Road to Hope

[Powers]

And I'll say it right now: I want a fanservicefiction between the Kyanah and Elonites.

[firestar464]

also:

- A human raised in a Kyanah pack (imagine if they let him go to human school, and the parent-teacher conferences are gonna be wild; whole pack amirite?)

- A Kyanah raised by humans (wack)

[Jakob]

So many new technological innovations had to be made for the Kyanah to go from interplanetary to interstellar in a span of 20 Earth years, that it was as if they were running four megaprojects at once. First there were the interstellar-grade engines, designed and optimized by supercomputer modeling for the insane stresses and tight constraints of interstellar travel. Pure nuclear engines were rejected as insufficiently powerful; instead antimatter-catalyzed nuclear fusion would be required to achieve the key specifications set forth by Ikun's Defense Alpha: a specific impulse of 4.5 million and a peak velocity of 7.5% of light speed. Such an engine would require 4.8 grams of antimatter to catalyze deuterium-deuterium fusion, and producing this would require a new particle accelerator, 100 kilometers in diameter and specifically optimized to produce and capture antimatter. This would be capable of running continuously for years, with energies running into the PeV range and up to a milligram of antimatter being produced every day. Though this was actually the most trivial problem that had to be solved.

To even begin to build the starship--or void strider, as the Kyanah called it, having no concept of a nautical ship--would first require the construction of new orbital infrastructure. To this end, they would have to built the largest space station ever built, with a 1.5 kilometer spinning rung, multiple bays for processing captured asteroids and assembling large void striders in orbit, and living space for thousands. Hundreds of launches of single stage to orbit nuclear spaceplanes would be made to bring up and assemble components for this Interstellar Vehicle Assembly Hub. Only then could the actual construction begin, making use of materials from small captured metallic asteroids for the bulk of the raw materials. This task, naturally, required metal refineries and furnaces capable of functioning in a hard vacuum and a zero G environment. The actual assembly of the hull made use of 3D metal printers: previously used for terrestrial construction, but never before for such large objects in space, so off the shelf machines had to be gutted and retooled before being hauled up to the Interstellar Vehicle Assembly Hub.

The Void Strider would be an enormous starship with a main body 400 meters wide and 2400 meters long. Despite the enormous specific impulse of the 63 antimatter-catalyzed fusion engines that were being engineered, the required velocities were more enormous and the tyranny of the rocket equation more enormous still: the wet mass to payload ratio would have to be no less than a whopping 148:1. This wasn't a grand conquest fleet, it was an interstellar invasion Apollo-style. Every bit of mass would have to be ruthlessly shaved from both the Void Strider's structure, and its internals, using the most aggressive optimization techniques imaginable. Every single thread of printed metal was reviewed to determine if it was a waste of mass, and materials scientists squeezed every milligram per cubic centimeter possible out of the hull alloys. New life support systems were devised, dropping the mass of life support equipment required per individual by half. As for the payload, countless hours of research went into predicting the future technological advances of Earth according to multiple predictive models and calculating the bare minimum amount of military hardware needed to secure Project Hope's strategic objectives. Ultimately, this would come out to 180,000 tons of ship--including its laser-based point defense systems--and 195,000 tons of payload...a lot until you consider that it's all they've got to invade the Earth with.

Of course, a big part of the 195,000 tons were just to hold them over until they were able to set up all their ISRU equipment on Earth. The plan was never to have interstellar supply lines, after all--there really is no such thing without FTL--it was to make everything on the front lines, from food--using vats of genetically engineered microbes to grow flavored meat--to missiles. Even entire bases and factories were to be 3D printed out of Terran regolith, rather than hauling building materials all the way from Tau Ceti--not only that, but these printers would have to be regolith-agnostic since no one knew the precise composition of Earth's regolith. Naturally, conditions on board the Void Strider were not the most spacious, to say the least. Instead of wide, sweeping hallways and luxurious cabins, packs were crammed into the smallest and lightest possible nests and traversing any hallways had to be done in single file, carefully ducking and dodging around life support equipment randomly bolted all over the walls and ceiling.

