to tear entire cities into the sky, and drill a hole to the earth’s core in a day, the bad guy has to lay some kind of trap to lure a few of earth’s bombers inside its 3000km long spaceship and then blow them up. Why? Why doesn’t it just wipe them all out in a millisecond and keep on about its business? And how does this trap in any way relate to its subsequent ability to destroy all the earth’s satellite communications? (The movie suggests that they are linked somehow). This is just incoherent. Of course then subsequently, having proven that it has a spaceship capable of destroying any opposition and protecting it from any harm, the evil bad guy decides to depart in a much smaller ship and attack the main human base, which is heavily defended, rather than just sending minions. Suddenly the bad guy goes from being an implacable insect mind of infinite evil and cruelty to a vengeful viking with no common sense. This kind of sudden change in behavior really obviously was just done to make the plot work, and when the writers betray the principles of the characters so that they can make a story, you just find yourself thinking they’re arseholes with no respect for their audience.

    The pointless sacrifices that don’t matter: It’s apparently impossible to send a guided missile through a hole the size of a large crater in this super-technological future, so instead a bunch of brave dudes have to commit to a suicidal run to get that weapon in there, and then of course it doesn’t work anyway because the whole thing was a trap. This might make sense except that moments earlier we’ve been told that the air force will use drones to break down the 3000km long spaceship’s (previously impervious!) shields. I’m sorry, but if you want me to place some value on a person’s self-sacrifice, you actually have to give me a reason why they should kill themselves.

    Being a dickhead idiot jock never has consequences: Apparently when you work on a top-secret high-value moon base that holds a weapon so powerful it can destroy massive alien spaceships, that is the prize of earth’s fleet, you can just steal a spaceship, go to earth, pick up a couple of guys you think you might need (who incidentally never told you where they were) then return to the moon and be given no punishment. You can also nearly destroy that weapon by your own stupidity, then do something really reckless to stop it being destroyed, and be grounded for a day. Even though it’s your third offense, and your first offense involved destroying an experimental jet and nearly getting your buddy killed. Here’s the thing, idiot hollywood writers: jocks aren’t cool. They’re bullies and dickheads. You don’t make them cooler by making their bullying, reckless, stupid behavior consequence-free. When you do that you just make most of the audience like them less, and wonder why they’re cheering these people on.

    The cataclysms that don’t: This 3000km long spaceship settled over the Atlantic and created a tidal wave so great that it washed away Florida, and hurled cargo ships around like matchsticks; but a tiny salvage ship full of dodgy dudes out in the middle of the Atlantic, a mere kilometre away from the source of the ship’s death ray, was completely untouched and not even rocked by a wave. In case you’re thinking “oh but that was just the eye of the hurricane, right?” the writers are sure to make it clear that this is the only ship left in the area. Similarly we see these ordered refugee columns fleeing the destruction and leaving a lane of the road open for people to pass them by, and we see a rain of destruction in which one city is dropped on another city but our heroes’ valiant spaceship is completely undamaged by being in the middle of it all. This kind of thing is really annoying because it tells you immediately that all the death and destruction you’re going to see is not a threat to your heroes – they’re immune to everything and anything, and the story will make this clear repeatedly, so that by the end you’re bored of the supposed “challenges” they get caught in. Why should I invest any energy into supporting the struggle of a bunch of dudes who I know are going to make it out no matter what, because they’re jocks?

    Once, just once, I would like to see one of these movies go through all these stupid errors and then in the last 20 minutes wipe out the earth and kill all the heroes because they’re reckless fools. That, of course, is never going to happen. So instead I have to sit through these movies full of shlock in order to see a few things blown up. I guess if writing these kinds of stories were difficult this might be okay, but I’m a GM and I know how to make a simple plot that involves lots of violence for a good purpose; plus I’ve seen movies like Die Hard, Aliens, Starship Troopers and Dog Soldiers which are able to make a simple story hang together in a believable way, even though every aspect of every one of those movies is completely unrealistic.

    This shit is really not difficult to get right. Why is it so hard for modern Hollywood blockbusters to make a decent action movie?

  • Spiral Confederacy 8: Secrets of the Tombspine

    completely insane, our glory
    lost in vain
    what a perfect view

    enter my coffin
    my wintercoffin
    awaiting to see the faithful king
    what a perfect view!

    [GM Note: This is a report of a part of session 8 of the Spiral Confederacy campaign. Session 8 covered a lot of different events, which are too much to describe in one post, so I’m breaking the write-up over three or four separate posts to keep them manageable]
    Having successfully recovered what they believed was the Tablet of the Gods, and received a beautiful spaceship in exchange for trading away their dead cargo, the PCs returned from Slainte to The Reach. Upon returning to the Reach they were informed that initial exploration of the Tombspine had begun, and a smart young archaeologist had uncovered several graves, scattered out of order in nearby areas, that were probably linked to the graves that the characters had encountered a death priest trying to explore. Preparations were under way to open the graves and exhume its contents but these would take time. In the meantime the archaeologist had identified one particular grave of interest for its unique design, and was preparing to take a deep scanner to investigate its contents. Would Alva like to join her?
    Of course our heroes, being men and women of science, wanted to know. They took the ship’s boat from their new, beautiful ship and headed as fast as they could to the Gardens, taking their weapons of course and the young archaeologist who had found the tomb. At the Gardens they found an agent of Pearl 7 acting as a gate guard, ready to report on any suspicious new entrants to the place, but he reported there had been no unusual activity. They hiked up into the hills, following the path they had followed when last they came here chasing the death priest. They reached the scene of their fight with the priest, now tranquil and scrubbed of any sign of violence or demons, and followed a narrow culvert into the hills. Here the Gardens sprawled across the ancient, craggy remains of a Confederacy spaceship, probably an early Continent class ship, that formed the spine of the structure they were walking along. Wrecked probably 2000 years ago in the Confederacy’s first ill-fated encounter with The Reach, when this sector was still well outside the frontier, this ship would have been 100kms long and 50 kms high, a beast of plasteel and field technology too vast to be easily fragmented; its wrecked superstructure formed the spine on which the entire Gardens was built, layers of wreckage piled on top of its flattened and uncoiled shell. At the higher, older reaches of the gardens, though, those other smaller ships were no longer part of the soil, and the characters found themselves toiling up grassy, forested slopes that were once the upper decks and turrets of this ancient, nameless starship. Mists gathered in the many valleys and tree-lined canyons of the ship’s grave, and all along the undulating ruins near the top of the tombspine they could see the remains of ancient turrets, turned thousands of years ago into tombs for fallen pirates.
    One of these tombs was their target. The young archaeologist led them along a narrow valley, filled with mist and cascading water, and up to a long, narrow block of plasteel that had endured against the encroaching forest for millenia. This building was once a missile turret, perhaps holding weaponry capable of destroying a cruiser or the entire fleet of a lesser navy. Now it stood abandoned, hollowed out for its new purpose and left to the elements. They pushed through a narrow door and into the turret itself, and the young archaeologist explained the tomb to them.
    It’s a central grave, this huge block of black material that’s blast-proof and bullet proof. There was an elaborate trap in the walls of the turret, some kind of complex laser trap triggered by the tomb itself with sufficient power and coverage to turn everyone in the room into chunks of barbequed meat. It’s been disabled now, but the central tomb is a strange arrangement still.
    The tomb sat there, a squat and ominous pile of black … something, taking up much of the room. A small pile of flasks and boxes in one corner indicated the presence of grave goods, unopened and unrobbed. The central tomb rose to chest height, a perfect block of bomb-proof black … something, unmarked in every way. Apart from the small pile of pots and pans the rest of the room was empty and undisturbed, light filtering through a few holes in the ceiling and some plants growing out of cracks in the wall. They fired up the scanner.
    They scanned the tomb. The outside of the tomb was, as their archaeologist had noticed, a weapon-proof shell. But inside it was another shell, a massive computer edifice devoted to fighting AIs. Inside that was a small computer and a sub-space power system, still running and dedicated to powering both. The AI defence and the smaller computer were both fried, destroyed by some intruder, probably necessary to disable the laser trap in the walls of the tomb. Once these two defenses had been disabled the lid of the tomb could be opened, which it had been. The body inside the tomb appeared to have been disturbed, though on first inspection nothing had been removed. Beneath the body was a small space, a final holder for grave goods, large enough to hold a tablet. It was empty.
    Someone had come here, destroyed the AI defences around the central computer, disabled the trap surrounding the tomb, and disturbed the body inside just enough to take a single grave good – a tablet. The PCs could guess the implications of this: the leader of the Cult of the Unredeemed had come here 1000 years ago, broken into the tomb, and asked his AI to break through the defenses. The Starred One had managed to break the defenses but gone crazy during the battle. The cult leader had then removed the tablet and he and his now-crazy AI had jumped onto a sublight ship and headed off to the Perez system to hide.
    This tomb told the PCs that someone placed immense value on the tablet they had found, and in particular they thought it needed to be protected from AIs.
    What had they found?

  • Barack Obama’s Review of Obamacare

    This week’s Journal of the American Medical Association features an excellent article by Barack Obama, reviewing the implementation and outcomes of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). Obviously large parts of this article were likely written by someone else, since Obama is too busy with his secret Muslim conspiracies to write a full paper, but some parts – particularly the part on why and how he implemented it – do seem to be written in Obama’s voice, which is nice to see. Vox has a brief report of the article, indicating that it is the result of a six-month Whitehouse review of the legislation and focusing on the implications of one of Obama’s recommendations (for a public option). Like most non-Americans I don’t find the recommendation of a public option to be particularly controversial or striking, so I’m not interested in revisiting it here. Rather, I’d like to briefly discuss the article’s findings on Obamacare’s achievements, take a moment to rant about what a terrible statistician Obama is, and look at some of the other conclusions he draws from his success. I will quote some parts of the article and put up one figure, but I won’t go quote too much or put up too many figures because JAMA probably wouldn’t like that. I would like to say that this is a very easy-to-read article and the choice of figures and data presentation is largely very strong – Obama certainly knows how to make a case. Also note the author affiliation: “President of the United States, Washington, DC”. Classic.

