Lies, Damn Lies, And Logistics...

In my opinion, one of the most neglected aspects of military science-fiction is the need for logistics. That’s probably true of most military fiction in general, but the old maxim that ‘professionals study logistics’ will almost certainly continue to be as true in the future as it is today. All navies have as many support ships as they do combat vessels, the proportion rising the further the fleet is to operate from its own shores. For any sort of expeditionary work, a range of vessels are required to keep combat ships fighting, and they have only grown in size and complexity over the years. Even the U-Boat fleets hunting the Atlantic in the Second World War had tenders they periodically visited for resupply.

The need for supplies must be solved in two ways. First is the construction and maintenance of a network of repair and refuelling stations in key strategic locations. This has featured heavily in a few Alamo books to this point - much of the action in ‘Stars in the Sand’ revolves around securing such an outpost, and ‘Aces High’ covers this as well. (As does the pending ‘Triple-Edged Sword’, but that’s for the future.) No ship should be forced to operate on the edge of its range as a matter of routine, though there are always compromises in the interests of economy and politics.

These bases, naturally enough, can be the source of stories themselves. While usually they will be under the control of the government they support, this is by no means always the case. Until recently, I could cite the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol as just such an example. Ascension Island, used by British forces during the Falklands (the British borrowing an American base on a British territory...nice and confusing.) Historically, you have examples such as Hong Kong, Goa, and the like. All examples that I will be...but that’s something I can’t talk about yet.

What’s more interesting here is the fleet trail. One of the general assumptions of the Triplanetary setting is the fabricator, a device that is essentially an nth-generation 3D printer. This has advantages, in that many spare components can be replicated, but it does still require source materials to work from, and the more complicated the device, the harder it is to build. It’s extremely helpful, but it isn’t a replicator.

Even with such an advantage, a fleet train is still needed. Tenders provide engineering support for major jobs, as well as additional fabricators - not to mention that someone has to build the outposts and spacedocks. Fuel can be refined on site, but that requires specialist equipment; Tankers might well travel to their location empty, and start hunting down ice as soon as they arrive, acting almost as temporary space stations. Transports are needed to move personnel around in large numbers, though I still think that many new crew will find themselves on whatever ship is heading their way.

All of this is ignoring the Espatiers. In the doctrine I’ve established for the Triplanetary Fleet, all capital ships carry a platoon of troops - theoretically for boarding actions, though of late they have also been used for planetary work. (A post of its own for the near future.) There are always going to be circumstances where a capital ship is not needed but the Espatiers are, or they will be needed in numbers larger than platoon size. I’ve dealt with this in two ways. The stopgap is the Assault Carrier - small fighter carriers converted to carry troops, similar to the Commando Carriers operated at various times by the Royal Navy, many of which originally flew fighters.

That’s overkill, though. What is really needed is something that can carry a company of Espatiers, three platoons and a command unit, as well as - preferably - operate a large number of shuttles and aerospace fighters. There’s no suggestion that they will engage in space combat, not without protection from other warships, so they don’t need a lot of the systems that warships have. The model I’m using here is RN again - HMS Ocean, a helicopter carrier built in a rather...civilian way. And probably the most-used ship in the Fleet since it was launched.

No, this is not ideal. In a better world the larger assault carriers would be retained. They’re better, with more capability and more survivability. I’m illustrating a point that I almost never see in military science-fiction - that the best approach will not always be used. I cite as an example...frankly, every military organization in the world. Each has equipment that was the result of a compromise that didn’t result in the best outcome - often, not even the best for the money that was spent. Sometimes doctrine turned out to be flawed, sometimes technology, sometimes politics just gets in the way.

In the Triplanetary Universe, the latter is what happened. The Assault Carriers were expensive to run, and the new Progressive President was brought in to cut military spending as part of his election pledge. Given the current threat levels, that wasn’t practical...but that didn’t mean that corners wouldn’t be cut. The Assault Transports are cheaper, faster to build, and have fewer eggs in each basket. (Spoiler Alert - Losing an Assault Carrier in the Battle of Hades Station really did not help their cause.) Furthermore, there is promise that the design can be adapted to civilian use, meaning a potential export market - often difficult with warship designs.

Even that didn’t completely solve the budgetary problems. So, out of the four planned Assault Transports, two get delayed by a couple of years. (Technically two will be built, but intended for sale rather than deployment with the Fleet. As the Ottoman Empire learned at the start of World War One, that can have interesting ramifications if wars start at the wrong time.) As a stopgap, two Light Assault Transports are commissioned - and these are conversions of new-build Rhodan-class Transports. Actual civilian ships.