Fortunately for the Kyanah, they have a rather different conception of personal space and most packs are perfectly fine with a 3x3x2 meter compartment to share amongst themselves as long as they have a partition to block out prying eyes and ears; each pack is granted a very "generous" ~7 kg for personal effects--about 1-2 kg per individual, or about 50-70 tons for the total mass penalty factoring in the crew of approximately 32,000 soldiers and 8,000 scientists brought along to gain strategic insights on Earth and its inhabitants, and optimize the ISRU processes. Then again, most of the 160 Earth year journey will be spent in cold sleep--another recent invention perfected for Project Hope. As for the cargo area, that was even more tightly packed and chaotic with all manner of military hardware stacked everywhere with seemingly no rhyme or reason to optimize space usage--though actually every single item has been carefully weighed and its exact location within the cargo hold noted in the manifest for further use by tactical AI during the invasion. Many advances also had to be made in self-healing materials, to ensure that a chance collision with a speck of dust would not be catastrophic.

The remaining elephant in the room was the fuel. Nearly 60 million tons of deuterium would be required just to get the Void Strider to cruising velocity via antimatter-catalyzed fusion. Naturally, the Kyanah homeworld had no such source: even draining the entire Ikun oasis dry a dozen times would not even secure a fraction of the required deuterium. The solution to this was to resort to atmospheric mining on the outer system gas giant Entiak-Ryitu. This had already been done to a limited extent by Ikun and one or two other city-states in recent years; without a convenient moon, this was the easiest place to get helium-3 for fusion to compete with older fission reactors. However, the deuterium required for Project Hope was on another order of magnitude than such early efforts. And so the Interstellar Vehicle Assembly Hub was concurrently used to build several large nuclear spaceplanes, each a kilometer long, and fly them to Entiak-Ryitu, where they would continuously cruise through the upper atmosphere, using nuclear power from the gathered deuterium to stay aloft--simply flying until they broke down--and scoop up the atmosphere. Sophisticated nanoparticle meshes, stored in the emptied-out propellant tanks of the spaceplanes separated out atmospheric deuterium with quite high reliability. Every so often, a rotating skyhook comes down, picking up the deuterium-saturated mesh and dropping a fresh one, and then on the up cycle, "wringing" the saturated mesh into a magnetic confinement zone, slowly growing a cloud of nearly pure deuterium in orbit around Entiak-Ryitu. While most of this was automated, there was a small space station nearby to keep an eye on things without light speed delay.

Once the fuel was gathered, there was the small problem of getting the Void Strider to Entiak-Ryitu. Ultimately, a mere few thousand tons of deuterium were painstakingly produced locally by scavenging volatiles from Project Hope's asteroid mining ventures and purifying it out of oasis water on the ground. Even with such a tiny amount of fuel, the specific impulse of the antimatter-catalyzed fusion engines is such that interplanetary velocities can be easily achieved. This was essentially like putting a teaspoon of gas in the tank of your car to make it across the street to fuel up for a trans-continental journey using the gas station you built there for that exact purpose. Albeit a "teaspoon" that nearly drained Ikun's oasis. For the second time in a few years.

As a final wrinkle in the problem of Project Hope, there was the matter of actually slowing down at Sol once all the fuel was spent accelerating. The piece to this puzzle was the three stage to Hope model, where the Void Strider would be divided into multiple expendable stages like an old Earth chemical rocket to save fuel (there's a reason why Project Hope could be seen as the Apollo of interstellar invasions). The 31 engines of the first stage would accelerate it to about 4% of light speed before being dropped and letting the second stage with another 31 engines take over; this one would drop away too once the final cruising velocity was attained, leaving almost nothing but the payload and a third stage with one last engine and basically a drop of fuel in comparison to the first two stages. In order to actually slow down in the Solar System, a Bussard ramjet would be used, leveraging the fact that the drag outweighs any thrust generated, making it more of a Bussard parachute, or a void parachute as the Kyanah called it. With a 10,000 kilometer magnetic field, it would decelerate using the drag over the course of about one Earth year before using one last antimatter-catalyzed fusion engine for course correction, terminal guidance, and orbital insertion around Hope/Earth, where the compliment of nuclear spaceplanes affixed to the outer hull would be used to ferry the first troops and cargo, along with ISRU equipment to build propellant plants so the rest of the crew could be brought down to Earth. Thus, only the payload and a bare minimum of protective packaging and laser point defense systems would actually make it to Earth orbit.

