Interworld travel

 A key feature of the Roselight universe is that the compactness of the planetary system makes interplanetary travel relatively trivial. Although conventional spaceflight technologies are generally still required, the travel times are greatly reduced, making it far more practical for ordinary people to make the journey between worlds.

This ease of access leads naturally (or so I feel) to the construction of sustained (sustainable is another matter!) interworld infrastructure. The keystone of space travel in Roselight is a series of large space stations orbiting Rosa continuously amongst her children. These are cyclers - for the unfamiliar, a type of vehicle which follows an orbit that is resonant with the worlds it intends to connect. An Earth-Mars cycler, for example, follows a relatively quick arc between the two planets, then spends the rest of its orbit coasting while the planets come back into alignment to repeat the process. Although spacecraft visiting the cycler must expend similar ΔV to match its trajectory, the cycler must only be boosted up to speed once. Thus, the visiting spacecraft can be lightweight and spartan, while the cycler itself may grow arbitrarily large and luxurious - they are sometimes called "castles" for this reason.

For continuous service, you might operate many such vehicles on staggered routes such that windows are more frequently available. This is the case in the Rosa system, in which many of these vehicles operate like ocean liners, offering vast accommodations for thousands of passengers at a time, in a variety of comfort levels (depending, of course, on the passenger's socioeconomic class).

We see a lot of immigration happening between worlds - primarily poorer citizens seeking economic opportunities beyond their homeworld, or the more well-to-do seeking an idyllic life far from the lands they've known. Additionally people do, of course, just engage in interworld travel frequently to visit relatives, take vacations, and attend events; we first meet Noira when she is on leave from Arcturus Meridian to visit her family on pr'Sefone.

Noira can usually only afford to travel labor class, and even then pretty infrequently - the shipping lines continue to make enormous profits, justified by a rather dated notion of spaceflight as a luxury in itself. These conditions are densely-packed and poorly-furnished, with few amenities - though the voyages are only a few days long, which mitigates the unpleasant conditions somewhat. By comparison, cabin class is considerably more plush: fewer, larger cabins, with access to grand internal promenades and galleries - as well as casino-like amenities carefully tuned to maximize the financial value extracted from their patrons. Though ASMC won't pay for her travel independently (it comes out of her own pocket!), Noira earns considerably more in the engineering division, and so she's able to save up for a shared cabin for herself and her friends to visit the Worlds Fair.

The ultimate luxury offered by these liners is one yet unseen even in modern spaceflight: gravity. The liners themselves resemble the large Earth ocean liners of old, suspended from a network of kilometers-long cables tethered to heavy slag counterweights. By rotating the entire system end-over-end like a bolas, centrifugal forces simulate acceleration towards the floor of the inhabited section.

(Hmm, I may need to start using Imgur or something to host images, since blogger is pretty bad at it.)

Embarking & disembarking, meanwhile, is quite an adventure in itself. Reaching the cyclers, as mentioned, requires equivalent ΔV to making the interplanetary transfer alone. The most frequent architecture involves air-launched SSTO tenders that power their way up to escape velocity, running down the liners as they go sailing by. This is a relatively high-g maneuver, lasting somewhat longer than the usual uphill push into orbit, and culminating in a rendezvous of just a few hours at most. The nature of launch windows with available means several tenders will launch within a few seconds of each other, a hypersonic procession trailing the liners.

Since the stations can't afford a de-spin for boarding, the tenders approach along a tangent line, seeking to instantaneously match the velocity of the hull and interface with a long dynamic trapeze, like an exaggerated version of those used by airships to deploy and retrieve parasite fighters in the 1930s. These long mechanical arms hook onto dorsal load points and swing the tenders around, drawing them up into bays in the underside of the liners' hulls. Once berthed, crew and passengers alike transfer aboard the liner for their voyage.

Disembarkment is largely the reverse process. Since the tenders are designed for aerodynamic capture at their destinations, they need only to depart their host liners and adjust their trajectories to intercept the atmosphere. This act uniquely leverages the rotation of the liners: with their tangent lines aligned with the impulse required, the same trapeze can act to slingshot tenders towards their destination. The ΔV imparted in this way is relatively constant, so the departure time is the key parameter to adjust - though tenders by this point will retain residual propellant for fine-tuning their approach.

