Rebuilding From the Collapse (Open RP, PMT) Sign-up/ OOC

[Duhon]

Sooooo... orange is insular southeast Asia, Australasia, and Taiwan, yes?

[Maineiacs]

Sooooo... orange is insular southeast Asia, Australasia, and Taiwan, yes?

As well as everything in the Pacific except Hawai'i and Midway. Are you interested? You're certainly welcome to join.


Very belated EDIT: You also wouldn't have Clipperton Island off the west coast of Mexico.

[Duhon]

Sooooo... orange is insular southeast Asia, Australasia, and Taiwan, yes?

As well as everything in the Pacific except Hawai'i and Midway. Are you interested? You're certainly welcome to join.

i am interested, but i'd need to craft a reason to integrate so many diverse nations together

eu-style setups are still fine, correct?

[Maineiacs]

As well as everything in the Pacific except Hawai'i and Midway. Are you interested? You're certainly welcome to join.

i am interested, but i'd need to craft a reason to integrate so many diverse nations together

eu-style setups are still fine, correct?

You can create any government type and any backstory you want as long as it integrates elements mentioned in the OP.

[Wasted Genius]

As well as everything in the Pacific except Hawai'i and Midway. Are you interested? You're certainly welcome to join.

i am interested, but i'd need to craft a reason to integrate so many diverse nations together

eu-style setups are still fine, correct?

Welcome to the game! Maybe an extended ASEAN type treaty organization at first or a rework of TPP without the T? We can work with whatever you come up with!

[Wasted Genius]

Edit 1: Changed recommended music selection from Pete Drake and His Talking Guitar, "Forever" to Baccara, "Yes Sir I Can Boogie", partly because Forever's nice and all but "Yes Sir I Can Boogie" is exquisite late 70's disco. A perfect description of this performance comes from the YouTube comments, "Two Spanish women singing in English to a German audience."

My idea for this recommended music was imagining the music the dancing girl would be hearing in her head. But then I thought, maybe the music we should be hearing is the music that was playing in Jerry's head as he was watching her. A close second was Stravinksy's "Rite of Spring - Sacrificial Dance" which is probably a more accurate description of what she was doing. But it's Stravinsky, which can be a kind of buzzkill if you're not into the whole neoclassical thing. You can see it at https://youtu.be/d6d8wacBjPQ

Edit 2: Fixed text / link for the new recommended music selection, because TBH, it was late and I got so wound up in changing the URL (which is no small feat of precision on a mobile phone), that I forgot to change the label. There was no intent to Rick Roll (or in this case Baccara Roll) anyone.

[Wasted Genius]

Maineiacs - just a quick technical question. How does time progress in RFTC?

I'm fine with it being fluid in the moment - time passes more slowly in a storytelling series, but in the background it is moving at a pace like a RL month (or week) is a year in RFTC time. As usual I'm totally open to discussion. 1 month RL to 1 year RFTC would keep the pace slow enough to accomodate storytelling, but it may be too slow if you're waiting for a transit to/from Mars. The opposite is true for 1 week to 1 year RFTC - that would mean a day goes by every 27 minutes (my math skills have deteriorated from iffy to horrible, so check my calcs).

Today's theme music (best fit to the mood edition): Public Enemy, "Welcome to the Terror Dome" https://youtu.be/2BBgOlfSLQI

[Maineiacs]

Maineiacs - just a quick technical question. How does time progress in RFTC?

I'm fine with it being fluid in the moment - time passes more slowly in a storytelling series, but in the background it is moving at a pace like a RL month (or week) is a year in RFTC time. As usual I'm totally open to discussion. 1 month RL to 1 year RFTC would keep the pace slow enough to accomodate storytelling, but it may be too slow if you're waiting for a transit to/from Mars. The opposite is true for 1 week to 1 year RFTC - that would mean a day goes by every 27 minutes (my math skills have deteriorated from iffy to horrible, so check my calcs).