I’m reaching back into the canon here a little. On two occasions (more spoilers!) Rhodan-class ships have been used by other governments in a military role. Someone in the Confederation Government was obviously paying attention, and decided to follow the crowd. Now, these have one single advantage - they are quick to convert. A matter of a few months. The problem is that all they can do is deliver two platoons (yes, two platoons each - they can manage a company between them) to the surface. No real support capability, no aerospace fighter squadron, no defence systems.

Strange as it may seem, these ships aren’t completely crazy. Even when all four planned Assault Transports are ready, they will still have a role, if only for moving Espatiers around or for training purposes. They might be surprisingly useful - but not in the rule that expediency is going to force them into for a few years. And yes, we’re seeing T.S.S. Hengist in Triple-Edged Sword, which is where all of this began...

What Does An Operations Officer Do?

We’ve all watched Star Trek. At least, I’m going to go ahead and presume at least some level of familiarity with the show. In both TNG and Voyager, one of the key bridge roles was ‘Operations Officer’, a role that, frankly, was undefined. On the Enterprise, it was trusted to Starfleet’s only android, while on Voyager, it was given to a rookie right out of the Academy, but in both cases, the primary role seemed to be ‘Exposition Officer’. If something was coming towards the ship, they would report it. Frankly, it always seemed to me like it was a combination of the Navigator and Science Officer from TOS, but...that didn’t really make sense to me.

Nevertheless, when it came time to start work on Price of Admiralty, I went ahead and included one in the crew roster, more because there was a character I needed to put into the ship rather than because I had any clear idea what his role would be. I knew what everyone else was doing, but I was still vague on this one. Something to do with administration, perhaps, I thought - and then I went ahead and added an ‘Administrative Officer’ to the roster over the course of the books, though the role vanished rather quickly.

Finally, after a lot of thought, I managed to define it, and it is this. The Operations Officer is responsible for all Bridge Operations; all of the watchstanding officers report to him, and his task is to manage shift rotations, supervise training and discipline, cross-training and emergency cover. He also acts as third-in-command of the ship, after the Executive Officer. A needed role, something that places him into a story context - as many scenes on Alamo will always take place on the Bridge. (That’s a key element. If you want a character to be something other than a name, he needs a reason to be involved in whatever the ship is doing. Which is why Medical Officers can be damned difficult to write for.)

Security Officer is another role which has evolved somewhat in my mind. Initially, it was Security in the classic ‘Star Trek’ sense, a group of guards responsible for protecting key areas of the ship, but when there is a platoon of Espatiers on board, that seemed rather redundant; my in-universe explanation is that the different Planetary Fleets had different definitions, that the Callisto Orbital Patrol was rather more authoritarian than the Martian Defence Force, who had a different idea - that it was responsible for System Security, and was essentially a room full of hackers.

Even that is potentially subject to change, and if you have reached the end of the latest book, you’ll see what I mean; System Security was originally a responsibility of the Systems Officer, and periodically Quinn did agitate to get his staff back under his control. Now there is a new role, and you’ll see that coming into play in the next few books, and that is something that I got out of David Gerrold’s ‘World of Star Trek’ - the professional landing party, a dedicated team that can be sent down for missions.

It does make a lot of sense - and I can recommend the book where it is outlined in greater detail - but the short version is that it makes no sense for a senior officer to be leading such a team. I’ve tried to avoid landing teams being Captain, First Officer, et cetera, and this codifies that. A junior, but trusted, officer is given the command, with a team of specialists - paramedics, technicians, and so on. For combat missions, Cooper’s Espatiers get the job. That’s what they are there for.

Something that I have been trying to show is that the Fleet is evolving extremely rapidly. Five years ago, it was a begrudged collection of battlecruisers, cast-offs from the Planetary Fleets, responsible for patrolling close interstellar space. Oddly, it turns out that space is a lot more dangerous than anyone had thought, and a collection of war scares has led to a dramatic expansion of the fleet, both in terms of absorbing the Planetary Fleets into the Triplanetary Fleet (something that will be explored in pending books, but the three independent Planetary Forces don’t really exist any more except as reserve formations) and in the construction of new ships. Right now, the logistics tail is being expanded, as ships are operating far further than anyone had previously thought.