    Reduction in the uninsured

    In Figure 1 of the paper Obama presents the long-term trend in the proportion of Americans not covered by health insurance, and shows a huge drop after the implementation of Obamacare, from 15% to below 10% of the population. That is a huge achievement, which he states corresponds with roughly 20 million Americans receiving health insurance who would not have received it if Obamacare had not been passed. This still leaves about 30 million people without health insurance in 2015, a pretty shocking number for a developed country (in contrast, Japan has about 98% coverage and the UK about 100%). In Figure 2 Obama shows that the Medicaid expansion was responsible for a major reduction in the uninsured, by comparing the percentage drop in the uninsured in states that accepted the Medicaid expansion and those that didn’t. This drop in the uninsured increases with the proportion of people who had no insurance before the implementation of Obamacare: in a state that had 20% of its population uninsured in 2013, we see a 10% drop in the uninsured rate if the state accepted Medicaid, compared to 5% if it didn’t (these are percentage point drops, too, meaning that the proportion uninsured halved in the Medicaid state!) Obama doesn’t attempt to estimate the total number of people missing out on insurance due to the recalcitrance of the 21 states that refused to accept the Medicaid expansion, but I think the implication is obvious.

    Obama’s sad statistics

    Figure 2 annoys me because the straight lines shown in the plot are from an ordinary least squares regression of percentage point drop in uninsured against pre-intervention proportion of the uninsured. The straight line fit for non-Medicaid states is quite poor, because of course the relationship between percentage point drops and their starting point is non-linear. Obama would have been better served to take the logit transformation of the proportional drop, fitted a straight line model to that, and then back-transformed the resulting prediction to get two pretty s-shaped curves in his figure. I guess his article wasn’t subjected to JAMA’s usual rigorous peer review standards …

    (In truth this isn’t a big deal in this case because the relationship in the data is so obvious that it doesn’t really matter how you handle it. My guess is that this figure was prepared by one of the people doing the review of Obamacare, and I would like to think that the people doing that review can do higher quality work than this!)

    The three dimensions of coverage
    The three dimensions of coverage

    Mixed results on financial protection

    Insurance is only good if it covers the services you need and offers financial protection. In health financing we talk about depth, height and breadth of coverage, which are depicted graphically in the figure above that I cribbed from an LSHTM course on financing health. Reducing the number of uninsured increases the breadth of coverage (the proportion of the population covered) but if this comes at the expense of the depth of coverage (which services are covered) or the height of coverage (the proportion of financial protection people receive) the overall benefits of the plan may be limited. Obama tackles these three dimensions in his paper, though he doesn’t use the WHO framework described in the figure above. Regarding depth, he states

    Coverage offered on the individual market or to small businesses must now include a core set of health care services, including maternity care and treatment for mental health and substance use disorders, services that were sometimes not covered at all previously

    Which indicates that Obamacare has forced minimum standards of coverage onto organizations that offer health insurance. This is something that people living in countries with robust universal health coverage (UHC) systems take for granted, and it’s really hard to imagine having to navigate a health insurance market where this isn’t the case – at the very least setting up a core set of covered health services reduces the risk of mistakenly choosing a health insurance package that doesn’t help you with the things you’re most likely to need it for. Obama’s language here implicitly suggests that the core package of services covered under Obamacare is an expansion of those in the previous system, but he doesn’t present any evidence that this is the case for all plans, or even in general – it could be that in adhering to these core requirements insurers have dumped some other coverage from their plans. I haven’t ever seen any research on how to assess the best services to include in a plan, or how to compare two plans that have quite different and non-overlapping benefits, so I don’t know how to assess this aspect of Obamacare (or if it can be assessed), but from the point of view of consumer protection having a guaranteed core of services seems like a good idea.

    Obama's Figure 3
    Obama’s Figure 3

    On financial protection – the height of services – Obama makes a strong case that his legislation has been very protective. Figure 3 in the article, shown above, shows the trend in the proportion of workers enrolled in an insurance scheme that has no annual upper limit on the amount of out-of-pocket payments they must make. Out of pocket payments for health care are the main source of financial risk for individuals, and typically arise when someone has no health insurance (so must pay everything from their own money) or has health insurance with very high co-payments and deductibles, a common problem in the USA before Obamacare. Obamacare required insurers to put a cap on these out of pocket payments, and the effect on the proportion of workers exposed to unlimited financial risk is obvious in this chart. Unfortunately in a later figure we see that average out of pocket expenses haven’t changed much over time, suggesting that the annual limits that insurers placed on out of pocket payments were set high enough as to not effect the majority of such payments. To properly explore this issue we need to see data on health-related financial catastrophe, distress financing, and impoverishment due to health expenses, which to the best of my knowledge have never been adequately reported for the USA. We see some hints of this in other parts of the report, where Obama notes that the proportion of people not seeking care because they can’t afford it is down, and the average size of Medicaid debts is also down, but the picture here is incomplete. My suspicion is that a lot of healthy people have picked up bronze plans that offer them financial protection in only the most extreme cases, leaving them wearing significant costs for routine care. This isn’t in itself necessarily a problem, but to properly understand the financial protection and equity effects of the law we really need to see measures of who gets screwed by very high costs and how, rather than seeing trends in average costs.

    Lessons from this policy battle

    Obama concludes, unsurprisingly, that his policy has been highly effective, and I agree with this conclusion. It’s definitely not the best UHC plan out there, and even before it was rewritten by the Supreme Court and repeatedly undermined by Republicans it wasn’t a great plan, but it has achieved a lot and a lot of Americans are much better off for it. He states in the conclusion that he now wants people to accept it as the law of the land and move on to ways of improving it, but first he makes this comment about the challenges of working in American politics which gives some idea of how much of an achievement even this compromised package is:

    The first lesson is that any change is difficult, but it is especially difficult in the face of hyperpartisanship. Republicans reversed course and rejected their own ideas once they appeared in the text of a bill that I supported. For example, they supported a fully funded risk-corridor program and a public plan fallback in the Medicare drug benefit in 2003 but opposed them in the ACA. They supported the individual mandate in Massachusetts in 2006 but opposed it in the ACA. They supported the employer mandate in California in 2007 but opposed it in the ACA—and then opposed the administration’s decision to delay it. Moreover, through inadequate funding, opposition to routine technical corrections, excessive oversight, and relentless litigation, Republicans undermined ACA implementation efforts. We could have covered more ground more quickly with cooperation rather than obstruction. It is not obvious that this strategy has paid political dividends for Republicans, but it has clearly come at a cost for the country, most notably for the estimated 4 million Americans left uninsured because they live in GOP-led states that have yet to expand Medicaid

    Here he hasn’t gone into great detail about how the Supreme Court rewrote the Medicaid expansion part of his bill, and he has notably understated the effect of obstructionism on the Republicans, but his central point is clear: this legislation could have been better if Republicans would just have supported it, or contributed in any way at all to a constructive debate on health care. Five years have passed since the bill was first introduced to Congress, and Obama has had enough time to review its effects and write a JAMA article on it, and in all that time the Republicans have tried repeatedly to repeal it yet are still to come up with an alternative health care plan. Today they released their convention platform, and as reported by Vox it doesn’t include an alternative health care plan – in an election year. This is beyond juvenile politics, and in any other democratic polity a party that cannot come up with a coherent health policy would be treated as a joke. This is the background of Obama’s legislative efforts.

    Finally, Obama makes the point that people working in health financing understand well: that UHC is about a pragmatic pathway to financial protection for everyone, not about an ideological commitment to a specific means of getting there. He says:

    The third lesson is the importance of pragmatism in both legislation and implementation. Simpler approaches to addressing our health care problems exist at both ends of the political spectrum: the single-payer model vs government vouchers for all. Yet the nation typically reaches its greatest heights when we find common ground between the public and private good and adjust along the way. That was my approach with the ACA. We engaged with Congress to identify the combination of proven health reform ideas that could pass and have continued to adapt them since. This includes abandoning parts that do not work, like the voluntary long-term care program included in the law

    and in this respect I also agree with him. I suspect that if the Republican party were a real political party and not a clown car, they would have recognized the importance of reform and accepted Obamacare as a practical model that protects the free market nature of the existing health system. For those Bernie dead-enders who refuse to accept compromise, nothing except a full single-payer public plan will do, and while this worked completely fine in Australia, Canada and the UK it just won’t make it in the USA, which is probably why those Berniebros find themselves in their current cul-de-sac. Obamacare is an artful example of the importance of compromise in making good health policy, and the value of practical planning over ideology. Shamefully for the Republicans and unfortunately for the country, it hasn’t been able (yet) to achieve its full promise. Obama made a few suggestions for how it can, but ultimately his particular recommendations are less important than the simple need for a return to rational policy-making by the Republicans. Whoever the next president is, she is going to want to begin tinkering with Obamacare to make it better, and hopefully the Republicans will by then have recognized that it is their responsibility to contribute positively to that process, for the good of all Americans.

    I don’t see that happening, but like Obama, I can always hope …

  • Infinite Armies of the Spiral Confederacy: War in a Post-Scarcity Utopia

    What Dreams These?
    What Dreams These?

    Although it is a post-scarcity utopia, there are some things that even the Spiral Confederacy cannot guarantee its citizens. Ocean class spaceships, for example, 40km long and 10 km wide, require special facilities to build, and so much energy and raw materials that they cannot be built quickly enough to meet demand. Ships of this size are so rare even in the Spiral Confederacy that their citizens are not free to travel where they like, but find themselves bouncing around the Confederacy on missions and tasks that the leadership require. The Confederacy has never built a Dyson sphere, although it has constructed smaller orbitals, because the engineering challenge is too great to be worth the reward. Some technology, such as psionic amplification devices, is still so new that it requires rare elements that are hard to obtain and work with, and so although the Confederacy might in theory have the resources to produce an infinite quantity of such devices, in reality their numbers are never sufficient, and they are not distributed evenly across the Confederacy. Some commodities are limited because the Confederacy’s success has rendered it incapable of mobilizing people to do some tasks, and its strict resistance to allowing AIs into society prevents it from utilizing their prodigious intellects to replace human ingenuity. For this reason the Confederacy never has enough researchers to further its understanding of new planets or to develop new technologies, and until it admits AIs fully into its society will not be able to progress beyond Tech Level 15 at any appreciable speed. Because no one in the Confederacy has to work, real scientific endeavour has stagnated. Although the Confederacy has more stars in its borders than anyone can count, and more people orbiting those stars than it could ever catalog, it suffers from a single scarcity: A scarcity of workers.

