Date: Sun, 1 Oct 1995 15:21:05 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: The Economy and Technology of the Coalition

On Sat, 30 Sep 1995, Tony L. Hayes wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Sep 1995, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> 
> > Most essentials are
> > probably produced by each race, there is probably no point in transporting
> > simple foods several lightyears to the consumers unless FTL travel is so
> > cheap it can compete with on-planet or in-system communications. 
> 
> Or if its exotics.  Coffee or tobacco or coca perhaps there are no
> equivalents on the other planets.

Yes, I think many (but not all) species like variety in their daily life. 

> > Energy: Energy can be transported in a stable form as antimatter kept 
> > in holding tanks to be used to power things, fuel STL and FTL ships or 
> > used as a weapon. The conversion of energy to antimatter is not that 
> > efficient, but if you have lots of energy it makes sense in storing it. 
> > This is mainly done using huge farms of solar collectors in orbit in 
> > systems with bright stars and convenient asteroid belts (to use as 
> > building material for the collectors). 100 km^2 of solar collectors 
> > produce around 1 gram of antimatter each day.
> 
> This to me seems...wasteful.  Assuming all colonies are in star systems,
> just collect your own energy - its cheap, just scoop up your photons.
> You might see high quality, highly efficient collectors (you have a better
> system for example) but why buy what your home star is _pouring_ out
> daily (secondly!).

Making antimatter of stellar energy which otherwise would have been 
radiated into empty space is not wasteful, its a quite good idea if you 
want a stable way of storing immense amounts of energy.

Actually, energy is plentiful in space, but what you often want is
concentrated energy or a kind of energy you want. Solar collectors might
be a good idea to have on most space installations and will supply them
with reserve power, but they are not very good when you need a lot of
energy or when you are far from the sun. Fusion power is possible, but 
probably requires a quite large power-plant; fission units can be small 
but require fairly rare fuels and has some waste disposal problems. 

In many situations you don't want to carry around a huge powersource, for
example in building a spaceship. Energy storage works fine for most
smaller uses, but truly high energies require rather extreme measures. 
One solution might be superconducting coils with stored current (probably
the way energy is stored before being injected into the FTL drive), but
they require cooling (even if there are high-T superconductors) and
protection. Another idea might be microwave or laser beams, but they 
provide a big traffic hazard if used carelessly.

> Even if we come up with a reason for energy trade, anti-matter is not
> a good choice for transport.  It would have to be transported in 
> electro-magnetic containment tanks which would use a fair amount of
> energy, increasing the amount of energy needed to get some back.

Actually, that might not be that problematic if you have reasonably good
superconductors and are able to make charged antimatter. I would recommend
"Indistinguishable From Magic" by Robert Forward for a scientific look at
various uses for antimatter and its storage. Its not easy to make and
store, but its uses are rather manifold (ship fuel, drilling, medical
scanning, energy transportation, explosives and probably lots of other
things).

> A better method is to split Helium into Hydrogen.  Helium is readily
> available and Hydrogen is far easier to transport then Anti-matter
> would be.  At the destination, pump the Hydrogen into your handy
> fusion reactor and out come energy and Helium which you can send
> back for reprocessing back into Hydrogen - a renewable fuel source
> (well sort of).  Naturally, the creation of Hydrogen would be done
> using 'free' energy like solar power and would only be needed for
> transport to areas that don't have access to energy.

Actually, there is lots of hydrogen in a solar system (oceans on garden 
worlds, gas giant atmospheres etc), so there is no need for splitting 
helium (which is rare). Just sift through the hydrogen for the isotopes 
you want. 

The above scheme would work fine if the fusion reactor is a handy "Mr. 
Fusion", but what if fusion reactors are hard to scale down to fit a
reasonable ship (we have to agree on ship sizes latter; myself I like
rather big ships but not entire floating cities)? 

> Now, I agree that if you are making ship fuel, Anti-matter is the
> way to go but for simply carrying the energy around, Hydrogen seems
> better even though you'll carry more mass then with A-M it'll be
> easier to deal with.

Antimatter makes such a nice ship fuel, and we will still need some kind 
of way of getting around a solar system. You just need a small amount of 
antimatter in a suitable form, and reaction-mass which can be just about 
anything: hydrogen, water or garbage. You just inject a small amount of 
antimatter into the thruster together with a large amount of matter; the 
matter will become heated into a plasma and work as reaction mass. 

I think the Coalition has stringent rules for the handling of antimatter 
within its domain; the risk of terrorism or simple errors is too big. 

> > Heavy Industry: While most races can build their own heavy industry, it is
> > often more cost-efficient to let experts build it for you. Some systems
> > produce compoents or entire structures for fusion, asteroid mining, solar
> > power stations, megascale engineering or atmosphere converters. 
> 
> This seems reasonable especially given the under current that I've
> been sensing that every race has a strength and a weakness.  Some races
> are going to be 'natural scientists' for example or whatever. 

I'm not sure every race has a distinct strength and weakness, but most 
have their own way of doing things. The Gools I described are quite good 
at all forms of mechanical engineering but dislike electronics, some 
races might have an easy time grasping relativistic field equations while 
others may simply have developed such an efficient economy and industry 
in one sector they can out-compete most others in that sector.

> > Communication: Most races need to be in touch with each other, so there 
> > is a thriving market for couriers and mail-ships. 
> 
> UPS at FTL seems AOK to me! :-)

"Denebola Express: When it has to get there within a choozmorg!"

> > Weapons:	Another thriving market these days. Everything from 
> > personal weapons to strategic weapons have a market. Many races (and the 
> > Coalition as a whole) may have rules for what individuals, groups and 
> > organisations may buy and own, but these rules vary a lot. 
> 
> This gets back to the heart of the matter.  Are these generally peaceful
> races or not?  Perhaps the coalition's chief asset is that these races
> have lost the will for combat.  That's why the Human's scare them so.
> Sure they fight, but only with failed races from the safety of a
> sanctioned orbital bombardment.  A real war with real combat against
> equals is terrifying and horrifying.  To attack another civilized race?
> Unthinkable!  As a thought.  It all really depends on how we view
> this races.

I'm not entirely sure all races are this civilized. Some might be (note
that the Ikkadju had a fairly good arsenal to throw at the humans), but a
war between Coalition members is unheard of. Of course, some of the member
races have stockpiles of nasty weapons (the original treaties probably
allowed this since the Coalition was formed to fight many enemies) and
fleets, but they are kept under lock and key for the most part. Probably
each member is expected to contribute somewhat to the defense of the
entire Coalition. 

Here is another idea: the Hafaru are so utterly civilized that the 
thought of them actually harming somebody else makes them physically sick 
(upsets all their 12 stomaches). But they are at the same time quite 
devious, and the thought of using other species to do harm do not disturb 
them at all (their revulsion is only at the direct level). Thats why they 
"helped" the humans...
 
> > The Technology Ceiling
> 
> Can someone explain why there should be a technology ceiling?  Is this
> just to keep the races on par with one another?  So that they're not
> too far advanced from the lowly humans?  

I think that is the game reason. Myself I would like the idea of an
unlimited growth of technology, but that would cause a lot of new
problems: how to deal with super-civilizations, why haven't they taken
control of everything etc. Things get more interesting among equals (with
humans as the underdog to add some further spice). 

> > Technology: Solid state nanotechnology is very hard to do, but may
> > function in some very limited applications (like the creation of special
> > microinstruments or materials). In its place many species use
> > biotechnology (where the limits depend more on the ethics and biology of
> > the user). 
> 
> This one doesn't seem that hard.  Have you seen the microscopic machines
> and machining being done?  One place machined a crown that fit an ant,
> another built an electric engine and a car that was barely visible to
> the naked eye.  And I'd say we are at a pretty pathetic tech level at
> the moment.

Actually, that is just micromachinery and while it is definitely cute and
possibly useful (of course the queen ant should have a crown!), it is a
far cry from molecular nanotechnology. To get there we have to bootstrap a
system of molecular machines int building more of themselves, which is
probably quite hard to do. I really think it is possible in the real world
(just as I think there is no technology ceiling), but if we allow too
powerful nanotechnology things could easily get out of hand. Take a look
at the game "Men Like Gods" by Phil Goetz (and me) at
http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/Trans/related_page.html#games for an
example of how things could become. 

If anybody don't mind, I'll try to write up a bit of ideas about the Old
Ones, the Great War and the foundation of the Coalition. 


Date: Mon, 2 Oct 1995 09:42:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Tony L. Hayes" <tlh@epsilon.com>
Subject: Re: The Economy and Technology of the Coalition

On Sun, 1 Oct 1995, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> > This to me seems...wasteful.  Assuming all colonies are in star systems,
> > just collect your own energy - its cheap, just scoop up your photons.
> > You might see high quality, highly efficient collectors (you have a better
> > system for example) but why buy what your home star is _pouring_ out
> > daily (secondly!).
> 
> Making antimatter of stellar energy which otherwise would have been 
> radiated into empty space is not wasteful, its a quite good idea if you 
> want a stable way of storing immense amounts of energy.

You missed the point.  My point is making anti-matter to carry around
as a trade item seems wasteful.  Why make anti-matter in system A and
carry it to system B when system B could just collect its own energy
from its star.
> 
> Actually, energy is plentiful in space, but what you often want is
> concentrated energy or a kind of energy you want. Solar collectors might
> be a good idea to have on most space installations and will supply them
> with reserve power, but they are not very good when you need a lot of
> energy or when you are far from the sun. Fusion power is possible, but 
> probably requires a quite large power-plant; fission units can be small 
> but require fairly rare fuels and has some waste disposal problems. 

Again, within a solar system, moving energy around isn't the issue.  I
took you to mean using energy (in the form of A-M) as a trade item
between solar systems not within one.  Further, A-M reactors don't
seem to me to have any intrinsic properties that would allow them to
be any smaller then Fusion reactors.  In fact, they'd probably have
similar design features.  In both you need to contain a plasma (two
in the case of an A-M reactor), you need a mixing chamber, you'd need
radiation shielding, you need heat/energy extraction systems, you might
need waste extraction (you certainly would in the case of Fusion).  Of
course, Fusion would need an ignition system but it might be possible to
either A) setup a sustained reaction where you keep pumping in fusable
and extracting energy or B) use a cold fusion method (provided one can
be found).  A-M on the other hand has fuel transport and containment
issues but does produce quite a lot more energy per unit volume of fuel
(at least in theory since I know of no data on experiements involving
the mixing of any sizable quantities of A-M and matter).  Then again,
Hydrogen is pretty plentiful.

> In many situations you don't want to carry around a huge powersource, for
> example in building a spaceship. Energy storage works fine for most
> smaller uses, but truly high energies require rather extreme measures. 

If this is to imply that A-M is a better power source for starships, I
agree.

> > Even if we come up with a reason for energy trade, anti-matter is not
> > a good choice for transport.  It would have to be transported in 
> > electro-magnetic containment tanks which would use a fair amount of
> > energy, increasing the amount of energy needed to get some back.
> 
> Actually, that might not be that problematic if you have reasonably good
> superconductors and are able to make charged antimatter. I would recommend

The problem is, if you are carrying A-M in a plasma state, its going
to be farily high energy so you would have quantum tunnelling issues.
These aren't a problem for short term storage but anything long term
this could become significant.  If on the other hand you store the A-M
as, say, Anti-Hydrogen - making it intrinsicly more stable and allowing
it to be stored as considerably lower energies - you'd then have to
break apart the atom prior to using the A-M and have to run two separate
fuels - positrons and anti-protons.  It just seems to me that for purposes
of transporting a material for energy extraction, hydrogen is a better
choice.  You don't have energy requirements for containment, its far
safer to handle, and its a lot easier to come by.

> "Indistinguishable From Magic" by Robert Forward for a scientific look at
> various uses for antimatter and its storage. Its not easy to make and
> store, but its uses are rather manifold (ship fuel, drilling, medical
> scanning, energy transportation, explosives and probably lots of other
> things).

I'm not arguing against the versitility nor efficiency of A-m only the
added issues with toting it around as a trade item.

> Actually, there is lots of hydrogen in a solar system (oceans on garden 
> worlds, gas giant atmospheres etc), so there is no need for splitting 
> helium (which is rare). Just sift through the hydrogen for the isotopes 
> you want. 

You are correct, I should clarify.  You can obtain hydrogen in many
ways any of which are far easier then the creation of A-M.  I used
the example of splitting Helium because I was thinking of a simple
renewable energy system where you fuse hydrogen into helium then,
using solar power, split the helium into hydrogen for fusing creating
an energy cycle that doesn't require constant shipments from outside
agencies.  You will of course lose a little so fresh infusions of
hydrogen or helium to the process would be required from time to time
but not constant shipments of A-M.
 
> The above scheme would work fine if the fusion reactor is a handy "Mr. 
> Fusion", but what if fusion reactors are hard to scale down to fit a
> reasonable ship (we have to agree on ship sizes latter; myself I like
> rather big ships but not entire floating cities)? 

A-M is clearly the _fuel_ of choice for ships.  Its mass to energy
value makes that obvious.

> > Now, I agree that if you are making ship fuel, Anti-matter is the
> > way to go but for simply carrying the energy around, Hydrogen seems
> > better even though you'll carry more mass then with A-M it'll be
> > easier to deal with.
>
> Antimatter makes such a nice ship fuel, and we will still need some kind 
> of way of getting around a solar system. You just need a small amount of 

Within a solar system isn't the issue, interstellar trade in energy is
the issue.  I'm only contending that an energy based trade doesn't (to
me) make economic sense if both side can extract the energy equally
well and that for long term storage and long distance shipping, I'd
think Hydrogen would be a better choice then A-M.

> > This seems reasonable especially given the under current that I've
> > been sensing that every race has a strength and a weakness.  Some races
> > are going to be 'natural scientists' for example or whatever. 
> 
> I'm not sure every race has a distinct strength and weakness, but most 
> have their own way of doing things. The Gools I described are quite good 
> at all forms of mechanical engineering but dislike electronics, some 
> races might have an easy time grasping relativistic field equations while 
> others may simply have developed such an efficient economy and industry 
> in one sector they can out-compete most others in that sector.

So the Gools have a strength in mechanical engineering and a weakness
in electronics consequently trading with races that are better in
electronics and not as good in mechanical engineering would be a good
idea.
 
> I think that is the game reason. Myself I would like the idea of an
> unlimited growth of technology, but that would cause a lot of new
> problems: how to deal with super-civilizations, why haven't they taken
> control of everything etc. Things get more interesting among equals (with
> humans as the underdog to add some further spice). 

Perhaps as an alternative to a ceiling you could use the argument that
some one mentioned that as tech goes up it gets harder to deal with
the information so growth slows but doesn't ever stop.  Lower tech races
close the gap quickly giving the illusion of all races being of nearly
equal tech when in reality, each race will have some areas where they
are more advanced and some where they are less.  Perhaps further, the
parent race held the tech levels of the children in check but during
the revolt, the parents were surprised and overwhelmed by numbers.
This doen't preclude a more advanced race from being elsewhere in the
galaxy just from them being in the local area.  Further one could argue
that the galaxy just doesn't have that many races old enough to have
attained a significantly higher tech then the local area (whose tech
growth was accellerated by the ancients).

Again, just a collection of thoughts for everyone to consider.  I can't
help it.  As Jim can attest to, I like being the Devil's Advocate.


Date: Mon, 2 Oct 1995 14:28:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Tony L. Hayes" <tlh@epsilon.com>
To: james vassilakos <jimv@cs.UCR.edu>
Subject: Re: 91-data

On Mon, 2 Oct 1995, james vassilakos wrote:

> hey there. you never got back to me about extracting/deducing
> star colors/sizes (types/classes) from the 91-data. What do ya
> think?

I'm sorry, I thought I answered you.  Yeah, I can write a program
to take the color indices and magnitudes and make a first guess
at the star class.

This'll take me a few days but I should be able to have something
for you soon.


Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 22:29:44 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Number of alien species

I have thought a bit about how to determine the number of aliens within
the Coalition, and I realized that with reasonable assumptions we could
get just as many of few we want. So instead I think we should decide a
reasonable number to make the game playable and interesting and fit our
assumptions to this number. After all, never kill a good story because of 
reality.

I would think around 20 races would be involved in the setting, several 
of which are now extinct (like the Old Ones) or primitives like the humans 
(and thus isolated unless someone breaks some rules). If this turns out 
to be a bit high compared to the rest of the galaxy, we can always 
assume the Old Ones were quite prolific with their uplifting, and if it 
is fewer than the expected mean we can assume several extra races were 
destroyed in the Great War.

Another matter to think of is the size of the Coalition and how fast the 
warp direve works. This is also an area where game considerations can 
help us. The star map seems to be be 50 ly across (unless we choose to 
use the NASA data), and I think we want to keep most of the action for 
the humans within that map. This means that travel across more than 50 ly 
will be a large undertaking for solians and probably take a significant 
amount of time for solian warp drives. If this time is on the order of a 
few months (which seems slow enough to deter players from carooming off 
the map and fast enough to make travel reasonable), the warp get a speed on 
the order of a few ly per week. 

Other races of the Coalition probably have faster ships (so far), so 
their trave times might be shorter. However, they are probably not more 
than a few times faster than the solians (especially if we adopt that 
energy requirements are proportional to speed) so to hold together, the 
Coalition will have to be just a few times larger than the star map. A 
nice, round number might be that it has a radius of 150 ly. That would 
give it a volume 27 times of the star map, with around 19000 stars. This 
might actually be a bit too much space. What do you think?


Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 14:44:08 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: The Economy and Technology of the Coalition

On Mon, 2 Oct 1995, Tony L. Hayes wrote:
> You missed the point.  My point is making anti-matter to carry around
> as a trade item seems wasteful.  Why make anti-matter in system A and
> carry it to system B when system B could just collect its own energy
> from its star.

I think most developed systems produce their own antimatter, especially 
since they probably are around bright stars. I'm not an expert on solar 
collectors, but wouldn't they be much more efficient in a system with a 
bright star than a red dwarf? Antimatter production is mostly done in 
systems with a bright star and where solar collectors can be set up 
without too much trouble, and then exported to other regions if needed.

> Further, A-M reactors don't
> seem to me to have any intrinsic properties that would allow them to
> be any smaller then Fusion reactors.  In fact, they'd probably have
> similar design features.  In both you need to contain a plasma (two
> in the case of an A-M reactor),

I'm not sure of the best way to build an A-M reactor. An ambiplasma
(matter + antimatter) would be fairly stable, radiating hard gamma rays
which are used to heat the coolant or sent into the warp core where they
interact with the frozbnick crystals. But it would be roughly neutral, so
containment might be a problem (unless you charge both matter and
antimatter).

> > In many situations you don't want to carry around a huge powersource, for
> > example in building a spaceship. Energy storage works fine for most
> > smaller uses, but truly high energies require rather extreme measures. 
> 
> If this is to imply that A-M is a better power source for starships, I
> agree.

Yes, I think this is one area where we agree.

> > Actually, that might not be that problematic if you have reasonably good
> > superconductors and are able to make charged antimatter. I would recommend
> 
> The problem is, if you are carrying A-M in a plasma state, its going
> to be farily high energy so you would have quantum tunnelling issues.

I seriously doubt you would like plasma A-M, cold A-M is probably easier 
to handle. One truly bizarre idea I saw in the Daedalus column in Nature 
a few years ago was that antihydrogen could be stored within the crystal 
lattice of hydrogen. Heat it up, and it goes boom!

> If on the other hand you store the A-M
> as, say, Anti-Hydrogen - making it intrinsicly more stable and allowing
> it to be stored as considerably lower energies - you'd then have to
> break apart the atom prior to using the A-M and have to run two separate
> fuels - positrons and anti-protons. 

I don't see why, just inject pellets of A-M into hydrogen (or trash) and 
you get the energy. Neat, 100% conversion of matter + A-M is probably 
hard to achieve in any case.

> It just seems to me that for purposes
> of transporting a material for energy extraction, hydrogen is a better
> choice.  You don't have energy requirements for containment, its far
> safer to handle, and its a lot easier to come by.

This could be different between different groups. Civilians and many races 
might prefer to use fusion or fission, but the military and many 
starships would use antimatter (maybe A-M is restricted by various 
treaties for military use only?).

