Plausibility of interdimensional Earth-looting?

I have an in-planning story involving Earth in 2055 - let's call it Earth-A - being raided by unknown hostiles presumed to be aliens. These invaders are later revealed to be humans from a parallel Earth - let's call it Earth-W - where the Cold War ended in a nuclear exchange in the 2030s, plunging that Earth into an ice age. Now, the humanity of Earth-W developed dimensional shifting or dimshifting technology that allows them to cross into parallel universes^note and in fact was the whole reason the Frozen Fire War broke out: when one side developed it, the other freaked out that it can give their enemies potentially infinite resources and launched the nukes and are using it to launch raids Earth-A aimed at plundering as much food as possible to feed their own starving population.

You're probably asking why don't they just ask nicely? The answer is because we're talking about tens of millions of mouths to feed and the civilized countries of Earth-A simply don't have that much food to spare on short notice without making their own people starve. I was thinking that Earth-A's UN covered up the invasion to prevent a worldwide panic but now that I look at it, a military operation of this scale would be all but impossible to cover up.

The other problem Earth-W has is energy. The only reason they haven't all frozen to death already is because they developed controlled nuclear fusion using helium-3 mined from the Moon as fuel^note and in general have more advanced technology due to the twice-as-long Cold War fueling innovation to the point where Earth-W has mass-produced Humongous Mechas with energy weapons while Earth-A has only just rolled out their first TracerFrame prototype with weapons like shotguns and bazookas. The problem is, the lack of an Outer Space Treaty in that universe resulted in a massive proliferation of KillSats - killsats that proceeded to blast each other into smithereens during the war, triggering a Kessler Syndrome that cut off access to space for the next century or so. Thus, they are running out of power as well - at the start of the story, they have less than two years' worth of juice left, even with power rationing and rolling blackouts in place.

How plausible is this setup?

How plausible do you mean by "plausible?"

Alternate timelines in alternate universes might be fun but a parallel universe is probably more like to contain alternate fundamental laws of physics than parallel human civilizations.

That being said it's very similar to a concept I've been working on for a while but kind of lost my interest and began writing hyperspace and the multiverse as Eldritch Locations with Alien Geometries.

By plausible, I meant not breaking suspension of disbelief or provoking too much Fridge Logic over how it shouldn't work like that.

If that's what you mean, yes, it works as a conceit like artificial gravity or universal translators. Your concept for this resource depleted Earth is cool, similar to what I had intended to do. If it takes less energy to raid another world for resources than the alternatives (or if there are no alternatives) I'd say you're on solid ground in terms of literature if not science.

Okay then, next topic. I intend to pull a bog-standard Falling into the Cockpit scenario with a teenage Japanese protagonist - except it's deconstructed like crazy: she manages to get through her first engagement without much damage to her new toy but afterwards, she's held at gunpoint, beaten and thrown into the brig for being a security breach. In fact, the owners of the mecha contemplate on outright killing her on the basis that she's an orphan and thus nobody's going to miss her (they can always say she died in the latest attack) but the top-ranking officer decides to press-gang her into the project purely to not stain his own hands with the blood of a child.

Even then, her job is anything but glamorous: she's not allowed to leave the base and most of the base personnel either ignore her or treat her like dirt for two reasons. One, she's looked down upon because she's an FNG, and a civilian FNG at that. Two, Japanese culture despises and looks down on people who stick out like a sore thumb - and a teenage girl without even boot camp training doesn't really have anything to do in a JSDF military base. Her age is pretty much the only reason she's not hazed or bullied but the lack of meaningful social contact coupled with being forced to risk her life all the time is enough to put her on a fast track to a nervous breakdown really damn quickly.

The lowest point in her story is when the first mass-produced versions of her mecha are fielded, her unit is deactivated and she's simply thrown out into the street with nary a thanks^note she's eventually called back when the mass-produced units keep getting shot down faster than they're built, chiefly because they're manned by professional soldiers who are used to staying put and taking potshots from behind hard cover, a combat style quite ineffective in mecha combat due to the size of the combatants denying them cover and making them big, stationary targets; the protagonist, on the other hand, improvises from moves she learned at the self-defense course she took before she got press-ganged and is constantly on the move to make herself harder to hit. And keep in mind that this happens on Earth-A, AKA the real world analogue, not the post-war frozen hellhole!