That changes the nature of the Fleet. More Admirals, more organization at home, more ships, and a clearer definition of what is needed. The Espatiers have gone from a specialized boarding force to one that is now required to operate on a variety of planetary surfaces, re-learning techniques that haven’t been used for centuries. Their technology is distressingly old in many ways, because no-one has researched ground-forces equipment in the Triplanetary Confederation, well, ever. Protected Forces is up-to-date, top equipment, but no-one thought that battles on open planetary surfaces would happen. Now the battle honors list Ragnarok, Jefferson, Haven, Thule, and are only going to expand.

The same in the fleet. Merging three sets of doctrines together is going to be a rough and ready process, especially as capital ship commanders tend to have greater latitude, though that is settling down. To an extent, the Captain can - at present - choose where he needs department heads. Take the position of Deck Officer, for example. Alamo managed without one for a long time, but my thought was that when Alamo had a Flight Commander on board, the position was superfluous, that a supervised Chief could handle the shuttles, and that the Sub-Lieutenant was needed elsewhere.

Having a Science Officer on board was a new requirement after Desdemona - and suddenly, the fleet found itself needing archaeologists, paleontologists, anthropologists. Certainly they would have had plenty of astrophysicists, chemists, cosmologists on hand - but in a space-based culture, how many archaeologists would there be? Just a few hobbyists, and that’s all they began with. Lots of re-training taking place, lots of people taking correspondence courses, new classes at the Triplanetary Academy.

Something else I haven’t really covered, because it hasn’t really come up in a story yet, but the Triplanetary Fleet now has its own training academy. Previously, there were three, at Mars, Callisto and Titan. While there are still three, they are now under a single control - in fact, there will be four shortly. In the transition period, there was a ‘Finishing School’ where the best candidates from the three training academies spent a year, but now it works differently. A four-year course on Mars as the central campus, with specialist training at Callisto, Titan, and Ragnarok - I have it in mind that ultimately, Ragnarok will be where all Espatiers are trained, as there they can do Protected Forces and Planetary Warfare.

There’s a lot more going on. I need to do a post on the ‘State of the Triplanetary Fleet’, and that’s high on my priorities list at the moment. I have plans for this blog, and there should be a window of a couple of weeks when I can work seriously on them - hopefully, I can bring these changes live for the launch of the next book, which is still scheduled for January 4th. There will be maps, as well - I spent about eight hours yesterday re-drawing the map of Known Space to incorporate the next dozen Alamos, as well as the spin-off...and yes, that’s happening, and I’ll be writing about that as well...

Suddenly, A Spin-Off...

About two years ago, I released ‘Spitfire Station: Triple-Cross’, a book that was intended to launch an Alamo spin-off series, featuring Logan Winter, Kristen Harper and others. My plan had been to continue this as a line of its own, but it just didn’t end up happening. The first book was straightforward enough to write, but I struggled with the next two, and eventually they ended up being written as Alamo novels, the characters I liked being absorbed back into the general storyline. (Ghost Ship and a very early version of Aces High, if you are interested.)

In retrospect, there were two problems. I’m happy with the book itself, I’ll say, I wouldn’t have released it if I wasn’t, but the feel was too similar to Alamo, whilst being rather more constrained. Tying the crew to a fixed base meant that stories had to come to them, and the contrast with Alamo stories - where the ship can always go to the adventure, rather than the other way around - gave me serious problems. It was an experiment, and one that resulted in a book I was happy with, so it wasn’t really a failure, and it did add a few characters I was able to get use out of again in later Alamo novels, though I think long-term Harper has been the only survivor.

The other mistake I made was to tie it in so closely to what was happening with Alamo. This was - and there are spoilers here - intended to be a way in which I could show events back home in the Triplanetary Confederation, while Alamo was off on its travels across the Cabal. What it meant in real terms was that any books I wrote tangled themselves up in events back at Spitfire Station, and that plotting was a lot more difficult than it otherwise needed to be - which tended to discourage me from writing more books to make use of that setting, as well as making it a little more daunting for new readers.

Since then, the galaxy has expanded considerably. When I wrote Spitfire Station, the potential enemies were the Republic and the United Nations, with the Cabal an unknown power. Now the Cabal, the Not-Men, and are out there waiting, and relations with the Republic are improving, recent events notwithstanding. Even so, there’s a lot of empty space still out there, and a lot of unknown systems and worlds to explore. Which means that, at least in my mind, there is room to do a completely independent set of stories set in another part of the universe.