> > Actually, there is lots of hydrogen in a solar system (oceans on garden 
> > worlds, gas giant atmospheres etc), so there is no need for splitting 
> > helium (which is rare). Just sift through the hydrogen for the isotopes 
> > you want. 
> 
> You are correct, I should clarify.  You can obtain hydrogen in many
> ways any of which are far easier then the creation of A-M.  I used
> the example of splitting Helium because I was thinking of a simple
> renewable energy system where you fuse hydrogen into helium then,
> using solar power, split the helium into hydrogen for fusing creating
> an energy cycle that doesn't require constant shipments from outside
> agencies.  You will of course lose a little so fresh infusions of
> hydrogen or helium to the process would be required from time to time
> but not constant shipments of A-M.

Interesting, but sounds a bit cumbersome in practice. 

> Within a solar system isn't the issue, interstellar trade in energy is
> the issue.  I'm only contending that an energy based trade doesn't (to
> me) make economic sense if both side can extract the energy equally
> well and that for long term storage and long distance shipping, I'd
> think Hydrogen would be a better choice then A-M.

Hmm, I think this becoming more and more an issue of setting instead of 
physics. What would make the setting more interesting?

> > > This seems reasonable especially given the under current that I've
> > > been sensing that every race has a strength and a weakness.  Some races
> > > are going to be 'natural scientists' for example or whatever. 
> > 
> > I'm not sure every race has a distinct strength and weakness, but most 
> > have their own way of doing things. The Gools I described are quite good 
> > at all forms of mechanical engineering but dislike electronics, some 
> > races might have an easy time grasping relativistic field equations while 
> > others may simply have developed such an efficient economy and industry 
> > in one sector they can out-compete most others in that sector.
> 
> So the Gools have a strength in mechanical engineering and a weakness
> in electronics consequently trading with races that are better in
> electronics and not as good in mechanical engineering would be a good
> idea.

You could say that, but it is a rather severe oversimplification. The 
Gools dislike overt electronics and have some trouble designing it, but 
they would probably buy non-obvious electronics when needed just to avoid 
the trouble with dealing with such gross technology. The reason for this 
is of course the way they sense the world (mostly touch and smell), and 
electronics is almost invisible to them.

I don't like having races being good or bad at things for no reason, there
should always be some logic in the abilities of each race. Humans are
barbarous and primates, and thus better at war and scratching than most
other races, while the Old Ones were genius uplifters because they
desperately wanted the company of young species (I'm nearly finished with
a write-up of the prehistory of the Coalition, if anybody is interested). 

> Perhaps as an alternative to a ceiling you could use the argument that
> some one mentioned that as tech goes up it gets harder to deal with
> the information so growth slows but doesn't ever stop.  Lower tech races
> close the gap quickly giving the illusion of all races being of nearly
> equal tech when in reality, each race will have some areas where they
> are more advanced and some where they are less.

Good idea! I like this better than the hard ceiling we implied earlier. 

>  Perhaps further, the
> parent race held the tech levels of the children in check but during
> the revolt, the parents were surprised and overwhelmed by numbers.

As I described it, the Old Ones were rather passive just before the
revolt, mostly occupied by their pet projects of philosophy,
xenopsychology and uplifting theory. They really didn't expect what would
happen when their underlings (their "firstborn" race) out of spite allowed
the other children to communicate with each other... suddenly they
exchanged technologies and advanced centuries at once! 

> This doen't preclude a more advanced race from being elsewhere in the
> galaxy just from them being in the local area.  Further one could argue
> that the galaxy just doesn't have that many races old enough to have
> attained a significantly higher tech then the local area (whose tech
> growth was accellerated by the ancients).

Or perhaps the local area is unusually dense with civilizations with 
high technology (thanks to the Coalition). Outside, there might be some 
rather empty corners and lesser civilizations, and further away the 
ultra-civilizations everybody dreams about (and has never seen).

I have another idea for a neighbour to the Coalition: the unknown space. 
This region appears to be deserted since several millions of years, but 
as the Old Ones noticed, it is not entirely unoccupied. Apparently there 
was a quite advanced race that lived there, and now it has vanished/moved 
away/died out and left some nasty autonomous weapons to guard its home 
region. The Old Ones and the Coalition has never managed to learn much 
about it, and mostly keeps away from it hoping it will gradually decay in 
a few millions of years or so. 

> Again, just a collection of thoughts for everyone to consider.  I can't
> help it.  As Jim can attest to, I like being the Devil's Advocate.

I think its a very good idea. We all need to see the pro and cons of each 
idea before deciding what to use. 


Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 16:15:29 +0000 (WET)
From: Henrik Ohrstrom med <henohr@sokrates.mip.ki.se>
Subject: Re: The Economy and Technology of the Coalition

On Wed, 4 Oct 1995, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Oct 1995, Tony L. Hayes wrote:
> > You missed the point.  My point is making anti-matter to carry around
> > as a trade item seems wasteful.  Why make anti-matter in system A and
> > carry it to system B when system B could just collect its own energy
> > from its star.
> 
> I think most developed systems produce their own antimatter, especially 
> since they probably are around bright stars. I'm not an expert on solar 
> collectors, but wouldn't they be much more efficient in a system with a 
> bright star than a red dwarf? Antimatter production is mostly done in 
> systems with a bright star and where solar collectors can be set up 
> without too much trouble, and then exported to other regions if needed.
 
If there are settlements out in deep space far from any stars but in the 
middle of a mineral/hydrogen/whatever rich area, then they would probably 
import A-M as a complement to their own fusion/fission.

This makes me wonder, matter in deep space, or around a brown dwarf.
Deepspace mining of something, warping out collecting and warping home,
perhaps in the remains of a nova or such.

Imagine a generation STL ship drifting thru space sent before FTL and now 
a base for mining in a interstellar gas cloud, where the decendants of 
the original colonists mine and trade with visiting merchants, selling 
rare isotopes and fusion energy, both mining outpost and Highway cafe.  


From: james vassilakos <jimv>
Subject: Re: Number of alien species
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 09:23:49 -0700 (PDT)
 
> I have thought a bit about how to determine the number of aliens within
> the Coalition, and I realized that with reasonable assumptions we could
> get just as many of few we want. So instead I think we should decide a
> reasonable number to make the game playable and interesting and fit our
> assumptions to this number. After all, never kill a good story because of 
> reality.

True, though we can twist the assumptions implicit in the setting to
just about any number we choose and still rationalize the whole thing
so it seems realistic.
 
> I would think around 20 races would be involved in the setting, several 
> of which are now extinct (like the Old Ones) or primitives like the humans 
> (and thus isolated unless someone breaks some rules). If this turns out 
> to be a bit high compared to the rest of the galaxy, we can always 
> assume the Old Ones were quite prolific with their uplifting, and if it 
> is fewer than the expected mean we can assume several extra races were 
> destroyed in the Great War.

Well, we can apply the following (modified-Drake) equation:

          N = A * B * C * D * E

Where N = # of coalition member races
      A = # of planets in coalition space
      B = % of A which are suitable for life
      C = % of B where life actually exists
      D = % of C where "intelligent" life evolves
      E = % of D where intelligent species develops civilization
      F = % of E where civilization achieves FTL

We won't know A & B until we decide on the size of coalition
space and finalize the starsystem generation scheme, however,
let's assume something like 100,000 and 1% respectively, just as
a very rough guesstimate.

   N = 100000 * .01 * C * D * E * F
   N = 1000 * C * D * E * F

Then let's assume that C is fairly high (on Earth, life didn't
take very long to come about after the cooling of the planet).
I'd guess 80% as a rough estimate.

   N = 1000 * 0.8 * D * E * F
   N = 800 * D * E * F

Now, D (the evolution of intelligence) is a real hard one to
guess. My perception is that it depends on how you think of
intelligence. Certainly, it took a good while (several billions
years) between the emergence of life on earth and the birth of
the first homo sapiens, however, if we consider that perhaps the
Old Ones could have uplifted Tyrannosaurus Rex had they come
around a hundred million years sooner, and that humanity was not
their only prospect when they did finally show up, then this
figure is reduced considerably. Lets say 50% for a very off-the-
wall guess.

   N = 800 * 0.5 * E * F
   N = 400 * E * F

Now, under normal circumstances, E and F might both be very low.
However, considering (the assumption implicit in the premise)
that we were uplifted to a high enough intelligence level to
accomplish both civilization and FTL with relative ease (though
we were eventually given the latter), I would guess that most
uplifted races were in a pretty much similar boat. Let's assume
E*F = 75% 

   N = 400 * 0.75
   N = 300

So we get three hundred member races in the coalition with an
additional 100 who either haven't attained FTL just yet or have
already destroyed themselves before attaining it. We might knock-
off an addition 10% for those who got the shit kicked out of them
during the war some 1500 years ago (leaving us with 270 races).

Now, granted, we can play with the probabilities quite a bit, but
this represents one possible rationalization.
 
> Coalition will have to be just a few times larger than the star map. A 
> nice, round number might be that it has a radius of 150 ly. That would 
> give it a volume 27 times of the star map, with around 19000 stars. This 
> might actually be a bit too much space. What do you think?

Again, we can choose just about any figure we want, so long as we
assume that there are ships to cross that distance is a reasonable
amount of time or at the very least some means of communicating
from one end to the other in a reasonable amount of time.

On the topic of the Starmap, Tony has been fiddling with the 1991 data
a bit. I've put his latest output-file on my web page. He's managed to
come up with X,Y,Z coordinates for the stars in the 91 data, however,
he's still working on getting star color & size (type & class) info
out of that data file.


Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 22:44:17 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: The Economy and Technology of the Coalition

On Wed, 4 Oct 1995, Henrik Ohrstrom med wrote:
> This makes me wonder, matter in deep space, or around a brown dwarf.
> Deepspace mining of something, warping out collecting and warping home,
> perhaps in the remains of a nova or such.

I'm not sure there are anything out there valuable enough to mine. 
Refueling is probably the best idea, so you might want to find a brown 
dwarf or something like that as an energy source and easy place to find. 

Actually, how accurately can you specify your position in deep space? I 
assume the best way would be to measure the angles between the closest 
stars and then computing where the ship is. This doesn't sound that 
exact, it has probably a quite large error range.

> Imagine a generation STL ship drifting thru space sent before FTL and now 
> a base for mining in a interstellar gas cloud, where the decendants of 
> the original colonists mine and trade with visiting merchants, selling 
> rare isotopes and fusion energy, both mining outpost and Highway cafe.  

There is another use for deep space outposts: military outposts. It seems
that we have the usual problem with hi-tech warfare: if you can be seen,
you can be hit and there is no armor that can stand the attack. So you
have to hide or be destroyed. Thus deep space outposts are the way to go;
you can refuel, repair and stock weapons outside a system without any
chance of detection as long as nobody starts sending signals (and then you
can just move the base somewhere else). Space is so large that you cannot
find these bases if you don't know where they are, and they provide a nice
staging ground for an attacker. 


Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 22:53:17 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: Number of alien species

On Wed, 4 Oct 1995, james vassilakos wrote:
> Well, we can apply the following (modified-Drake) equation:
> 
>           N = A * B * C * D * E
> 
> Where N = # of coalition member races
>       A = # of planets in coalition space
>       B = % of A which are suitable for life
>       C = % of B where life actually exists
>       D = % of C where "intelligent" life evolves
>       E = % of D where intelligent species develops civilization
>       F = % of E where civilization achieves FTL
> 
> We won't know A & B until we decide on the size of coalition
> space and finalize the starsystem generation scheme, however,
> let's assume something like 100,000 and 1% respectively, just as
> a very rough guesstimate.

I get around 1% garden worlds with the 2300AD system, and that seems to 
be reasonable. 

> Now, D (the evolution of intelligence) is a real hard one to
> guess. My perception is that it depends on how you think of
> intelligence. Certainly, it took a good while (several billions
> years) between the emergence of life on earth and the birth of
> the first homo sapiens, however, if we consider that perhaps the
> Old Ones could have uplifted Tyrannosaurus Rex had they come
> around a hundred million years sooner, and that humanity was not
> their only prospect when they did finally show up, then this
> figure is reduced considerably. Lets say 50% for a very off-the-
> wall guess.

The problem is that it could happen in the remote past or future. I think 
there is just 5% chance for intelligent life *right now* (assuming 
undeveloped races remain for several millions of years, never escaping 
the stone age). This gives me a tenth of James values.

>    N = 300

My guess would give us 30 instead.

> So we get three hundred member races in the coalition with an
> additional 100 who either haven't attained FTL just yet or have
> already destroyed themselves before attaining it. We might knock-
> off an addition 10% for those who got the shit kicked out of them
> during the war some 1500 years ago (leaving us with 270 races).

I think a tenth of your values makes sense from a game purpose too - we 
don't want to have too many races, maybe room for GMs to develop their 
own, but few enough so that we can describe them and many enough so that 
the world gets interesting. "The Shining Huurg? Never heard of them... 
aha, one of those races in the Eta Quadrant we have never seen."


Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 17:07:18 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: History

Here is my writeup of the history of the Old Ones and the Coalition. It 
is still preliminary, and I really want some comments on this. 

The History of the Coalition

The Old Ones

The Old Ones were bilaterally symmetric beings with a spindle- shaped
body, two arms and two legs just like humans (although they often
reverted to four-legged movement when in hurry) which branched at the
elbows and knees into two lower arms or legs and at the wrists into eight
two-fingered hands or feet, giving them an remarkable dexterity. They
were covered with a thick, woolly fur they often braided into long locks
and to which they attached colourful clothing. 

By all accounts the Old Ones were a very curious race, and explored the
universe with great interest. They had already developed a highly
advanced technological civilisation when they began leaving their home
system in their great helical ships. When they appeared on the galactic
scene they began to search for other intelligent life, eager to meet it
and understand it. They made contact with a few other races, but they
found that intelligent life on their own level was rare; most intelligent
beings were trapped in primitive stages or in evolutionary cul-de-sacs,
and the advanced races of the spiral arms they eventually encountered
were not particularly sociable. 

This disturbed the Old Ones immensely. They had built a quite powerful
empire over the centuries they had expanded, but now they began to turn
inwards. Their technology had reached a plateau, similar to most of the
other races they could interact freely with. The manifold philosophies,
cultures and forms of art they had seen fascinated them, but at the same
time urged them to understand their creators better. Somehow, the Old
Ones felt, they had been given all the pieces of a cosmic puzzle, a kind
of universal enigma they had to solve. This feeling gradually spread, and
the once expansionist Old Ones began to settle down to think through
things. 

For a long time they pursued various paths; some developed more and more
elaborate philosophical systems, others contemplated mystical visions and
a few made ever more complex scientific experiments. Finally one idea
began to gain a following: to gain a better insight into things, they
needed other minds which could add their perspectives to the great quest.
The Old Ones began to study xenopsychology with great interest, and began
to seek ways to bring more consciousness to the stars. 

The first uplift project taught the Old Ones almost as much as they
taught the uplifted beings. They discovered the pitfalls of intervening
too often or manipulating alien minds too much, the problems of managing
a project lasting for millennia and the risks of a young, inexperienced
race. But it also encouraged them to begin several similar projects to
help other races in need. Gradually they transformed their empire into a
complex zoo, with many systems set apart for the development of
intelligent life and other systems "natural preserves". They had never
been that overpopulated, so there was plenty of room for the Old Ones. 

The Yss

The first race to be uplifted by the Old Ones was perhaps their greatest
success and failure, a brilliant but unstable first-born. The Yss were
elephant-like, trilaterally symmetric beings from a low gravity world
which already had developed a quite high intelligence on their own, but
were held back by some fairly simple biological limits. The Old Ones
removed the limits and began the uplifting process much too quickly and
overtly, appearing to the primitive Yss with gifts of knowledge,
technology and guardianship.  Quite soon they had developed an
intelligent species whose mentality was a mixture between the original
Yss mind and the Old Ones own, due to their frequent and well-meaning
manipulations and the imposition of their own culture. The Yss never grew
up as a race, they became a kind of new Old Ones with some alien traits. 

The Old Ones were not entirely satisfied, since they had wanted a truly
alien (yet understandable) child race, but there was no way to undo the
damage. The Yss also understood the problem all too well.  The entire
race suffered from a kind of inferiority complex versus the Old Ones, who
they regarded as perfect and ideal. They began to seek ways of developing
in new ways to please their masters, to find the new perspectives their
masters (and they) desired. The Old Ones were quite worried about their
children, the young race was so unstable that they had to intervene
strongly several times to prevent a catastrophe. At the same time, they
were impressed by the zeal and ingenuity of the Yss in finding new paths,
and gave them a much longer leach than their latter creations. After all,
the Yss were practically a reflection of the Old Ones, what could go
wrong? 

The Uplift Epoch

For a long time the Old Ones, their allies and the Yss continued the
uplifting process. Having learned from their mistakes, they were more
patient and intervened less and less, to make the development of the
uplifted race more natural and avoid imprinting alien ideas on it.
Eventually the Old Ones decreed that no contact should be undertaken at
all with a young race before they had evaluated the consequences
carefully, and then the interference should be as minimal as possible. At
least in one case this non-intervention policy almost cost a young race
its existence as the Old Ones just watched it teeter on the brink of
destruction.  However, the rule was not absolute and sometimes the
uplifters would get impatient and intervene anyway, especially in
problematic cases. 

The child races were generally contacted later and later in their
development as the Old Ones got better and better at uplifting and more
and more desperate to keep their children free from outside influence. At
the same time, the contacted child races were confined within their home
systems to keep them "natural", visited by the curious Old Ones who
wanted to see things from their perspective.  In a few cases they allowed
races to travel to other stars in the vicinity, but generally they held
back the development of FTL travel and encouraged the child races to
remain in their home system. 

The Old Ones gradually changed further, becoming ever more philosophical
and content to watch the civilisations they had spawned. Their children
each developed in their own way, but always the Old Ones or their
servants were there, ready to put an end to any disagreeable development. 

The Mlenimm

One of the races the Old Ones uplifted was the Mlenimm. The Mlenimm had
evolved on the extensive plains of an old garden world. Herbivores formed
big herds stalked by various predators, just like on an terrestrial
savannah. But one predator developed a symbiotic relation to its prey: a
pack-family would "adopt" a herbivore herd, eating old and weak
individuals when other prey grew scarce but also protecting the herd from
other predators, warning it of danger and leading it to fertile areas the
pack discovered. Gradually the protectors evolved as the climate
gradually worsened and the competition became more harsh, and attained
intelligence. Unfortunately for the Mlenimm, their tribal cultures were
locked into an ecological trap: to evolve culturally and technologically,
they would need to become more populous, but that was impossible due to
the finite size of their ecological niche.  They could never build
permanent settlements, since the herbivores would then eat all available
food and force them to move on again, and above a certain size the herds
became too large and unwieldy to handle. So they remained a primitive
race, herding their animals with crude stone and wood tools. 

The Old Ones changed all that. They had to intervene directly and
radically, but they succeeded in giving the Mlenimm an evolutionary boost
without destroying their uniqueness. They moved them to huge orbital
stations imitating the plains, and taught them how to use the facilities
and build more habitats if needed (the orbital stations were heavily
automated and essentially ran themselves anyway). Then the Old Ones
retired again, and watched the space-Mlenimm develop their own culture. 

The Mlenimm became a unusual but skilled race. They kept the old intense
pack-loyalty even when the old nomadic lifestyle was gradually replaced
with a high-tech nomadism among the asteroids and habitats of their
system. They were unusually peaceful as a race (since they as predators
had strong inhibitions against killing each other), although non-lethal
fights were extremely common between individuals to establish the pecking
order. Mlenimm philosophy was simple, rugged and very rational: the
universe is a big and strange place, but you can always trust your
pack-mates and find a herd of some kind to protect. They never saw the
Old Ones as gods or masters, just a strange and very lucky gift, or maybe
as welcome prey... 

The Fall of the Old Ones

The biggest error of the Old Ones was probably not their actions, but
that despite their immense curiosity and will to understand others, they
never really understood their child races. Maybe they had become too used
to their highly advanced philosophical life that they had simply lost
touch with the often hard reality the other races lived in. 

The Yss were not content with the situation, as they more and more felt
that their masters had lost the spark they had given them.  They wanted
to bring back the dynamic to the empire and once and for all be accepted
as the equals of their uplifters. Among other things, they went behind
the backs of the Old Ones and allowed communication between the child
races for some reason. It is unlikely that the Old Ones didn9t notice
this, but either they didn9t care or they thought this inter-species
communication could provide a much needed clue to their quest. 

