bintananth
behind a desk
When I came up with the idea which resulted in the story Tintagel I'm sharing here I wanted to avoid a flaw that all too many SciFi writers fall victim to: tossing out numbers which sound impressive but actually aren't.
Fr'ex: One of Babylon 5 movies has a massive fleet defending Earth from a Drakh fleet with a Shadow planet killer. 10,000km is mentioned as too far away to effectively hit anything.
Before I started writing I decided the ancient power (the Llyrians) which has been around for awhile and seen some shit would think of the Virgo Supercluster as basically their back yard and that each of their warships would be a Type I Civilization on the Kardashev scale all by itself while also being so ridiculously tiny that they're basically telling others "to us the laws of physics are merely polite suggestions".
I came up with 600 - only 25 of which are capital ships - as a reasonable number of active warships of all types for them to have.
I just looked up the number of Galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster. If I stick to that number for the size of the their fleet the odds a random Galaxy actually having a Llyrian battleship in it are worse than the odds of rolling a Nat1 on a d100.
I'm guilty of this too, but in the other direction.
Fr'ex: One of Babylon 5 movies has a massive fleet defending Earth from a Drakh fleet with a Shadow planet killer. 10,000km is mentioned as too far away to effectively hit anything.
Before I started writing I decided the ancient power (the Llyrians) which has been around for awhile and seen some shit would think of the Virgo Supercluster as basically their back yard and that each of their warships would be a Type I Civilization on the Kardashev scale all by itself while also being so ridiculously tiny that they're basically telling others "to us the laws of physics are merely polite suggestions".
I came up with 600 - only 25 of which are capital ships - as a reasonable number of active warships of all types for them to have.
I just looked up the number of Galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster. If I stick to that number for the size of the their fleet the odds a random Galaxy actually having a Llyrian battleship in it are worse than the odds of rolling a Nat1 on a d100.
I'm guilty of this too, but in the other direction.