I have naught but a few sketches demonstrating this most recent iteration of the cycler design, though they offer a pleasant resemblance to classic Gilded Age ocean liners already. I do have some artwork of an older concept that lacked artificial gravity, giving it a more traditional spaceship appearance. Though function dictates the new design, I will strive to incorporate these aesthetics as I move forward!

We can see here that the trapeze for carrying tenders underneath was already present in an earlier design, as were another form of the large golden solar sails. The stepped decks and sloping walls are features I will seek definitely include, alongside the overall color scheme. It's honestly one of the best examples of the weird blend of steampunk, art deco, and sci/fantasy look I'm going for in this setting. Perhaps I'll redo that dramatic painting sometime!

Characters!

 So! I've developed a lot of the general story behind Roselight so far, and I promise more of the vague summary is coming soon!

But I wanted to take a moment to develop some of the character relationships that will become important in the rest of the story - and showcase these characters to begin with!

So here is the diagram I made for myself, which several sources report is illegible but pretty:

In fact, it's even less legible after the blogger compression, so don't even bother reading the tiny text - I'll just transcribe it below.

The four main characters we have so far are Maliyah, Clare, Noira, and Marion. Each arrow depicts one direction of a relationship between two characters, with a little associated text blurb to describe some of the main attributes of their dynamic. The text mostly describes how the starting point of the arrow feels/acts towards the endpoint of the arrow.

(Note that Marion only knows Noira, while the other three develop close friendship with each other.)

MARION -> NOIRA

Mentor

• Mostly professional, work-related
• Limited emotional support
• Wants the best for Noira; recognizes her potential and skill, but has a bit of a "vision" for her career
• Some inaccurate social views bleed over into a misguided protectiveness

NOIRA -> MARION

Student

• Looks up to Marion for guidance, primarily career-oriented
• Very impressionable, and tends to value his opinions on other matters more than is perhaps justified
• Perceives - mostly correctly - very high expectations, both as a professional and just in general as a person.
• Frets quite a bit about disappointing or letting him down, failing to meet his "vision"
• Will begin to pull pretty strongly from said vision as she learns more about who she is, culminating in The Big Revelation of Doom^TM

NOIRA -> CLARE

Confides

• Gets along very naturally despite very different overall demeanors
• Noira finds them very approachable & trusts them with more insecure feelings than Maliyah
• Admires their sociability/extrovertedness, tries to learn some self-confidence
• Somewhat envies their pretty clear sense of what they're doing in life - namely, having fun! Clare has ambitions, but doesn't depend on meeting external goals to enjoy the journey

CLARE -> NOIRA

Advises

• Clare is very good at helping people talk through their feelings, which Noira struggles with.
• Admires her apparent focus & interest in a particular niche, as they have difficulty finding specific interests
• Serves as a sort of grounding/reference point - am I being unreasonable? Clare will be honest with you.

CLARE -> MALIYAH

Assures

• Similar to relationship with Noira, but Clare knows Maliyah's tendencies much better by now & tends to know how she's feeling already
• Lots of friendly banter that stems from this mutual understanding
• Gently guides when she & Noira have trouble understanding each other

MALIYAH -> CLARE

Supports

• Maliyah's known Clare a long time, and they've both helped each other through rough times
• Provides a lot of just consistent support & company. Clare isn't specifically unhappy with their current job, but Maliyah visiting & hanging out often goes a long way
• Much like Noira, Maliyah often confides her insecurities to Clare, particularly when that barrier with Noira appears

MALIYAH -> NOIRA

Shares

• Wants to help make Noira feel at home, understood & supported
• Quietly knows Noira needs to see more of the reality of Orus, but is more than happy to explore with her...
• Sometimes has trouble relating to Noira's understanding of the world; occasionally inclined to dismiss views she perceives as naïve
• Still, ultimately comes to care strongly for her...

NOIRA -> MALIYAH

Learns

• Again, Noira is deeply impressionable, swept up in the excitement of discovery - exploring Orus and making new friends
• Really enjoys learning from & listening to Maliyah, even if much of her perspective is foreign
• Desperately wants to impress well on Maliyah, and to reciprocate the support that means so much to her...