There would also be ramifications of alternate universes being involved; at one point, the protagonist would come into a close encounter with an enemy pilot and spend the next chapter comatose with a high fever due to catching a bacteria not native to Earth-A. During her forced 10-Minute Retirement as described above, she again encounters the enemy pilot who is similarly sick with local diseases and steals medicine for him, even though she's conflicted whether it would even work.

edited 13th Mar '14 5:00:54 PM by amitakartok

So, they can only access World-A?

They can theoretically access other worlds, but doing so requires a complete recalibration and retuning of the dimshifting equipment - and they can't really spare the time or energy on a trial-and-error enterprise that might not work at all. Right now, they can access Earth-A and do so without problems, so they're rolling with that.

^ No. No. No. No. No. You are getting the two parts of my response confused. This is not how parallel universes probably work (they aren't created by divergent timelines) if they exist , and to make this even worse, we don't know that they exist at all, just that they're theoretically possible, but again, you can a conceit like that when you are writing fiction.

When physicists talk about parallel universes they are most definitely not talking about Hitler winning World War II or the Americas never having been colonized, or Rome still ruling in the 21st century. They are talking about quantum differences, not sociological/historical differences.

That is why when I answered the OP's post I was carefully to say that it's scientifically rubbish but as long as that's a conceit he's making like FTL travel or Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Gravity, then it's fine in literary terms as far as one's suspension of disbelief.

edited 14th Mar '14 3:30:02 PM by fulltimeD

If the two universes would have different fundamental laws of physics, it would make both inhospitable to each other and kill the whole point of the story. I've read somewhere that if the fine-structure constant would be even a tiny bit different from what it is (and there's evidence that it's not actually a constant, being different in certain parts of the universe), life as we know it would be impossible as molecular structures wouldn't assemble in quite the same way, radically changing their chemical properties.

With that said, a different history isn't the only difference between the two. As I wrote above, both worlds have microbes unique to them (posing the very real threat of a fatal infection to someone of the other world due to its nonexistence over there meaning no natural immunity could develop in local life) which cannot really be explained with a historical divergence.

edited 14th Mar '14 4:54:46 PM by amitakartok

^ That's a good solution to the scientific implausibility. It makes it easier to suspend one's disbelief if it's not like Sliders. I like the microbial differences and the fact that it's a separate, distinct parallel reality rather than some alternate timeline created by a historical divergence.

Implausible. Why are they (let's call them Vyrams, since Earth-A would probably give them reporting names or something) merely looting and not conquering? 10,000,000 isn't all that many mouths to feed, basically New York City plus Seattle, and not all that great a reason to build a dimensional bridge to plunder rather than try to negotiate (or research new means of food development) - fact of the matter is, we presently grow enough food around the world to feed everyone, and widespread starvation is typically more an issue of logistics or malice. (I'd have Earth-W be controlled by a bunch of hawks, a la Space Warrior Baldios or Toushou Daimos, who can't really conceive of peaceful negotiation.)

I'd be careful about the whole 'Japan hates the different and has a laughably dumb not-quite-military' thing, and what you've described here is a bit insulting. That mentality might have had some basis in reality thirty years ago, but would be outlandish in a modern setting; nowadays, they're more likely to ask why that nail or post is sticking up before hammering it down into a water main, and this trend is likely to continue as the old generation will have died off by 2050. I'd give Masami some personality problems instead (as wouldn't be totally unexpected from someone who sneaks into a military base, which tend to be well-marked).

The SDF, despite how they're shown in a number of shows, is quite modern and would begin training her replacements immediately without ignoring the fact that mecha and infantry combat are entirely different. I think they'd transfer drivers or pilots (and then make sure they know how not to trash their expensive new toys, as no one in the SDF wants to have to explain to their oversight committee why they're burning through money at such a rate). Her age wouldn't protect her; her necessary skill would.

I think you're underestimating the power of media-fueled scandals in Japan, and just how many rules and regulations have to be broken for Masami to be in that situation in the first place (and even if they shot her, someone would then have to dispose of the body - "this teen girl is mysteriously full of bullet wounds, and I need you to take her to the crematorium"). Every official even remotely connected to that program would start worrying about their necks if Masami ever went to NHK and started describing the base she was at in precise detail. At the very least, the on-duty guards would have been thrown into the brig too, and... now that I think about it, since there's no way at all that she's in the SDF, why would she be in the brig instead of a civilian police station for trespassing? She wields some power in that situation.