There were, despite the 195,000 ton payload, some things that couldn't fit in Void Strider. The satellites, especially the heavy tungsten rods from god (tyorun-spears) and orbital shot (to engineer a Kesler syndrome on Earth), along with an assortment of comms and spy satellites, lunar mining and construction equipment to repair and replenish the force's space-based assets in-situ, and also support water mining in space to keep the Void Strider's corrective thrusters topped up for station keeping and dodging possible human attacks. To facilitate all this, two additional backup nuclear shuttles had to be included as well. And so a second, smaller vessel had to be built; to round out the payload, a supercomputing complex was added in for the Kyanah invasion force to run their tactical AI on the best possible hardware, along with comms modules and a command center to allow this vehicle to serve as the command module for the invasion, and so it came to be known as the Alpha Strider. While "only" 250 meters wide and 1600 meters long, with a payload of 50,000 tons and a ship mass of 45,000 tons, it still required a nontrivial 15 million tons of deuterium fuel and 1 gram of antimatter. Alpha Strider too was just as cramped as Void Strider, what passed for the "bridge" was not some grand sweeping room with ornate furnishings, but a glorified closet with screens, computers, and random bits of life support that didn't fit anywhere else on every square centimeter of the walls and ceiling, and no elbow room for the generals.

It should come as no surprise that every single one of the sentences above was a research question whose solution got at least one pack to scholar of the second rank or third rank--and sometimes more than one pack. This included a certain Nyektor-pack, a newly minted scholar of the third rank and professor at Toryak University in Ikun at the start of Project Hope. Here they were working on supercomputer simulation and modeling of ultra high-performance rocket engines, but once involved with Project Hope, they gradually integrated their research both horizontally and vertically, coming to run an entire department with over a hundred packs developing the basic research needed to build Void Strider and Alpha Strider, all while balancing very extensive and contradictory demands from Lawspeakers insisting that this or that component be manufactured with technology from their district, Ikoin Corporation--the main contractor in charge of building Void Strider and the Interstellar Vehicle Assembly Hub--pressing them to downscale the Void Strider at every turn to save money, and Ikun's top military brass pressing them to raise the payload so they could pack 53-ton Rkion 19.3 main battle nyruds instead of the nearly as capable 41-ton Rkion 15.7 model, etc. etc. ad infinitum (n.b.: in Kyanah history, armored ground vehicles with a main gun on a turret were never named after water tanks, but after the nyrud an animal traditionally prized for, well, pretty much everything, including as a beast of burden and military steed in pre-mechanized times; an especially apt comparison as modern battle nyruds have a hexapod actuation system powered by artificial muscles rather than tracks). In any case, Nyektor-pack's department, and especially Nyektor-pack themselves, as the department alpha, got the bulk of the credit as the main architect and visionary behind Project Hope, despite the thousands of packs in and outside of Ikun who solved tens of thousands of pressing technical problems. Soon after the Void Strider and the Alpha Strider made their short hop to Entiak-Ryitu, a now-elderly Nyektor-pack would be recognized as scholar of the fourth rank, the highest academic honor on the planet, and several packs of their former students of the second and third rank would travel to Earth as civilian scientists to advise the military personnel and oversee continued technological developments on Earth. This was, however, quite controversial as by Y976 the devastating economic and environmental consequences of Project Hope were on display for all to see; indeed just a few years later, it would be canceled entirely, leaving the unfinished Void Strider 2 and Alpha Strider 2 to languish in orbit. Though of course by that point, Void Strider and Alpha Strider had burned all their fuel and dumped their first two stages, so for them, there was no coming back.

[Jakob]

also:
- A human raised in a Kyanah pack (imagine if they let him go to human school, and the parent-teacher conferences are gonna be wild; whole pack amirite?)