As the different child races begun to interact, they realised they shared
the same problem despite their other differences: the Old Ones limited
them in all manner of ways, without ever letting them forget who uplifted
them in the remote past. They also began to realise that they were quite
numerous and powerful compared to the Old Ones, who had spent the last
millennia on philosophy, xenopsychology and uplifting theory instead of
technological development. Gradually the child races begun to demand to
be able to choose their destiny for themselves, instead of having it
dictated by the Old Ones. While the Old Ones discussed the matter in
their usual philosophical and slow manner, some of the more impatient
races began to act independently anyway. During a few years the situation
grew more and more uneasy, as the Old Ones tried to convince the children
that they were acting wrong and the children tried to sneak between the
patrols to reach new worlds. 

The igniting spark occurred when a habitat of Mlenimm was destroyed by
the Old Ones as they were attempting to explore a ecological preserve,
set aside to house a new uplifted species. The reaction was immediate:
the child races declared war on the Old Ones, who apparently were a bit
surprised by the swift reaction. At first the war was mostly a matter of
sabotage as the Yss tried to cripple the society of the Old Ones and the
Mlenimm destroyed orbital installations, hoping to force the Old Ones to
back down and grant them independence. But it soon turned more deadly as
the shocked Old Ones unleashed the weapons they had cached in secret
bases millennia ago. After the first atrocities nobody could stop; the
war was a matter of life and death. The Mlenimm groups 2adopted2 other
species and helped them with tactics. The Yss subverted Old One
technology. The Gools provided weapons and shipyards. The Mothers
coordinated the rebel races. 

The Great War raged for several decades, across immense distances.  The
Old Ones had the most weapons and skill, but lacked the ferocity of the
younger races and more importantly, their desperation. Even to the end
the Old Ones could not understand that they were beaten, the entire
concept was alien to them. As system after system fell, the weapons used
became more and more destructive. Invisible FTL missiles annihilated
orbital installations, ships and habitats, but planets proved harder to
subjugate. Usually strategic installations, infrastructure and population
centres were targeted to render the planet harmless as the invaders tried
to find the hidden bases and weapons in the system before moving on. 
Latter biological weapons, climate- and ecology-wrecking asteroids or
huge antimatter detonations wiped out the inhabitants (and in some cases
most life) on several planets. Automated factories would churn out
autonomous weapons, intended to seek out certain targets in space or
orbit above a planet, destroying all signs of intelligent life. 

As the War went on, the child races increasingly often confronted each
other over vital resources, and it became obvious that the Old Ones were
actually a minor threat compared to other groups, and the destruction of
their last strongholds was hardly noticed.  Something had changed in the
Mlenimm during the war; their old inhibitions against attacking others
(or themselves) were gone, and they increasingly saw themselves as the
race that should lead and protect the others, just like they once
protected and led their herds.  Some races had intense internal schism
and were destroying themselves, taking others with them. 

The Coalition

The Coalition was formed as a defence alliance against the aggressive
Mlenimm between three races, the Yss, the Mothers and the Hafaru. As one
of the few united groups it managed to resist the Mlenimm, and other
races began to ally with it, seeing the advantage of cooperation.
Gradually the Coalition became more and more powerful, despite huge
internal problems and the fall of the Yss. 

The Old Ones had implanted hidden psychological weaknesses within the Yss
during their uplifting as a precaution. They never used them in the Great
War, possibly because they now felt them to be totally repugnant but more
probably because they had forgot about them. The Mlenimm had no such
scruples, and used psychological warfare to activate hidden weaknesses in
the Yss and other uplifted races. As the Coalition advanced on the
Mlenimm, the Yss civilisation rapidly crumbled when an epidemic of
suicides spread; when other Yss heard about it, they also committed
suicide until the entire race was gone. Fortunately the Old Ones
apparently didn't insert similar safeguards in other species, but the
Mlenimm became so adept at psychological warfare that their name still
inspires fear to many races. 

The decisive battle against the Mlenimm was a narrow victory for the
Coalition, mainly due to the problems the Mlenimm had with working
together. But long after the main concentration of the predators had been
destroyed small groups reappeared, striking from hidden bases and quickly
retreating. 

The final fate of the Mlenimm was somewhat ironic. One of the last
surviving groups of the race had set up a colony on their old home planet
in order to build a defensive outpost. The Coalition defeated its space
forces and carefully destroyed the installations on the planet, but could
not wipe out the survivors without seriously damaging the remaining
ecosystem. So instead a permanent sentinel station was placed in an
orbit, and the surviving Mlenimm left alone on the planet as long as they
didn9t attempt to build any technological installations. Little is known
about the conditions on the surface, but observations indicate that the
advanced Mlenimm have had some influence on their primitive cousins left
behind by the Old Ones. 

The Reorganisation

After the defeat of the Mlenimm, the Coalition began to secure its 
hold over the remains of the Old One9s empire. This process took 
well over a century of intermittent warfare as rebellious planets 
were brought back into the fold and rouge races defeated. The 
restoration (or terraforming) of ravaged planets was begun. It was 
during this epoch, known as the 2Reorganisation2 that one of the 
most tragic incidents of the entire war occurred.

The Vessels of Potentiality, a minor uplifted species previously left
totally alone had quietly developed their own technology, somewhat helped
when the Yss secret listening post broke down and fell into their
surprised claws. They had moved out into their solar system, and sent one
of their first FTL ships towards a nearby star. This star was actually
one of the most important remaining population centres for the Gools, and
as the unknown vessel appeared in the system it was mistaken for an
Mlenimm raid and immediately destroyed. Worried that the Mlenimm had some
secret base in the region they previously thought was safe, the Gools
scouted nearby systems and found a planet surrounded by what appeared to
be starships under construction. They immediately attacked what they
perceived as a Mlenimm colony, destroying all orbital installations and
other signs of civilisation before someone saw the old records indicating
the system as a uplifting system. 

The Coalition (and the Gools) were horrified by the destruction, and
immediately stepped in to save what they could. The damage done was
horrific; cities had been incinerated, entire regions were glass deserts
and the climate had been seriously altered. Despite some rather expensive
Coalition help, billions of the Vessels died. The survivors grew up as a
race within the Coalition, and today remain a very strong factor in its
politics, fierce supporters of the protection of non-starfaring species
and the rules of the Coalition. 

The general outcry among the members of the Coalition after this affair
led to the formation of a new treaty delineating the rights of primitive
species and the responsibilities of starfaring species to them. It also
led to the Great Mapping, a huge project where the Coalition tried to
define the regions belonging to each species. The turmoil of the War and
the Reorganisation had seriously confused this area, and things were not
made easier by the fact that some species had occupied planets far from
their homeworlds, not to mention the loss of the archives of the Old
Ones. There was also some discussions about punishing the Gools for the
devastation, but since they were such an important part in the
Reorganisation at this point (and that most races realised they might
have done the same) the question was eventually dropped. 

The Great Mapping eventually managed to solve most geopolitical problems
and establish some general rules. Each species got a domain, not
necessarily a connected volume but otherwise up to them to rule as they
saw fit (under the various treaties the species had accepted, of course).
To ensure the possibility of interstellar travel, corridors of Coalition
space were established where the rules of the Coalition held instead of
any individual species. In addition some regions were declared
restricted, usually systems where primitive species lived (in this kind
of system no activity detectable by the technology of the locals is
allowed, and no interaction is to be undertaken without approval from the
Coalition). Finally, in some regions the Coalition established special
zones with compromise rules since no easy solution to the political
problems could be found or to ensure access to some resources for all
Coalition members. 


From: james vassilakos <jimv@cs.UCR.edu>
Subject: Re: History
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 1995 12:30:57 -0700 (PDT)
 
> Here is my writeup of the history of the Old Ones and the Coalition. It 
> is still preliminary, and I really want some comments on this. 

Just read through it a minute ago. I am most impressed. Good stuff!
The only section that I questioned was about the Gools attacking the
Vessels of Potentiality, that race that got royally screwed because
of a Gool mistake. I guess it depends on how powerful the Gools
were, or how much space they had explored, but it seems to me that
any reasonably powerful (or well-traveled) race would have already
known that the starsystem of the VoP held a developing race. Hence,
that sort of mistake could only be made by a race which was very
much in the dark about who was inhabiting the surround star
systems. Unless we assume that the Old Ones made the VoP system
a red-zone, and that the Yss had enforced this through the war
right up to their demise, and then when the attack came, the
Gools, who had been previously occupied with other matters, just
assumed that the Mlenimm (formerly known as the Herders if I
remember correctly) had taken over the system and used it as
a staging area... well, you see where I'm going. But, in any
case, the less powerful/well-traveled the aggressor race in
this incident, the better, just in terms of believability.
But I can go with the Gools being this race, and I sort of
like the idea that they were horrified about the mistake. That
would certainly leave a lasting impression on their racial
psychology. Probably make them much more timid and sympathetic
toward Humanity, which would be kinda neat. ("Why are you being
so nice to us?"  "Atonement for the great blunder... our
pennance is everlasting."  "Huh... great blunder?" :-)


Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 13:12:36 +0100 (MET)
To: Science-Fiction RPG <jimv2@empirenet.com>
Subject: Re: History

On Mon, 9 Oct 1995, james vassilakos wrote:
> Just read through it a minute ago. I am most impressed. Good stuff!

Thanks!

> Hence,
> that sort of mistake could only be made by a race which was very
> much in the dark about who was inhabiting the surround star
> systems. 

I like the idea that the Gools were a bit inexperienced when this 
happened. They had spread from their home system in the turmoil of the 
war, desperately trying to survive. In some cases they settled remote 
systems to build new colonies and industries to help the Coalition, but 
often there was very little planning in this: a few badly damaged ships 
found a system and had to hole down for repair, and eventually formed a 
colony. Records could be lost

> Unless we assume that the Old Ones made the VoP system
> a red-zone, and that the Yss had enforced this through the war
> right up to their demise, and then when the attack came, the
> Gools, who had been previously occupied with other matters, just
> assumed that the Mlenimm (formerly known as the Herders if I
> remember correctly) had taken over the system and used it as
> a staging area... well, you see where I'm going.

This is an interesting idea. Why didn't the Yss (who probably knew a lot 
about the projects of the Old Ones) know or tell about them? Maybe the 
Vessels were actually an illegal uplifting attempt by the Yss which they 
kept secret from everybody? Or perhaps this could be left as one of the 
great unsolved mysteries of history, which alien historians debate to 
this day. 

Apropos names: I think it might be an idea to give each race in the game
two names: its human name (usually based on what we can perceive or their
language) and its "official" name in the Coalition (which has to be more
abstract so that everybody can understand it). For example, the Mlenimm
are also known as the Herders, the Gools as the Divided Ones, Mothers as
the Mothers (they do not communicate with speech so humans simply
translated the Coalition term), the Swimmers as the Fractal Economy, and
so on. 

I'll write more about my ideas for the language of the Coalition in 
another post. 

> But, in any
> case, the less powerful/well-traveled the aggressor race in
> this incident, the better, just in terms of believability.

Yes, it makes it more tragic too. 

> But I can go with the Gools being this race, and I sort of
> like the idea that they were horrified about the mistake. That
> would certainly leave a lasting impression on their racial
> psychology. Probably make them much more timid and sympathetic
> toward Humanity, which would be kinda neat. ("Why are you being
> so nice to us?"  "Atonement for the great blunder... our
> pennance is everlasting."  "Huh... great blunder?" :-)

Nice! I think I'll rewrite the Gool text a bit to include these ideas. 
Originally I saw the Gools as one of the most conservative races and
probably enemies of the barbarous humans, but this could change it quite
nicely: "Humans are disgusting creatures. But we are obliged to help and
respect them, regardless of the cost. That is our duty." 


Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 13:57:49 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: The Coalition

I have been thinking about the structure of the Coalition and how it
might work. At first I envisioned something like the UN or the EEC, but
some of my friends pointed out that that was a very human way of doing
it. So here are some new ideas (thanks, Martin!): 

As the children of the Old Ones began to communicate with each other they
immediately ran into problems. Their languages and minds were very
different, and their individual goals were even more diverse. To
facilitate interspecies communications the Mothers, helped by the Yss
began to develop some kind of standard way of communicating with other
beings. This language or code is today known simply as the Standard. 

The Standard is a rather cumbersome language, since it is intended to be
understood by as different beings as possible. To a human it would appear
like a mixture of formal logic, bureaucratic definitions and a computer
language, which is quite close to the truth. To enable everyone to relate
to it the creators based it on mathematical concepts which can be
understood by most intelligent species, gradually building an elaborate
mathematical language on this. This framework is then used to define
other terms as carefully as possible, to ensure that all beings
understand what is meant. At first fundamental physics is defined, and
then gradually extended into the everyday world until everything is
encoded into the Standard, from gravity to philosophy. The Standard can
be expressed in a symbolic form, as datastructures, relations or in other
systems, to suit the various races; this is just a user interface to the
language. 

Needless to say, the complete Standard is immense, impossible for any
individual being to understand. But most terms are only relevant on a
deep level, and beings can discuss areas that interest them using small
subsets of the Standard. The language is modular, with extensions and
optional substructures not unlike a programming language (several races
have developed automatic translators to and from Standard of varying
quality). Even more troublesome is the fact that not all terms are
defined or understood yet, something which keeps the Coalition
xenolinguists and xenophilosophers busy (and well paid). And some species
have trouble grasping even the fundamentals of the language for various
reasons, so some alternative "secondary standards" have been developed to
allow them to communicate through a second translation between Standard
and the secondary standard. 

Despite these rather big problems, the Standard became extremely
important to the formation of the Coalition: it was the only way the
founders could communicate on similar terms, and allowed them to deal
with other races. Eventually the Coalition and the Standard became almost
synonymous: a race that could learn the Standard was intelligent, and
could be considered for membership. All rules, treaties and discussions
in the Coalition was to be described in Standard. Of course, the majority
of beings never learned it, but as long as negotiations and inter-species
communications were held according to it, everything was fine. 

The Coalition was not a centralized group even from the beginning, and
during the War and Reorganization it was impossible to have a central
government, both for practical reasons (such as communications delays and
internal schisms) and since many races resented the idea of aliens having
anything to say about their internal affairs. Instead a system was
established and encoded within the Standard to allow the Coalition to act
as an unity when needed but without any central control. 

Each species rules in its own domain (with some restrictions later
imposed), and has one vote in the Coalition. Who or what gives this vote
is unimportant as long as it represents the race (among the Mothers it is
the Grandmother of the Balanced Mediator Clan, while the scrupulously
democratic Ikkadju vote internally first about what to do). Discussions
are held through a network of communications channels and very fast
message missiles between the various races, like a kind of governmental
internet where each newsgroup represents an instance). These votes are
used to determine general policy and actions of the Coalition as a whole
or as a part, but are seldom used (instead the debates are the real
political arena). Frankly, the Coalition tends to be extremely wordy and
slow in action these days. 

The Coalition itself is an abstraction and have no real physical
existence other than the network of communications that has been
established. It has no citizens itself (although it has some formal
wards), and the physical installations linked to it (like the network
hardware or local administrative centers) are founded and run by the
various races (among humans they would be some kind of foundations). 
That doesn't mean it has a tremendous power: the numerous councils (like
the Council of Standard Linguistics, the Council of Interspecies
Conflict, the Council of Interspecies Ethics, the Council of Scientific
Exchange, etc...) have a real say in their various spheres of influence,
member species have warships under Coalition "flag" (the Coalition has
never been given a single symbol; many species have their own idea of how
to represent it) and some regions are officially Coalition domains. 


Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 15:09:52 +0100
From: Joerg Rhiemeier <rhiemeir@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>
Subject: Names

My question is: where do all those species names come from?  (I mean names
like Hafaru, Ikkadju, Yss, Mlenimm, etc.)  The problem I see with these names
is this: the different species have entirely different physiologies and
therefore completely different repertoires of phonemes/pheromones/whatever.
This means that alien languages will be nothing like human languages, and
their species' own names cannot be rendered in human speech or writing!

Obviously, terms like `Yss' or `Hafaru' are no words coined by humans when
they discovered the species.  Humans would give them either descriptive
names (such as `Greys' for the Hafaru, or `Leeches' or `Swimmers') or
names which allude at legendary creatures (such as `Gryphons' or `Rooks'
for the Ikkadju).

Names such as Yss, Hafaru, Ikkadju or Mlenimm imply that at least one
other species speaks a language composed of phonemes similar to human
languages.   This is very unlikely, unless one assumes that the Old
Ones engineered the vocal organs of other species (including humans) to
produce the sounds of their own language.  Did this actually happen?
If it did, this has a significant impact on the campaign.  If not, it
is better to dispose of those exotic-sounding names.


From: larrys@zk3.dec.com (Larry Smith)
Subject: Re: Names  
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 95 10:29:51 -0400

Joerg Rhiemeier <rhiemeir@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>:
>My question is: where do all those species names come from?  (I mean names
>like Hafaru, Ikkadju, Yss, Mlenimm, etc.)  The problem I see with these names
>is this: the different species have entirely different physiologies and
>therefore completely different repertoires of phonemes/pheromones/whatever.
>This means that alien languages will be nothing like human languages, and
>their species' own names cannot be rendered in human speech or writing!

I am reminded of H. Beam Piper.  "Naming stuff was easy on inhabited
planets - just point to something and ask a local, and when he gargles
a mouthful of syllables at you, take it down phonetically and that is
the name of the critter.  It doesn't matter whether that _was_ the name,
he could've been asking "Whaddaya wanna know for?" but it's good enough.
But uninhabited worlds, well, we wind up with names like "damnthing".

Names come from a variety of sources.  Sometimes they are descriptive,
but many times humans imitate a characteristic sound - chickadee, for
instance - as the name.  "Hafaru" might be an anglicized version of
of the normal "Hafaru-greeting-non-hafaru" sound whose actual trans-
lation might be "Greetings, Non-Hafaru, I am unarmed!" although even
a Hafaru might not twig to that after the anglicization.  And it doesn't
really matter if _our_ phonemes match _their_ phonemes because they don't
match even between humans.  In the US, dogs go woof!  In Japan, they go
rar!  In Denmark, they go auw!  Or some such.  Everybody has their own
way of _hearing_ sounds as well as speaking them.  Only a philologist
will know where these names came from - or care.


Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 15:45:24 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: Names

On Tue, 10 Oct 1995, Joerg Rhiemeier wrote:
> My question is: where do all those species names come from?  (I mean names
> like Hafaru, Ikkadju, Yss, Mlenimm, etc.)  The problem I see with these names
> is this: the different species have entirely different physiologies and
> therefore completely different repertoires of phonemes/pheromones/whatever.
> This means that alien languages will be nothing like human languages, and
> their species' own names cannot be rendered in human speech or writing!

Good point, which I think we have to disentangle a bit (I made a try in a 
recent post, but I'm not sure I was understandable). 

> Obviously, terms like `Yss' or `Hafaru' are no words coined by humans when
> they discovered the species.  Humans would give them either descriptive
> names (such as `Greys' for the Hafaru, or `Leeches' or `Swimmers') or
> names which allude at legendary creatures (such as `Gryphons' or `Rooks'
> for the Ikkadju).

I think humans would not call aliens by descriptive names officially. 
Colloquially people will of course call the Hafaru Greys, but no diplomat
would ever dare to call them that (which might just show how primitive we
are :-). So I think one of the first questions the Americans asked the 
captive Hafaru in 1947 was "What do you call yourselves?". And he might 
have answered "We call ourselves humans" which sounds like 'Hafaru'. 

> Names such as Yss, Hafaru, Ikkadju or Mlenimm imply that at least one
> other species speaks a language composed of phonemes similar to human
> languages.

I think many species make sounds, but fewer communicate with them (as a
Gool would say: humans smell, but do not speak through it!). So humans
might name other species after hearing their word for themselves or
something similar but of course it will be seriously mangled in the
translation. A human cannot hiss like the Yss, and the soft ultrasonics of
the Mlenimm are impossible to hear (I assume these names were chosen by
humans seeing historical recordings of Coalition history). 

Maybe some names are simply titles?


Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 15:48:35 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: Names 

On Tue, 10 Oct 1995 larrys@zk3.dec.com wrote:
> Names come from a variety of sources.  Sometimes they are descriptive,
> but many times humans imitate a characteristic sound - chickadee, for
> instance - as the name.  "Hafaru" might be an anglicized version of
> of the normal "Hafaru-greeting-non-hafaru" sound whose actual trans-
> lation might be "Greetings, Non-Hafaru, I am unarmed!" although even
> a Hafaru might not twig to that after the anglicization.

This is my explanation for the Gools: the radio-units which link their 
secondary bodies to their main bodies chime 'gool' from time to time 
(their equivalent to a rasping radio?). 

In some cases this could become quite amusing. What do the other races 
call us? The 'Hellos'? 


From: "Tony L. Hayes" <tlh@epsilon.com>
Subject: Re: hey
To: jimv@cs.UCR.edu (james vassilakos)
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 1995 16:32:10 -0400 (EDT)

james vassilakos writes ->
> greetings. so anyway, i haven't heard from you in a few days.
> have any more luck with that 91-star data?  later...  jimv@cs.ucr.edu
 
Yeah, I know.  Life as a sys admin - its cyclic.  Busy...bored...busy.
I was beginning work on the program but I stopped to track down a compiler
problem on my linux box (that's where I write the code usually).  I
figured it out just now in fact (no really, I did).  It turns out
it wasn't a problem with the compiler at all but rather with the
data and how the compiler works on Suns.  It turns out one data
point had a zero parallax (or the parallax was empty).  Anyway,
my linux box (gcc) barfs up a floating point exception while the
Sun silently lets it pass filling the variable with infinity (divison
by zero).  So I thought there was a problem with gcc when really
it was the Sun not reporting the error and gcc did.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I was avoiding writting the code 
until I tracked it down (I wasn't sure I could trust the results until I
knew why I got the error on a piece of code that I thought worked properly
at work on my Sun).    Now that I know what the issue was, I can resume
writting the code.  It should only take an evening or two to get it
pulled together.  Just add some more reads in the existing code and
cross reference the values with this table I have.

I'll mail you the new code as soon as I get it together.

Keep after me, I get side tracked easily!


From: "Tony L. Hayes" <tlh@epsilon.com>
Subject: Re: hey
To: jimv@cs.UCR.edu (james vassilakos)
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 11:19:15 -0400 (EDT)

james vassilakos writes ->
> greetings. so anyway, i haven't heard from you in a few days.
> have any more luck with that 91-star data?  later...  jimv@cs.ucr.edu
 
Have you been getting mail from me?  I was having a problem with bouncing
mail.  I think it was elm.  My pc recently arrived at work (finally!)
and I put linux on it.  The default elm (from slackware) has MIME
support compiled in and it was messing things up (I think).  Anyway,
I rebuilt elm (which it turns out was no small task) and I think
things are working correctly now.

As for the data, I was looking at it and realized it _has_ star class
or type built in as a field.  Not all stars have a class but many do.
I've changed the program to pull out that data as another column.  I'm
attaching the new program. you want the results too or do you want
to run the code?

Anyway, the short of it is, the class info is there for many stars
but not all.  The remainder may best be handled by hand since I
also discovered that some of the data I was going to use is not always
there (B-V in particular).  Finally, the class data sometimes has
extraneous characters included (notes and what not) or it is color
and not star type at all.

-----------------cut here-----------------
#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>

#define FACTOR  (3.14159/180.)
#define NUM_REC  3802
#define TILT	(23.5*FACTOR)
main()
{
	FILE *data_fp, *out_fp;
	char junk[258], ident[13], class[13];
	float parallax, range, dec_min, theta, psi, app_mag, abs_mag;
	int ra_h, ra_m, ra_s, dec_deg, count;


	data_fp = fopen("data.text", "r");
	out_fp = fopen("results.text", "w");

	fprintf(out_fp, "Range      X      Y      Z      Visual  Real Mag    Class       Ident\n");

	for (count=0; count < NUM_REC; count++)
	{

		fgets(ident, 12, data_fp);

		fscanf(data_fp, "%d", &ra_h);
		fscanf(data_fp, "%d", &ra_m);
		fscanf(data_fp, "%d", &ra_s);

		theta = 15. * (ra_h + ra_m/60. + ra_s/3600.);

		fscanf(data_fp, "%d", &dec_deg);
		fscanf(data_fp, "%f", &dec_min);

		if (dec_deg < 0)
			psi = (float) dec_deg - dec_min/60.;
		else
			psi = (float) dec_deg + dec_min/60.;

		fgets(junk, 27, data_fp);

		fgets(class, 12, data_fp);

		fgets(junk, 2, data_fp);

		fscanf(data_fp, "%f", &app_mag);

		fgets(junk, 36, data_fp);

		fscanf(data_fp, "%f", &parallax);

		fgets(junk, 8, data_fp);

		fscanf(data_fp, "%f", &abs_mag);

		fgets(junk, 257, data_fp);

		if (parallax != 0) range = 3.26/(0.001*parallax);
		else range = 0;

#ifdef DEBUG
		printf("\nIdentifier %s\n", ident);
		printf("RA is %2d Hours %2d Minutes %2d Seconds\n",
			ra_h, ra_m, ra_s);
		printf("Theta is %f\n", theta);
		printf("Dec is %3d Degrees %4.1f Minutes\n",
			dec_deg, dec_min);
		printf("Psi is %f\n", psi);
		printf("Star Class = %s\n", class);
		printf("Apparent Mag = %6.2f\n",app_mag);
		printf("Parallax is %6.1f\n", parallax);
		printf("Range (from parallax) is %4.1f parsecs\n", range);
		printf("X = %4.1f, Y = %4.1f, Z = %4.1f \n",
			range * cos(FACTOR*theta) * cos(FACTOR*psi),
			range * sin(FACTOR*theta) * cos(FACTOR*psi),
			range * sin(FACTOR*psi));
		printf("Absolute Mag = %5.2f\n", abs_mag);
#endif
		fprintf(out_fp, "%5.1f   %5.1f  %5.1f %6.1f    %6.2f   %5.2f      %13s%10s\n"
			,range,
			range * cos(FACTOR*theta) * cos(FACTOR*psi),
			range * sin(FACTOR*theta) * cos(FACTOR*psi) * cos(TILT),
			range * sin(FACTOR*psi) * cos(TILT),
			app_mag, abs_mag, class, ident);
	}
}


From: james vassilakos <jimv>
Subject: sfrpg: star data options
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 10:46:17 -0700 (PDT)

Going back to the topic of star data, Tony has been working on a
program to extract the necessary data from the 91-Gliese file.
Both the original data, the extracted data, and the program are
on my home page under Science Fiction RPG at http://cs.ucr.edu/~jimv

Tony writes: 
> Anyway, the short of it is, the class info is there for many stars
> but not all.  The remainder may best be handled by hand since I
> also discovered that some of the data I was going to use is not always
> there (B-V in particular).  Finally, the class data sometimes has
> extraneous characters included (notes and what not) or it is color
> and not star type at all.

My main worry about the extracted data file is that the star type/class
info is sketchy to say the least. Ideally, each star would have both
a clear type and class, G2 V for instance. However, we've got many
stars with the following sort of entries:

   k   (no class info)
   m
   k-m  (not even certain about the type)
   g-k
   DA
   dM0 (I'm not sure what the difference is between D & d)
   M1.5

And then there are those stars where absolutely no type/class info
is given... depressing to say the least.

I suppose that what GDW did was to simply take a similar data file and
start rolling dice on every unknown. No wonder they ended up with 6%
in Class VI (Population II). They didn't have an astronomer on hand
to tell them otherwise. This is just a guess, of course, but they
had to find some sort of solution.

In any case, we're still faced with the same decision we walked in
the door with. Should we use the 69-data which GDW seems to have
rolled-up for us, and just make minor adjustments to it where we
have a strong inkling that it's screwy, or should we modify the
91-data file which GDW has absolutely nothing to do with, and where
all errors are our own?

69 Pro: Less work.
69 Con: Might get into copyright hassles with GDW later on.

91 Pro: Covers (over four times) greater volume of space.
91 Con: Final data will still be inaccurate due to forced guessing.

Well, there's the situation. Any comments?


From: "Tony L. Hayes" <tlh@epsilon.com>
Subject: Re: sfrpg: star data options
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 13:51:36 -0400 (EDT)

james vassilakos writes ->
> In any case, we're still faced with the same decision we walked in
> the door with. Should we use the 69-data which GDW seems to have
> rolled-up for us, and just make minor adjustments to it where we
> have a strong inkling that it's screwy, or should we modify the
> 91-data file which GDW has absolutely nothing to do with, and where
> all errors are our own?
> 
> 69 Pro: Less work.
> 69 Con: Might get into copyright hassles with GDW later on.
> 
> 91 Pro: Covers (over four times) greater volume of space.
> 91 Con: Final data will still be inaccurate due to forced guessing.
> 
> Well, there's the situation. Any comments?

Just one.  The 91 data has absolute magnitude info.  Using that we
can at least make _reasonable_ guesses on the class.  Not great since
there are other factors involved (like color) but reasonable.  I can
type in a little table cross referencing abs mag and class type for
Main Sequence, Giants, and Supergiants.  I _might_ have tables for
some of the other classes but not handy.


Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 19:23:28 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: sfrpg: star data options

On Wed, 11 Oct 1995, james vassilakos wrote:
> In any case, we're still faced with the same decision we walked in
> the door with. Should we use the 69-data which GDW seems to have
> rolled-up for us, and just make minor adjustments to it where we
> have a strong inkling that it's screwy, or should we modify the
> 91-data file which GDW has absolutely nothing to do with, and where
> all errors are our own?

I like the idea of using the 91 data, since its more recent, larger and 
definitely not copyrighted by GDW. Maybe it could be cross-referenced 
with other data so we can get the names and classes of the stars? There 
has to be more such files out there in the Net of a Million Lies...


Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 14:28:12 +0100
From: Joerg Rhiemeier <rhiemeir@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>
Subject: Re: sfrpg: star data options

James Vassilakos writes:
>My main worry about the extracted data file is that the star type/class
>info is sketchy to say the least. Ideally, each star would have both
>a clear type and class, G2 V for instance. However, we've got many
>stars with the following sort of entries:
>
>   k   (no class info)
>   m
>   k-m  (not even certain about the type)
>   g-k

A small g is sometimes used as a prefix to a spectral type (e.g. gK2)
to denote a giant (i.e. class Ia, Ib, II, III or IV).  I don't know about
k and m, though.

>   DA
>   dM0 (I'm not sure what the difference is between D & d)

D is a white dwarf (a dead star which has passed beyond its giant stage),
while d denotes a red dwarf (a small main sequence star).

With white dwarfs, the digit behind the stellar class letter is often omitted.
For our purposes, it doesn't make a difference, anyway.

>   M1.5

These occur from time to time, and I think it means that the author wasn't
sure whether to put the star in M1 or M2.

>And then there are those stars where absolutely no type/class info
>is given... depressing to say the least.

Yes, I hate these things... I also hate incomplete data which omit important
details.  Once I made a map of a star empire, only to find out a few weeks
later that the star around which I had put the capital world was closely
orbited by a white dwarf.  (Or did it turn out to be a subdwarf or subgiant?
I don't remember.)  I had to trash the entire map, because I couldn't
just move the capital without the entire thing stopping making sense!

>In any case, we're still faced with the same decision we walked in
>the door with. Should we use the 69-data which GDW seems to have
>rolled-up for us, and just make minor adjustments to it where we
>have a strong inkling that it's screwy, or should we modify the
>91-data file which GDW has absolutely nothing to do with, and where
>all errors are our own?
>
>69 Pro: Less work.
>69 Con: Might get into copyright hassles with GDW later on.
>
>91 Pro: Covers (over four times) greater volume of space.
>91 Con: Final data will still be inaccurate due to forced guessing.

I'd rather favour using the '91 data, which are probably better.

Anders Sandberg suggested:

>	Maybe it could be cross-referenced 
>with other data so we can get the names and classes of the stars?

I have a list of more than 300 stars within 25 parsecs which I received
from Eric Edwards some time ago.  He compiled it from various sources.
I will dig it out and either post it here, or put on my web site.


Date: Fri, 13 Oct 1995 12:51:12 +0100
From: Joerg Rhiemeier <rhiemeir@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>
To: jimv@cs.ucr.edu
Subject: Star lists

Hi!

Would you mind mailing me the `massaged' version of the '91 star list (d91)?
I tried to retrieve it multiple times, but never managed to get a complete
version.  (This problem often occurs with larger files; seems to be a problem
with our computing center's proxy.  The guys at the computing center are
perfect know-nothing bozos and lazy with regard to fixing defects as well.
They have managed to achieve things like installing SunOS binaries on HP
machines and 32-bit applications on 286s, or having a laser printer run
without toner for months.)

Not that the incomplete versions weren't better than nothing (unlike an
incomplete program binary; an incomplete star list still contains useful
info about stars -- but about fewer stars than a complete one, while an
incomplete program binary just won't work), but a complete list is just
better than an incomplete one, because it lists more stars ;-)

Thanks in advance


Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 14:50:31 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: The Ikkadju

I have some ideas for the Ikkadju, the race that nearly annihilated mankind.

The Ikkadju evolved as flying predators on quite earthlike world (thats 
also why they are so interested in Earth). Their ecological niche was not 
unlike Earthly birds of prey, but they were more numerous (due to an 
abundance of prey living in floating plants) and had to avoid a related 
species that preyed on them.

They look a bit like deep blue (camouflage) dragon-fishes when flying (not
sure thats the correct English name for the fish), with long semi-rigid
feathers/wings they use to circle in the updrafts. On the ground they look
downright silly (to a human) when greenish fur cover the blue feathers and
they waggle around on their tiny legs. 

The Ikkadju are extremely individualistic, and during their history all
attempts by individuals to subjugate others have been met with great
resistance and failed after a short time. Direct democracy is the only
viable form of government among the Ikkadju, and through millennia of
history they have developed a feeling of pride in being able to cooperate
with each other (just as we humans pride ourselves in being
compassionate). 

However, modern Ikkadju society is not democratic from a human
perspective. It is an immense direct democracy, where all decisions are
ratified by individuals voting through secure computing networks (the
integrity of these networks is almost sacred to the Ikkadju), although
most of the time only those influenced by a decision choose to vote. But
the Ikkadju media have developed immense power over public opinion, and
are the seat of true power. By deciding how to cover a question or how it
is formulated in a vote, the media-politicians can gain tremendous
influence. On the other hand, they are also competing against each other
all the time and in the past some periods have been extremely confusing as
various groups have vied for the voters. But most of the time the system
actually works (to the surprise of most other beings), especially since
the Ikkadju seem to be quite happy to make sure everything works even when
nobody has given them orders about it. 

Ikkadju media are (at least to the Ikkadju) extremely slick and
persuasive, but also extremely open. The trouble is that amateurs simply
can't formulate themselves as well as the media-politicians and thus will
never gain power. 

The Ikkadju-Sol war was due to a media frenzy, where a group of Ikkadju
media corporations managed to scare the public opinion with the thought of
Hafaru controlled barbarians overrunning the Coalition and destroying
democracy.  However, while the democratic system works excellent in
running the Ikkadju domain in times of peace, it is a bit inefficient in
war. There are no officers or leaders, the general strategy is decided by
a vote among the military and tactics is up to each ship. In the first
phase, everything worked splendid: everybody was unanimous in firing the
FTL missiles and attacking the orbital installations. But a dirty war on
the ground simply wasn't possible for the Ikkadju, since each division
would act on its own and possibly retreat if faced with too big odds. The 
Ikkadju had counted on help from other Coalition members in doing this, 
but to their surprise didn't receive any such assistance for complex 
political reasons. When the situation began to deteriorate, the Ikkadju 
simply returned home leaving a startled humanity. 

What do you think? Are they a worthy and interesting opponent?


From: james vassilakos <jimv>
Subject: Re: The Ikkadju
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 10:14:43 -0700 (PDT)

> I have some ideas for the Ikkadju, the race that nearly annihilated mankind.

<snip>
 
> they were more numerous (due to an 
> abundance of prey living in floating plants) and had to avoid a related 
> species that preyed on them.

Floating plants?

> The Ikkadju are extremely individualistic, and during their history all
> attempts by individuals to subjugate others have been met with great
> resistance and failed after a short time. Direct democracy is the only
> viable form of government among the Ikkadju

One problem with this is that direct democracy isn't feasible at lower
(ie pre-internet) tech-levels. You'll need to consider how they governed
themselves prior to that, either through an extended hierarchy of
representatives or whatnot.

> What do you think? Are they a worthy and interesting opponent?
 
I really liked the write-up on the Ikkadju-Solian war. Maybe a bit
more detail on important personalities in the Ikkadju media and
military (i think they would need to have some form of military,
no matter how disorganized it actually is, unless it consists
solely of various merchantile craft outfitted for a short campaign,
which i suppose is a possibility).


From: james vassilakos <jimv>
Subject: Re: sfrpg: star data options
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 10:36:20 -0700 (PDT)
 
I wrote: 
> In any case, we're still faced with the same decision we walked in
> the door with. Should we use the 69-data which GDW seems to have
> rolled-up for us, and just make minor adjustments to it where we
> have a strong inkling that it's screwy, or should we modify the
> 91-data file which GDW has absolutely nothing to do with, and where
> all errors are our own?

Everybody who responded seemed to prefer using the 91-data.

Tony wrote:
> The 91 data has absolute magnitude info.  Using that we
> can at least make _reasonable_ guesses on the class.  Not great since
> there are other factors involved (like color) but reasonable.  I can
> type in a little table cross referencing abs mag and class type for
> Main Sequence, Giants, and Supergiants.

Okay... let's have it.

Anders wrote:
> Maybe the 91-data could be cross-referenced 
> with other data so we can get the names and classes of the stars?

Well, the 2300 star list does have gliese numbers, so we can
cross-reference that way to get names, however, I'm not sure I'd
trust GDW any further than that.

Joerg wrote:
> I have a list of more than 300 stars within 25 parsecs which I received
> from Eric Edwards some time ago.  He compiled it from various sources.
> I will dig it out and either post it here, or put on my web site.

Please do.


From: "Tony L. Hayes" <tlh@epsilon.com>
Subject: Re: The Ikkadju
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 14:11:17 -0400 (EDT)

james vassilakos writes ->
> > The Ikkadju are extremely individualistic, and during their history all
> > attempts by individuals to subjugate others have been met with great
> > resistance and failed after a short time. Direct democracy is the only
> > viable form of government among the Ikkadju
> 
> One problem with this is that direct democracy isn't feasible at lower
> (ie pre-internet) tech-levels. You'll need to consider how they governed

On large scale.  This doesn't preclude city-states or a hybrid version
where reps are in place for day to day operations but all major actions
are voted on by the populace.  It would still be hard but possible only
on smaller scale.

> themselves prior to that, either through an extended hierarchy of
> representatives or whatnot.

A more problematic issue, in my mind, would come from their extreme
independance.  If they are so independent that they are unwilling
to use representative democracy or permit a reasonable command
structure within a military organization (ie they are unwilling
to relenquish any personal rights as it were) you would be in a
constant state of civil war.  Why?  There may be many issues where
we disagree but most will just say, "Well, I lost the vote so
we'll do it your way."  But if we hit a sensitive issue (and with
such extreme independence that shouldn't be hard) we will have people,
possibly a large number if the vote was close, _refusing_ to abide by
the vote, ie civil war.

Don't think so?  Look around, USA, France, USSR, UK, Germany,
most every third world country, etc.  The list goes on and on. 
Almost every country in existance today has had some form civil war,
often several.  Some were more peaceful than others, some were
overlooked due to other more pressing events but nearly everyone had
mass civil unrest followed either by an actual war or some sort of
fundemental governmental change or concession.  How could the Ikkadju
avoid the same?