    This scarcity of willing workers means that the Confederacy suffers two particularly challenging constraints, in delivering sudden death and eternal life. Although the Confederacy is blessed with an infinite supply of the most destructive and violent weapons humans have ever seen, it lacks people to wield them; and although it has developed the technology to save human souls into computers and download them into new bodies, it lacks the medical staff and skilled workers to be able to provide this resleeving service to everyone within its borders. This technology – officially called Sentient Recapture but unofficially and everywhere referred to as “resleeving” – offers the potential for eternal life to anyone who uses it, and liberates human civilization from the fear of death. It enables a human soul, with all its personality and memories, to be stored digitally, and reimplanted into the empty mind of a cloned body. This technology is enormously costly, however, for two reasons: AI attack, and human genetic caprice. Because AIs are excluded from human society, and creep around the fringes of its computer systems, colonizing them and using the human information architecture as parasites use a host body, all major computer systems in the Confederacy have to be built with protection against AI intrusion. Although no one has any evidence that it has ever happened, fear of AI inserting themselves into human stored consciousness, potentially using resleeved humans as experiments in organic AI tech, require that the digital storage sites for backed-up souls be heavily guarded against AI intrusion. Since the primary defense against AI attack is a physically huge computer system with multiple redundant physical structures and huge quantities of highly advanced anti-intrustion software, human download sites are physically massive, use huge amounts of power, and require the constant presence of technicians to monitor the systems. They simply cannot be expanded rapidly enough to accomodate all the humans in their local area, and so some mechanism is needed to ensure that only some privileged people receive this technology.

    Similarly, war cannot be fought by AIs, and the Confederacy has put strict limits on robot technology to ensure AIs cannot infect robot soldiers and suddenly uplift them to artificial intelligence. This means that ultimately the Confederacy will rely on physical, human soldiers to do the old-fashioned work of killing enemies – and although it is a utopia, the Confederacy has many enemies. The Confederacy also relies on humans to do some medical work, to do much of its scientific research, and to manage distant space stations and territories. Even if it were willing to work with AIs, AI cannot travel through jump space, so ultimately inter-stellar force projection and border control depends on mobile, committed and well-trained humans. But in the Spiral Confederacy work is considered a bother – people only work for fun, never because they need to, and this principle is so central to the Confederacy’s self-conception that it can never be trained.

    The Confederacy’s leaders have solved this problem by offering special rewards to those who serve it voluntarily. These rewards usually take the form of those scarce technologies that are still not ubiquitous even after 20,000 years of constant growth. If someone is willing to spend 10 years running a remote research station she will be given her own starship, so they may fly where they will; if a psionic is willing to spend a couple of years doing field work on a remote planet occupied by semi-sentient psionic lizard creatures, he will be given an amplification device and training in new disciplines. And if someone joins up for the Confederate army and actually goes near a war zone, they will be given a backup. Of course the Confederacy has other means to get people to work – from threats of prison to simple old-fashioned propaganda – but in the end it knows that where principles and a desire for adventure fail, basic rewards will work.

    This means that there are really only three reasons that anyone joins the Confederate army: they are a true believer in the Confederate cause; they want to kill people; or they want to live forever. Most of the billions who join the Confederate army will never see action, instead spending a couple of boring years on a space station somewhere before returning to civilian life, perhaps now possessed of some minor reward that will forever set them apart from their peers. But should they be unlucky enough to see actual combat, they will get to enjoy all three of the motivations at once: They will kill many people for the cause, and they will be granted eternal life. All soldiers heading into the field are given a backup, and guaranteed a resleeve in the same body should they die or suffer any injury so serious that they cannot be restored to full health. There are soldiers in the Confederate army who have multiple posthumous medals (and were at the award ceremony for all of them); no Confederate soldier can ever remember the moment of their death, but every soldier who dies receives the coveted broken heart award, that sets them apart from their peers as particularly dedicated to their work (and especially unlucky).

    This compact of eternal life makes the Confederate soldier an implacable and fearsome foe, dedicated to the cause he or she has signed up for and committed to killing for it. No soldier ever need fear death, and because most Confederate citizens are genetically engineered to have a euthanasia switch they can engage during periods of prolonged suffering, no soldier need fear torture. Among Confederate soldiers death isn’t just the highest sacrifice – it’s a sacrifice they can live to brag about, though only their peers will be able to tell them how they died. Confederate soldiers do not seek death, but they happily embrace it when the mission demands it. Confederate leaders also know that they can send their soldiers on suicide missions, and throw away whole divisions in reckless gambits or desperate moves. Such sacrifices need only be judged on their merits, as logistical and tactical problems, not on moral grounds. For the enemies of the Confederacy this adds a terrifying additional calculus to every battle. As if it weren’t enough that their opponents carry the best weapons and armour in known space, they do not relent in their use of those weapons or shirk from even the hardest of battles. An enemy of the Confederacy cannot expect to win by forcing their enemy to pay too steep a price – they must entirely exterminate their enemy, or fail.

    It is always the case that foolish warmongers fail to properly assess the risks of the war they decided to wage, and so of course reckless rebels or jealous outsiders will attempt war with the Confederacy, thinking that this time they have a strategy that will ensure the price is so high that they will force this vast confederation of uncaring stars to come to some settlement. But then an Ocean class battleship drops a million dedicated soldiers onto their planet, and refuses to even consider negotiation after half a million have died. Seeing such recklessness, the rebel presses the attack even as his or her own losses mount, thinking that the back of that force must break, but still the only official communiques from the Confederacy are surrender requests. The Confederates gain ground, and the rebel’s position begins to become precarious. They suggest a ceasefire, and in return they are given an offer of total capitulation. As their own losses grow their own political support wavers, people begin to fear the insanity of the Confederate strategy. Who can argue with people who are not afraid to die? Every battle they see thousands of their enemy die, and yet they lose every battle. Every culture that has been to war has some version of a story about pyrrhic victories, but it seems that the Confederacy can sustain a thousand pyrrhic victories and never waver in its certainty that it will win. The confidence of the aggressor wavers, and they suggest a negotiated settlement; the Confederate general refuses to accept anything less than the immediate execution of war criminals and unconditional surrender, disarmament, humiliation. The rebel’s generals report that morale is good among the enemy’s soldiers, though they have lost 70% of their number. Another battle, a major city falls, a conquered country’s neighbours switch sides. Political support collapses, and the tumbrils take the warmonger to meet his new Confederate executioners.

    On the frontier, the lesson is always the same: there is no use in arguing with people who cannot die.

    A note on ideas: I picked up the term “resleeve” and most of the associated ideas from the Richard Morgan book Altered Carbon, which I reviewed here. This sci-fi vision has been something of a fixture in my gaming: the quotes from the Dialectic Ephmeralists that Drew became fond of in the New Horizon cyberpunk Campaign were all drawn from Quellchrist Falconer, a political visionary in Morgan’s books. I don’t do anything original when I game.

  • Skype D&D: In Search of the Ordinary

    Two good friends and I are doing occasional Sunday evening sessions of original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D) over skype. I reported the first session here, and haven’t reported the subsequent four because … well, because there’s nothing to hang onto. Our second session ended with a TPK, but I think I didn’t report it, and since then we decided to move on to a different module, B1: In Search of the Unknown, which we have been slowly unpicking over three more sessions. We are following a pretty specific plan, which is to play the rules as they are written with no deviations. Basically, if it’s not in the Rules Cyclopaedia we don’t use it. So far we have tried two adventures, the one that came with the 1983 Mentzer Red Box, and B1. We have, to say the least, been underwhelmed, and at the end of the last session we stopped and had a solid discussion about what is wrong with the game and the system. Basically, we concluded that we’re really enjoying hanging out together (we live in different countries and regular skyping is fun) and the game is a good vehicle for that, and we’re having a lot of fun but mostly this fun has increasingly turned to taking the piss out of the game as we play it. This post is an attempt to summarize our complaints about Basic Dungeons and Dragons so far, and perhaps also a brief discussion of what it means that there is a whole movement (the OSR) that is evangelical about how good this stuff is.

    So first, the problems we’ve encountered so far.

    The PCs are all the same

    Even with the Rules Cyclopaedia’s rudimentary skill rules, the PCs are all the same. If you’re not a Fighter, your attributes are basically only meaningful as an XP bonus – for example, intelligence doesn’t improve a wizard’s spellcasting at all, and dexterity makes no difference to a thief’s skills (which are, in any case, absolutely useless). So far our most entertaining characters have been the wizard with 1 hit point (because his death was so assured) and Lefto the Halfling, who managed to get enough hit points to survive a full power blow from a longsword (but still died because my wizard was conserving his sleep spell for when we really needed it). When you’re distinguishing PCs on the basis of their hit points you know you’re plumbing the bottom of the barrel. What reason do we have to keep any of these people alive? Why are they here? Why are we here? More diversity in PC choices and more effort in making them identifiably different at first level would make the game so much more interesting. I’ve heard the argument that in D&D you don’t invest your character with any special meaning at first level because you know it’s going to die, and you wait for its personality to emerge if it survives, but I don’t think the allegedly easy deaths are the reason (especially for fighters and dwarves, who don’t die); the reason is that the PCs simply have nothing to hook onto when you first make them.

    The adventures are absolutely terrible

    The two modules we have played so far have been, to put it frankly, terrible. The first, the adventure that comes with the Mentzer red box, is an absolute disaster that starts and ends with a TPK. The carrion crawler at the gates is such a stupid idea, it’s beyond ridiculous, but there is another TPK buried at the back of the first level of the dungeon, where your FIRST level characters can break into a room that holds two harpies. You get no warning about these beasts anywhere in the adventure, and for first level characters they are absolutely fatal. Even if your entire party doesn’t get caught by their siren song, their attack is way more than a first level party can handle. Now you could argue that this is just life as an adventurer, but this is meant to be the very first introductory adventure for people who have never played this game before and it is absolutely punishing. It is a prime example of what in Japan we call power harassment, in which the GM simply uses his power to bully the PCs brutally, and nothing they can do can escape it. I’m confident that a great many young people dropped out of this hobby after their first experience of it, simply because of this adventure.