No Kyanah would ever willingly accept that, and if you tried to force it, they'd react in much the same way as if their child's life was in danger. It's ingrained at a primeval hardware level to never leave your young. Ever. To do it so frequently, so casually, and for such a long time as would be required to attend a human school would be as bad as straight up killing your own children. It's the only force stronger than that which keeps them from straying far from their adult packmates.

also:
- A Kyanah raised by humans (wack)

They probably get mentally stunted or permanently damaged due to improper socialization in the hatchling stage. They're so much smaller than human newborns when they hatch that their brains are also smaller and they have to play catch-up, meaning extremely rapid weight iteration in the neural stalk that can be disastrous if something goes wrong; constant active interaction is required to ensure that this process doesn't go haywire when the higher brain functions start to come online. I doubt any human couple would be physically able to do that while also having a job and a life, there's a reason why the minimum legal pack size is three or four in most city-states. Even if you get the socialization right, I doubt they'd ever be innately comfortable with how "distant" and "cold" their human packmates are (assuming they act like a normal human family) or how uncomfortably close and intimate random humans are. Sure they'd understand intellectually that humans are wired different, but there's no way they'd emotionally feel like they're loved or belong with normal human family dynamics. The inability to reconcile that would probably lead to a massive identity crisis and suicide by mid adolescence.

I doubt the flip side would be much better, a human child in a Kyanah pack would mentally suffocate, the constant social stimulation and complete lack of personal space or time alone or even the understanding of why anyone would want that would be brutal, especially during adolescence. I'd give the human child a slightly greater chance of living to adulthood, but once there, they'd likely be stuck as a packless outcast forever in Kyanah society, or have fucked up ideas about how human interactions and relationships work in human society, that would take at a minimum years of therapy to undo.

And there is the language barrier. Neither species could physically speak to each other and even with writing and sign language, it's unclear if it's biologically possible for a human to think in the nonlinear treelike structures of Kyanah language, or for a Kyanah to think in humanity's linear sequential languages. More than likely, even if they knew the right vocabulary, they'd have to put a constant effort into how to organize the information to effectively communicate, communication would never flow as naturally as between two members of the same species.

So yeah, all around a bad idea that probably leads to tragedy.

[Jakob]

And I'll say it right now: I want a fanservicefiction between the Kyanah and Elonites.

I unfortunately can't do that, as it would be canon not fanfiction if I did.

[firestar464]

*psychological torment*

oof

[Jakob]

*psychological torment*

oof

Best to leave the babies of any species in the hands of those who evolved for millions of years to take care of them.

[firestar464]

Pets:

[Jakob]

Pets:

I guess at least a tyorket or truntyork wouldn't have a massive identity crisis and off itself. Not sure how you'd feed one though.

[Jakob]

Note that in all of these tech posts, the present is with respect to Y976, the year that Project Hope launches towards Earth, or about AD 1863...the canon hasn't been fully decided for Kyanah civilization on the Homeworld after that point.

Kyanah agricultural technology has advanced in several major steps over the history of their civilization. First-order agriculture, or the practice of taming, herding, and breeding prey animals such as nyruds and tyukruds instead of just killing and eating them on sight, provided a considerable advantage over primitive hunter-trapper lifestyles (zeroth-order agriculture), giving packs a steadier supply of meat and eggs, as well as bones, hides, and other useful materials. First-order agriculture is believed to have originated first in the northern boreal scrublands around 20,000 Earth years ago and surpassing hunter-trapper lifestyles in prevalence on every inhabited region of the Homeworld by about 3000 years ago--though dwindling numbers of hunter-trappers remain even in modern times, though habitat destruction, pollution, and military campaigns have caused their numbers to plummet.

Second-order agriculture, the process of cultivating feed plants to sustain larger livestock herds, would not emerge for many thousands of years after first-order agriculture though. Clearly, spending all their time and effort cultivating plants that they couldn't even eat was a hard sell for primitive Kyanah, though ultimately the surplus of food provided ultimately proved irresistible. After emerging around 5500 years ago in the boreal scrublands--and independently in other areas over the next few hundred years--second-order agriculture would surpass first-order agriculture in prevalence in all inhabited regions by 900 years ago. Second-order agriculture was also much more likely to produce a surplus of food and a division of labor, eventually leading to the first organized city-states around 43-4400 years ago--around 2500 BC. Advanced second order agriculture, or 2.4-order agriculture, is often used to refer to second-order agriculture done with motorized tools as opposed to hand tools and animal power; this is the most primitive form of agriculture that still dominates anywhere on the Kyanah homeworld, mostly in poor and less-developed regions, and responsible for about 27% of global agricultural production.