From: "Tony L. Hayes" <tlh@epsilon.com>
Subject: Star Table
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 14:20:03 -0400 (EDT)

Here is the abbreviated version of the table that lists spectral type
vs Absolute Magnitude and Color (B-V).  The original table can be
gotten from Astrophysical Quantities, 3rd Edition by C. W. Allen

Type	Mag	Color(B-V)
Main Sequence (V) stars
O5	-5.8	-0.35
B0	-4.1	-0.31
B5	-1.1	-0.16
A0	0.7	0.0
A5	2.0	0.13
F0	2.6	0.27
F5	3.4	0.42
G0	4.4	0.58
G5	5.1	0.70
K0	5.9	0.89
K5	7.3	1.18
M0	9.0	1.45
M5	11.8	1.63
M8	16	1.8

Giants (III)
G0	1.1	0.65
G5	0.7	0.85
K0	0.5	1.07
K5	-0.2	1.41
M0	-0.4	1.60
M5	-0.8	1.85

Supergiants (I)
B0	-6.4	-0.25
A0	-6.2	0.0
F0	-6	0.25
G0	-6	0.70
G5	-6	1.06
K0	-5	1.39
K5	-5	1.70
M0	-5	1.94


Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 19:56:51 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: The Ikkadju

On Wed, 18 Oct 1995, james vassilakos wrote:
> > they were more numerous (due to an 
> > abundance of prey living in floating plants) and had to avoid a related 
> > species that preyed on them.
> 
> Floating plants?

Just an idea I saw in a dream. They began as a kind of kelp-like 
aquatic plant with gas-filled floaters. Eventually, some developed 
floaters with such buyoancy that part of the plant could extend above the 
water, giving it access to more sunlight and a quick way of dispersing 
(parts broke loose an blew away). After some tens of million years, 
entire floating plants had developed, held aloft by gas sacks. During the 
day, they rise and gather sunlight, while at night some free-floaters 
take temporary root and immobile plants fold together into big piles. On 
and in these plankton-like plants vaarious creatures live, and there is a 
big aerial ecology. Some plants have symbiontes that weave webs to gather 
nourishment to the plants, others shuttle between ground and plants to 
gather soil (this makes it possible for the plant to stay floating all 
the time, making it a safe haven) and a few are carni- or herbivorous! 
There are of course normal plants too on the ground.

Do you think this ecology is possible?

> > The Ikkadju are extremely individualistic, and during their history all
> > attempts by individuals to subjugate others have been met with great
> > resistance and failed after a short time. Direct democracy is the only
> > viable form of government among the Ikkadju
> 
> One problem with this is that direct democracy isn't feasible at lower
> (ie pre-internet) tech-levels. You'll need to consider how they governed
> themselves prior to that, either through an extended hierarchy of
> representatives or whatnot.

I think they remained in the family/tribe stage for a long time, 
eventually developing groups of cooperative tribes and city states a la 
classic Greece. For a long time they were held back because everything 
was so utterly divided; imagine a world with 10,000 more or less 
independent states where citizens who don't like their current government 
can just fly away! Eventually their technology allowed them to form 
democracies on a larger scale, but this long period of experimentation 
with various forms of government was probably formative.
 
> > What do you think? Are they a worthy and interesting opponent?
>  
> I really liked the write-up on the Ikkadju-Solian war. Maybe a bit
> more detail on important personalities in the Ikkadju media and
> military (i think they would need to have some form of military,
> no matter how disorganized it actually is, unless it consists
> solely of various merchantile craft outfitted for a short campaign,
> which i suppose is a possibility).

I'll try to write them up as soon as possible (the Mothers and the Soft 
Ones are almost finished, but I have to do a few exams too). I think it 
would be fun developing some alien media personalities; does anybody have 
an idea for an Ikkadju game show? :-)

Remember that the Ikkadju are not disorganized, just extremely
individualistic (in theory, I think cultural conditioning from media have
made them more cooperative). There are cultural and military institutions,
its just that they are run in a democratic fashion unlike human
authoritianism. The military was founded by taxpayer money, and probably
has its own media supporters ("This program was sponsored by the Ikkadju
Space Navy, the Departement of Aerial Justice and Kikikch Corporation.
Thank you for viewing, and remember that democracy has to be protected at
all costs!"). 


Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 20:26:46 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: The Ikkadju

On Wed, 18 Oct 1995, Tony L. Hayes wrote:
> A more problematic issue, in my mind, would come from their extreme
> independance.  If they are so independent that they are unwilling
> to use representative democracy or permit a reasonable command
> structure within a military organization (ie they are unwilling
> to relenquish any personal rights as it were) you would be in a
> constant state of civil war.

I think they are independent, but not neccesarily that extreme. Civilized 
Ikkadju pride themselves in their ability to work together, even if they 
are constantly bickering in a way that would make most humans worried. 

> There may be many issues where
> we disagree but most will just say, "Well, I lost the vote so
> we'll do it your way."  But if we hit a sensitive issue (and with
> such extreme independence that shouldn't be hard) we will have people,
> possibly a large number if the vote was close, _refusing_ to abide by
> the vote, ie civil war.

This was probably the reason most previous Ikkadju governments has 
fallen, and it is quite possible that the long era of their current 
direct democracy has also had periods were groups have broken loose and 
chosen their own path. But maybe they have partially overcome their 
original extreme independence to the extent that they cherish 
individuality and the ability to make their own descisions, but also 
acknowledge that abiding by democratic decisions is a good thing. This is 
probably a rather recent phenomenon, possibly developed after they 
founded the first world democracy. Also note that in the current 
mediocracy it is in the interest of the medias to keep people interested 
and make them follow orders, so a lot of propaganda may be used to 
indocritrinate the people with the ideals of democracy, cooperation and duty.

I get visions of Ikkadju children's (hatchling's?) stories where the moral
is to work together and be yourself. 

"... and then Djakk dropped the evil Kry into the kukk-sack Kinkkaj and
Djakka held in their craws, and Rrill twisted the djarr so that it
vanished into kakkudjarr, and they molted happily ever after in their
tower." 

> How could the Ikkadju avoid the same?

Remember that they are predators, that could already place a limit on
their aggressiveness against each other. But I think another reason would
be that Ikkadju never developed human-type strong governments able and
willing to use violence (supplied by loyal soldiers) against anybody
opposing their rule. This would be as alien to an ikaddju as a generally
peaceful media-run direct democracy of predators would be to a human. 

Ikkadju city states were mostly run by the most influential and persuasive
citizens, and while there were probably numerous wars, there was no
incentive to take over another city - the appointed governors would most
probably start to run it on their own, unless the defeated population
didn't just refuse to do what it was told and leave. When better 
communications were developed, the states could become larger but the 
internal conflicts became more complex, so for a long time the ikkadju 
experiemented with all kinds of governments and societies, eventually 
becoming a rather balanced race (in their own opinion). 


Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 15:59:32 +0100
From: hza@gen.ks.se (Henric Zazzi)
Subject: Re: The Ikkadju

Maybe the Ikkadju could manage their individualistic ( or totally
anarchistic) trait by being united in a common cause.

What united the Ikkadju could be that on their planet of origin existed a
predatory race (we could call them the Wonkaii) that was semi-intelligent
and reproduced much faster than the Ikkadju. This nearly got the individual-
istic Ikkadju on the brink of destruction but later they learned to cooperate
(at least temporarily) and formed city states. There was a long war 
between the Wonkaii and the Ikkadju (more like guerilla warfare).
Finally the Wonkaii got completely annihilated. Genocide or should we call
it xenocide. In the end cooperation and superior intellect was the crucial
factor in the end.

I can see the Wonkaii as a semi-intelligent race of tree-dwellers with
four long spiderly legs/arms and having the same powers as a cameleon.
Almost like a cross between a crocodile and a spider.

They lured high up in the trees. Waiting for the a prey (=Ikkadju) and 
with their big jaws finished it of quickly.
Since they were semi-intelligent they lived in familygroups which together
could make a kill of a couple of individualistic Ikkadju.

I think it could be a nice way to make the Ikkadju survive with there
individualistic trait intact. Maybe it should nice some smoothing around
the edges.


Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 16:25:58 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: The Ikkadju

On Thu, 19 Oct 1995, Henric Zazzi wrote:
> Maybe the Ikkadju could manage their individualistic ( or totally
> anarchistic) trait by being united in a common cause.

Yes, I think this could be a good idea. Besides, it would explain how the 
media have reached such power: they are able to unite ikkadju. 

Ikkadju are individualists, but feel wonderful when they manage to work 
together. Maybe they have had religions based on this?

> What united the Ikkadju could be that on their planet of origin existed a
> predatory race (we could call them the Wonkaii) that was semi-intelligent
> and reproduced much faster than the Ikkadju. This nearly got the individual-
> istic Ikkadju on the brink of destruction but later they learned to cooperate
> (at least temporarily) and formed city states. There was a long war 
> between the Wonkaii and the Ikkadju (more like guerilla warfare).
> Finally the Wonkaii got completely annihilated. Genocide or should we call
> it xenocide. In the end cooperation and superior intellect was the crucial
> factor in the end.

Interesting idea! Hmm, this could have been the work of the Old Ones (I
have been thinking about uplifting methods). They had seen that the
ikkadju and wonkaii both had some uplifting potential, and tinkered with
both species genes to see what would happen. The Old Ones watched with
interest as the species battled, without interfering when xenocide occured
(the wonkaii were not progressing well anyway, the Old Ones thought). 

> They lured high up in the trees. Waiting for the a prey (=Ikkadju) and 
> with their big jaws finished it of quickly.

Maybe they could make gibbon-like jumps from tree to tree or onto Ikkadju 
to throw them to the ground. That could create a strange racial phobia 
against jumping creatures with four limbs...

> I think it could be a nice way to make the Ikkadju survive with there
> individualistic trait intact. Maybe it should nice some smoothing around
> the edges.

Yes, of course. I intend to do a serious writeup when I get the time, 
right now I'm most happy to hear suggestions and ideas. The other beings 
I wrote about were rather distant from the Hafaru-Ikkadju-Human conflict, 
so they didn't need that much control, but we should be careful when 
detailing our enemies.

By the way, another thing we might have to think about is the state on
Earth after the Ikkadju attack. 


Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 10:55:13 +0100
From: hza@gen.ks.se (Henric Zazzi)
Subject: Wonkaii/Ikkadju war

I really liked that idea about religion, and racial phobia towards human.
As I see it we could that into a deity.

When the Ikkadju were at the brink of their own destruction, a great
leader called Visau appeared and led them to cooperate to exterminate
the terrible Wonkaii. He devised the idea of citystates that where a lot
easier to defend. Later this citystates formed a kind of army that
together annihilated the Wonkaii (=Holy war).

After the war was over a diety was founded were Visau was given the status
of a God. This religion most important message is that cooperation leads
to survival of the race Ikkadju.
This leads to that the highly invidualistic Ikkadju are imprinted, at an
early age, to cooperation because survival of the race depends on it.

This foundation of a religion could also be seen as Visau as a God/saviour, as
I said before, and the Wonkaii could be looked upon as the Devil.

The symbol of the Devil would then be a four-legged creature sitting, lurking
in a shambola tree. (A pinkish tree very common in the natural habitat of the
Ikkadju)

Since the Wonkaii had cameleon-like powers, it would be slightly pink.
Because of this phenomenon the Wonkaii represented as the symbol of the Devil
would also be slightly pink.

When the Ikkadju first laid eyes on the human race, they could directly
compair the human race to the Wonkaii. This lead to hatred/antipathy
for the human race as a whole, because they feared that the human race
would take up where the Wonkaii had finished.

When the human race reached FTL then the danger became more imminent and
this demanded serious problems to the Ikkadju. A holy war was started.

They tried to completely annihilate the human race in a single sweep.
Although they destroyed most of the human colonies and big part of earth, the
job was not completely done. The human warfleet was bigger than they
expected.

After this attack the Ikkadju are trying to assemble the second wave, but to
achieve this they have to build a new warfleet since a vast protion of their
war armada was destroyed by the stubborn humans.


Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 15:10:06 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: Wonkaii/Ikkadju war

On Fri, 20 Oct 1995, Henric Zazzi wrote:
> I really liked that idea about religion, and racial phobia towards human.
> As I see it we could that into a deity.

I wouldn't say its a religion of the human form with deities, more like a 
philosophy. And I wouldn't say they have a racial phobia against humans, 
just that humans look awful to them (imagine use finding a civilization 
of what looks like demons).

> When the Ikkadju were at the brink of their own destruction, a great
> leader called Visau appeared and led them to cooperate to exterminate
> the terrible Wonkaii. He devised the idea of citystates that where a lot
> easier to defend. Later this citystates formed a kind of army that
> together annihilated the Wonkaii (=Holy war).

I think the idea of citystates was probably developed in many places 
independently and in many forms; Visau might be the one everybody 
attributed with their creation. 

I also doubt that the Wonkaii were defeated in a single Jihad, it was 
probably more like a gradual decimation as the city states drove them 
away to the hinterlands, mounted expeditions against them and eventually 
colonized more and more of the world. But again, Visau might be 
attributed as the master strategist (essentially he is a cultural myth 
and may never have existed).

> After the war was over a diety was founded were Visau was given the status
> of a God. This religion most important message is that cooperation leads
> to survival of the race Ikkadju.

I'm not sure the Ikkadju would envision a deity like us humans do (a big 
alpha male in the sky). They have probably lots of different ideas about 
how things work, and big, unified religions never formed. Instead they 
have rather broad philosophies, that accept quite a bit of different 
beliefs (like the mixture of Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan). The 
"religion of cooperation" might have Vishau as "The Great One, discoverer 
of the power of the Unity of Will" instead of a god. Of course, lots of 
ikkadju claim he never existed, that he was sent by the Old Ones, that he 
was the creator of the universe, that Vishau was the collective will of 
the entire race or even stranger things.

> This leads to that the highly invidualistic Ikkadju are imprinted, at an
> early age, to cooperation because survival of the race depends on it.

I think this is a good idea. Ikkadju regard working together as a group 
well as not only a virtue, but a pleasure. To fully be able to become the 
part of the whole for a time is one of the highest ideals, but they also 
relish in being independent too. Unlike humans who want one or the other, 
the Ikkadju often seek a balance between them, citing the problems of 
other races who are too collective or too divisive. Of course, even when 
the ikkadju work as a team, they are constantly bickering and discussing 
the best way to do it, and everybody looks up to ikkadju striking out on 
their own and showing others the way.

> The symbol of the Devil would then be a four-legged creature sitting, lurking
> in a shambola tree. (A pinkish tree very common in the natural habitat of the
> Ikkadju)

I like it! I also think the Ikkadju might use symbols, something not 
every race does.

Apropos Evil (tm), the Old Ones might be represented by their old symbol, 
a branching tree (reminiscent of their limbs):


\/  \/  \/  \/
 \  /    \  /
  \/      \/
   \      /
    \    /
     \  /
      \/

This sign is regarded by many races as an ancient sign of ill omen, a 
reminder of the formation of the Coalition and the danger of a species 
growing too old and powerful.


> When the Ikkadju first laid eyes on the human race, they could directly
> compair the human race to the Wonkaii. This lead to hatred/antipathy
> for the human race as a whole, because they feared that the human race
> would take up where the Wonkaii had finished.

I'm not sure I like the 'racial fear' bit, I would like to keep the 
similarity an aggravating factor but not the entire reason. But note that 
it is easy to play on such feelings in media...

(After all, the Hafaru also look a bit like wonkaii - a coincidence?)

> When the human race reached FTL then the danger became more imminent and
> this demanded serious problems to the Ikkadju. A holy war was started.

I wouldn't call it a holy war, more a media war. Many Ikkadju were 
already worried about the humans and really wanted Earth (which would be 
a paradise to them after some remodeling), and when they realized the 
Hafaru had helped the humans they got truly frightened. Several 
high-impact groups had already profited from scaring the population with 
visions of space barbarians (associations to the Mlennim and Wonkaii) led 
by the inscrutable Hafaru. The demands for swift action became intense, 
the Ikkadju voted for war and explained it in the Coalition (the Ikkadju 
are represented by the results of their votes, of course). Possibly some 
other races said something the Ikkadju interpreted as support (but it 
wasn't intended as such) and the war-fleets started...

> They tried to completely annihilate the human race in a single sweep.
> Although they destroyed most of the human colonies and big part of earth, the
> job was not completely done. The human warfleet was bigger than they
> expected.

Plus their problems with running a war in a democratic fashion, and the 
lack of Coalition reinforcements. The Ikkadju sincerely believed others 
would help them, but were quite wrong.

> After this attack the Ikkadju are trying to assemble the second wave, but to
> achieve this they have to build a new warfleet since a vast protion of their
> war armada was destroyed by the stubborn humans.

I get the vision of the Ikkadju realizing that they were not winning and
that no support was forthcoming. So the ships voted among themselves and
went home in a rather disorderly fashion, and the humans shot at them even
then, against all civilized behavior. Right now the Ikkadju are on one
hand arming themselves, but there are also intense debates about the
proper course of action. Beside the hawks, there are also groups which
think the war was a stupid idea from the beginning. The political
situation has become dangerously unstable again, and many blame the
humans... 


Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 13:54:49 +0100
From: Joerg Rhiemeier <rhiemeir@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>
Subject: Hafaru: Some thoughts

I have spent some thoughts on the Hafaru, and this is what I have come up
with.  I openly admit that I stole the pack concept from the Claws in
Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_, but at least I modified some
details :-)

The Hafaru

The Hafaru are a race of amphibious, grey-skinned bipeds.  They are about
1.20m tall in average, but have larger heads than humans, with big brown
insect-like eyes.  (Though they are not in any way insectoid in other
regards.)  Their body shape is remotly humanoid, with two arms ending in
three-fingered hands, though their anatomy, physiology, psychology and 
sociology are entirely different.

Biology

The Hafaru start and end their life in water.  They are oviparous, i.e. they
hatch from eggs.  The Hafaru's larval stage lasts about six Earth years
until it reaches sexual maturity.  The young Hafaru is now a male.  However,
it is still a non-sentient, aquatic creature resembling a 30 centimeter long
tadpole.  After mating and dropping its male genital glands, the young
Hafaru enters a second period of bodily and mental growth.  It grows into
its final humanoid shape and develops a dim sentience.  At an age of nine
years, it is about 1 metre tall and ready to join a pack (see below).  This
is the point where the young Hafaru enters society.  The average lifetime of
a Hafaru lasts about 30 years.  At the end of its life, the Hafaru `fades'.
This means that it leaves its pack and returns into the water.  Its
sentience dims, and it grows female genital glands.  The old Hafaru is now
ready for mating.  It seeks out a male, and swallows the male glands it
drops.  The male glands then release the sperm, which fertilizes the eggs.
Then the female dies.  A typical spawn comprises about 2000 to 3000 eggs.
Only a few dozen of the larvae reach male maturity, and even less sentience
and female maturity.

The Pack Minds

The real individuals of Hafaru society, however, are the packs.  A pack
usually consists of 3 to 8 members, though larger packs (with up to 300
members) also exist.  The intelligence of the pack depends on the number of
members, as follows:

Members	 IQ (100=human average)

  1	 60
  2	 90
  3	120
  4	140
  5	150
  6	160
  7	160
  8	160
  9	150
 10	140
 12	130
 15	120
 20	110
 25	100
 30	 90
 40	 80
 50	 70
100+	 60

(With large packs, the intelligence decreases due to communication
overhead.)

[Perhaps, the intelligence of big packs ought to derease more sharply?]

Each pack has a single intelligence, consciousness and personality.  The
pack members are connected by a kind of short-range electromagnetic
telepathy.  Loss of this connection causes pain to the fragments, which will
do their best to re-unite.  A fragment is always a bit less intelligent than
a complete pack of the same size.  If all attempts to restore contact with
the other members fail, the mental wounds heal out, and the fragment slowly
turns into a complete pack.  (However, if this pack will meet another former
fragment, both packs will usually be eager to meld.)  The violent death of a
pack member has a similar effect; so does the fading of a member, though the
latter is far less painful as it doesn't come unprepared, and the remaining
pack recovers much faster.

Two or more packs might meld, which means that they become one larger pack.
Small packs (4 members or less) are very eager to meld with another pack;
for a newly awakened individual, the first thing it will do is seek out a
pack it can join.  If two newly awakened individuals meet, they will
instantly form a pack of two, which will then try to adopt more freshlings,
or meld with a larger pack.  Packs usually grow much older than any of their
members; most easily reach 400 years or more, some are thousands of years
old.  When a member dies or fades, the pack will be open to adopt new
members, either by incorporating freshly awakened ones, or by melding with a
smaller pack.