Today's theme music (best fit to the mood edition): Public Enemy, "Welcome to the Terror Dome" https://youtu.be/2BBgOlfSLQI

Keep it slow for now, as I won't be able to post until the weekend, I was planning a bit more internal politics until Ares 2 launches, at which time, Ill pick up the pace a little (I hope). I'm leaning toward your idea, with ad hoc adjustments if they seem appropriate, and we can rethink it later if we need to.

[Wasted Genius]

Interesting article about nuclear fusion research. Relevant to nations developing fusion energy as a part of their storyline.

"Permanent magnets stronger than those on refrigerator could be a solution for delivering fusion energy" -Phys.org

[Wasted Genius]

Feel free to comment on anything you see in this OOC thread or the IC thread. You don’t have to be an IC player to comment here, any and all are welcome. But please try to keep the comments on point and not just random stuff. If you want to roleplay in the IC thread, pick an unoccupied region on the map and claim it here in the OOC thread with Maineiacs.

I’m including this technical note about nuclear rockets here so as to not bog down the Get Your Astronaut To Mars storyline with my inadequate knowledge and capacity to explain technical subjects.

This video on YouTube, Vintage Space| A Primer on Nuclear Rockets and Why They’re Awesome in Space does a great job of telling the history, physics and technology of nuclear drives.

My main takeaway from the video was that nuclear rockets are about twice as efficient as chemical rockets. This leads to a faster transit time to Mars and/or a greater payload capacity. It’s also important to note that chemical rockets have limitations on how much mass they can get moving, even in space. But more about that later.

[Wasted Genius]

PSA’s Mars Transfer Program is a (cynical) homage to NASA’s Space Transportation System project and one of its components, the Space Shuttle. NASA's STS is an example of how bureaucracy impacted scientific progress and engineering designs by promoting competition between government administrations, the Pentagon, NASA and corporate lobbies. See Curious Droid| Was the Space Shuttle Doomed From the Beginning? for a discussion of the causes of flaws and inefficiencies in the Shuttle Program for a real-life example of this.

In the prehistory to the “Get Your Astronaut to Mars” series, the ”Space Eggs: For when it absolutely, positively does NOT have to be there overnight” post says that the PSA’s Mars Transfer Program originally used liquid / solid chemical rockets. We find out later that this is due to an administrative snafu in an accounting department of one of the many agencies that make up the Pacifica Space Agency Steering Committee.

The PSA’s Mars Transfer Program ends up being an overbuilt, under-utilized and slow method of getting cargo to an orbit around Mars. It doesn’t accommodate astronauts and it doesn’t land anything on the surface, but it does precisely meet the requirements of the committee to provide cheap transport to Mars by reusing leftovers from previous space projects. This is similar to what happened with NASA after the Apollo program was cancelled.

Feel free to comment on anything you see in this OOC thread or the IC thread. You don’t have to be an IC player to comment here, any and all are welcome. But please try to keep the comments on point and not just random stuff. If you want to roleplay in the IC thread, pick an unoccupied region on the map and claim it here in the OOC thread with Maineiacs.

[Wasted Genius]

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The inspiration for the IC series title: "Get Your Astronaut To Mars"

Get Your Astronaut to Mars

buzzaldrin.com

[Wasted Genius]

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Primary terrestrial locations of the Pacifica Space Agency

Pacifica Space Agency administration is headquartered in the nation's capital, Anaheim, CA, along with all of the other Pacifican government agencies.

For the purposes of the IC storyline, there are technical operations divisions where a lot of the engineering and development work happens. These are the locations:

Long Beach, CA - RL Boeing's Seal Beach facility is a contributor to the DARPA spaceplane project. IC it’s been consolidated into the Long Beach office and it's a design and engineering center for the Skylon SSTO spaceplane, currently in 4th generation development.

Anaheim, CA - RL the Boeing/Rockwell/Autonetics campus is now closed, this is an homage to my cool RL uncle who used to engineer Minuteman III missiles there. IC they design precision guidance systems and space systems diagnostic equipment.