Third-order agriculture was the next step, emerging in approximately the past 100 Earth years. It essentially centered around maximized control of the farming environment to eliminate remaining inefficiencies. Feed crops are genetically engineered to be more nutrient rich and resistant to disease, and are sometimes grown in hydroponic, aeroponic, or synthetic-medium agriculture, where a solid or liquid synthetic soil substitute is used to reduce space and water usage and promote nutrient uptake while averting many of the logistical concerns with hydroponics or aeroponics. Livestock are also extensively genetically engineered for faster growth, disease resistance, and ability to metabolize cheaper feed plants. Heavy labor is done mostly by agricultural robots and drone swarms, with farmers dispatching and instructing them and also serving as a bridge between automated systems in tasks where the gaps between them are impractical to automate. This form is basically considered mainstream agriculture, responsible for about 62% of the Kyanah homeworld's food production.

With advanced 3rd order agriculture--or 3.4-order agriculture--the genetic engineering gets even heavier, as feed crops and livestock alike are modified to be neurally interfaced with technology to automatically communicate health and growth analytics, and certain movement patterns and biological impulses can be triggered via an app. This allows for seamless integration between feed crop and livestock farming systems, with optimal mixtures of feed crops being grown and "told" not to interfere with each other, while livestock can simply live in the field and be "told" what to eat and where to move, and both of them can "tell" farmers when their health is threatened so that the issue can be resolved immediately. This allows for the level of efficiency and control provided by conventional factory farms, without the need for expensive containment structures and feed transport and delivery systems.

Advanced third-order agriculture has only been around for 20-30 Earth years, and is only dominant in a few farming city-states in the Meatbucket with economies built around high-tech agriculture, though it has seen limited adoption in other affluent regions. Third order agriculture, especially advanced third order agriculture, has attracted considerable controversy, as genetic modifications are often proprietary, with breeding or control systems being paywalled to extract subscription fees from farmers; in the past few years, open-source agriculture and the hacker-farmer subculture have emerged in the Meatbucket as a backlash to this. To a human observer, an advanced third-order farming operation might indeed seem quite eerie, with livestock arrayed through a decidedly artificial-looking field in a near-perfect grid pattern with no apparent containment mechanism, all eating and moving in unison, and none wandering off or exhibiting any sort of randomness seen in normal livestock.

While the technology for fourth-order agriculture has been around for a few decades, and has been considerably commercialized, there is nowhere where it actually dominates over third-order or advanced third-order. Fourth order agriculture primarily revolves around customization, quality, and completely divorcing food production from anything resembling plants, animals, or natural ecologies; where advanced third-order agriculture blurs the line between farming and manufacturing, fourth-order shatters it. Instead of breeding and feeding real livestock, microbes are genetically modified to produce edible meat-like structures--actual meat in a biochemical sense, rather than some sort of meat substitute. The Kyanah have somewhat dragged their feet on fully developing and commercializing fourth-order agriculture; this is not despite their advanced technology and obligate carnivory, but because of it.

Due to their inherently carnivorous nature, Kyanah society has never seriously questioned the ethics of eating animals, so any impetus to develop synthetic meat would be purely economic, and economically, it is very difficult for alternative methods to catch up with the sheer efficiency and production volume of third-order and advanced third-order agriculture. Cost-wise, fourth-order of agriculture is technically cheaper, but the cheapest products are generic, homogenous ground meat with artificial flavoring to mimic real animals, while higher quality and more complex meats tend to lose to established methods. Complex and heterogenous creations made from synthetic meat do exist, but to be profitable, they normally have to be sold as the flesh of extinct animals (with advanced AI and paleontology, Kyanah scientists can often make a decent guess at what they may have tasted like!) or mythological beasts, or have some other marketing gimmick. Though such things aren't generally for everyday eating due to the cost; for everyday eating, city-states rich enough to afford the up front capital to develop meat-growing tanks usually also have middle classes rich enough to demand high-quality fresh meat, so fourth-order agriculture currently is a minority everywhere on the planet, encompassing 9% of global food production. In space, it's a different story, as having any livestock at all (especially the large herbivores that Kyanah evolved to eat) is wildly impractical, so synthesizing meat with microbes is a necessity. This would be doubly true during their invasion of Earth, as transporting livestock across interstellar space in their primitive and heavily mass-limited starship would be a ludicrous pipe dream, and relying solely on premade rations would be, honestly, quite stupid.