The whole 'unmissed orphan' thing is unlikely, and making it realistic would take more justification than is worth the effort. For one, actually confirming this means they looked up her past, and that means she's on record at some city hall in some city somewhere - no one is truly invisible in that country, even if she's a locker baby. They'd have to go and physically burn her record then wipe her from whatever existing tracking system. I'd make her a runaway instead, and have her parents actively refuse to take responsibility for her.

Falling into the Cockpit tends to be justified by some skill or ability on the pilot's part, if not availability. So if a teen with no training can pilot Monomegalith-xv1, why couldn't a soldier? If Masami could be kicked out onto the street solely for the reason that they finally have as many T Fs as pilots (delivered en masse?), they wouldn't have waited until mass-production. I'd change the reason to just stress on her part affecting her ability to pilot, to the point that your standard soldier could do better than her.

I'm hard-pressed to believe that FNG syndrome would apply here, given that she's more than pulled her own weight already and they are operating on their home turf. By the time anyone's aware of Masami, her Colossal Dimension Beast kill count is one greater than everybody else's.

Question: on any military or SDF base, is there a requirement for the janitors to have gone through boot camp training? That's Masami's day job, then.

Re: the bacteria (I'd make it a virus) from Earth-W. What situation would put her into unprotected contact with an enemy, and how would she recover from something like that?

Also - what scale did you imagine the Tracer Frame battles at, and why are attack helicopters, jets, cruise missiles, and long-range tank shelling (let alone infantry and paratroopers - all of which are presently options in the JSDF toolbox and are not likely to disappear in the next 50 years because North Korea) not as effective as them at combating this dimensional threat?

What is the justification for the existence of the Tracer Frames, and what is their 'gimmick' as mecha that keeps them from being carbon copies of mecha from other media? I would also keep in mind what the newly-trained pilots are using for cover (keep in mind that what constitutes 'hard cover' is different based on the type of firepower being directed at you, and by the point this happens they will most certainly not be under any illusions about the type of weapons the Dimensional Beasts like to use), and how most cities do not appreciate being used for cover.

That's a shitload of good stuff.

In-universe, there are people in their leadership who are indeed arguing in favor of conquering. There is a problem with that approach, however. I'll have to bring in a WW 2 analog here: like the Germans, the invaders have individually better tech but like the Americans, Earth-A has a much higher industrial capacity due to not having been ravaged by a nuclear war and subsequent ice age. Those who ordered the raiding operations are being Genre Savvy by deliberately avoiding backing their opponent into a corner with a full-scale invasion so as to avoid Awakening the Sleeping Giant.

I said tens of millions, not ten million. And it rapidly becomes much harder to feed that population when there's practically no arable land that's not irradiated and/or permafrost.

I did think it sounded kinda irrealistic. Thanks for confirming it.

She didn't sneak into a base, she was on a class trip to a robotics expo when the invaders showed up to raid the warehouse next door. Also, she didn't get into the mecha of her own volition: she was literally tossed into the cockpit and sealed inside before an explosion killed the person who did this.

I'm still trying to figure out why the mecha was at the expo in the first place. Way I think right now, they didn't put it there deliberately; it was in transit from the factory to the testing grounds and the convoy stopped at the expo to take a break and report in before resuming their journey.

There are two reasons she could pilot the thing. First, it's controlled via a motion capture system (hence the name) in the form of an exoskeleton suspended inside a spherical cockpit, into which the pilot is strapped. Second, she took a self-defense course (not martial arts) and knows a bit of hand-to-hand combat; nothing fancy, though.

It might be just me but I personally think mecha piloting is sufficiently different from anything else that training someone from scratch yields better results than trying to retrain someone who already has expertise in something else, kinda like how army grunts aren't trained to fly gunships or drive tanks.

Whatever the reason, they'd still rather send out a professional soldier than a kid.