Normally, packs don't grow larger than 8 members.  However, they are also
some larger packs.  Such large packs usually form to do work which requires
many hands (and not too much thinking).  These macropacks often do not form
spontaneously, but are artificially assembled from freshlings bred for this
purpose.  Such a large pack, which can consist of a few hundred members,
remains stable only as long it has some kind of work to carry out.  When the
job is done, it usually spontaneously breaks up into smaller units.  (Though
this can be prevented by jailing the pack in a tight kennel.)  At
this level, fragmentation is not very painful anymore, as the pain of
separation is overweighed by the joy of attaining a higher intelligence
(note that with more than 8 members, smaller packs are more intelligent than
larger ones).

Two packs usually stay away from each other, lest they disturb each other's
thinking.  Unless they wish to meld, they won't voluntarily get closer to
each other than 5 metres.  If two packs are forced into moving close
together for a longer time, they will meld to overcome the pain caused by
the mutual disturbance of thinking.  This method is actually used to
assemble macro-packs for boring labour from specially-bred freshlings.

Society

As has been said, the `individuals' which make up the Hafaru society are not
individuals in a biological sense, but packs.  This means that any role in
society will be filled by a pack.  The ruler of a colony or a city, or the
captain of a ship, will always be a pack of 5 to 8 Hafaru.  The crew of a
small scout vessel is always a single pack.

[Much has to be filled in.  Actually, I have no good idea for the Hafaru
society.  Judging after their preference for the west when tampering with
Earth's politics, I'd say their society is individualist/capitalist
(not necessarily democratic) rather than collectivist/communist, but this
is not necessary.  Perhaps they chose the west not because it was closer
to their own society, but simply because it was more efficient.]

Each pack has a name, which is usually a long term describing its origin,
behaviour and profession (such as `Jealous-Playful-Trickster-Scout-From-
The-Eastern-Hinterlands-of-Old-Herder's-Town'), suffixed by the names of its
members.  These names are untranslatable and cannot be rendered properly
in human alphabets, as the Hafaru language is composed of hisses, scratching
and flapping sounds and grunts.  (The name `Hafaru' has been coined in 
onamotopoeic fashion after their sounds.)


Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 14:03:13 +0100
From: Joerg Rhiemeier <rhiemeir@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>
Subject: Re: Ikkadju

On Fri, 20 Oct 1995, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>On Fri, 20 Oct 1995, Henric Zazzi wrote:
>> I really liked that idea about religion, and racial phobia towards human.
>> As I see it we could that into a deity.
>
>I wouldn't say its a religion of the human form with deities, more like a 
>philosophy. And I wouldn't say they have a racial phobia against humans, 
>just that humans look awful to them (imagine use finding a civilization 
>of what looks like demons).

Exactly.  We humans simply appeal to the Ikkadju's urangst of the Wonkaii,
due to our ape-like appearance (a gibbon or an orang-utan would appeal even
more to their urangst, but we look similar enough).  Wait... the
gibbon/orang-utan bit brings me to an idea... what if the Ikkadju find out
about these apes in the middle of the war?  `Oops, we have been beating the
wrong dog all the time!  Look at those forest beasts!  *They* are *real*
Wonkaii!'

BTW: Where do the names `Visau' and `Wonkaii' come from?  Do the Ikkadju have
a language with human-like phonemes?  I'd rather like using descriptive terms
such as `lurker-snatchers' instead of `Wonkaii', or `Joiner' instead of 
`Visau'.  When coining alien names, one should be careful: most alien
languages will be completely unlike human languages, such that alien names
cannot be rendered in human writings, and humans will have to use either
translations (if they are available) or self-coined terms.  `Wonkaii' only
makes sense if the Ikkadju have a human-speakable language, but
`Lurker-snatchers' makes sense even if they communicate via ultrasonic
chirps.  It constantly annoys me when an author of a SF novel describes the
aliens' language as `rapid clicks', `ultrasonic beeps' or whatever, and
nevertheless assigns fancy names to alien individuals, places, etc.

>> When the Ikkadju were at the brink of their own destruction, a great
>> leader called Visau appeared and led them to cooperate to exterminate
>> the terrible Wonkaii. He devised the idea of citystates that where a lot
>> easier to defend. Later this citystates formed a kind of army that
>> together annihilated the Wonkaii (=Holy war).
>
>I think the idea of citystates was probably developed in many places 
>independently and in many forms; Visau might be the one everybody 
>attributed with their creation. 

Visau/Joiner might just have been one of the first, and one of the most
successful city-state leaders.

>I also doubt that the Wonkaii were defeated in a single Jihad, it was 
>probably more like a gradual decimation as the city states drove them 
>away to the hinterlands, mounted expeditions against them and eventually 
>colonized more and more of the world. But again, Visau might be 
>attributed as the master strategist (essentially he is a cultural myth 
>and may never have existed).

I would say that the Ikkadju/Wonkaii war lies very far back in the past, in
a time from which no photographical or similar records exist.  I. e., the
Wonkaii (oops, lurker-snatchers!) are, for the Ikkadju, just a myth, as
dragons are to us.  There is no authentic footage, just tales of
nightmarish, four-limbed creatures.  Perhaps the lurker-snatchers have
never existed, at least not in the form the tales tell of.

[...]

>I'm not sure the Ikkadju would envision a deity like us humans do (a big 
>alpha male in the sky).

To the Ikkadju as *flying* creatures, the sky is somewhat less unreachable
then to us ;-)

>	They have probably lots of different ideas about 
>how things work, and big, unified religions never formed. Instead they 
>have rather broad philosophies, that accept quite a bit of different 
>beliefs (like the mixture of Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan). The 
>"religion of cooperation" might have Vishau as "The Great One, discoverer 
>of the power of the Unity of Will" instead of a god. Of course, lots of 
>ikkadju claim he never existed, that he was sent by the Old Ones,

One moment... are the Old Ones considered good or evil?

>	that he 
>was the creator of the universe, that Vishau was the collective will of 
>the entire race or even stranger things.

I.e., there are lots of sects, which come up with different interpretations
of the Joiner myth?  I assume that they disagree similarly on the nature of
the lurker-snatchers as well.

[...]

[Zazzi]
>> The symbol of the Devil would then be a four-legged creature sitting,
>> lurking
>> in a shambola tree. (A pinkish tree very common in the natural habitat
>> of  the
>> Ikkadju)

On the matter of the colour of pink: Not all humans have a pinkish skin.
There are many different brownish hues, as well.  Perhaps the mythological
skin colour of the lurker-snatchers doesn't match any human skin colour,
but the colour of human starfleet's uniforms :-)  Or perhaps the multitude
of human skin colour (which might be unique among sentient races) remind
the Ikkadju at the lurker-snatchers which are said to have occured in `many
different colours'.

>I like it! I also think the Ikkadju might use symbols, something not 
>every race does.
>
>Apropos Evil (tm), the Old Ones might be represented by their old symbol, 
>a branching tree (reminiscent of their limbs):
>
>
>\/  \/  \/  \/
> \  /    \  /
>  \/      \/
>   \      /
>    \    /
>     \  /
>      \/
>
>This sign is regarded by many races as an ancient sign of ill omen, a 
>reminder of the formation of the Coalition and the danger of a species 
>growing too old and powerful.

Well, it might be rocking the boat of coincidence too far, but perhaps the
same (or a very similar) symbol is for some reason displayed on human
starships (meaning something entirely different, of course; if drawn
upside-down

       /\
      /  \
     /    \
    /      \
   /\      /\
  /  \    /  \
 /\  /\  /\  /\

you get yet another variation of the good old rocket/arrow symbol used by
so many real and fictitious space-faring organizations from NASA to Star
Trek's Starfleet; it could also symbolize federalism, or whatever), or even
worse, the ships themselves are for some technical reason shaped like this!

Let's have a look at what happens: on some day, a few starships of unknown
origin sneak into an Ikkadju colony system.  The ships are shaped like the
old binary tree symbol, which is, to the Ikkadju, what hammer, sickle and
red star were to Joseph McCarthy:  the mark of Ultimate Evil.  The Ikkadju
conclude that the feared Old Ones have returned, and attack.  One of the
wrecks crash-lands on a moon, and is examinated by an Ikkadju exploration
force.  The Ikkadju find that the ship is crewed with creatures which have
four long limbs each and look like -- lurker-snatchers!  Now, it should be
easy for some demagogues to stir up the masses against the humans by
claiming that these beings are actually lurker-snatchers, sent by the Old Ones
themselves (look at the shape of/the symbol on those ships!) to vanquish
the Ikkadju!

>> When the Ikkadju first laid eyes on the human race, they could directly
>> compair the human race to the Wonkaii. This lead to hatred/antipathy
>> for the human race as a whole, because they feared that the human race
>> would take up where the Wonkaii had finished.
>
>I'm not sure I like the 'racial fear' bit, I would like to keep the 
>similarity an aggravating factor but not the entire reason. But note that 
>it is easy to play on such feelings in media...

Exactly!  At first, only a few fanatics see the humans as the returned
lurker-snatchers, and most Ikkadju consider this to be mindless paranoia.
But not for very long...

>(After all, the Hafaru also look a bit like wonkaii - a coincidence?)

Perhaps the Hafaru *were* the Wonkaii -- in a distant age, long ago!

But the humans might still fit the traditional description of the
lurker-snatchers better: either because the Wonkaii/Hafaru have changed in
many aspects, or -- even more likely -- because the tales have warped quite
far from reality, now matching humans far better than the Hafaru or what
the lurker-snatchers have really been like.

>> When the human race reached FTL then the danger became more imminent and
>> this demanded serious problems to the Ikkadju. A holy war was started.
>
>I wouldn't call it a holy war, more a media war. Many Ikkadju were 
>already worried about the humans and really wanted Earth (which would be 
>a paradise to them after some remodeling), and when they realized the 
>Hafaru had helped the humans they got truly frightened. 

Why are the Ikkadju hostile against the Hafaru?  Perhaps the hostility
results from the similarity between Hafaru and the mythical
lurker-snatchers?

>	Several 
>high-impact groups had already profited from scaring the population with 
>visions of space barbarians (associations to the Mlennim and Wonkaii) led 
>by the inscrutable Hafaru.

Whatever is the real reason for the Ikkadju/Hafaru hostility, the Hafaru's
resemblance to the lurker-snatchers definitely helps in agitating the
masses...

>	The demands for swift action became intense, 
>the Ikkadju voted for war and explained it in the Coalition (the Ikkadju 
>are represented by the results of their votes, of course). Possibly some 
>other races said something the Ikkadju interpreted as support (but it 
>wasn't intended as such) and the war-fleets started...

The same old story... perhaps *all* important events are triggered by
mistakes?

>> They tried to completely annihilate the human race in a single sweep.
>> Although they destroyed most of the human colonies and big part of
>> earth, the
>> job was not completely done. The human warfleet was bigger than they
>> expected.
>
>Plus their problems with running a war in a democratic fashion, and the 
>lack of Coalition reinforcements. The Ikkadju sincerely believed others 
>would help them, but were quite wrong.

BTW: What is the political system of Earth like at that time?  One of the
few quite well-established `laws' of human history is that democracies
don't war against democracies, but does this also hold in interspecies
relations?

>> After this attack the Ikkadju are trying to assemble the second wave, but to
>> achieve this they have to build a new warfleet since a vast protion of their
>> war armada was destroyed by the stubborn humans.
>
>I get the vision of the Ikkadju realizing that they were not winning and
>that no support was forthcoming. So the ships voted among themselves and
>went home in a rather disorderly fashion, and the humans shot at them even
>then, against all civilized behavior.

Did they?  Why?

>	Right now the Ikkadju are on one
>hand arming themselves, but there are also intense debates about the
>proper course of action. Beside the hawks, there are also groups which
>think the war was a stupid idea from the beginning. The political
>situation has become dangerously unstable again, and many blame the
>humans... 

This constitutes an interesting situation.  Perhaps there are really some
infidels working for the humans to shed discord among the Ikkadju?  Or
perhaps working for the *Hafaru*?


Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 15:53:32 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: Ikkadju

On Mon, 23 Oct 1995, Joerg Rhiemeier wrote:
> BTW: Where do the names `Visau' and `Wonkaii' come from?  Do the Ikkadju have
> a language with human-like phonemes?  I'd rather like using descriptive terms
> such as `lurker-snatchers' instead of `Wonkaii', or `Joiner' instead of 
> `Visau'.

Yes, this is better. But it seems that the names have stuck a bit. I
really like the term 'lurker-snatchers'! Maybe the Ikkadju is generally
known as the Flyers (flying intelligent beings are probably fairly rare). 

>  When coining alien names, one should be careful: most alien
> languages will be completely unlike human languages, such that alien names
> cannot be rendered in human writings, and humans will have to use either
> translations (if they are available) or self-coined terms. 

This is important; one of the main themes of the game (as far as I have 
understood where we are going) seems to be the problems and dangers of 
dealing with other species. 

On the other hand, the Ikkadju/Flyers may have a *somewhat* intelligible 
language. As I have sketched them back home, they have excellent vision 
and hearing (but rather poor other senses). They could communicate with a 
high-pitched 'chattering' noise, from which the term 'Ikaddju' comes. Or 
even more probable: if humans and Hafaru have had secret communications, 
Ikkadju may be the Hafaru name of the flyers. 

> >I think the idea of citystates was probably developed in many places 
> >independently and in many forms; Visau might be the one everybody 
> >attributed with their creation. 
> 
> Visau/Joiner might just have been one of the first, and one of the most
> successful city-state leaders.

A bit like we now remember the first Chinese emperor.

> I would say that the Ikkadju/Wonkaii war lies very far back in the past, in
> a time from which no photographical or similar records exist.  I. e., the
> Wonkaii (oops, lurker-snatchers!) are, for the Ikkadju, just a myth, as
> dragons are to us.  There is no authentic footage, just tales of
> nightmarish, four-limbed creatures.  Perhaps the lurker-snatchers have
> never existed, at least not in the form the tales tell of.

The Old Ones probably knew, and some records may have survived (but they 
are fragmentary and possibly relates to something else). There are 
probably a few fossils which imply a bit about the lurker-snatchers, and 
of course old folk tales and recurring reports that Ikkadju have 
vanished *as if snatched by hidden jaws* in some remote regions... (their 
equivalent to Loch Ness/the Bermuda Triangle). 

> >I'm not sure the Ikkadju would envision a deity like us humans do (a big 
> >alpha male in the sky).
> 
> To the Ikkadju as *flying* creatures, the sky is somewhat less unreachable
> then to us ;-)

I think the Ikkadju have a more dynamic view. Think about how a flock of
bird flies: there is no leader, but everybody keeps away from colliding
with his neighbors and follow them, while trying to move the flock towards
what he perceives a good direction. Flocks can break in two or merge, 
depending on circumstances.

In the same way Ikkadju society works: everybody works together from time 
to time as a huge flock, but everybody seeks to modify the direction of 
movement a bit. The Ikkadju on the edges are often the ones to notice new 
and unusual things, and often break loose and seek them out - sometimes 
everybody follows them or a new flock forms. And when there is no need, 
the Ikkadju move completely independent.

Ikkadju religion/philosophy might be based on this. The idea is 
that the whole race is an immense flock of flocks, and has to fly 
carefully together in times of danger. The details are up to individuals 
and flocks, but the unity is vital. 

> One moment... are the Old Ones considered good or evil?

That depends on the race, I think. Most probably consider them just
misguided. Some are still thankful to them for being created, and mourn
their destruction. The Mothers thought they were somewhat insane and in
need of help. The Mlenimm/Herders saw them as weird but helpful prey to
the pack. I think there have been many violent historical debates between
xeno-archeologists and xeno-historians about the role and legacy of the
Old Ones; some regard them as a criminal, sick species, others as
misunderstood and tragic. Maybe the Ikkadju have some good reasons to 
hate them; possibly their homeworld was almost destroyed by the Old Ones 
near the end of the War.

This brings up another fun thing I have been thinking of: the Ikkadju and
terraforming. Restoring their devastated home was probably something they
undertook with great zeal, but colonizing other planets proved hard. Like
most flying beings, they are somewhat claustrophobic, so they don't like
living in space colonies unless absolutely necessary (Ikkadju ships are
very roomy and the walls are covered with screens showing the space in all
directions). They are also much too mercurial for undertaking serious
terraforming of all but the most habitable planets, so they are in
desperate need of new garden worlds. Thats why they wanted Earth so much. 

Some Ikkadju circumvent this by colonizing marginal worlds instead,
showing that they are able to survive there (after some minor
alterations), but they are rather few. These "breakaways" do not belong to
the mainstream of the race. 

> >	that he 
> >was the creator of the universe, that Vishau was the collective will of 
> >the entire race or even stranger things.
> 
> I.e., there are lots of sects, which come up with different interpretations
> of the Joiner myth?  I assume that they disagree similarly on the nature of
> the lurker-snatchers as well.

Of course. Not to mention the question of the ethics of wind-pillars, the
stories about the Trees of Weight and the complexities of the tenth system
of wisdom. I think Ikkadju are among the most argumentative of all races; 
able to cooperate perfectly while constantly bickering. 

> Well, it might be rocking the boat of coincidence too far, but perhaps the
> same (or a very similar) symbol is for some reason displayed on human
> starships (meaning something entirely different, of course; if drawn
> upside-down
> 
>        /\
>       /  \
>      /    \
>     /      \
>    /\      /\
>   /  \    /  \
>  /\  /\  /\  /\
> 
> you get yet another variation of the good old rocket/arrow symbol used by
> so many real and fictitious space-faring organizations from NASA to Star
> Trek's Starfleet; it could also symbolize federalism, or whatever), or even
> worse, the ships themselves are for some technical reason shaped like this!

Well, I think this is a bit too much of a coincidence. But the Ikkadju 
might have found human technical manuals, and seen all those binary trees...

> The Ikkadju find that the ship is crewed with creatures which have
> four long limbs each and look like -- lurker-snatchers!  Now, it should be
> easy for some demagogues to stir up the masses against the humans by
> claiming that these beings are actually lurker-snatchers, sent by the Old Ones
> themselves (look at the shape of/the symbol on those ships!) to vanquish
> the Ikkadju!

Sounds plausible. I have noted a paradox with the Ikkadju system: in order
to participate in the frequent votes on different subjects, you have to
keep track on them on the Ikkadju net. But then you will be manipulated by
the media. So you can avoid the media, but then you have a hard time
finding out what is going on and which votes are about to happen. So the
media-politicians win whatever the individual do. 

> >I'm not sure I like the 'racial fear' bit, I would like to keep the 
> >similarity an aggravating factor but not the entire reason. But note that 
> >it is easy to play on such feelings in media...
> 
> Exactly!  At first, only a few fanatics see the humans as the returned
> lurker-snatchers, and most Ikkadju consider this to be mindless paranoia.
> But not for very long...

"Look! These aliens look exactly like slimy giant spiders; and you really 
think they want PEACE?!"

> >I wouldn't call it a holy war, more a media war. Many Ikkadju were 
> >already worried about the humans and really wanted Earth (which would be 
> >a paradise to them after some remodeling), and when they realized the 
> >Hafaru had helped the humans they got truly frightened. 
> 
> Why are the Ikkadju hostile against the Hafaru?  Perhaps the hostility
> results from the similarity between Hafaru and the mythical
> lurker-snatchers?

Or it goes further back. Ikkadju and Hafaru have been neighbors for 2000 
years, and have had plenty of time to get irritated on each other. It 
could be that the two races have had disagreements about other planets 
too (the Ikkadju want more space, the Hafaru won't give it to them). 
Another possibility is that the Hafaru are rapidly gaining power (in 
Ikkadju eyes) and could become even more dangerous in the future. After 
all, the Hafaru were among the first members of the Coalition, and still 
have lots of prestige, while the Ikkadju were almost beaten in the War 
and had to join the Coalition to survive. And a few paranoids think the 
Old Ones have survived and use the Hafaru as their pawns...

> >	The demands for swift action became intense, 
> >the Ikkadju voted for war and explained it in the Coalition (the Ikkadju 
> >are represented by the results of their votes, of course). Possibly some 
> >other races said something the Ikkadju interpreted as support (but it 
> >wasn't intended as such) and the war-fleets started...
> 
> The same old story... perhaps *all* important events are triggered by
> mistakes?

I think that is true. Of course, many important events would have been 
triggered by other things if the first mistake didn't happen.