Laguna Niguel, CA - "the Ziggurat building", in RL this building was rumored to be a first wave target for Russian nukes in the 1970s. IC, it’s a high-security facility for cutting edge AI research and a vast data warehouse of digital archives known as "the Dataverse" to laypersons, or the "the Lake" to data management insiders, or "the Swamp" to the DBAs who actually maintain it.

San Clemente, CA - RL the old TRW site, “Star Wars Central” in the 1980s. Back in the day I saw one of the lasers they were building there, it was as big as a semi-truck. IC it’s a space communications facility.

San Diego, CA - RL Lockheed and Northrop Grumman campuses. IC it’s a design and production plant for SABRE hypersonic engines and carbon-carbon wing/lifting body components.

Lancaster, CA - RL, nothing. There is nothing to see in Lancaster in real life. Nothing. IC there’s an enormous factory for building Skylon spaceplanes.

Adelanto, CA – RL, it’s home to the Southern California Logistics Airport, which boasts of a precision instrument runway of 4.58 km. IC it supports the Skylon fleet and is the main port for SSTO operations. In both RL and IC, it is hotter than hell there in late summer. Year-round there is a kind of bizarreness that you find in most high desert towns.

Hillsboro, OR (near Portland) In RL, last stop westbound on the Trimet and an Intel facility. IC, no one knows why this one exists yet. It is rumored the they are researching AI, autonomous space vehicles and space drones. No one has ever met an employee that works there or has ever been on campus.

Feel free to comment on anything you see in this OOC thread or the IC thread. You don’t have to be an IC player to comment here, any and all are welcome. But please try to keep the comments on point and not just random stuff. If you want to roleplay in the IC thread, pick an unoccupied region on the map and claim it here in the OOC thread with Maineiacs.

[Wasted Genius]

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Tech note: L-CID - an evolutionary step in artificial intelligence

WG comment: L-CID will play a significant role in the story of Pacifica, but I didn't want to disrupt the plot with a wordy tangent. I'll leave that here in the OOC where it belongs. And credit where credit is due - the name L-CID was influenced by (aka "jacked from") the character SID in the short lived TV series "UFO". UFO was a great creation of 1970s camp science-fiction. Check out the show's intro here. And check out SHADO and SID in action here.

L-CID stands for Library – Cybernetic Inferential Database. And yes, this is one of those contorted acronyms like the ones super-geek scientists come up with and think they are clever for doing so. In this case the super-geek scientist was Dr. Peter Wilburton, a stone-cold killer of AI systems development.

As Dr. Wilburton intended, L-CID sounds like the name El Cid, the undefeatable knight of Spanish lore. And the name doesn’t completely misrepresent the system’s function for the sake of this connection.

L-CID started as simply “CD” (the Comprehensive Database), an app created for the Office of Inspectors General (OIG) with the intention of automating the audit process across all government databases. After its initial success at streamlining audit reports, Dr. Wilburton took over the program and expanded it by adding modules that focused on certain frequently required capabilities. This collection of modules was known as the CD Library. It didn’t take much to move the letters around, add one, change up their meaning and create L-CID. But it wasn’t just the name that changed. L-CID was the beginning of an evolution in computing.

As the government grew and multiplied exponentially, its databases grew and multiplied even more exponentially. Agencies, departments and offices were (mostly) able to maintain their own information, but for the one office charged with ensuring the integrity of data across the sprawling Pacifican government, the task was becoming dangerously unmanageable.

Everyone was using CD and hundreds of millions of queries were hitting hundreds of thousands of databases. Tables were being accessed and joined in perverse and obscene ways (from a data normalization perspective). And then there was the scourge of Excel. Excel with its ancient query and reporting utilities pounded the system constantly, hooking into keys and values that were never meant to be hooked into and sometimes even attempting to scrape terabytes of data remotely. Give a clerk Excel and login credentials to a database and you’ve got a security threat greater than any black hat would ever pose. It all added up to a kind of chaotic data complexity that had never been seen by mankind.