The SDF higher-ups do eventually find out about it - from the very same guy who beat her up, nonetheless. Shitstorm ensues, several people are court-martialed and dishonorably discharged (including the base commander), some are even imprisoned and our heroine receives a formal apology, along with a little extra: she receives an honorary commission equal to corporal while the whistleblower Master Sergeant is busted down to private and reassigned to her command.

Still thinking about it. Current scenario is that the enemy pilot got pissed at her repeatedly being in the way during his sorties and in this particular instance, he finally lost it and tried to board her mecha to kill her. However, he Didn't Think This Through and while he does manage to blow off her cockpit hatch and attack her personally, she fights back and breaks his helmet before forcing him back out and literally shakes him off.

The infection can be treated with conventional medicine but as she doesn't have any natural resistance against it, the required dosage is very high. As in, high enough to endanger her life on its own.

Purely to fight the invaders. It's not the be-all-end-all weapon, mostly because its titanium-based composite armor is not any more durable than a tank. On the other hand, it is still light enough (with respect to the Square-Cube Law) to be airlifted, though its size necessitates a special aircraft^note a licensed version of the Antonov An-225, upgraded with mid-21st century electronics.

My usual line of thought when discussing mechas is that their use as a military weapon can be justified only if the mecha is fast enough to make accurate targeting of the legs impossible. In this case, Tracer Frames use electromagnetic, contactless joints to minimize friction and speed up response time.

Kinda hard to say. There are several Motion Capture Mechas in fiction but these tend to be either Super Robots or Mini-Mecha; Tracer Frames are neither. With that said, they're not that large either; I'm thinking about eight to ten meters tall.

edited 16th Mar '14 7:14:14 PM by amitakartok

Just so you know I think that this is an amazing idea, and i would totally buy it, even if it is not, in the strictest sense of the word, plausible. Seriously write this

Glad to help (I think?).

What this dude said.

So in short, what does Earth-W send over (piloted mecha, monsters, infiltration team - is there a limit on that Dimension Bridge?), and what do they accomplish? Are they a distraction for the raiding, or do they do the raiding, or do they weaken defenses for the raiding to happen?

(Ah, you're right. I misread that.) But hold a sec. 'Tens of millions' is the entire population of Earth-W or the starving part of it? ...And actually, who exactly is attacking Earth-A? Given the background of Earth-W, is it one country (dimension bridge tech not being the sort of thing you share with your enemy, after all) or the whole surviving population? If there's any amount of resistance to the Earth-W dictatorship... maybe a spy came to Earth-A with Tracer Frame know-how, using an early Dimension Bridge prototype, and decided to defect? You then have another character who 'doesn't fit in', that Masumi can just barely relate to, if you need some drama.

I wonder if you're familiar with Dai Guard (where the mecha-threat disappeared for some time after the mecha was built) or Megazone23 (where the mecha doesn't get used for its intended purpose until quite some time later - and frankly has exactly the sort of military you were describing earlier, with one hell of a justification)? They both take steps to justify how much you could leave a mecha in plain sight and why. (The convoy stopover idea's nice, but a little coincidental. What about a factory tour?)

...what about this? Masumi's such a good pilot largely because she's small. She can move around in the cockpit better, which has to be a bit cramped due to the overall size of the Tracer Frame, and what little training she has (self-taught?) is geared towards being the 'small guy' in a fight - thus, she's surprisingly good at pragmatically fighting alone, as opposed to in a team. (This would also justify why the production type T Fs suck so much - they're either a bigger target or less armored or unbalanced or are forced to carry less fuel, due to the increased size of the cockpit.) Militaries tend to attract and retain recruits of a certain size, after all, and at 8-10 meters the torso's only just big enough for mocap (ex: Mobile Police Patlabor, and even then just barely).

The 'training a soldier from scratch' thing makes plenty of sense, particularly given the interface. I don't think it's done much in the genre, either, planetside at least.

That change in treatment sounds good. I'd save it for after she's kicked out and completely in the dumps - and then she finds out that this whole time she's been thinking no one's got her back (she's been cut off from the world, after all), the public totally understands how much effort she's put into protecting them and completely supports her. From there, the story begins moving from pessimism to idealism, because honestly that'd be a proper deconstruction of the Real Robot genre. Heh - imagine Bright Noah forcibly taking command from Gendou (*Brightpunch* "YOU WERE IN MY SEAT."). Though if I were writing it, I'd give the Master Sergeant a commission and put her in charge of the newly-formed "Masumi Platoon", since A) the new guys are doing poorly, and B) giving a MRE-grown groundpounder a desk job seems like punishment enough .