Tech levels and other random stuff

A reminder that Roselight is sorta steampunk inspired! Probably set a little later as far as the genre goes, tech-wise probably more into the early 1900s – 40s is probably the latest any influences go.

In particular the Titanic (1912-1912) stands out as a good example of the sorta domestic-environment tech I want to have. Electric lighting and other basic features are definitely included, but most people won’t interact with much digital stuff at all.

Rosa’s frequent magnetic storms make the use of any electrical equipment difficult. Any long cables need to be shielded, adding additional cost to long-distance power and communications wires. Even still, they’re subject to outages or continuous interference, so quality is going to suck – transmission rates are probably slow like morse to combat noise (averaging out the small fluctuations over a longer tone?) and overall volume is low. Good excuse to have telegraph-like comms.

Radio transmissions can be used but are also susceptible to noise during storms. These are reserved primarily for high-priority applications – most individual ships, aircraft, and all spacecraft will have them, as they are used by traffic controllers. Major government/corporation/headquarters buildings use them, but not your everyday average citizens. They will generally have a single telecommunications line into their residence, or even just a single line shared by multiple residences (common in lower-income housing like Noira’s old tenement – the entire building had one line!).

Advanced microelectronics are also right out on account of radiation damage, especially in space. Flight computers are more akin to Apollo than this laptop, though we do retain lessons learned from thousands of years ago so we can probably make them more efficient even if the tech is forced to suck a bit. Spacecraft will each have their own simple flight computers that can do limited orbital mechanics – probably like patched conics, with hand-based tools used to calculate for other perturbations, like radiation pressure and n-body effects – much like the little hand-calculators used by pilots to account for crosswind and stuff. Aircraft might not have these systems at all, relying only on analogue sensors and readouts to give flight engineers info about the status of their aircraft. And individual consumers – sheesh. “Consumer electronics” is hardly even a thing, relegated to simple appliances – there are no “personal devices,” not a screen in sight, just people living in the moment.

Actually, that’s a good point; live image transmission is almost fully out of the question for now, although facsimile (wait THAT’s what fax means????) is a very real and prevalent technology. Can be used in news media to transmit images of important things (like exposé images, or faces of fugitive company employees), which could be printed on paper…

….Stone paper, probably, since regular paper is NOT in abundant supply. I’m sure there are forests and trees that can be used for wood products in Roselight, primarily in construction, but paper is probably not something that can be afforded when stone is RIGHT THERE. Indeed, most textiles come from a variety of different geologic sources – we’ve heard of petra already, one of the most common. pr’Sefone is a source of some plant-based fibers, similar to flax. 

Visions of irid'An

 I have made a small breakthrough in how I want to portray the capital world irid'An:

volmcano.

I've always conceptualized this planet as an archipelago world in my head, but I've struggled a little to give it its own unique flair. This is a small detail to add, but I think giving the islands these volcanic craters will really help flesh them out a little more. It also holds narrative meta-significance!

The majority of the Rosa system's population lives on irid'An, I think - a large number of tertiary economy, sorta upper-middle-class people that live generally well-off lives. Any big population center will have some lower-economy stuff like manufacturing, maybe some light farming - think the inner rings of human geography models. Obviously useful work is done here, but not much dirty work - aquaculture, produce/market gardening, "dairy" (still need to figure out what animals we have), etc. are the basest industries here. The lower parts of the economy, like ranching, field crops, mining, and heavy manufacturing, take place on pr'Sefone and Orus.

irid'An features big bustling marketplaces down in the crater floor where all the perishable goods are traded and sold; wholesale & retail happen as you move higher up the wall, with big business headquarters and stuff mostly in the uppermost city - again, tertiary sector of the economy.

A lot of technological development happens here, and much of the system's research is based on irid'An - a very utopian Tomorrowland kind of vibe here. New communications equipment (advances in radio transmission to allow more than just telegraph-type signals!! Wowie!!) is a big deal these days, and designing computer tech that can handle Rosa's intense radiation bursts is always a point of interest. Medicine and domestic tech is also developing well. However, some grittier research, like aircraft/spacecraft propulsion & heavier-than-aircraft design, takes place over on Orus, and of course that world famously houses ASMC, which has an entire division dedicated to mining tech.