    In contrast, the next module we played, In Search of the Unknown, is tedious and stupid and not at all challenging. It famously comes unstocked, with a list of monsters and treasures that the GM is supposed to place at his or her whim throughout the dungeon, but the dungeon is huge and the treasures and monsters list small, so it ends up incredibly dry and boring – the classic endless series of dusty empty rooms. I bulked up the monster and treasure list and it’s still tedious. Furthermore, the dungeon setting is embarrassingly written in so many ways. The dungeon is the lair of two famous adventures, one of whom is called Zelligar the Unknown (even though we have all heard of him), and these two adventurers are incredibly arrogant and insecure – their rooms are full of murals of themselves, and statues to their own prowess, like cheap dictators. The rooms are terribly described, so that for example we learn in some rooms that the walls are carved in intricate detail, yet we are told nothing of what this detail is, while in another room we are given intricately detailed information about some random book (it was meant to be returned to the library!) or other object, ofttimes detail that is impossible for the adventurers to know. I’m told that the hand axe in room 34 has a split handle but I’m told the walls in room 33 have been carved in intricate detail that isn’t explained at all – this isn’t how GMing is supposed to work. This adventure is probably the first adventure that GMs will use to learn how to do this stuff, and it’s a contradictory mess of consistently bad lessons.

    It’s boring for another reason too – D&D movement and combat is just not much fun.

    The movement rules suck balls

    Of course our fighters and clerics are wearing full plate – otherwise fighting would be randomly fatal rather than randomly easy, see below – so our whole party moves at 60′ per turn. That is, 60′ in 10 minutes. As I said, we’re following the rules, so we’re tracking oil flasks and movement and wandering monsters, which is relatively easy because we’re doing this over skype so we have a google doc. We don’t have a “caller” and a “mapper” because as soon as we saw that idea we laughed and decided to use roll20, so now we unveil sections of the map consistent with the lantern range, and avoid mapping. If we were mapping B1 we would be spending most of our sessions arguing about the mistakes in the map, because the dungeon is incredibly complex and hard to map based on a GM’s description, which is what we would be doing back in the 1980s when this game was released – another example of terrible module design, for the first independent module to be designed to be too hard for beginning (or even experienced!) players to map easily.

    So we’re spending our time documenting these movements that take 10 minutes to move 60′, and trying to understand why. In a complex dungeon this means that you spend an hour retracing your tracks to explore a room that is literally just around the corner, and you have to go back to town because you’re out of oil. Of course this doesn’t really matter since this game is designed so that you go home as soon as your wizard has used his Sleep spell, but it hangs over us like this oppressive bit of pointless stupidity. Why did it take us 10 minutes to go around the corner, and why did we use an appreciable amount of oil exploring that room? This is even worse if you follow the original rules 100% precisely, which require one turn to explore a 10′ square. Module B1’s most famous room would take about 5 hours to explore, and would take two sessions since the PCs would have to return to town twice to get oil, if you followed those rules.

    Speaking of which, Module B1’s most famous room – the one with the pools – is stupid. One of our players immediately thought of using the fish from the pond with fish to test all the other ponds, rendering all the stupid save-or-die traps immediately harmless, and turning the whole thing into an academic exercise.

    Level-gaining is random and easy

    If you read around the traps, you’ll find this general opinion presented that in original D&D you gained levels slowly after much struggle, and D&D is a low-experience, slow-reward game. Were this true it would be the textbook definition of bullying, since you have been given a completely cookie-cutter character with limited survival chance and been told that he has to go through a large number of near-death experiences at the hands of a save-or-die fickle GM in order to get that one more level that might possibly make him vaguely able to make it on his own efforts.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. Because XP is gained from treasure and treasure generation is random, it’s actually really easy to gain a level by blind luck. We’re three four-hour sessions into B1 and we’ve hit second level, because we found a 1500 Gp dragon hide, a 1000Gp treasure horde, and a 5000 GP statue (actually the rules say at least 5000). And we were unlucky. We found a Green Slime, which has treasure type B – with a 25% chance of 1d6 items of jewellery, each of which has a 90% chance of being worth 2000Gp or more (incidentally, the Rules Cyclopaedia estimates of treasure average values are clearly wrong). This reliance on treasure for XP makes leveling up a completely arbitrary process, which either happens randomly and suddenly according to rolls on treasure tables, or is completely determined by GM caprice (but role-playing XP is a bad idea!)

    Combat is boring and randomly fatal

    Combat is heavily dependent on the position of the fighters when it starts and the initiative roll, which is completely random. If the party wins the initiative the fighters attack with a THAC0 of 15 (because of high strength and weapon mastery). If anything is left after they have done their job it attacks, usually with THAC0 19, unless it’s a TPK machine like a carrion crawler. Typically the enemy is AC 5-7 but we are AC 2-4, so the odds are stacked against the enemy. Occasionally an enemy gets a lucky hit and one of us dies, unless it’s Lefto the halfling who went through multiple attacks and who we left to die rather than waste our sleep spell because he was a henchman and we were going to get more xp if he died but if I cast sleep we would all go home with less.

    This is not fun combat. Especially at early levels where everyone literally has one option – attack and roll damage – so combat is just a short series of hit/damage rolls with the outcome primarily determined by initiative. There is no choice of magic items or special abilities that would make your character have some unique contribution, nothing outside of the environment at all to distinguish between the vast majority of characters – at first level literally only wizards and elves have any unique abilities and they can’t use them more than once a day so they hold them back. And even then there is no wizard whose unique ability is ever anything except sleep (held in reserve for when a group of enemies appears) and no elf who hasn’t learnt charm person (because for some stupid incomprehensible reason they’re not allowed to learn sleep).

    It’s also telling that the only time we bothered to not use combat as a solution to our problems was when we had an elf with charm person learned. There are no social skills, and all our enemies are evil, so why would we bother?

    Important rules are completely missing

    There are a lot of rules for basic things missing in D&D. The absence of these rules gives you pause to think, “Hmmm, we’ve learnt a lot in 30 years”. This absence of rules isn’t restricted to the rulebooks but also applies to the modules. For example, B1 is full of secret doors but doesn’t give any information about how they work or how PCs should find them or how GMs should manage them. Similarly, B1 has a couple of obvious huge treasure hauls but no information on how to treat them. The most egregious example is the dragonhide in room 26, which you are told is “immense” and has “brassy scales”. There are no brass dragons in Basic D&D, but the module gives you no information on what this hide might be worth. This same room contains a stuffed cockatrice and some dragon paws, but no idea of their value (consistent with my complaint above, other rooms give details about the monetary value of mouldy cloaks and component parts of beds). So I had to make this up (for those who googled “D&D value dragonhide” I went with 50Gp per hp of the original dragon multiplied by a third, and rolled hps for a large red dragon – the third represented the fact that the hide was incomplete). Why would you give the monetary value of a mouldy cloak but not a dragonhide? Ridiculous.

    The most obvious example of this lack of rules is the problem of magic items. There are no rules on how to sell magic items, something that I have also seen presented as a plus about original D&D (who would sell a magic item!?) but this is something that makes no sense once you’ve played five minutes of the game. As soon as you get a magic item you don’t need that someone else obviously wants, you are going to want to sell it, but there is nothing about the obvious market that would result from adventurers surviving modules (except the introductory module, which is inevitably fatal because we want people to enjoy our game so we loaded it with TPKs as an advertising mechanism). Of course you could use the rules on the amount it costs to make magic items as a guide but – shock! – these rules are stupid. The amount of money required to make a magic item is completely out of context to its value. It’s as if there is no connection between the rules for magic items and how they are actually available and used in play.

    Say it isn’t so.

    Conclusion: This game is not an exemplar of its kind

    I hate the Beatles, or rather, I hate the hype about the Beatles. This is the band that wrote Obladioblada, they aren’t good. But people mistake them for good because they were first. There is no song the Beatles ever made that compares with Stairway to Heaven or Child in Time (the video for which is a splendid piece of early musical beauty), and there is no sense in which the Beatles are as connected to the fundamental traditions of the English language as later metal bands are. But the Beatles get the attention because they were there first. I feel that Basic D&D has been treated the same, and just as there is a certain group of “connoisseurs” who have managed to convince themselves that bands like the Beatles were good, rather than just the first, there is a network of revivalists (the OSR) who have convinced themselves that D&D was somehow revolutionary for its content rather than for its timing, as the first. In reality subsequent generations of games are far, far better, and have added so much more to gaming than D&D. They have improved the rules (even AD&D did this) and added new elements of story, character development and GM skill and training to the gaming world. The truth is that gamers don’t want this mechanical dungeon crawl dice rolling stuff, they want story and character development and engrossing adventures with themes and purpose. That kind of stuff doesn’t emerge from crawling around empty, dusty chambers in the dark. It’s a purposive thing, that needs good rules and engaged GMing that is about more than setting up a bunch of rooms for hollow shell-people to die in.

    I’ll keep doing my D&D skype thing with my friends, because they’re great and killing kobolds with them is fun. But exploring this game that was at the roots of our gaming experience has shown me that we have all grown since we started, as has the hobby, and we should respect original D&D for its originality and its explosive potential, at the same time as we should accept it for the stunted and narrow game that it was.

  • Spiral Confederacy 7: The Left Hand of Darkness

    What? What is it?

    And oh my love remind me, what was it that I said?
    I can’t help but pull the stars around me, to make my bed
    And oh my love remind me, what was it that I did?
    Did I drink too much?
    Am I losing touch?
    Did I build this ship to wreck?

    -Traditional poem of the pirates of The Reach

    In their most recent adventures in the Reach, our heroes managed to create a major incident in the Bones, a particularly unsavoury part of the pirate system known as The Reach, and in so doing learnt that the death priest they had killed was entangled in some ancient story of AIs and betrayal. They had discovered that 1000 years ago the leader of a cult of adherents had traveled to the Gardens on a secret mission, and then fled suddenly with the cult’s AI, both of them abandoning the system in a sub-light vessel and heading to a nearby star system to hide. The death priest they killed had been digging up bodies in the same part of the Reach and torturing the souls of the long dead for information on a thing called “the ansible”, so naturally the PCs guessed that the cult leader had fled with information about it, and determined to follow.