> >Plus their problems with running a war in a democratic fashion, and the 
> >lack of Coalition reinforcements. The Ikkadju sincerely believed others 
> >would help them, but were quite wrong.
> 
> BTW: What is the political system of Earth like at that time?  One of the
> few quite well-established `laws' of human history is that democracies
> don't war against democracies, but does this also hold in interspecies
> relations?

I think this would hold in most cases, but not all. The Ikkadju system 
obviously allows it (if the media could make enough citizens paranoid). 

As I see the situation on Earth, NATO had gained a tremendous power from 
Hafaru technology (which was allowed to trickle out into the economy of 
the member states). My guess is that the Hafaru intervened and also gave 
some stop-measure help to China to prevent a massive disaster, and it 
became the second superpower. In the developed world the constant influx of
high technology (especially antigravity and spaceflight) caused a "second 
industrial revolution" and the definitive move to an information society.

The rest of the world was quite possibly left behind, put under heavy
pressure by the Powers to become more ecological and to decrease the rate
of population increase. Many underdeveloped nations became completely
dependent on support from the developed nations, while others resolutely
turned away from Western ideals (I have the vision of a strong pan-Islamic
movement espousing a return to a simpler, more natural way of life). Its
worth noting that one of the biggest opponents against the NATO/Hafaru
alliance might have been the Vatican! 

Of course, during the War things got nasty. Ikkadju targeted important
infrastructure, population centers and military installations from orbit. 
Electromagnetic pulses and gamma-ray detonations wiped out much of the
vital services in developed countries, and many big cities or defense
installations were nuked from orbit. Without infrastructure, most
developed nations collapsed almost totally. Underdeveloped nations managed
better, and was not as reliant on high technology, so people there
survived. 

There are some groups trying to deal with things: NATO/UN are the only
ones with a strong space presence, and still have access to Hafaru help
and technology. But many humans blame them for the catastrophy. Pan-Islam
might become a major factor, saving parts of Africa, Asia and Europe from
the devastation. The same goes for the Vatican. 

> >I get the vision of the Ikkadju realizing that they were not winning and
> >that no support was forthcoming. So the ships voted among themselves and
> >went home in a rather disorderly fashion, and the humans shot at them even
> >then, against all civilized behavior.
> 
> Did they?  Why?

What would you do if you saw your home-planet almost reduced to slag? 

> >	Right now the Ikkadju are on one
> >hand arming themselves, but there are also intense debates about the
> >proper course of action. Beside the hawks, there are also groups which
> >think the war was a stupid idea from the beginning. The political
> >situation has become dangerously unstable again, and many blame the
> >humans... 
> 
> This constitutes an interesting situation.  Perhaps there are really some
> infidels working for the humans to shed discord among the Ikkadju?  Or
> perhaps working for the *Hafaru*?

I think the Hafaru-Human-Ikkadju politics makes heads (or similar organs)
spin in most of the Coalition. There are no doubt individuals and groups
with their own agendas, ranging from human sects that claim the Hafaru are
demons, the Ikkadju angels and that we are experiencing Armageddon to
Ikkadju media corporations thinking about how to make the War more
interesting for the viewers... 


Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 16:37:55 +0100
From: hza@gen.ks.se (Henric Zazzi)
Subject: Re: Ikkadju

> Exactly.  We humans simply appeal to the Ikkadju's urangst of the Wonkaii,
> due to our ape-like appearance (a gibbon or an orang-utan would appeal even
> more to their urangst, but we look similar enough).  Wait... the
> gibbon/orang-utan bit brings me to an idea... what if the Ikkadju find out
> about these apes in the middle of the war?  `Oops, we have been beating the
> wrong dog all the time!  Look at those forest beasts!  *They* are *real*
> Wonkaii!'

I must say that the war between the Wonkaii and the Ikkadju happened a long
time ago so it is difficult for it to collide to the discovery of the human
race. Mostly because I would say that before this Visau (and others like him)
united the Ikkadju against the Wonkaii, they didn't possess much of a
civilization.
The food was in excess and the climate was perfect, so they didn't have
anything to thrive for, even if they were intelligent. When the Wonkaii
appeared it all changed. They had to cooperate to survive. This cooperation
also lead to the technological advances, which in the end, created FTL.
And they couldn't have encountered the human race before that!!!

> BTW: Where do the names `Visau' and `Wonkaii' come from?  Do the Ikkadju have
> a language with human-like phonemes?  I'd rather like using descriptive terms
> such as `lurker-snatchers' instead of `Wonkaii', or `Joiner' instead of 
> `Visau'.  When coining alien names, one should be careful: most alien
> languages will be completely unlike human languages, such that alien names
> cannot be rendered in human writings, and humans will have to use either
> translations (if they are available) or self-coined terms.  `Wonkaii' only
> makes sense if the Ikkadju have a human-speakable language, but
> `Lurker-snatchers' makes sense even if they communicate via ultrasonic
> chirps.  It constantly annoys me when an author of a SF novel describes the
> aliens' language as `rapid clicks', `ultrasonic beeps' or whatever, and
> nevertheless assigns fancy names to alien individuals, places, etc.

I must agree with Anders S. in his letter dated 10 Oct 95.
An Ikkadju said to the first human, that saw a Wonkaii in an old religious
book, that its name was lurker-snatchers...in IKKADJU.
This sounded like Wonkaii for the human, so they were called Wonkaiis.
The same goes for most other names.

> Perhaps the Hafaru *were* the Wonkaii -- in a distant age, long ago!

> But the humans might still fit the traditional description of the
> lurker-snatchers better: either because the Wonkaii/Hafaru have changed in
> many aspects, or -- even more likely -- because the tales have warped quite
> far from reality, now matching humans far better than the Hafaru or what
> the lurker-snatchers have really been like.

I don't think it's a good idea to make the Wonkaii evolve into the Hafaru.
First of all they don't fit the description of the Hafaru race described by
Joerg Rhiemeier Mon, 23 Oct 1995, and second of all I like the concept of an 
semi-intelligent tree-dwelling race that the Ikkadju had to annihilate to
achieve a technological society.


From: james vassilakos <jimv>
Subject: sfrpg: administrivia
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 13:30:18 -0700 (PDT)

Henric mentioned that he had some trouble with his sfrpg-post
bouncing off several addresses. I'm not sure what the
problem is, but the people currently on the list are:

jimv@cs.ucr.edu (Jim Vassilakos)
jimv@bronze.lcs.mit.edu (Jim Vassilakos)
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg)
rhiemeir@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de (Joerg Rhiemeier)
llvogel@teleport.com (Allan Vogel)
tlh@epsilon.com (Tony Hayes)
larrys@zk3.dec.com (Larry Smith)
henohr@sokrates.mip.ki.se (Henrik Ohrstrom)
martin_eliasson@ssco.se (Martin Eliasson)
hza@gen.ks.se (Henric Zazzi)

If your post seems to bounce off just one or two addresses, you
might try resending to those individuals directly. If it
bounces off many, however, and the problem only occurs when
going though the list address and not when you email the
individuals directly, then let me know, and I'll try to find
out what's going on.


Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 18:21:45 +0000 (WET)
From: Henrik Ohrstrom med <henohr@sokrates.mip.ki.se>
Subject: Re: Hafaru: Some thoughts

On Mon, 23 Oct 1995, Joerg Rhiemeier wrote:
[..] 
> The Hafaru start and end their life in water.  They are oviparous, i.e. they
> hatch from eggs.  The Hafaru's larval stage lasts about six Earth years
> until it reaches sexual maturity.  The young Hafaru is now a male.  However,
> it is still a non-sentient, aquatic creature resembling a 30 centimeter long
> tadpole.  After mating and dropping its male genital glands, the young
> Hafaru enters a second period of bodily and mental growth.  It grows into
> its final humanoid shape and develops a dim sentience.  At an age of nine
> years, it is about 1 metre tall and ready to join a pack (see below).  This
> is the point where the young Hafaru enters society.  The average lifetime of
> a Hafaru lasts about 30 years.  At the end of its life, the Hafaru `fades'.
> This means that it leaves its pack and returns into the water.  Its
> sentience dims, and it grows female genital glands.  The old Hafaru is now
> ready for mating.  It seeks out a male, and swallows the male glands it
> drops.  The male glands then release the sperm, which fertilizes the eggs.
> Then the female dies.  A typical spawn comprises about 2000 to 3000 eggs.
> Only a few dozen of the larvae reach male maturity, and even less sentience
> and female maturity.
 
I like this concept, although it is quite a ripoff.
How about this?
The Hafarus biology are like Joerg suggests, lets add electric elements 
to the mix, like electric eels, and when the Hafaru grows into the 
second period these electric elements are used for comunication, 
telepathy through radio. This radio are always turnd on, in fact it is 
part of the Hafaru brain, which means that if two Hafaru comes close to 
each other then their brains will start to overlap and they leak emotions 
and thoughts to each other.

From the begining this second stage was a mobile stage in order to allow 
the Hafaru tadpoles to migrate betwen diffrent ponds of water and to make 
sure that they could survive a draugth that dried out the ponds. 
Intelligens was needed in order to survive in the dangerous environment 
on dry land where they could'nt protect themselves with their electricity.
On the other hand they could use it (as radio) to coordinate themselves in 
the pack of mobiles (second stage Hafaru) which allowed them to act as a 
unit in defense and flight/fight search of food and so on.

In this stage of evolution they were a kind of group intelligens and 
needed (never had any reason to leave) to be with their pack of siblings 
(Since the tadpoles are agressivly cleaning out rivaling families from 
their ponds all mobiles from one pond are close relatives, it is the first 
stage tadpoles that dominate the ponds, the third stage tadpoles just mate 
and die, minimal care for the young are handled by 1:e stagers.
If there are no first stagers in the pond then the mobiles resort to 
virgin birth (clone them selves).)

As time passed the Hafarus spread from their origin in the low swampy 
lands of their ekvatorial home continent, they came to harsher and 
dryer parts of their world where the distance betwen suitable ponds 
increased the mobiles became more and more intelligent.
On land the mobiles are peaceful herbivores with a complicated system 
of stomacs (so complex that the fresh mobiles need to eat grass on which 
another mobile has defaecated in order to get all the bacteria.)

The Hafaru had no chance to evolve true intellegence on their own since 
the Old ones became interrested in the planet with so much low level 
radio and no (for them) intelligent life. They intervened and bosted 
Hafaru mobiles IQ (not much, they were already on the level of 
~dolphin) mixed the until now strict sibling packs and introduced 
technology (the Hafaru tech level was basic weather protection and 
advanced jamming (for use on other packs and predators)) and the concept 
of culture. 
 
> The real individuals of Hafaru society, however, are the packs.  A pack
> usually consists of 3 to 8 members, though larger packs (with up to 300
> members) also exist.  The intelligence of the pack depends on the number of
> members, as follows:
> 
> Members	 IQ (100=human average)
> 
>   1	 60
>   2	 90
>   3	120
>   4	140
>   5	150
>   6	160
>   7	160
>   8	160
>   9	150
[..]
> (With large packs, the intelligence decreases due to communication
> overhead.)
> 
> [Perhaps, the intelligence of big packs ought to derease more sharply?]
> 
> Each pack has a single intelligence, consciousness and personality.  The
> pack members are connected by a kind of short-range electromagnetic
> telepathy. 
This intelligence is quit lose, the diffrent mobiles can move far from 
each other  unless there are other packs near ,then the pack have to 
close up in order to keep pack integrity. 
The Hafaru have partly left this pack based life, they don't feel well 
unless there are a couple of other Hafaru in brainmeld distance but which 
one are less important, they just need to be familiar enough to trust each 
other. The pack is still significant for the Hafarus although they can 
meld with others and be singel(in a emergency)howewer they don't feel att 
all well unless they have a pack to belong and rest and eat together in 
brain meld.  

[..]
> pack it can join.  If two newly awakened individuals meet, they will
> instantly form a pack of two, which will then try to adopt more freshlings,
> or meld with a larger pack.  Packs usually grow much older than any of their
> members; most easily reach 400 years or more, some are thousands of years
> old.  When a member dies or fades, the pack will be open to adopt new
> members, either by incorporating freshly awakened ones, or by melding with a
> smaller pack.
I like this continous pack thing, it gave the primordial pack a large 
survival bonus, both knowledge and young muscle...
Probably there are some packs that claim that they remember faintly as 
far back as the dawn of Hafaru civilisation. 
[..]

> As has been said, the `individuals' which make up the Hafaru society are not
> individuals in a biological sense, but packs.  This means that any role in
> society will be filled by a pack.  The ruler of a colony or a city, or the
> captain of a ship, will always be a pack of 5 to 8 Hafaru.  The crew of a
> small scout vessel is always a single pack.
True.

[..]
> Each pack has a name, which is usually a long term describing its origin,
> behaviour and profession (such as `Jealous-Playful-Trickster-Scout-From-
> The-Eastern-Hinterlands-of-Old-Herder's-Town'), suffixed by the names of its
> members.  These names are untranslatable and cannot be rendered properly
This is close to A fire upon the deep but it is quite logical for a lose 
group intelligence like the Hafaru, lets keep it.


Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 17:06:54 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: Hafaru: Some thoughts

On Thu, 26 Oct 1995, Henrik Ohrstrom med wrote:
> How about this?
> The Hafarus biology are like Joerg suggests, lets add electric elements 
> to the mix, like electric eels, and when the Hafaru grows into the 
> second period these electric elements are used for comunication, 
> telepathy through radio. This radio are always turnd on, in fact it is 
> part of the Hafaru brain, which means that if two Hafaru comes close to 
> each other then their brains will start to overlap and they leak emotions 
> and thoughts to each other.

I think its a bit unlikely that it would work as radio, I think they 
would be more sensitive to electrical fields (more probable from an 
evolutionary point of view). Hafaru skin would be able to give electric 
discharges of various strengths (this might be the explanation why many 
abductees report they were paralyzed by the aliens). They are also 
sensitive to electricity, and distinctly dislike most human cities for 
the 50 (or 60) Hz noise everywhere (this is why they mostly land in 
remote regions). 

A small note: this system would make it improbable that Hafaru use sounds 
for communication. The name Hafaru might actually be the Ikkadju name of 
the race! (The Ikkadju use body language and sounds to communicate). the 
question is what the official name of the race is? Maybe the "Watery 
Ones" or "The Charged Ones"?

> In this stage of evolution they were a kind of group intelligens and
> needed (never had any reason to leave) to be with their pack of siblings
> (Since the tadpoles are agressively cleaning out rivaling families from
> their ponds all mobiles from one pond are close relatives, it is the first
> stage tadpoles that dominate the ponds, the third stage tadpoles just mate
> and die, minimal care for the young are handled by 1:e stagers.
> If there are no first stagers in the pond then the mobiles resort to
> virgin birth (clone them selves).)

Wouldn't there be some interchange between the ponds to prevent
inbreeding? This is common among tribal cultures, where the young females
(or males) are married outside the family. These interchanges (maybe
Hafaru groups originally exchanged pairs of members who had just begun to
dim; this could have developed into a kind of weird marriage/death
ceremony where different groups try to outdo each other by donating their
formerly best members). 

> As time passed the Hafarus spread from their origin in the low swampy 
> lands of their ekvatorial home continent, they came to harsher and 
> dryer parts of their world where the distance betwen suitable ponds 
> increased the mobiles became more and more intelligent.
> On land the mobiles are peaceful herbivores with a complicated system 
> of stomacs (so complex that the fresh mobiles need to eat grass on which 
> another mobile has defaecated in order to get all the bacteria.)

Yuck! I like it!

> The Hafaru had no chance to evolve true intellegence on their own since 
> the Old ones became interrested in the planet with so much low level 
> radio and no (for them) intelligent life. They intervened and bosted 
> Hafaru mobiles IQ (not much, they were already on the level of 
> ~dolphin) mixed the until now strict sibling packs and introduced 
> technology (the Hafaru tech level was basic weather protection and 
> advanced jamming (for use on other packs and predators)) and the concept 
> of culture. 

Maybe the Old Ones merely improved their communications abilities? I 
think good uplifting usually works by finding a crucial factor and then 
fixing it.

> The Hafaru have partly left this pack based life, they don't feel well 
> unless there are a couple of other Hafaru in brainmeld distance but which 
> one are less important, they just need to be familiar enough to trust each 
> other. The pack is still significant for the Hafarus although they can 
> meld with others and be singel(in a emergency)howewer they don't feel att 
> all well unless they have a pack to belong and rest and eat together in 
> brain meld.  

I like this. The Hafaru are quite different, and not exactly the 
run-of-the-mill group intellect (I'm so tired of them). Actually, among 
the races we have talked about the situation is this:

* Mothers:               Family based group minds/individuals
  Orbs:                  Networked communal mind
  Gool/Multiple Ones:    Individuals with secondary bodies
* Ikkadju/Flyers:        Individuals
  Swimmers:              ??? (Possibly corporate mind)
  Hafaru:                Pack minds/individuals
  Humans:                Individuals
* Soft Ones:             Individuals (with changeable personality)
* Rollers:               Individuals with varying self awareness, packs
  Outsiders:             Individuals
+ Old Ones:              probably individuals, may have experimented with 
                         group minds and other forms.
+ Mlenimm/Hunters:       Individuals, strong pack bond
+ Yss:                   ???
  Vessels of Potentiality: ???

* = I'm trying to finish the description after my exams.
+ = extinct

Have I forgot some races? I think we have a rather nice mixture of various
races, and some interesting possibilities. The Mothers might get along
fine with the Hafaru, Orbs, Swimmers and maybe the Gools, while the
individualistic Ikkadju regard them as somewhat unsettling. 
Individuality-cults among the rollers look up to the individualistic races
like humans, ikkadju and gools. 

> > Each pack has a name, which is usually a long term describing its origin,
> > behaviour and profession (such as `Jealous-Playful-Trickster-Scout-From-
> > The-Eastern-Hinterlands-of-Old-Herder's-Town'), suffixed by the names of its
> > members.  These names are untranslatable and cannot be rendered properly
> This is close to A fire upon the deep but it is quite logical for a lose 
> group intelligence like the Hafaru, lets keep it.

Maybe the Hafaru refers to themselves as members of the 'Pack of packs' 
(and the Coalition as a slightly dysfunctional pack). 


From: james vassilakos <jimv>
Subject: Re: Hafaru: Some thoughts
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 16:44:24 -0700 (PDT)

Joerg writes of the Hafaru:
> Each pack has a single intelligence, consciousness and personality.  The
> pack members are connected by a kind of short-range electromagnetic
> telepathy.

Sorry I haven't responded to this before now. Partly, I wanted to
see what the other list members had to say. Partly, I just needed
time to think.

First, the whole concept of psionics in general and telepathy in
specific seems to me a little overused. Psionics has become the
magic of science fiction, creating a sort of science fiction/fantasy
subgenre which tries to encompass both parent genres but can be argued
to possess the qualities of neither. In any case, at least you
attempted to provide a rationale for this telepathy by invoking
electromagnetics. If this can be explained plausibly, then I'll
have no problem with their telepathy, but I would also expect
other races to have deleveoped this capability unless it can
be plausibly explained why it is unique to the Hafaru.

Some questions, then, to the biologists in our group. How can
this EM-telepathy be explained? Is it plausible that a species
could develop this via evolution or even be gifted with it
via genetic tampering? How would it work? Also, are there
examples of creatures on Earth which use something similar
(aside from visual-spectrum communicators such as, perhaps,
electric eels and the like)?

As for the group-mind idea, I can't say that I'm all that
much in favor of it, but then something so radically different
from anything I've ever observed or heard about would take
some getting used to. One thing that bothers me about
group-intellect is that if such a thing were as commonplace
as we are supposing (see Anders' list of aliens), then we
would expect to see examples of it among animals on Earth,
however, to the best of my knowledge, no such examples exist
(correct me if I'm wrong). Maybe I'm just being too Terran-
centric or something.

In any case, I think we may be pushing the idea too hard
just in order to create a sense of the mystical and strange,
which was probably the same thing many SF writers were
doing when they incorporated psionics and telepathy.
I'm guilty of doing this also, by the way. The Harrison
Chapters (that half-edited novel some of you might have
spied on my homepage) are rife with psionics, not to
mention the plot of the Star Trek PBeM which is practically
based on it (but then Star Trek never was the epitome of
plausible science-fiction).