Overall, despite the utility of the research done on irid'An, and the vaguely self-sufficient gardening and aquaculture and such, the population of this world is vey sheltered. Physically, they live in pretty little bowls with walls on all sides; narratively, they are shielded from the rest of the system and its social issues. pr'Sefone and Orus have distinctly dystopian attributes in plain sight - the destruction of those natural environments and poor labor conditions. irid'An's dystopia is more subtle: the people here are simply quite clueless about how bad things are outside, and the information is kept from them very efficiently.

ASMC's headquarters are based here, and Marion, Noira, and her friends will travel here for a special event: a Worlds Fair (no apostrophe!), showcasing new developments from around the Rosa system. It is here that Noira will start to gain unsettling inklings of the true nature of the work she's been doing...

Roselight Outline: Part 2

The time comes for Noira to return to Orus; her family sees her off, as they take one of the older land carriages up to Eterna, the capital city and spaceport of pr’Sefone. Telma is wary. We don’t know where the father in this family is…but Telma worries for her daughter. They exchange their sincere goodbyes, and there’s an unspoken feeling that neither understands; that somehow, things are going to be different…

Noira boards a shuttle carried high over Eterna by a large, double-hulled airship. Upon release, the shuttle ignites rocket engines to power its way free of the planet, chasing down an interworld cycler. As the shuttle docks to its new home, Noira takes a moment to look back down at the world she’s leaving behind, city lights glimmering in the perpetual dusk; far below, her family watches the brilliant star of the cycler sail away, off into the deep open sky.

The trip only lasts a few days, owing to the compact nature of the Rosa system, close-packed worlds whirling close to their mother. Noira explores some of the luxurious faculties of the cycler; it’s a permanent space station, furnished on the inside something like a vast ocean liner. The cycler coasts between worlds, catching and releasing transient fleets of passenger shuttles. Other passengers are more prone to socializing and partaking in extravagant recreation to pass the time; Noira mostly keeps to herself.

Arriving on Orus involves a violent and somewhat harrowing reentry, culminating in a balloon-arrested descent. In fact, the shuttles don’t “land” at all — the deployed envelope brings them to a halt high above ground level, allowing the safed vehicles to be towed into port by tug balloons.

Disembarking is its own ordeal. Life on Orus is controlled in totality by ASMC, which views the world as one big mining village and claims the right to police it accordingly. They form a sort of paragovernment agency that, among many other unpleasant policies, maintains an intrusive transportation security force. Noira isn’t surprised by this, having been through the process before, but we note that the screening makes her very uncomfortable, and she is relieved to make it through and get on with her life.

Her life on Orus is not nearly as peaceful and idyllic as the farm on pr’Sefone. Noira lives in dense, decrepit tenement housing, the only living standard she can afford even with her pretty strong qualifications. She lives on an island named Kaldus, which is fringe even by Orus standards — it’s near the edge of the more populated island chains, serving as a staging point to mines situated far out at sea. Overall, Noira’s not too fond of her life ashore, and views Ark Royal as her home while she’s on Orus.

While we’re with Noira, she witnesses the vessel Ark Duchess limping into port, apparently after some significant catastrophe. Depending on exactly how I want to spin the narrative, Ark Duchess may have fallen victim to an air raid, sustaining significant damage from gunfire and losing many crew members in the process. Alternatively, it may be returning from an open cast mine which suffered a catastrophic seawall collapse, damaging the ship and killing many mine workers. In either case, the incident reminds Noira (and the audience) of the hazards of her occupation, and the image of body bags being carried off the stricken vessel leaves her wary ahead of her upcoming voyage.