    They learnt from their new follower Sue the Unbroken that the leader had fled to an abandoned observation post called Rocannon’s World, in the remnant system Perez, and headed there as soon as they could. Perez was too far for their tiny utility ship to reach, but they could pass through the system of Slainte, a near-uplift system with a major starport carved into one of the remnant planet’s moons. On arrival they were shocked to discover hundreds of naval ships in-system, including the much-feared Blindhammer and the enormous Ocean-class battleship the Rubicon, and began desperately searching the system for the Reckless. Fortunately the navy hadn’t arrived for any purpose in connection with the PCs’ irrelevant mission, and weren’t gathering for an attack on the Reach; they were preparing a major battle further out on the frontier.

    Lam, the group’s pilot, is an ex-naval officer, and was able to identify a ship she used to serve on, the cruiser Notes From the Fallen. She had spent a year on this ship, cloistered in the tiny crew area with 11 other men and women while they engaged pirates on the edge of the Rim, and she was eager to catch up with them. She put in a call and the cruiser docked with the space port to allow a little R&R. The Notes from the Fallen is a 300m long beast comprised entirely of engines and weaponry, its crew forced into a tiny living area in the very centre of the ship, and everyone on board took any chance to get portside and stretch their legs. They met Lam in a bar called Moonfall, and toasted her independence in the local brew, a vile seaweed-based liquor that is always drunk so cold it almost burns the throat. They had spent the last year hunting rebels on the frontier, tracking isolated ships through asteroid fields in long-forgotten systems, a game of cat-and-mouse that inevitably ended the way all such games end, with the mouse crushed and the cat barely sated, until they were called away for this new mission into a different frontier. They had no gossip for Lam or any information about anything relevant to her group’s mission; their job was simply to destroy any automated defense systems that might resist psionic attack, and they doubted they would even get a chance to fire a weapon in a fleet this size. Mostly they were there for show – the Blindhammer could destroy the combined fleets of every rebel system on the frontier without pausing to reload, and if they really needed it the Rubicon could bomb an entire planet to ruins. If they were lucky they would get to blow up a communications satellite, but as far as they were concerned this was a holiday, and they hadn’t been paying attention to the details.

    Lam returned to the Come As you Are no wiser to any salient details of their mission, so they decided not to dally. They jumped out to Perez.

    As good a place as any to die
    As good a place as any to die

    The Starred One

    They reached Perez in one week, finding a system with a tiny star port hanging over a remnant planet on the edge of uplift, and another, much older observation post on the edge of the system. This post appeared to be shut down, and had been overlooked in favor of more modern stations further in-system. The PCs approached this ancient observation post cautiously, but it appeared to be mostly silent, nothing active or moving except a few flashing red proximity lights. The station consisted of a simple spindle running through a single habitation disc, the most basic of observation outposts. It had a single ship docked, a huge vehicle composed mostly of engines that must surely be the sub-light vessel that the leader had hijacked to come here. That vessel was completely empty and silent, and scans revealed a primitive vessel with no signs of life or even computer activity.

    They docked, and with some trepidation entered the station. Simon Simon, using his new Stealth grace, was able to activate doors and docking procedures without drawing the attention of the AI they suspected was hiding in the space station, so they were able to enter and turn on the lights without any challenge. The hallway from the docking area into the main chamber of the station was silent and cold, and the atmosphere seemed breathable, but it had a chilling strangeness about it. On one wall someone had smeared, in red paint

    Hello Silence

    and on the other wall

    my old friend

    Someone checked, and confirmed for once that it was not human blood or anything else creepy – just very old, crumbling red paint. They advanced.

    The station was a simple structure, a single walkway curving around the outside of the station and a small cluster of rooms nestled inside it. They began walking around the walkway, looking for the main ventral corridor that would take them to the key rooms. Their vacc suit torches showed them that strange things had been done to the walls and ceiling of this hallway – the ceiling had been coated with phosphorescent stick-on stars, and the walls covered in red hand prints that crumbled to dust when anyone touched them.

    They advanced cautiously, but not cautiously enough. As the ventral corridor emerged into view, two hovering drones emerged from the corridor and opened fire. They ducked back around the curve of the hallway but two more drones attacked from behind. Caught against the curve of the hallway, they opened fire with everything they had, and managed to destroy all four drones without taking more than moderate damage themselves. When the gunfire and smoke ceased, Alva and Simon Simon were gasping in pain but they were mostly still safe.

    They advanced into the ventral corridor. This corridor stretched from one side of the station to the other, passing through all the living and science areas of the station – all the doors opening into this corridor gave access to all the important rooms in the entire station. They were moving towards the first of these when the wall exploded outward and a massive, angry robot stumbled into the corridor. This robot was constructed of all the rubbish and equipment of a scientific station: its body was made of tables, chairs and coffee machines, its arms built of cables and bedding and even a microwave oven. On one arm was a huge blade that appeared to have been carved out of a steel optics bench, and in the other a huge machine gun. Its head was a speaker surrounded by the dark plastic nodules of cctv camera housings. From the speaker came a roar of distortion and static, and it attacked.

    Ahmose moved forward to take it in single combat as the others opened fire with auto rifle and laser. The robot was screaming in galactic standard language, its voice horribly distorted by feedback and static but recognizable as the smooth, calm voice of a space station announcement system. Whatever mad sentience drove this creature had taken the announcements from the space station system and rearranged them into deranged muzak versions of ancient poems. It quoted monologues on revenge and anger from famous poets from all across the known planets, screaming them out from the overpowered public announcement speaker in its face as it swept its sword at Ahmose. After it hit her it screamed, in unevenly spaced distorted announcer-woman words

    They think our heads are in their hands
    But violent use brings violent plans
    Keep him tied, it makes him well
    He’s getting better, can’t you tell

    Ahmose, staggered, fell back, but Alva pressed a stun stick into her hands. Simon Simon used his scrying grace and computer skills to hack into the things eyes and blind them, at the same time as Ahmose hit it with the stun stick. Where their weapons had deflected from layers of armour and useless garbage covering, the stun stick penetrated straight to its electric core, driving it crazy. It staggered back and opened fire wildly with its machine gun. Ahmose pressed the advantage, but in the hail of bullets Simon Simon went down. More blows with the stun stick and the beast finally fell, coruscating with sparks and impotent screaming rage. They poured fire into it until it stopped twitching and screaming.

    What is it?

    With the AI’s main weapon disabled they were able to explore the remains of the station comfortably. They found several rooms where the scientists lived and relaxed, all ransacked for parts for the warrior-machine, which had clearly been constructed by a servitor robot they found in the remains of the cafeteria. They moved cautiously into the main control room, where they found the adherent who had come here with his AI. His dessicated corpse sat in a chair looking at a huge set of screens, an empty glass on the floor on one side of the chair and a discharged slug pistol on the other. On a desk in front of him was a single object: A slim grey tablet, about two hands in size, inert and inscrutable. It surface, sides and back were completely smooth and unbroken except for a single hole in one side, which appeared to be a slot for something.

    All the screens in the room were activated, showing one of two images. On half of them the words “What is it?!” scrolled constantly, flashing in different sizes and fonts. On the other half was a slowly revolving three dimensional model of an irregularly-shaped object, which perfectly corresponded with the shape of the hole in the tablet.

    Ahmose and Alva recognized that object instantly. It was the exact same shape and size as the mysterious crystal they had been engaged to obtain from an asteroid in the Dune system, when they first met.

    They had held a 1000 year-old secret in their hand, and gave it away to some gangster called Mr. Kong in exchange for a worthless voucher for a backup service.

    Shaking their heads in disappointment, they took the tablet and left. Simon Simon shut down the power for the AI, and they took its memory in case they would need it later. Carrying the mysterious tablet and the secret of its missing part, they returned to Slainte.

    An offer you can't refuse
    What games are these?

    The Left Hand of Darkness

    On Slainte they had to spend a week resting. Some of them needed healing, and everyone wanted to let off steam in a real Confederate space port, so they took their time here. After two days on the port they received an invitation to an evening meal from a strange man called Dathrak Khan Sevelid 3 of Mithrandir. The invitation was to a hangar, with a dress code (party) and a weapons code: Optional. They investigated this Dathrak Khan and discovered that he was a scion of some noble family on a distant remnant planet, who had used his connections and wealth before uplift to ensure he got the most he could out of the Confederacy after uplift. His reputation was slightly scandalous, since he retained a lot of his remnant ways and didn’t bother conforming to the strange customs of the core; he was old enough to have resleeved several times but had made a point of resleeving only into remnant bodies, adopting none of the sophisticated biology of the Core except for the enhanced sexual function. Famously charming, this man had a body that still sported hair and still sweated in a primitive fashion, but despite this his parties and social events were enormously popular. He was also rich, even by confederate standards.

    Intrigued, they attended his party in their finest formal wear, carrying only light weapons. They were greeted by a barely-dressed woman carrying a vaping bowl, already obviously very high, who welcomed them effusively and gestured them inside. She led them through an entry area and into a hangar that looked out over the scarred grey surface of the moon-sized spaceport. The hangar itself was a huge space carved out of the rock of the moon, field effectors holding air in and keeping the temperature even. The far doors of the hangar were large enough for a small ship to pass through, and indeed there was a ship in the hangar – a beautiful, lethal black sliver of high-tech luxury, beneath the nose of which was set out a dining table and chairs big enough for a party of about 12. A woman was sprawled over two of the chairs, giggling, and in another chair sat a slim, handsome man in a slightly unorthodox suit.

    In the corners of the hangar stood guards in full battle dress, heavy machine guns in hand.

    As they entered the man stood up and sashayed towards them, carrying himself with a casual arrogance and obvious awareness of his own beauty. He greeted them all by name, introduced himself as Dathrak Khan Sevelid 3 of Mithrandir (“my friends call me DK, or Doctor Khan – do as you will!”) and welcomed them all to his table. The woman disappeared to get drinks and drugs, barely functional through her giggles, and within moments servitors were emerging with plates of delicious-looking food. A few more young men and women joined them, all high on various vapes, and soon DK himself was sampling from a range of steaming bowls. The PCs kept their wits about them, until eventually DK revealed the purpose of his invitation.