There’s no real secret that I’ve spent most of this year trying to conjure up a second series of novels to run alongside Alamo. Trying and failing, in a variety of different genres, and I had just about resolved to give epic fantasy a try - I’ve got a plot lined up for that, at least, though I had strong reservations about it. Logically, science-fiction ought to have been my first goal, and I did play around with a lot of concepts. I think I’d ruled out a spinoff in my head, and the problem I was running into was that the setting was too similar to Alamo, and that it felt like I would be tripping over myself.

That...has changed. I won’t be doing the epic fantasy. Not for a while, anyway. Still pondering doing some historical tales, but that’s a story for a different time. You see, for the first time...well...ever, I have actually managed to come up with a spin-off that I actually want to do, one that is an independent story in the Triplanetary Universe, using new characters, with a different focus. To put it in brief, if Alamo is my answer to Star Trek, this is my answer to Firefly, though naturally, it is nowhere near as simple as that. Provisionally, I’m calling it ‘Forbidden Stars’, though that is just a working title that will change before release. This will focus on the crew of a civilian starship, doing some good old fashioned Trade Pioneering. (Shades of van Rijn, here, but that’s definitely a good thing in my mind.)

I’m not going to go into many details here, largely because everything is still firming up in my head, but I will say that I’m 99% of the way towards giving this a green light, and that I’m making some preparations to help with it. Primarily, that means finally putting down an Alamo Bible, and I spent yesterday undertaking a Strategic Defence Review of the Triplanetary Fleet, working out procurement for the next ten years. (Something on this will likely appear as an extra in Malware Blues, but the short version is a significant expansion of Fleet Logistics - Transports, Tankers, Tenders, to deal with the increasing length of supply lines to Fleet facilities. Everyone always forgets the Fleet Train…)

I’ve switched from a two-month rotation for Alamo releases to an eight-week - fifty-six days, and if I stick to that schedule, it means the next book will be out around January 4th, with the one after that out on February 29th...and the first of this new series out on March 28th. I’ll be doing my usual ‘New Year’s Day’ post, and by then I’ll know for certain what I’m doing, but it looks like you’re going to be getting more SF Adventure out of me than I was expecting in 2016...and I can’t wait to get started. I begin work on Malware Blues by the end of the week, and hopefully this time I won’t have to write it twice...

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A New Star Trek Series!

Yesterday, some astonishing news began to drift out across the Internet - that Star Trek was coming back to television in 2017. It had been long enough that there seemed to be a general suspicion that it was never coming back again, and yet, the gap between Enterprise and the New Series is narrower than that between the Original Series and the Next Generation. There are a lot of guesses flying around about what form the series will take, but given that there is almost nothing to work with...any attempt to work out exactly what is planned is meaningless. Largely because at this stage, everything will still be in the very early stages of pre-production. Rather than make any wild guesses, I’d like instead to offer some suggestions, in the vanishing unlikely event that anyone from CBS ever reads this…

Fire the Canon!

Star Trek has a hell of a lot of baggage, and most of it - in all honesty - doesn’t help much in the creation of an entertaining television show. It’s been more than a decade since it was on the air, and the ratings then were poor. This series is going to have to stand on its own - which means no reliance on what has gone before. (One thing I can guess is that this series will be set in the timeline of the films, and I’d recommend that in any case.) This does not mean never using anything from the franchise, but it does mean that creating new material is preferable. Let’s not see Ferengi, Vulcans, Bajorans just because we need to use them ‘for the fans’. New alien races, new civilizations.

Don’t Bring Back Kirk!

Don’t make this the voyages of the Enterprise. We’ve seen them. We know those characters. It’s a big galaxy - create a new ship, set it in a new time, and build new dynamics, new characters, new stories. (My personal choice would be Endurance, but that’s just me.) Make sure you have room for character conflict. Yes, make it a Starfleet crew - that’s what people will be expecting, and it makes a lot of sense - but new characters, please.

Getting onto the ‘advice’ section, don’t just automatically think ‘bridge crew’. Stories are a lot easier to tell when you have different points-of-view to play with, and some occupations are inherently more suited to adventure than others. The Captain is an obvious, unavoidable, the one who makes the call. For the others, well, the Security Chief should be the one leading landing parties as a rule, and someone defined by his character, not his role. Maybe the Medical Officer is working as an undercover Intelligence Agent, or something like that. Three main leads, and six secondary to make sure they have people to play off, and to allow for the ‘breakout cast’.