This is when Dr. Wilburton turned L-CID into the crusading knight of the Pacifica Dataverse. He devised L-CID to autonomously roam anywhere throughout the domain. He then seeded it with the best systems map available and sent it on a mission to create for itself an infinitesimally fine-grained index of every bit of data, every user ID and all security accesses and trust relationships across the vast government organization. It was a colossal undertaking that an army of analysts and engineers would never have been be able to complete. L-CID did it in less than 24 hours.

There was good news and bad news though. First the bad news: Being a deep-learning AI, L-CID made up its own way of cataloging the information it discovered. As far as Dr. Wilburton could tell this involved at least 11 dimensions and was therefore impossible for anyone to interpret in a meaningful way. But there was the good news: You could pose natural language questions to L-CID and it would produce a pretty good response. And as L-CID got better at interpreting questions, it could be charged with simple tasks and low-level abstractions, as long as you carefully defined the criteria and gave meaning to the connections between them. L-CID was advanced, but it was in no way sentient, at least not to Dr. Wilburton’s knowledge.

The fully AI version of L-CID (known as “Dot-0”) became the single most important tool for the auditors of the OIG. Everyone else got a dumbed down Dot-1 version that was pretty good at making a spiffy looking report or chart based on the output of a commonly available query engine. The users especially liked the voice activated interface that allowed them to build a query just like they would ask their home automation devices to start the laundry. But unbeknownst to their users, the Dot-1’s were in constant contact with Dot-0, providing it with whatever intel it asked for. And sometimes these Dot-0 requests went far beyond simple feedback about databases.

[Wasted Genius]

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Footnote 1: The Politics of Coffee

Bruce’s “coffee” is an analog of actual brewed coffee. This imposter emits as a thin, weak stream from the nozzle of an over-used, under-maintained Keurig apparatus, said stream consisting of water heated to a tepid 89 degrees C, which has been forced through a lime-deposited plastic tube into the pre-ground and compressed contents of a non-biodegradable but theoretically recyclable “K-cup”, which due to the bulk buying policy of OIB Investigative Services is a full 13 months past its best-by date and has been subjected to temperature and humidity extremes well beyond its engineering tolerances.

There was a disappointingly small but rageful social media uprising within the OIG district offices where existing Coffeetek Neo DFB machines were replaced by the Keurigs in the name of employee convenience. This was a marketing feature (lie) pushed by the Keurig institutional business development team who were targeting Coffeetek as a weaker competitor. Let it be known that the Coffeetek Neo DFB was a superior technology in the heated beverages vending market space and that facilities administrators should be wary of a Keurig institutional sales teams’ wild distortions of end-user preferences.

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[Wasted Genius]

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Footnote 2: The OIB Inspection Services User Customizable Dashboard and L-CID Dot-0 Alerts Sub-pane

“The dashboard” was an add-on feature of the OIB Inspection Services Case Management System designed to provide each OIB user with a summary of everything that was important with respect to achieving his, her or their objectives. The value-add feature (lie) behind this add-on was that it was fully customizable by the user and thus would stimulate their engagement with the Case Management System. Marketing studies had shown that the primary cause of case neglect was the lack of daily caseload visibility and un-alerted violations of case velocity metrics. That is, unattractive cases tended to get pushed into a dark recess and forgotten like a dweeb at a sophomore dance. The intention of the dashboard was to thrust the dweeb-cases into the middle of the dancefloor where they could continue to be ignored in the full disco ball sparkling dimness until a chaperone (manager) forced a more socially adept kid (case analyst) to dance with them.

This customizability was of course and however subject to management approval and system privilege limitations. For example, users felt that having a daily newsfeed sub-pane would be useful, but management found this to be distracting from assigned work and replaced it with a graph comparing the users caseload with the assigned metric and with the average performance of other users case portfolios. The users turned this into a kind of under the table Hunger Games betting market. In this marketplace of cynicism, you could almost hear the cannon’s boom if a user’s graph line fell too far below average for too long.