    “Allow me to introduce you to your new ship, the Left Hand of Darkness. Darkness, say hello.”

    The ship greeted them in a smooth, professional-sounding woman’s voice. “Hello new masters. I look forward to serving you.”

    Lam went into rapture, and charged to the ship, all further thought of rational conversation forgotten. Against the backdrop of Lam’s exclamations of joy and rapid-fire questions, or statements about the ship, DK laid out his terms: He would give them full ownership of the Left Hand of Darkness, a Tech Level 14 ship straight from the Core’s best factories, if they would give him the body of the dead remnant from Dune that they were carrying with them. He didn’t ask for the living one, only the dead one; in exchange, they would be full legal owners of the Left Hand of Darkness, no questions asked or conditions. He was, he told them, attempting to procure the body for a collector of rare and unique galactic items.

    They asked for a few days to think about it. He agreed, but everyone at the party knew exactly what would happen.

    Hello darkness my old friend
    Hello darkness my old friend

    The shadow of the hunter (is the last thing that the mouse sees)

    Of course they agreed. Ahmose observed that there was nothing else they could do, since DK no doubt intended to get the body one way or another, and at least this way they could get some benefit and some chance of tracking the collector. They decided to hand over the body, but that Alva would attempt to read DK’s mind when they did so, to find out who this mysterious collector was. Two days later they returned to the hangar with the body of the dead remnant, to find DK waiting. They handed over the remnant, and DK gave them the ownership certificates. After they had exchanged a few pleasantries, Ahmose said to DK

    “I know there’s no point in asking this, but I can’t help myself. Who is the collector who is so interested in this body?”

    Of course DK waved a demurring hand, laughed and said something about how everyone knows such trade secrets are never shared. As he did so Alva probed his surface thoughts, and took out the information they wanted.

    The collector was an AI. Its name: The shadow of the hunter (is the last thing that the mouse sees).

    They left in possession of a new, beautiful ship, and a strange new secret.

     

     

    Save

    Save

  • The Political Science of Brexit

    On Thursday last week the British people voted to leave the EU, sending shockwaves through the British political establishment and the EU leadership. In the aftermath there is a lot of finger-pointing and blame going on, and as I predicted in a comment at Crooked Timber before it happened, people are lining up to blame Labour for what is a very Tory disaster. Here I want to talk about the limited available data on who voted what, to put paid to the idea that this was primarily (or even partly) a Labour failure. I’m then going to talk a bit about the “white working class” and the EU, and also give a brief opinion about what this means for health and the NHS. I intend to be polemical. By way of background, I have British citizenship and British parents, I’ve talked about growing up in Britain before on this blog more than once, and I really am not surprised by this result. I have only lived briefly in Britain since I was 13 – I immigrated to Australia and then worked for a year and a half in the UK on issues related to the NHS (during this period I started my blog, which is why it has the Thames as its header image). All my family still live there and I think in many ways my family present the ideal anti-EU demographic – I grew up in an environment steeped in racism and heirarchies of discrimination that I think people who grew up outside of the Tory working class, or outside of Britain, really can’t understand. This background informs my interpretation of political movements in the UK, and at its base is a simple theoretical position: for many British people, race consciousness always beats class consciousness.

    What could possibly go wrong?
    What could possibly go wrong?

    The demographics of Brexit

    There isn’t yet much clear data on who voted what, but we do have two data sources: the electoral returns for the local authorities, and an exit poll conducted by John Ashcroft. Let’s look first at the electoral returns, which are summarized neatly in the Guardian‘s referendum results page. In case that page dies I’ve put some screenshots of its contents here. First is the map, above, which shows clearly the regional pattern of voters: Scotland and the city centres voted remain (yellow) and the country areas voted leave (blue). For reference, the region I grew up in is the area of Wessex in the south west; I’ve magnified it below. This is the land of King Arthur and even contains a tiny separatist movement in the far south west (Cornwall). It doesn’t include Wales, which I’ve had to include a bit of in this map. The yellow (remain) areas are the cities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter and Plymouth. Outside these cities it is entirely blue. I grew up in towns like Salisbury (the furthest Eastward big blue blotch); Frome (south west of that blotch, in light blue); Falmouth (the dark blue patch west of the two small yellow ones) and Cornwall (the light blue patch poking out into the Atlantic). These are areas that benefit hugely from EU funding under the Common Agricultural Policy, were once strongholds for the Lib Dems, and are now shifting fast to UKIP. They’re heavy tourist towns with very low proportions of migrant and non-white people; unlike in London, if you go into a cafe in Torbay (where my parents live now, the dark blue patch east of Plymouth, I think) you’re likely to be served by a white local, rather than an Eastern European worker. These areas have received most of the benefits of the EU, and very few of its migrants, and have been largely isolated from previous waves of Commonwealth migration (ie Indians and Caribbean people).

    Oo-arrh, Oi've got a brand new combine 'arvester!
    Oo-arrh, Oi’ve got a brand new combine ‘arvester!

    These areas are old, with only three major universities in Bristol, Bath and Exeter. They’re rural and tourist-focused, and they’re also repositories of British history, holding places like Stonehenge, Avebury, and Tintagel. They’ve always been a little bit wayward and remote from the concerns of Londoners, so I suppose a bit of restive anti-EU thought makes sense here. But what about the rest of the UK? The Guardian has some graphs showing the proportion of people voting leave/remain by major socio-economic and demographic factors, which I’ve placed below.

    Let's make a classic political science error!
    Let’s make a classic political science error!

    It’s very clear what’s going on here: the more higher-educated, wealthier people, and the more people not born in the UK, the more likely the area is to vote remain (for those not steeped in British class lore, the UK office of national statistics classifies people by their social class, and “ABC1” is the professional and higher class groups). If you remove Scotland from this chart it will probably be even clearer, since Scotland’s poorer areas were more likely to vote remain. Note also that older areas were more likely to vote for leave.

    It’s a classic political science error to infer individual voting patterns from area-level statistics, because it’s well-established that these statistics often go in the opposite direction at individual and regional level (Andrew Gelman famously showed this for the USA: richer states are more likely to vote Democrat, but in all states poorer people are more likely to vote Democrat). However, this pattern in this case is so clear that even though we don’t know how individuals in those areas voted, we do know that areas with higher numbers of poor and uneducated people were full of people pissed off at the EU. It’s fundamentally the job of politicians to understand these kinds of big population-level movements in politics, and for Cameron to call a referendum on this topic despite the existence of such a powerful and fundamental dynamic in the electorate is either incredibly reckless, or incredibly ignorant, or both. This stupidity is compounded by the fact that areas with large numbers of poor and uneducated people are more likely to be labour-held areas, so Cameron was going to be relying on his political enemies to support him. I don’t think Corbyn is venal or stupid, but coming hot on the heels of the era of Blair, it’s incredibly risky of Cameron to assume the leadership of the Labour party wouldn’t be venal and stupid enough not to leave him hanging on this issue for cheap political gain.

    This brings us to the next issue: who actually voted how in these areas, and was the failure of the leave campaign the fault of Labour and its racist voters? For this we cannot rely on area-level data, but need to look at individuals, and sadly so far the only information we have is from John Aschcroft’s exit poll. I won’t screenshot this poll, which I linked to above, but the conclusion seems to be that this was a very Tory disaster. Here are some key figures:

    • No difference in gender (52% voting leave in both)
    • Young people were much more likely to vote remain (73% for 18-24 vs. 40% for the over 65s)
    • Big trends by social class, with the wealthier more likely to vote remain (a similar difference between the “lowest” and “highest” social class to that in age)
    • Labour, the Greens, the SNP and the Lib Dems voted heavily in favour of remain (over 2/3 for all groups) while Tory and UKIP voted for leave, so that only 20% of leave votes were drawn from Labour, vs. 40% from Tory
    • 33% of leave voters listed immigration as their main concern, and 79% described themselves as English not British

    The big caveat on these statistics is that the party affiiliation is based on voting in the 2015 General Election; turnout for this referendum was higher than the 2015 General Election, and so it’s likely that a lot of people who voted in this referendum did not vote in 2015 but did vote in 2010, or never vote; in this case describing them in terms of the last vote they cast may not be very informative. Nonetheless, of those who were recently involved in an election, those who voted for the tenets of the labour party were not interested in leaving. This fact is backed up by looking at the map, where the big labour heartlands in London were all for remain. The Guardian has analysis of some of these heartlands (because of course journalists immediately latch onto the meme that attacks Labour, not the obvious responsibility of all the Tory areas that voted leave). It describes a strong leave sentiment in the otherwise labour-focused area of the Thames estuary (the land of Eastenders), and a suburban revolt outside the Labour heartland areas of Merseyside and Tyneside. Tyneside is a good example: the former industrial heartland and labour stronghold north of the river voted remain, while the more suburban Tory-voting south side went with remain.

    My conclusion from this is that the leave vote was driven by pensioners, the “lumpen proletariat”, and Tory voters. The remain vote was driven by labour stalwarts, the educated, and working people in the big cities and former industrial heartlands, who perhaps understand that their future depends on being part of an integrated market. Obviously this is a broad brush, and a disappointingly large number of Labour voters (about 35%) sided with leave. Some people are saying that Corbyn should have gathered these people up with a better campaign, but I think this claim is doubtful. To the extent that Labour voted leave, they’re largely rebelling against the policies of New Labour, and for Corbyn to be more involved in the remain campaign he would have had to have shared a platform with Vampire Blair and the Pig-fucker General. I don’t think this would have convinced more people to vote remain, and would likely have had the opposite effect. If the Tories wanted Labour to help drag the country back from this disaster, they were going to have to make it less of an obvious Tory shitshow, and tell the idiots from New Labour to stay home and out of the sunlight.

    What about the white working class revolt?