So basically Tracer Frames are the most agile thing on the ground for their size. Will you be counteracting G-forces, maybe a secondary use of the zero-friction joint coating (thought I get the feeling you had something along the lines of Magnet Coating in mind), or handwaving them (since, honestly, it's not really checked off in most media anyway)? And do they contain tech that's simply impractical to put into a tank?

An... An-225? Kinda overkill, isn't it ? It's big, not built for a firefight, and how heavy is a full-kit Tracer Frame going to be (let alone the never-ending overtime for the maintenance crew)? I'd invent a VTOL craft designed around transporting one or two T Fs (something small and agile), but a ground transport would have a stealthier approach.

Incidentally, what kind of mecha would the resource-strapped Earth-W send over? I'd suggest old war machines (think Tetsujin 28 - outdated, but still useful) followed by a gradual switch to something organic, like what sometimes shows up in Metal Slug, as they finally run out of even those.

edited 17th Mar '14 11:01:00 AM by DeusDenuo

They're essentially the mecha equivalent of paratroopers: they drop in unannounced and raise enough havoc so that the main force coming behind them can do their thing (in this case, packing up what they came for) unimpeded.

The part that's relevant to the story. Exactly how many people survived the nukes is unknown.

Again, it's unknown how many people survived; this is just the number that was rounded up by one group and they understandably have other concerns than finding out the globe's current population density. When the heroine gets into an Enemy Mine situation with an invader pilot who got left behind, she has communication difficulties as he doesn't speak Japanese and she doesn't speak Russian. Current plan is that the attackers are an East Asian Soviet remnant (remember, Cold War lasted longer).

Tracer Frames are indeed reverse-engineered. I thought about having a defector as well; current plan is that the invaders use cockpits that can be ejected if the mecha is immobilized and there's no time to recover it.

I'm conflicted over making it public^note Though admittedly, I might be biased because of multiple incidents I've read about where several Japanese schools tried to cover up misdeeds committed within their walls independently of each other - whether it was a pedophile teacher or a student being Driven to Suicide by bullying - only for the massive public outrage when the truth got out being followed by... nothing at all. Rather, the brass takes care of everything quietly because if what happened would get out, it would be REALLY bad PR for them, to say nothing of the fact that they wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the exact person they need right now.

To be honest, I'm concerned of my readers crying Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!

An... An-225? Kinda overkill, isn't it ?

I meant being airlifted in an internal cargo bay, not just hanging underneath the plane (which would massively increase air drag and thus fuel usage). I initially wanted to pick a US-built plane due to the official military cooperation between them and Japan but I'm not sure a C-130 Hercules would be large enough and the C-5 Galaxy isn't exported.

War is the mother of innovation. Invader mechas are considerably more advanced than Tracer Frames and not just in terms of visual aesthetics; for example, they have solid-state laser^note and I mean laser, not "brightly visible ray of light" point defenses that automatically target incoming enemy projectiles, making these guys surprisingly resilient if More Dakka or a Macross Missile Massacre isn't applied.

However, note that these machines are leftovers from the war. They only field small numbers at a time to keep casualties down; if one unit is heavily damaged, it is cannibalized for parts and the pilot is given one of the reserve units.

By 2055, we'll have translation apps in our cheapest smartphones. (This just means neither Masami nor her prisoner are carrying theirs when they sortie, of course. ) They should even be available by 2020, I think; I'll even bet a can of Coke on that.

I think, in the interconnected world we can expect to have in 2050, it'd be extremely difficult to cover up mecha battles - or at the very least, doing so at that scale, and repeatedly, would require more resources than the result would justify, especially in a domestic setting. And PR aside, there's a morale boost in having a reasonably effective 'protector'. (Recall Mobile Suit Gundam, and how after Jaburo or so the Zeons would start turning white any time the White Base appeared. They called the Gundam 'The White Devil' for a reason - kind of an ironic side-effect, if you know the behind-the-scenes story for its color scheme.)