The dashboard had some oddities based on access privileges as well. Any given user would typically have two or three panes that were perpetually empty showing only a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in it followed by “Access Denied” as the only explanation. For those sub-panes there was an accompanying sense that the user should be in the know but wasn’t quite important enough to be included in the informed elite set.

Finally, there was the sub-pane that was included and functional on each and every dashboard, the L-CID Dot-0 Alert Sub-pane which was autonomously and meticulously tuned by the L-CID AI itself to match each individual’s work assignment. Not even management could alter this. And like the performance graph, users tended not to use it as intended by its designer but instead as primarily an inter-office gossip sheet.

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[Wasted Genius]

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Footnote 3: Management By Objectives is still alive and useless in the 22nd century

As far as Bruce’s performance objectives (commonly referred to as "MBOs") were concerned they amounted to Bruce preparing for and attending the mandatory beginning-of-year meetings with two or more of his upstream accountability matrix supervisors where he was asked with great sincerity about what he thought would improve his performance (with the assumption that his performance could and should be improved, in perpetuity). While the idea was to empower Bruce in determining his own work, in reality this was just a high-stakes guessing game, like when your significant other lets you pick the restaurant or like the whole Valentine’s Day logistical dance of commerce and romance.

Bruce’s (passionately) self-designed objectives were required to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-oriented. This was so that his no-excuses, accountable behind could be kicked around the neutral-zone conference room in a specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-oriented fashion during the end-of-year review session.

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[Wasted Genius]

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Footnote 4: MBOs - Management By Objectives: A Wikipedia definition followed by a short, opinionated and bitter rant

If you’ve never heard of MBOs before, consider yourself lucky. But even if you haven’t directly been part of an MBO program, you’ve probably been subject to its demands or exposed to its negative effects in your workplace or other establishments you frequent.

First, the Wikipedia definition of Management By Objectives:

“Management by objectives (MBO), also known as management by results (MBR), was first popularized by Peter Drucker in his 1954 book The Practice of Management. Management by objectives is the process of defining specific objectives within an organization that management can convey to organization members, then deciding how to achieve each objective in sequence. This process allows managers to take work that needs to be done one step at a time to allow for a calm, yet productive work environment. This process also helps organization members to see their accomplishments as they achieve each objective, which reinforces a positive work environment and a sense of achievement. An important part of MBO is the measurement and comparison of an employee's actual performance with the standards set. Ideally, when employees themselves have been involved with the goal-setting and choosing the course of action to be followed by them, they are more likely to fulfill their responsibilities. According to George S. Odiorne, the system of management by objectives can be described as a process whereby the superior and subordinate jointly identify common goals, define each individual's major areas of responsibility in terms of the results expected of him or her, and use these measures as guides for operating the unit and assessing the contribution of each of its members.”

That’s very nice. But that’s rarely how it works in the real world. As superficially illustrated in Footnote 3, the system becomes a maze of interpersonal dysfunction, asymmetrical empowerment and accountability issues, favoritism and layer upon layer of patches to these problems as the program matures. And the problems only accelerate when compensation, bonus or promotion incentives are added to the system. One cretan, a certain Jack Welch, elevated the MBO program to what became known as “rank and yank” at General Electric. The practice was finally completely abandoned at GE in 2015, but not before Welch wrote a few books on the subject and infected elite post grad program syllabi with it, spreading the cancer throughout corporations and gullible SMB copycats the world over.

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[Wasted Genius]

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Footnote 6: The Ziggurats - Chet and Mike

In the 22nd century, Laguna Niguel, California is probably best known as a bedroom community whose most significant contribution to Orange County is the daily outflux and later influx of commuters bound to and from anywhere else than their 4 bed 2.5 bath single family detached slice of the American dream.