Human Solutions for Human Problems

There is nothing more boring than for the climax to a story to be drowned in technobabble. No-one cares. The beauty of science fiction is that it allows the portrayal of ourselves through a lens, and Star Trek always worked best when it dealt with the issues of today. Maybe the Federation is under attack by Bajoran Fundamentalists, or they are having to deal with Orion Pirates raiding their shipping lanes. In the real world, solutions to problems are rarely cut and dried, decisions are usually hard, and not everyone wins. Sometimes not even all the good guys win. Have these decisions have consequences - to the characters, to themselves, to the Federation, and show how those play out.

Going with season-long arcs is the best way to work here. Have the characters, in the first season, ordered to bring peace to a war-torn sector of space, between two factions - and neither of them is the bad guy. Have the Federation involved, with another major opponent - someone new, who we don’t know much about - fighting an intelligence war while trying to stop the real war. Thirteen episodes of that would work well - and stand-alone stories aren’t going to work as well in the ‘boxed-set’ world of today.

Want another one? Right, the ‘Silk Road’, a valuable trade route between the Federation and another interstellar power, currently under siege by pirates. They have to be cleared, but of course, they have reasons for their piracy, their worlds stolen by the power they are co-operating with. Though it shouldn’t be as simple as that. There, that’s two seasons written for them! (If you don’t use them, I probably will at some point.)

Don’t do exploration. Not ‘brave new worlds’. Either it becomes ‘Captain beams down to world that is strangely like Earth’ or it is ‘Well, that empty sector is mapped. Now onto the next one.’ (And there were Next Generation episodes that pretty much had that in mind. Have a reason, a goal. Be seeking the Astonishing Maguffin, with two other enemy ships after it as well. (Yes, you can do Star Trek meets Raiders of the Lost Ark, and damn it, you should.) Need a plot for an episode? Read a newspaper.

What is far more important than worrying about the trappings of Star Trek is what Star Trek can be at its best - an exploration of the future, and of ourselves. That’s what science-fiction is truly all about, at the core. And this can be a chance to grow a whole new audience. The Star Trek fans will watch this, and as long as it has good stories and characters, they’ll stay watching it. Far more important is to bring in new people, ones who might not have watched a show like this before. Just like the Original Series did, fifty years ago. Go Boldly.

November Status Report

I should begin with some apologies; I had meant to post several times last month, and none of them ended up happening. ‘Cage of Gold’ turned out to be an order of magnitude harder to write than I had been expecting, the original plot torn into fragments and cast aside, taking twenty thousand words with it - though a few elements did survive into the finished book. This isn’t the first time this has happened, the last notable example being ‘Ghost Ship’, and like that book, this has ended up as a four-POV book (Marshall, Orlova, Cooper, Salazar.) Late last night, I finally finished the draft, and the editing process has begun - so the good news at least is that the book will be out on schedule.

That will close out Alamo for this year, but I still have another Alamo to write, ‘Malware Blues’. I’ll be starting that around the end of November for a January release. One unforeseen side-effect of the changes to ‘Cage of Gold’ means that there is scope for a sequel in the near-future, to be titled ‘Triple-Edged Sword’, and that is currently scheduled for a March release. That’s going to launch a long arc, similar to the one that began in ‘Not One Step Back’ and ended with ‘Ghost Ship’, and I can’t wait to send Alamo off on its next big mission.

In the meanwhile, work on the fantasy series continues apace. I know a lot more about it than I did a few weeks ago, though I’m nowhere near starting work on it yet. I’ve got a couple of shelves to work through in preparation for it. I have pretty much decided that, epic fantasy or no, I’m going to be writing at around Alamo-length, seventy to eighty thousand words, with a release schedule paralleling Alamo. One key difference will be that this is intended as a single contained story, probably seven novels in total - at least, that’s how I’m plotting it out at the moment. (Tolkien is the model here - if you count the Hobbit, that’s pretty much how Lord of the Rings was structured - seven books at the seventy-thousand-word mark.)

I won’t pretend that all of this isn’t a little daunting as a concept! I’m going to the roots, re-reading Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied and the Mabinogion, as well as taking a long look at the theories of a Soviet-era mythologist named Vladimir Propp; I’m keeping away from the monomyth, but there are lot of other narrative theories that I want to explore with this one. My current plan - pencilled in at best - is to write the first of the books in February for an April release; I want to get back to a two-month buffer!