The Cold War lasted as long as it did in real life thanks to cynicism (and you may need to come up with some way for the Earth-W forces to keep their bridgetroopers from defecting constantly, like through Shocker-style mind surgery or only performing raids at night so they can't see just how green and clean everything is, or even seeing Masami not needing to wear radiation gear would be enough). Idealism's not limited to light and soft; it's a desire to do better instead of 'staying the course' and assuming the future isn't going to deviate from the present. Those school scandal stories are all fairly recent - incidence rates haven't necessary gone up in those cases, but the reporting rate certainly has, and they get as much attention as they do because now everyone finds them shocking almost to the point of numbness. You can do idealism just fine without sacrificing a Gray Vs Gray storyline, but yeah, I'd definitely steer clear of Lighter and Softer.

If you haven't done so already, I recommend that you watch the first 10 minutes or so of the first Patlabor movie, which has transports doing more or less what you're looking for at the scale you had in mind. (I don't know what those transports are called, but you seem to be more familiar with them than me, is why. It's also a good movie, too!)

Of course, there's always just having the Tracer Frame shoulders being the kind that fold back, to reduce their total width during transport at the cost of increased height. (The friction-negating joints wouldn't be unduly affected by this, if I'm following you correctly on that.)

(...yeah, the C-150 definitely isn't big enough inside. It's long and just wide enough to carry a Tracer Frame, but the cargo space would have to be at least 3 meters tall with a Mocap system and surrounding armor. On the other hand, the C-5 would work just fine. It looks like the problem there isn't that they're not being sold, but that they haven't been any built since 1989 - with its cargo dimensions no one but the USA actually has any reason to buy one, and we've got enough of them to just keep upgrading the old ones rather than buy them new which we won't be selling used. Whatever one you go with, I'd make it a 'Tracer Frame variant', the C-5TF, for example.)

Maybe have a good anti-laser armor material (laminated carbon fiber-reinforced ceramics?), that the Tracer Frame is covered in but is (at the start of the story) too difficult to produce as armor packs for the tanks? ...no, wait. The production versions are covered in this, but the extra weight and mindset (they're touted as completely resistant, even though Earth-W has already altered their weapons to avert this by the time the armor is deployed) this brings contributes to their poor performance?

How necessary is the Mocap Control System to the story? Removing it and replacing it with a standard control system would be believable as part of the usual cost-cutting done for mass-production units in the genre (where it's normally done for sensible reasons - imagine if it was for something asinine like a politician demanding it because 'they're like video games, and my grandson can play better than the current pilot'), as well as free up some space to allow use of a C-150 as its transport maybe. It would also justify their increased rate of damage, while requiring them to switch tactics from 'Mocap' to 'poor imitation of the White Dingoes', and keep Masami useful/necessary as the only pilot with any real Mocap-style combat experience.

Why do they attack Japan, incidentally? My thought was that the dimension bridge tech works in a way that the Earth-W intruders can only 'bridge' into certain locations (corresponding to places in Earth-W?), and Japan is merely the least trigger-happy country they can reach, politically and culturally. (Except for North Korea, but they took one look around and decided that they'd somehow bridged to somewhere still on Earth-W. )

That's precisely the case. Depending on who's the viewpoint character of the scene, the other party's speech would be rendered in unsubtitled 日本語 or ру́сский to demonstrate the viewpoint character's inability to understand.

I don't. Admittedly, I still have no idea about the Tracer Frame's colors. What I do know is that the heroine's pilot suit is blue/white and when I wonder how the TF itself looks like, first thing that comes to mind is this◊.

The joints work on pretty much the same principles as maglev trains: an electromagnetic field keeps the moving parts from being in direct physical contact with each other. While the Tracer Frame is offline, the electromagnets are powered down and the joints are mechanically locked to prevent them from damaging themselves via friction; I thought about making the armor lock into a dead man's switch (that is, being locked is the default state and the joints have to be actively kept unlocked) to prevent accidental joint unlocks during transport but if the system malfunctions due to battle damage, it would mean the joints locking abruptly in the middle of a battle which would be a really bad thing. On the other hand, making it fail-open would mean that a malfunctioning lock turns the TF into a giant ragdoll and if the magnets are not powered, causes mechanical damage with every twitch.