At one time in the late-mid 20th century, Laguna Niguel was the hinterlands of Orange County and so when one of the darlings of the military-industrial complex needed expansion space away from its current Soviet ICBM targeted R&D facility, the federal government was happy to arrange the construction of a 7 story reinforced concrete bunker disguised as a postmodern architectural homage to indestructibility in the form of a stepped pyramid. In fact the building became known simply as "The Ziggurat" though its formal name would become The Chet Holifield Federal Building after the aforementioned darling of the military-industrial complex went through a rapid series of mergers and divestitures that resulted in it not needing the space after all.

In the early 21st century, the building that was designed to withstand all but a vaporization-grade attack from an adversary that itself had gone through some painful mergers and divestitures, became the home to what the public was told was among other things a federal regional document archive. The official story was that the documents were regional cultural treasures but rumor had it that the vast bulk of them were nothing more than pallets of cancelled paper checks leftover from an era when that was the way to pay for things. These regional cultural treasures were later moved to Riverside in an effort to consolidate and reduce the cost of archival maintenance, leaving Chet Holifield underutilized for decades.

With the advent of the digital age, it was discovered that the Ziggurat could be useful for storing archives of a different kind. By the time The Collapse rolled around, the building had been almost entirely converted to the largest catastrophe-survivable data center in Southern California.

As the Pacifican government expanded and surveilled everything, including government expansion and surveillance activities, the need for data storage grew exponentially. So they built a bigger Ziggurat, this one named after Michael Eminescu, the founder and Executive of Pacifica. To the people that worked at the Dataverse housed there, the buildings became known as Chet and Mike.

Chet, the 100+ year old structure that was built to survive a half-megaton direct hit was still structurally sound and quite well preserved due to meticulous facilities maintenance through the decades. But Mike was twice as big, twice as tall, twice as sturdy, half as old and much more energy efficient. So all of the intense heat generating data warehousing activity was moved there. Chet was again nearly abandoned. Until L-CID came along with its need for data proximity and protection from everything including H-bombs and prying eyes.

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Note: This is a mostly fictional account of the history of 1) Laguna Niguel, California; 2) the aerospace industry in Orange County and 3) the Chet Holifield Federal Building. It’s only purpose is to create a facade of authenticity for the story, because studies show that if you put something in a footnote, no matter how sketchy it is, people will tend to believe it more than if they read it in the body of the text. This is of course false. There is no study like that. Anyway, if you somehow got here while looking for facts, you’re in the wrong place, turn back now. And for chrissake, tighten up the resource filtering in your Google searches.

[Wasted Genius]

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Footnote 5: GUIDs - Gwids, Goo-ids, or Gooey-Ds?

No matter how you pronounce it, a GUID is a Globally Unique IDentifier. Here’s a short copy-paste definition from Wikipedia:

“A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems. The term globally unique identifier (GUID) is also used, typically in software created by Microsoft.

When generated according to the standard methods, UUIDs are for practical purposes unique. Their uniqueness does not depend on a central registration authority or coordination between the parties generating them, unlike most other numbering schemes. While the probability that a UUID will be duplicated is not zero, it is close enough to zero to be negligible…. the probability to find a duplicate within 103 trillion version-4 UUIDs is one in a billion.”

Here’s an example of a GUID:

67d59bbf-d532-4013-9517-3546e7547502

In the story, L-CID frequently uses GUIDs to make inferences between two chunks of data. For example, instead of saying “I found evidence that the suspect was in the neighborhood and that he was left-handed,” L-CID would note something like: “{Attributes.flag}==#GUID 6706fd83-1969-43b3-bf25-4e87071608b6>>#GUID 6706fd83-1969-43b3-bf25-4e87071608b6” which to an AI is a lot easier and more information rich than translating it out to a natural language result.

For all of you developers out there of both professional or wannabe stripe, I admit I’m not a developer and my coding skills are just good enough to know which developer to call in order to get the job done correctly. So before you point out the flaws in my syntax, yes, you’re absolutely right, I have no idea what I’m talking about in this regard.