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I'm not dead-set against
electromagnetic telepathy or group consciousness... I
just think that if it is introduced, the hows and whys
ought to be explained in better detail, and the whole
thing should possess a certain degree of logical
plausibility which is often missing in science fiction.


Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 10:55:24 +0100
From: hza@gen.ks.se (Henric Zazzi)
Subject: The X

I thought that we could use a new race.
The name of this race is rather peculiar, because they have
contacted other races but almost nobody knows about them.
They are believed more as a myth, then an alien race, by other civilization.

In other races they are called the equivalent word for unknown.
Earth learned of their existence from tales and myths given by the Hafaru, and
gave this race the terran name X. The unknown race.

HISTORY

They developed from an arid, poisonous world.
The star near it was very hot (~20000K), and so the atmosphere of this
world was highly contaminated with UV light.
The atmosphere also contained lots of sulfuric oxides, and other
poisonous gases. In short the planet had a close resemblance to Venus.
Chances that life could get a foothold on this planet were quite minimal, but
nature adapted and found a way out.
After a very long time the first single cell saw the light on this planet.
It has a kind of DNA which is a polymer composed of a
mixture of phosphor, sulfur, silica and other trace elements. It was highly
adaptable to its environment and had polymers (PP=protector polymer)
that could protect its genome from the dangerous mutagenic gases and radiation.
After this first step the cell quickly evolved into a multi-cellular
organism that finally reached intelligence.
Just when the old ones were on the brink of war, they discovered this planet.
They made a quick survey, that was quite sloppy, and returned to their
home world declaring this planet as lifeless.
If they would have searched further, they would have found that the
planet was populated by semi-intelligent rock-like organism.
They had an outer layer of cells that continuously mutated in the
dangerous environment, and protected the individual.
The inner tissue of the individual was, in such a way, protected with its outer
layer of sacrifying cells, and by the PP, from radiation and mutagenic gases.
This was also the way the organism propagated.
The old cell layer was continuously replaced by a newer one, and were an
embryo from the mother-organism.
Most of these cells were irreparably mutated and soon withered, but a few
had useful mutations or were a clone of the initial organism.
In a couple of years they were adult individual that were a clone of their
mother-organism or had mutated into an improved species. (chances are that
it also could be a species that was less sturdy than its mother-organism,
but such a species would die out in the natural competition on the planet)
At the time they reached FTL they were quite different from their
semi-intelligent ancestor. They still looked like grayish rocks, but had
developed six limbs that served as foots or hands. They had hearing and
talking organs but no eyes since they were not useful in the dense
atmosphere. They instead measured their surrounding by emitting ultrasounds, and
receiving the echo formed by these sounds. Very similar to the terran dolphins.
The PP had developed into an total protector for their genome. So no
mutagenesis occurred if the individual did not want so, but since their
propagation system depended on budding mutated cells, each individual could
choose when to propagate by peeling off its outer layer of cells.
The individual could also, by protecting various parts of the genome in the
budding cells, decide which part of its genome could mutate. In this way
they could decide, more or less, which traits their offspring would have.
After contact with other races, the X saw several advantages in looking like
the races they contacted and started to mutate into similar forms of life.
After a couple of generations the X had achieved the physical appearance of
several spacefaring races. They had developed eyes, which was
quite a new experience for them, and were ALMOST indistinguishable,
in appearance, from the race that they copied.

PHYSIOLOGY

In early days they all looked the same since one strain had a definite
advantage in confront to the others, but reaching FTL changed all that.
Now a date there are almost 20 different strains that are look-alikes of
other races. More are developing for every generation of X:s.
The only problem that could not be mutated to improve the species, is a
a characteristic in their Protector Polymer.
A chemical requirement of this polymer is a crystal structure composed
of mainly sulfur and phosphor. This crystal structure was created in large
amounts in the early genesis of the home planet, and every life form
depends on it for survival. The X are herbivores, and can even eat alien
vegetables, if they have mutated to digest it.
By eating vegetables from their planet of origin, though, they will get the
necessary amounts of sulfur/phosphor crystal.
So one X cannot be away from its planet of origin for a long time, otherwise
it will wither and die. They are not able to propagate outside their planet
as well. The Protector Polymer is also the reason why they die at exactly
100 years after they entered their mature state. Suddenly the PP stops
functioning and massive mutations develops everywhere in their body. RIP !!!
(X:s that were in space at that moment could survive a little time longer, but
eventually die of depletion of phosphor/sulfur crystal)

PSYCHOLOGY

Since their race is always changing into something new they are highly curious
of everything new.
When they saw new races, they turned into them. They examined their technology.
They acquired their culture.
This was always done covertly, because they were afraid that other races
could not understand their needs, and would hate them for simulating
their life forms.
They are the spies of the galaxy, but they are not malevolent. They only
want to gather as much information as possible. Some mishaps in the history
of the galaxy has sometime drawn some information from these beings, but
no evidence has been gathered. This created the myth of these beings.
The people of the galaxy picture them, wrongly, as evil spies that could
be everywhere or everyone. As a race they are individualistic within one
strain. They will help a strain-member in
everything, but see other strains as distant, less developed cousins. That is
also the reason why every member wants its offspring to be a better version of
the strain he is, and in such a way, by a father to a new breed.
They are very altruistic, though, when it comes to information. If one X knows
a piece of information he thinks its his destiny to enlighten everyone in
his path. (As you can imagine libraries are very common on their home planet)
In reality, its just to show other (lesser) strains that he has information
that they could not obtain. After years of gathering, they have almost
collected the complete knowledge of all spacefaring races. From complete
instruction have to build a anti-matter converter to
what the favorite terran pastry that you can eat while drinking wine.
(Not all knowledge has to be useful)

I thought that this race would be quite different from the other races
in Anders letter, and would make a fine contribuition to the game.
Comments are welcome !!!!


Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 11:09:45 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: Hafaru: Some thoughts

On Sat, 28 Oct 1995, james vassilakos wrote:
> In any case, at least you
> attempted to provide a rationale for this telepathy by invoking
> electromagnetics. If this can be explained plausibly, then I'll
> have no problem with their telepathy, but I would also expect
> other races to have deleveoped this capability unless it can
> be plausibly explained why it is unique to the Hafaru.

Actually, we are moving towards "telepathy" more and more through 
communications technology. One could imagine having implanted cellular 
phones making it possible to speak with any other human in the world. In 
my writeup of the Mothers I assume at least one fraction of that rather 
diverse race has gone off in this direction using bionics.

However, natural "telepathy" (I quote it because the version we discuss is
really distinct from the normal use of the word which is non-physical
transmission of information) is probably very rare, and the Hafaru are
probably unique in using em-telepathy. Lower bandwidth communication is
easier and less costly. 

> Some questions, then, to the biologists in our group. How can
> this EM-telepathy be explained? Is it plausible that a species
> could develop this via evolution or even be gifted with it
> via genetic tampering? How would it work? 

I think its not unreasonable to imagine communications developing using
electric signals in the right environment. If they could become complex
enough, possibly helped with some genetic tampering (long live the Old
Ones! :-) you could get some quite interesting forms of communication,
especially if the "language" of the species was more parallel than out
serial sound-language (not unreasonable if used on close range). But I am
sceptic to the idea of a real mind-link, I think Hafaru "telepathy" is
much deeper than human speech, but not true mind-reading. I think the 
Hafaru pack minds are not really a group consciousness, but more like a 
collective brainstorm. 

> As for the group-mind idea, I can't say that I'm all that
> much in favor of it, but then something so radically different
> from anything I've ever observed or heard about would take
> some getting used to. One thing that bothers me about
> group-intellect is that if such a thing were as commonplace
> as we are supposing (see Anders' list of aliens), then we
> would expect to see examples of it among animals on Earth,
> however, to the best of my knowledge, no such examples exist
> (correct me if I'm wrong). Maybe I'm just being too Terran-
> centric or something.

Its worth noting that group minds require good communications between
members, and as far as I know, primiates and possibly cetaceans are the
most communicative species. But we mammals are mostly individualists
anyway. I think natural groups minds are rather rare, but through some 
outside tampering might be possible to bring about. 

Another possibility might be that terrestrial evolution really is 
individuocentric, and on other worlds group minds are the rule. But its 
hard to tell. 

When it comes to the races we have, the situation looks like this:

Hafaru: Partly natural, possibly enhanced communications. I think the 
idea of em-telepathy is so fun and explains a lot we should use it.

Mothers: The uplift from the Old Ones consisted of increasing the neural 
connection between mother-daughter. Some groups of Mothers use digital 
links to remain in touch even when separated, but this is a fairly late 
development. 

Orbs: Artificial race, were designed as network-minds. No real rules apply.

Swimmers: Who knows? They might have decided to become group minds in the 
past. Most probably they have some completely different organization but 
aren't telling. 

The others are as far as I remember not real group minds, although some 
are very collectivistic. So it doesn't look that bad, especially if we 
avoid introducing too many new group-minds. 

> Anyway, those are my thoughts. I'm not dead-set against
> electromagnetic telepathy or group consciousness... I
> just think that if it is introduced, the hows and whys
> ought to be explained in better detail, and the whole
> thing should possess a certain degree of logical
> plausibility which is often missing in science fiction.

Exactly! I think we all have to pay close attention to the logic of our
creations and how they fit together. Personally I think it would be fun if
we could find physically reasonable explanations for weird events and
powers. Are the crop circles accidental results of gravity wave research
by NATO (see David Brin's "Earth")? 


Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 12:05:37 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: The X

On Mon, 30 Oct 1995, Henric Zazzi wrote:
> I thought that we could use a new race.
> The name of this race is rather peculiar, because they have
> contacted other races but almost nobody knows about them.
> They are believed more as a myth, then an alien race, by other civilization.
> 
> In other races they are called the equivalent word for unknown.
> Earth learned of their existence from tales and myths given by the Hafaru, and
> gave this race the terran name X. The unknown race.

I like this feeling of mystery. A mystery that baffles most other races is
truly enigmatic and frightening to humans (the Gools would probably be
downright paranoid about the X, since they have an instinctive fear of the
unknown). 

> HISTORY
> 
> They developed from an arid, poisonous world.
> The star near it was very hot (~20000K), and so the atmosphere of this
> world was highly contaminated with UV light.
> The atmosphere also contained lots of sulfuric oxides, and other
> poisonous gases. In short the planet had a close resemblance to Venus.
> Chances that life could get a foothold on this planet were quite minimal, but
> nature adapted and found a way out.
>
> After a very long time the first single cell saw the light on this planet.
> It has a kind of DNA which is a polymer composed of a
> mixture of phosphor, sulfur, silica and other trace elements. It was highly
> adaptable to its environment and had polymers (PP=protector polymer)
> that could protect its genome from the dangerous mutagenic gases and radiation.

I get the impression that the biochemistry is based on liquid sulphur
compounds or such things, or do they have a water-based chemistry? Anybody
on the list knowledgeable in high pressure/high energy chemistry? One
idea: instead of a terrestrial oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle, they use a
nitric acid-nitrogen oxide cycle, based on floating algae in the cloudy
atmosphere. 

> After this first step the cell quickly evolved into a multi-cellular
> organism that finally reached intelligence.

I'm a bit sceptical about 'quickly' under these circumstances. It seems 
hard to develop a complex organism in this kind of environment. 

> If they would have searched further, they would have found that the
> planet was populated by semi-intelligent rock-like organism.
> They had an outer layer of cells that continuously mutated in the
> dangerous environment, and protected the individual.
> The inner tissue of the individual was, in such a way, protected with its
> outer layer of sacrifying cells, and by the PP, from radiation and mutagenic gases.
> This was also the way the organism propagated.
> The old cell layer was continuously replaced by a newer one, and were an
> embryo from the mother-organism.

I like this! Its plausible and rather alien. The outer layers could also 
function as armor against predators (using sonic pulses to stun their 
prey) and possibly be covered by symbiotic growths in some cases.

> In a couple of years they were adult individual that were a clone of their
> mother-organism or had mutated into an improved species.
> (chances are that it also could be a species that was less sturdy than its mother-organism,
> but such a species would die out in the natural competition on the planet)

I think the phyologenetic tree on "planet X" would be much more branching 
than on Earth, but most branches would just be short twigs.

One problem: how are the young brought up? This is usually important for
intelligent beings, so that they can be taught the basics of their culture
(here is an unusual idea: the civilized X only educate enough youngsters
to fill their society, the rest live as primitives outside it). 

> They had hearing and
> talking organs but no eyes since they were not useful in the dense
> atmosphere. They instead measured their surrounding by emitting ultrasounds, and
> receiving the echo formed by these sounds. Very similar to the terran dolphins.

This would give them an unique impression of the world - unlike sighted 
species like us, their view of the world would be limited by their sonar 
range, with the internal structure of soft objects clearly visible. They 
might have developed a technology for creating 3D images of sound.

> The individual could also, by protecting various parts of the genome in the
> budding cells, decide which part of its genome could mutate.

How was this evolved? Or was it a technological development?

> After contact with other races, the X saw several advantages in looking like
> the races they contacted and started to mutate into similar forms of life.
> After a couple of generations the X had achieved the physical appearance of
> several spacefaring races. They had developed eyes, which was
> quite a new experience for them, and were ALMOST indistinguishable,
> in appearance, from the race that they copied.

I have a little trouble with this. While I *really* like the idea of a
race that imitates others, I doubt it would be feasible to become
indistinguishable in most cases. After all, even with severe
re-engineering a mammal would not become indistinguishable from an insect.
And since X biochemistry is based on rather extreme conditions, they would
not be able to survive well in other environments (they might be very
hardy, but when the silicone-oil in their veins become too viscous they
will be in trouble). 

> PHYSIOLOGY
> 
> In early days they all looked the same since one strain had a definite
> advantage in confront to the others, but reaching FTL changed all that.
> Now a date there are almost 20 different strains that are look-alikes of
> other races. More are developing for every generation of X:s.

I like the idea of this very diverse species. Maybe they are mixing
elements from other species too, to create (to them) more suitable forms
(imagine a Mother body (roughly tortoise) with some human/hafaru elements
and ikkadju wings). As mentioned above, I'm sceptical of how similar they 
could become.

> So one X cannot be away from its planet of origin for a long time, otherwise
> it will wither and die. They are not able to propagate outside their planet
> as well. The Protector Polymer is also the reason why they die at exactly
> 100 years after they entered their mature state. Suddenly the PP stops
> functioning and massive mutations develops everywhere in their body. RIP !!!

This doesn't make sense to me. If reproduction occurs by budding from the 
skin, then the reproductive period of an individual is essentially 
infinite and selection would favor long-lived individuals (bacteria never 
die, they just continue to divide), possibly even potential immortality. 
The cause of death would instead be being out-competed by the children or 
other species, not a natural death. 

> They are the spies of the galaxy, but they are not malevolent. They only
> want to gather as much information as possible. Some mishaps in the history
> of the galaxy has sometime drawn some information from these beings, but
> no evidence has been gathered. This created the myth of these beings.
> The people of the galaxy picture them, wrongly, as evil spies that could
> be everywhere or everyone.

Maybe they are believed to be the spies of the Old Ones? If they appeared 
during the turmoil of the Great War, this would seem logical (although I 
like the idea of them being far older). 

By the way, you don't have to look like a human to spy on humans; who 
thinks about that grey boulder over there? 

> They are very altruistic, though, when it comes to information. If one X knows
> a piece of information he thinks its his destiny to enlighten everyone in
> his path. (As you can imagine libraries are very common on their home planet)
> In reality, its just to show other (lesser) strains that he has information that they
> could not obtain.

Hmm, this reminds me of an idea I have toyed with. Maybe the X could be 
united with this idea: 

The X are also perfectionists, they want to find the optimal form of
everything. This is one of the reasons they are so curious and interested
in other species (beside the other reasons). Their homeworld is
continually "terraformed" to become even more perfect, and they are very
interested in all forms of improvements of their own strain.  However,
they realize that the rest of the universe isn't perfect and would destroy
them if they tried to change it, so they have to work discreetly and with
cunning. Most alien races are imperfect from an X perspective, but
sometimes come up with good ideas, so they are worth studying as much as
possible. 

During a long time the X have stratified their society: on the home planet
live the most perfect (from their perspective) individuals and strains,
functioning as leaders. Around it, in various orbital installations the
information gathering organization works with the gathered information,
finding out what is worth using, what is to be labeled dangerous and what
is to be merely archived. The strains in this organization are not as
perfected as the down below, but still better than the strains developed
to spy on other races (although perfect spies are of course revered). 

> I thought that this race would be quite different from the other races
> in Anders letter, and would make a fine contribuition to the game.
> Comments are welcome !!!!

I like it, although it needs a bit of polishing. I would like to hear more
about their sociology, for example. Just the major differences in
reproduction will make them very different in this respect. 


Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 17:44:55 +0100 (MET)
From: Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa@nada.kth.se>
Subject: Re: Hafaru: Some thoughts

On Mon, 30 Oct 1995, Joerg Rhiemeier wrote:
> One last try.  If this fails, I will send it to you via snail mail.
> This Emacs mail mode has an annoying bug which causes it to randomly
> substitute characters in the To: line, and all other mail programs
> installed here only allow *reading* mail.

Thanks! I received it.

> Normally, packs don't grow larger than 8 members.  However, they are also
> some larger packs.  Such large packs usually form to do work which requires
> many hands (and not too much thinking).  These macropacks often do not form
> spontaneously, but are artificially assembled from freshlings bred for this
> purpose.

Or from packs that voluntarily go together for a single purpose. Since 
the packs already have a rather loose sense of individuality, they might 
not be entirely averse to joining for a short while. At the same time 
individuals does not matter, so the Hafaru might not be averse to 
sacrificing members for the good of the pack. 

> Two packs usually stay away from each other, lest they disturb each other's
> thinking.  Unless they wish to meld, they won't voluntarily get closer to
> each other than 5 metres.

I think the range of electrical telepathy as we have discussed it here is
shorter if we want to have hi-fi communication. To become optimal, the
Hafaru must touch the others in the pack, forming a small huddle. When
encountered, they usually behave a bit like a group of scared Japanese
tourists, never venturing far from each other. To a human they would be
unsettling: they never speak (or just whisper), and still seems to
understand each other perfectly. When dealing with individuals, they tend
to crowd around them and touch them with their clammy and slightly
electric skins, constantly looking at them with their unblinking eyes... 

>  If two packs are forced into moving close
> together for a longer time, they will meld to overcome the pain caused by
> the mutual disturbance of thinking.  This method is actually used to
> assemble macro-packs for boring labour from specially-bred freshlings.

I can imagine Hafaru bureaucracy... :-)

> [Much has to be filled in.  Actually, I have no good idea for the Hafaru
> society.  Judging after their preference for the west when tampering with
> Earth's politics, I'd say their society is individualist/capitalist
> (not necessarily democratic) rather than collectivist/communist, but this
> is not necessary.  Perhaps they chose the west not because it was closer
> to their own society, but simply because it was more efficient.]

I tend to think Hafaru society is very uniform in one sense, since 
individuality isn't as intense as among humans and individuals are 
dispensable. The packs have a long history and long memories, and each 
might have its own "twist" of the main culture, but since they exchange 
members and interact closely from time to time it is rare for packs to 
become truly divergent. However, the Hafaru on different planets might 
have developed their own cultures. 

I think Hafaru might have very odd forms of organization. My guess is that
a number of packs work together, with each pack having a special function.
On a diplomatic mission there might be a security/medical pack, a
diplomatic pack and a ground support pack, which sometimes exchange
members according to complex customs or need. Groups and packs within a
certain area are independent, but they all have a collectivistic loyalty
to each other and their future (this stems from the time where several
packs lived around small lakes and such things). Individualism isn't
encouraged, and regarded as slightly irritating. 

As a whole, the Hafaru might be linked by special packs that functions as 
messengers/diplomats/politicians, moving around and overseeing work and 
giving information. These groups sometimes gather together for debates 
and the ceremonial exchange of members. 

I get the impression Hafaru are on one hand very honest to each other 
(lying is hard when others can hear your thoughts), but also quite good 
at withholding information to other species. And *never* play poker with a 
Hafaru! :-)

The Hafaru most probably have a *very* complex and alien society... I 
feel I have only scratched on the surface!