Noira prepares for her next voyage out on Ark Royal. On the way out, the ship will carry supplies and logistical support equipment out to a number of open-cast mines; in exchange, Ark Royal will pick up thousands of tons of bulk cargo and raw materials harvested from the mines, delivering them back to port to be processed in ASMC’s various plants and facilities. As a first for Noira, this voyage will take place primarily during the long night — Orus has a lengthy day/night cycle, so darkness will last what we would call about a week. This makes the voyage inherently more hazardous than those Noira has been on before; the seas are fraught with shifting floes of ice, and Orus’ place at the fringe of the Rosa system means not even the other worlds can illuminate its midnight skies.

Preparations begin around dusk, with Rosa’s disk lingering over the far horizon. Noira brings the majority of her belongings with her in luggage to board Ark Royal. At the port, we meet her mentor from the company, Marion Montaigne.

Marion is a senior engineer at ASMC who’s been helping to represent company interests as part of their partnership with Grand Ark Aeromarine. Arcturus Meridian, the supply line operator that Noira works for, requires input from both its parents to run smoothly: while Noira helps maintain GAA’s vehicle hardware, Marion ensures the machines support ASMC’s broader logistical needs. However, Marion has considerable technical prowess, and mentors Noira as she takes on more responsibility at AM. The night voyage is a part of this, as the environmental conditions are significantly more demanding as vehicle maintenance is concerned: lower temperatures, more turbulent air conditions, and a general inability to alight on the water in emergency situations.

They both know Noira is ready to shoulder the additional responsibility, even as she’s a bit nervous about the new situation. They talk about this at the gangway as the ship is prepared for its long voyage….

Roselight Outline: Part 1

I've got a lot of notes I've written on the general storyline for Roselight. So far they've only been maintained as a vague bulleted list, but I think a good exercise will be to convert this to prose. This isn't like proper written novel format, but will help organize my thoughts better, while introducing you, my dear blogreaders, to the story. So here goes!

~ ~ ~

Noira comes from a Sefones family who’ve been sustaining themselves on a small farm for generations. Small, family farms like these are starting to be outcompeted by growing industry; unsustainable practices mean creeping desertification further threatens smaller farms that can’t afford to repair and maintain the land. Noira’s family’s future is uncertain; her mother Telma presses her to follow her own path and pursue a career to support herself, to escape the worsening situation on pr’Sefone. Noira has many younger siblings, who are needed to help keep the farm alive. Although Telma hopes to help them all succeed, the proverbial eggs are sort of in Noira’s basket.

Noira learned some mechanical work from maintaining farm equipment. She got her first job beyond farming at Wollstone Air Freight, the operator of pr’Sefone’s ubiquitous airship lines, shipping passengers and cargo simultaneously across the plains. She deliberately shied away from working for the big industrial farming corporations, since they directly threaten her family’s livelihood.

Eventually, Noira’s connections at Wollstone landed her a more promising position working for Arcturus Meridian: a joint venture between Arcturus Steel and Mineral Company (ASMC), the preeminent mining corporation on Orus, and Grand Ark Aeromarine, the manufacturer of enormous airborne ground effect cargo ships. Leaving home was difficult, but she’s found her work enjoyable and made something of a home aboard the bulk cargo carrier Ark Royal. She’s been working this job for some time now, having participated in several week-length voyages servicing open-cast mines across the planet.

The main line of the story picks up when Noira visits home on pr’Sefone between voyages aboard Ark Royal. We see vast farms cultivating hardy crops which are, in a fantasy sort of way, vaguely recognizable but rather distinct from what we’re familiar with on Earth (the idea being they’re genetically engineered for the environment and output). Much of the world consists of small homesteads linked by long roads, although aerostat travel is common, creating a role similar to earthly sailing ships for transporting goods. However, those enormous corporations are carving roads and rails into the landscape, wearing out the soil and subjecting the world to ever-worsening dust storms. This only furthers the struggle of small farms which can’t afford to fight through the difficult conditions.