    People do like to bang on about how the average Labour voter is a racist and the only way Labour will get the “white working class” vote back is by appealing to these baser instincts, but I think this is fundamentally flawed. Yes, many working people in the UK are opposed to immigration and can express shockingly racist views, but a lot of these people were prised away from Labour back in the 1980s, and more left during the era of New Labour. I don’t think Labour will ever be able to get these people back, and it’s silly to talk about them as if they are part of the Labour heartland. The sad reality is that British politics realigned in the 1980s, at the same time as its industrial heartland hollowed out, so that the Tories have a reliable stock of poor white people voting for them on racial grounds. This is the “victory” of Thatcher-era politics and the vicious racism of the Daily Mail and the Sun. Amongst these groups, these newspapers have been pushing an anti-EU agenda for 25 years (just try reading the Daily Mail on Europe!), and also a vicious anti-Labour agenda. Of course these papers were going to do all they could to mobilize these readers against the EU in this referendum, and there’s very little the remain campaign can do against 25 years of constant anti-EU propaganda, much of which is straight up lies. This is hardly helped by the willingness of journalists to consistently let the leave campaign get away with their lies about the 350 million pounds (that Farage admitted wouldn’t go to the NHS the morning after the referendum).

    It needs to be made clear too that racism was a central part of the leave campaign, and they weren’t deploying a nuanced critique of immigration. The leave campaign was doing very poorly, well behind remain, until they dug up the claims about Syrian refugees, boats on beaches, the sexual assault “nuclear bomb”, the breaking point poster and the constant terror campaign about Turkey joining the EU very soon. Once that stuff came up, leave started catching up rapidly in the polls. Then of course political geniuses like Osborne screwed up the remain campaign with their petulant threats, and the job was done. When people as unscrupulous as Boris Johnson are willing to put out the kind of misleading, deliberately untrue, and viciously racist stuff they did, there’s very little a principled campaign can do except watch the election getting stolen from them. Fundamentally you can’t win a campaign against people who happily tell juicy lies and a media that supports them.

    I think a lot of commentators from both left and right in the UK fail to see how potent this stuff is because they didn’t grow up surrounded by it – they grew up in pleasant leafy neighbourhoods to professional or wealthy families, and didn’t have to put up with this stuff day-in, day-out during their childhood. If they did they would know, as I do, just how filthy and nasty the underbelly of the British polity is, and just how ugly its views are. A previous generation of Labour political leaders might have known this, but Tony Blair flayed those people and replaced them with his soulless ghouls, who know nothing except focus groups and servitude to the Elder Gods. I described this kind of politics two years ago on this blog, and this referendum is the vindication of my analysis. There are solutions to this problem, but “giving the racists the chance to shine” is not one of them.

    The implications for health policy in the UK

    The UK has been out-sourcing medical training and workforce development to Europe and the Commonwealth for years. Up to 26% of doctors and 11% of all NHS personnel come from overseas, a great many from the EU, and once the UK leaves the EU these EU staff will need to be replaced from elsewhere. More could be drawn in from the Commonwealth, but it’s unlikely to be able to fill the shortfall quickly because many Commonwealth countries have only small numbers of medical staff, and may not be able to provide a great deal more. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that a country that just voted to leave the EU out of fear of immigrants is going to suddenly implement policies to bring in more immigrants. The result of this will be further pressure on the NHS workforce, with even more difficulty in replacing staff as they retire and leave at a time when the aging population is putting more and more demand on health services. It takes 10 years to train a doctor and 5 years to train a nurse, but the government has been cutting funding for these training programs (including the nurses bursary) and has been repeatedly warned that it is facing a shortfall in health personnel even without leaving the EU. Pressure on universities is likely to increase with the sudden loss of EU funding, and in the huge economic readjustment that has to happen when EU funds disappear, universities are going to face major shifts in funding sources and needs. Without central organization they are unlikely to prioritize nurse training – they haven’t to date, why should we expect they will do so in the future, with tighter funds?

    This problem will be even more pronounced for small and medium enterprises outside of the NHS that provide services to the NHS, and also to financial services companies. At the moment there are a range of barriers to employing non-EU staff that were put in place in response to past concerns about immigration: you have to prove the job can’t be done by a local, and it’s very hard for non-EU workers to bring in spouses. As a result most small companies don’t sponsor visa applications, preferring instead to recruit from the EU where such rules don’t apply. For financial services companies, the sudden loss of their most qualified pool of staff is going to have huge implications, and I suspect for many of them the simplest approach will be to move to Europe. The same will apply to universities, who will suddenly lose access to the best-educated region in the world. This likely won’t affect senior staff but it will have a huge impact on the supply of graduate students and early-career researchers and teachers. These jobs aren’t just boutique jobs for underwater basket-weavers – the UK has a huge pharmaceutical industry that depends on universities and research institutes, as does its high-tech industries like oil exploration services, the arms trade, aerospace, and growth industries like alternative energy. Suddenly putting up barriers to employing people from the most highly-educated part of the world is going to be really bad for high-tech industries in the UK, at a time when industries that primarily employ lower-skilled professionals (like tradespeople) are offshoring rapidly.

    This is going to be an economic disaster for the UK for a very long time to come. Their only chance of a decent economic future is to implement an industrial policy, significantly improve funding to health and education, and shift from austerity to a Japan-style deficit-financed industrial society. The only person with a vision to do this – Corbyn – is about to be eaten alive by the Blairite ghouls still shambling through his own party, which will leave the political landscape ruled by Boris Johnson, who has no vision for the UK economy and is going to be so reviled by the time the UK exits that he won’t be able to make anything happen even if he had a sensible idea.

    Conclusion

    This was a political disaster that is going to leave Cameron, Osborne, Johnson and Farage the most reviled politicians in modern British history. It will likely lead to the breakup of the Union, and if it doesn’t, a return to civil war in Northern Ireland. It will also plunge the UK into a long period of economic collapse that it has no way out of, and no scapegoats for. The EU, coupled with a decent economic policy aimed at renewing British industry, was the only chance for the UK to remain globally relevant and for its citizens to enjoy a good quality of life. Cameron has wrecked that one chance in order to score a victory over the idiots in his own party, in a reckless and breathtakingly stupid political gamble. The tidal wave of economic and social problems about to hit the UK is the perfect proof that conservative politics is a wrecking-ball through modern life, and they should never ever be trusted with power.

  • The Strange Physics of the Spiral Confederacy: How Space Travel Works

    The Spiral Confederacy is a huge, galaxy-spanning civilization of thousands of systems, linked by a tenuous faster-than-light technology that strongly proscribes the way that these systems interact. Space travel and its associated technologies has liberated the people of the Spiral Confederacy from scarcity or poverty, so that everyone has everything they will ever need; the associated technologies have led to marvels of engineering such as space elevators, orbitals, and spaceships of vast scale and almost infinite power. Unchallenged by any rival (and strangely devoid of alien competitors …), the Spiral Confederacy enjoys incredible achievements in space technology, and its citizens are free to travel across a dizzying array of systems. The physics of space travel, however, includes some strict limitations that put strange conditions on the freedoms that Confederate citizens enjoy, and as much as this physics has liberated society from its old limits, it has also shaped the way that the citizens of the Confederacy interact with each other.

    Space travel in the Confederacy is powered by two kinds of physics: the physics of sub-space and the metaphysics of jump space. This post describes these physics and their consequences, and also the basic structure of all Confederate ships. It also describes the relationship between the physics of the Confederacy and its strangest components: psions, priests, and AI.

    Sub-space: The finite power of fields and drives

    Sub-space physics is the physics of a kind of substrate to the structure of space and time, which can be manipulated to induce temporary changes in the geometry of the space-time continuum. This can make places far apart suddenly become very close, or it can change the structure of physical space. This is the basis of field technology, which enables the creation of invisible fields in real space that are harder than glass, or the manipulation of objects at a distance with a new force that resembles gravity but is completely under the control of its creator. This is the technology that enables the Confederacy to project electrical energy over vast distances without crossing the intervening space, so that in Confederate star systems electricity is accessed remotely, as if fields of electricity were a kind of Wi-Fi. This technology is also the source of power for the Reach, but it operates at a higher level that no one in the Confederacy understands, drawing power directly from the sun and siphoning it to the different pearls.

    Sub-space technology cannot exert its influence faster than the speed of light, so it cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light, and does not break certain basic principles of relativity theory. It is also affected by gravity and affects gravity, and in general operating sub-space technologies in a gravity well is more difficult than in the clean expanse of space, so for example field technology on planets tends to require more energy and be less effective than it is in space. Nonetheless, sub-space technology suffuses all of everyday life in the Confederacy, enabling the transfer of power without cables or cords, miniaturization of fusion power, anti-gravity and levitation for flyers and personal transport, and of course sub-light space travel without reaction mass.

    Jump space: The strange metaphysics of the Other

    While sub-space physics manipulates the topology of the real world, jump space physics removes objects from the real world into an alternate space where the rules of physics simply do not apply. In jump space one can travel at many thousands of times the speed of light, because light does not exist. The physics of jump space is not well understood, and it is in many ways an extremely limited technology. Transition into jump space usually requires approximately a week of time – one cannot leave early, and one cannot leave later – and it seems to operate in defined quanta of speed: in that one week one can travel up to one parsec, or two parsecs, and so on, with the faster movement requiring more sophisticated technology and greater energy. Although the means to create this step into different levels of jump space has been developed, the underlying physics is not really understood, and jump space technology is not used for anything else.

    Jump technology has several strange quirks that cause many people to consider it as a form of metaphysics rather than a serious physical concept. Firstly, entering jump space requires an incredibly complex series of calculations that can only be done in real time by a powerful computer; but it also requires human willpower, and no object can enter jump space unless it is connected to a human will. Furthermore, non-human sentience – or at least, machine sentience – does not seem to be able to survive jump space. AI sent into jump space always either die or go insane, and this simple fact has prevented AI from effectively colonizing the solar systems of the Confederacy – they need to travel between systems only as memory in the possession of a human adherent, and cannot spread without human help. Finally, jump space has a strange effect on humans and computers that use it, which no one can fully understand, so that it is dangerous to reenter jump space immediately after emergence. This effect, called the jump wake, causes computers to malfunction and humans to lose the power to astrogate, leading to mis-jumps and sometimes complete loss of the ship, which is assumed to disappear permanently in the jump space. Typically one must wait about a week after jumping before one can jump again if one is using the same navigator and computer. More skilled navigators can recover in less time, and better computers can also recover sooner, but usually one has to spend a week letting the jump wake pass before one can attempt to jump again in the same ship.