Noira spends time at home with her mother and siblings, admiring/envying the simple joy and purpose with which they work the farm. She has a conversation with her mother about how she struggles with a sense of belonging; she doesn’t have much in the way of “family” on Orus, and feels very lonely a lot of the time. These ideas of family and belonging will be major themes throughout the rest of the story…

As a keepsake to help remind her of home, Telma gifts Noira the old wooden kalimba on which she used to play lullabies for her daughter. She also gives Noira an heirloom —  a small, beautiful moon-shaped necklace, carrying a relic gemstone from the old world…

Eterna sketches - aircourt & airships

 Eterna is the capital city and primary spaceport of pr'Sefone, the innermost planet of the Rosa system. Situated near the world's north pole, Eterna serves as a hub for interworld trade, particularly the agricultural exports the planet is best known for. However, there is also significant passenger flow between worlds; the system's compact nature means even low-energy Hohmann transfers take just a few Earth days to complete.

A staple of the fantasy genre, especially when connected to steampunk influences, is the presence of airships. The Rosa system is generally pretty low-tech - although we do have spaceflight and some computers, a lot of our infrastructure has been rebuilt from the ground up. At some point I just chalk it up to rule of cule cool, but there are some practical reasons to use them - they're relatively low energy (good for when your society spends a ton of energy recapturing materials for synthetic fuels), and their moderate payload capacity makes them useful for "shipping" relatively low-density agricultural cargo on a sealess world like pr'Sefone. Their simple VTOL capability is appreciated throughout the system; Orus is incapable of supporting runways. Heavier-than-aircraft are being phased in as society industrializes, but they are less sustainable both in construction and in fuel consumption. Land trains are also being introduced to pr'Sefone, but they threaten to dust-bowlify that delicate sliver of habitable land.

Here we see some sketches of a place I've called an "aircourt." To provide streamlined access to an ornate (spiky!) city, airships are afforded a series of high-altitude mooring platforms to spare them the trouble of navigating low amongst buildings. The linked towers enclose the eponymous "court" space. I imagine a steady stream of ships from all over the planet continuously feeding through the rows, some odd combination of the slowest airport in history and the most graceful aerial ballet ever devised.

What do these vehicles actually look like? I had originally envisioned grand sailing ships taking advantage of the continuous wind, but it turns out that's a bit too physically impossible for me to suspend disbelief. (If it only worked in real life, we'd probably have been flying them for decades.) Instead I pivoted to a cyclorotor design that approaches the original aesthetic and also provides a unique alternative to boring old props.

I'm pretty happy with the general aesthetic here, and the functionality is nice - cyclorotors (or, as they may be named in-universe, "rotor-sails") can produce a thrust vector in any direction within the plane normal to their rotation axis. In other words, airships with these installed can translate with immense precision and responsiveness, great for fighting those pesky winds or performing careful approach maneuvers.

You may be wondering with growing apprehension about the vehicle in the lower right. The catamaran airship above, with smaller rotor-sails, is an airlaunch platform. Smaller planets and a healthy dose of fantasy physics make airlaunched SSTO shuttles the most common passenger transport in the system. After being carried to their target altitude, the shuttles are released and power their way into orbit and beyond, chasing down big interworld cyclers (space stations on permanent transit paths, with accommodations like ocean liners). There they roost during the journey, detaching at their destination to reenter and land on their own.

Except, naturally, they actually deploy a stowed lifting gas envelope to "land" in midair, as illustrated by the sketch near the top there. That vehicle is shown being towed by a small tug balloon. Rides on these shuttles would be harrowing, but they're certainly the cheapest, and thus, most accessible, option for many people.

I have some older, more polished artwork that's relevant here:

This one depicts roughly the same vehicle as above. I may 3D model the design to codify some features; I shied away from the pointy winglets in favor of a stumpier, sturdier design. Also, I'm definitely avoiding naming a fuel type for anything anymore - these are certainly not hydrolox vehicles, and I'm not about to calculate mass fractions for these things.

Here we see a much older airship concept launching one of the shuttles. I'd like the vehicles in Roselight to have this level of whimsy; I'll just need to re-flesh them out beyond just the functional basics. Expect the end result to look pretty similar to this.

One of my favorites I've done, depicting a cycler sailing over Eterna on its way past pr'Sefone. The shuttles shown earlier would be dwarfed by this great liner, serving more as ship's tenders than spaceships on their own. The cycler is spacious and luxurious (results may vary by social class), although nobody stays very long...

I think it's about bedtime tonight, but hopefully this was somewhat interesting! I have a bit of a break coming up so I may try and get a few more posts in then.