    Jump space can be used to send information faster than the speed of light, but this information transfer occurs in two week steps due to the time spent in jump space and the jump wake. In a society as physically widespread as the Confederacy this means that information and news travel only slowly between planets, and systems off of major trade routes will often be years behind on key political movements in the core. Indeed, it has been calculated that if a major alien force were to attack one edge of the Confederacy it would be approximately a minimum of 8 years before every system in the Confederacy knew of the attack, assuming optimal information transfer strategies. Normal news, of course, travels far more slowly than this, so that planets on one side of the Confederacy can be experiencing an art movement long after it has been discredited in the planet where it started. Such are the fundamental limits to cultural exchange imposed by the jump drive.

    Physics, psions and priests

    Psionics enables humans to cross vast distances in the blink of an eye and to interact with the physical world using just their minds. It is widely believed that psionic power simply enables humans to directly manipulate sub-space using their mind. This means that psions are not believed to be able to do things that could not be done using sub-space technology, and it also means that psions cannot propagate effects faster than the speed of light. One implication of this theory is that it is theoretically possible to design a machine that could use sub-space technology to, for example, read minds; it is possible that AIs could develop such a machine given enough time and psions willing to assist them.

    In contrast, priests are able through their faith to perform acts of magic that would be impossible for either psions or any known technology, including transmitting information faster than the speed of light. This means that, for example, a priest with the correct invocation can communicate with another priest on the other side of the galaxy, instantly. This power is necessary for artifacts and magic items designed by priests to operate when the priest is not present, since these items must be tied to the priest’s will but will operate even when the priest is not present. Scientists generally accept that through their faith priests are somehow empowered to access some aspect of jump space in performing their invocations, and thus are able to break basic laws of relativity. This implies that no machine will ever be able to reproduce priest magic, at least until the Confederacy develops the technology to send unoccupied ships and drones into jump space.

    There are many research projects underway in the Confederacy to understand the relationship between psionics and priest magic, so that psions can gain the powers used by priests, and also so that sub-space and jump space physics can be better understood, to improve space ship design.

    How spaceships work

    Spaceships have four key components:

    • Miniaturized fusion reactor: Spaceships draw power from fusion reactors, which themselves use sub-space technology to miniaturize the power source, containing the entire plasma system in as small a volume as possible. A reactor a couple of cubic metres in size will provide power for a 50m long scout ship or basic utility vessel, and the power available scales exponentially with size. Larger ships will use multiple smaller reactors for redundancy, and larger reactors for military vessels with shields and weapons. Since both sub-light drives and jump drives consume huge amounts of power the size of the reactor depends heavily on the speed and jump distance the ship is capable of.
    • Sub-space drive: The sub-space drive uses sub-space technology to power the ship through normal material space. The drive functions by bending space-time around the ship so that it can move large distances without ejecting reaction mass, thus liberating the ship from the need to carry large amounts of fuel to eject from normal reaction drives. Because the sub-space drive breaks some aspects of Newtonian physics, it enables the ship to perform in strange ways. For example, sub-space drives do not accelerate smoothly, but simply place the ship in a higher state of movement automatically. This effect works primarily upon the plane on which the engine lies, and so smaller ships use smaller drives on movable planes to control steering; larger ships simply make right-angled turns, or have sub-space drives pointing in many directions. Engines are aligned on a plane because the act of suddenly changing speed in this way generates large amounts of exotic sub-atomic particles, which decay into physical space to produce light and heat, and ships need to be designed to ensure that this decay product is generated outside the ship. Some larger ships capture the decay product in field manifolds and use it for other purposes, but smaller and utility ships typically are designed simply to vent this nuisance heat and light. The result of this for most smaller ships is that mobility is best on a single axis, and manoeuvrability depends heavily on the smaller coaxial engines. Engine power and manoeuvrability is affected by gravity, and most ships used in the Core are assumed to always be able to travel between spaceports, so are not designed to enter significant gravity wells or atmosphere. A sub-space drive capable of operating in such circumstances usually has a different design, and such ships will also have shielding and aerodynamics to aid in steering, since the smaller coaxial engines will tend to be highly inefficient in atmosphere.
    • Jump space drive: The jump drive is usually small in comparison to the sub-space drive, and is located in the centre of the ship near the main computer. Some larger ships will have more than one to ensure redundancy, but the components and technology of a jump drive are rare and advanced even by Confederate standards, so most ships usually have a single jump drive at the lowest necessary rating. Jump drives are rated 1 to 6, with the number indicating the maximum number of parsecs the drive can travel in one week (one parsec is 3.26 light years). Most Confederate ships are jump 1-3; military ships can sometimes handle jump 4. Jump 5-6 is an exotic technology, valuable even by post-scarcity standards and rare in the Confederacy. The Confederacy maintains a series of communications lines called strategic leys that run centrally through the key axes of Confederate space, linking key rim systems at opposite ends of the Confederacy through the Core. These strategic leys are stocked with several jump 6 ships, with extra ships at regular intervals, so that key information can be transmitted across the Confederacy at maximum speed. Even so, moving one message more than 20 light years in two weeks requires the presence of two jump 6 ships, incredibly value vehicles even by Confederate standards. It is rumoured that the Confederacy maintains a small corps of priests scattered across its reaches, capable of instant communication, as a backup for emergencies, but this rumour is generally derided as fantastical – typically the Confederacy transmits information through very fast, efficient ships run by the communications corp.
    • Field effector: Every ship is capable of broadcasting energy outside the ship, to provide energy to ship’s boats, laser rifles, welders and other small peripherals. Some ships maintain an atmosphere around the hull, held against the hull by an external field, and many ships also maintain external shields to prevent impact from small objects or weapons. All ships maintain a minimal field to deflect debris. These fields are maintained by the field effector, another form of sub-space technology usually located near the power plant. Some ships have multiple specialized field effectors (e.g. shield effectors, basic field effectors, and in-atmosphere anti-gravity effectors). The field effector also ensures regular gravity on the ship even when it is undergoing intense in-atmosphere manoeuvres. To function as a properly self-contained vehicle all ships must have a field effector, and no Confederate ship is built without one.

    Because Confederate ships use miniaturized fusion reactors and have no need for reaction mass, they need little fuel and only refuel rarely. They can usually refuel through splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, or by scooping from a gas giant, but usually they refuel in a couple of minutes at each space port they enter. For basic life support and for their food fabricators, most ships also carry a form of fuel called a slug, a large block of material containing all the key elements necessary to fabricate food and water for the crew for a couple of months; the chemical fabricators in the ship then convert this slug into basic food and pharmaceuticals. Most ships stock real food and other goods, but fall back on the slug in survival situations or when a crew member requires a product not in the cargo manifest. Human and food waste is recycled into the slug. This ensures that stranded ships are able to last for months to years before the crew begin to starve.

    Typically, the only limit on the use of a Confederate ship is the jump wake, and the crew’s willingness to live in close quarters for long periods of time.

    Example Ship: The Blindhammer

    The Blindhammer is a Lake-class battleship that has never been defeated in its 100 years of active service. Lake-class ships are the perfect size for maximum maneouvrability, being large enough for a significant power and engine structure, but too small for their mass to interfere with the operation of the engines, and the Blindhammer is a perfect example of lethal agility. Five kilometres long, 2 kilometres wide and 1 kilometre deep, it is a little small for a Lake-class battleship, but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for in brutal power. With a crew of 24, the Blindhammer‘s structure is devoted almost entirely to powerplants, engines and weaponry. The crew live in an expansive series of mansions atop the ship, covered by a blister of atmosphere, but the rest of the ship is unblemished by human design concerns. Its huge engines are capable of accelerating the ship from a standing start to 0.1c (10% of the speed of light) in a couple of minutes, and it is capable of jump 4. Traditionally the Blindhammer has the best astrogaters and computers available in the Rim, and so is usually capable of a second jump within 1-3 days of exiting jump, making it capable of traveling 25 light years in just over two weeks – equivalent to a jump 6 ship with a lesser navigator. Unlike larger Ocean- or Peninsula-class ships the Blindhammer does not have munitions fabricators, so cannot change weapons during transit to the battlefield, so instead the Blindhammer is equipped with a versatile array of weapons. Devoted to interstellar combat, the Blindhammer does not have any weapons for orbital bombardment. It also does not sacrifice mobility or jump distance in order to maintain a force of marines for boarding, as does for example the Reckless (another Lake-class battleship). The Blindhammer has one role, which it performs very well: fleet destruction.

    The Blindhammer‘s typical strategy is a simple and highly effective application of advanced Confederate technology to destroy opposing fleets. It jumps into a system, identifies the position of the fleet, and immediately fires off a pattern of attacks from its huge array of laser weapons. Simultaneously it spins up to a near-Einsteinian speed, typically a large percentage of the speed of light, laying down more patterns of fire as its targeting computers gather more information on the movement of the local fleet and the likely evasive action they will take after first contact. Once at high speed it initiates a series of evasive manoeuvres, executing 90 or 180 degree turns at random using its coaxial engines. Usually the enemy fleet learns of its existence at about the same time as most of the fleet is turned to ash; any survivors will lay down fire patterns on assumed trajectories that the Blindhammer is not following, although such details hardly matter – no fleet has ever penetrated its shields and armour, on the rare occasion that their weapons hit it before they are destroyed. The Blindhammer then enters the immediate battle space at some percentage of the speed of light, destroying remaining ships while setting a trajectory for a new jump point, and jumps out before the planetary authorities have received a report of the destruction of their fleet. Usually, most of the thousands of crew in the opposing fleet will die before they know they are under attack, and the remaining crews will have at most a few minutes of panic before they, too, burn. Fragmented communications from the dying ships will likely reach the planetary command station at about the same time as the Blindhammer jumps out of the system.

    A week later, while the investigation into the destruction of the system’s entire battle fleet is still under way, the main body of the invasion fleet arrives. Negotiation commences …