I put it in because I thought it was the easiest to learn and the most realistic for complex machinery like that. No matter how much "plot says so" you pack into a story, I honestly can't see mechas of that scale doing any advanced maneuvers with joysticks and pedals; there are just too many potential axes of movement involved. On the other hand, standing all the time does tire the pilot out^note In another story of mine (fanfic, not original), there's a standard-controls Mini-Mecha that solves this without losing mobility by using a dual-mode hybrid control system: in passive mode, the leg pedals operate as throttle controls for an automated walking sequence while in active mode, the same pedals directly control the legs' articulation for combat maneuvers.; this is partially balanced out by the fact that they're not actually standing on anything but rather, the motion capture frame keeps their body suspended in the center of the cockpit, similar to those real-life gyroscope-like apparatuses (I don't know the name) where the user is suspended in the center and the entire machine twists and rotates chaotically. Still not going to do maneuvers like roundhouse kicks, though.

The earlier suggestion to recruit short pilots is actually a sound one and might also double as an interesting way of preventing foreign industrial espionage, considering that Japanese are quite short by Western standards...

They target more industrially-developed countries, not just Japan. Which also makes me think: how exactly should I solve the driving problem of the plot, ie. Earth-W's chronic food shortage? Gene-modified crops with higher than normal yields are all nice and good but where would they plant these (to say nothing of other problems like said crops being intellectual property forbidden to replant)?

I'm asking these because even though I haven't written more than a few dozen words yet, I already have an idea for a second season where the heroine, now 18, is recalled into service because a JSDF outpost just got stomped into the ground by Tracer Frames while their liaisons with the Easterns (codename for the faction that formerly raided) insist it wasn't them. Turns out it really wasn't them, especially once China launches a massive sea invasion with more Tracer Frames they suddenly acquired out of nowhere. Remember when I said Earth-W no longer has access to the Moon due to an ablation cascade of orbital debris? Well, that doesn't mean the lunar mining facilities aren't still operational and the formerly-US crew aren't using dimshift to back China in a proxy war... To counter this, our heroine is dimshifted to Earth-W to spearhead a counterattack intended to cut off the heat of the snake before World War 3 breaks out (as the US is already coming in hot to assist Japan and Russia is mobilizing as well to make sure the US doesn't use this incident as an excuse to extend its influence in the Far East).

I'm also debating over a title. What do you think about "The Unsung Heroine"?

edited 18th Mar '14 7:19:47 PM by amitakartok

Ah, yeah, I figured you'd go untranslated. Plus, there's a good chance that Earth-W Russian has evolved in a different direction than present-day Russian. As a country wraps itself more and more in its patriotic greatness - and you can see this in a bunch of cultures, though these movements are generally small and ignored - it looks to its purest roots. I wouldn't be surprised if the speaker has to alter his diction a little for the translator to understand.

(The Gundam wasn't going to be red and white and blue with yellow when the show was being planned. Tomino apparently wanted a gray color scheme like what was eventually used with the G-3 Gundam - though on the actual models that blue is darker and grayer - but the toy manufacturer insisted on the silly 'parade colors'. Obviously, a white mecha is going to stick out a bit in space and against most kinds of terrain, so it's a little odd. The eventual solution in the anime, since they couldn't really change the paint scheme, was to give it a reputation.)

That world is going to have widespread maglev trains, if they can get the tech to fit in a military machine. (I think the real-life ones require supercooled helium?) I'd make it a plastic coating, similar to how cartilage works, that has to be replaced frequently - 'joint coating', to give it a name. I would also make this the one piece of technology Earth-W cannot replicate, largely because it's Earth-A tech that couldn't have 'evolved' with the ongoing war. (This becomes comparatively peaceful Earth-A's ace-in-the-hole against Earth-W's constant war-forged weapons; 'they' have force, 'we' have agility.)

There's ways to make a roundhouse kick work in a mecha that size (like using assistance from a pole) - the problem is that doing one would damage the shin armor or ankle joint . Nonetheless, a Char-Zaku Kick would be effective.

The problem with mecha combat is that you still have to have spatial awareness. It looks like you had a 360-degree monitor in mind? Without holographic projections in the cockpit, it's hard to know what you're leaning your mecha against without a lot of practice. Masami's skill might just be high spatial awareness and balance. I wouldn't use a gyroscope though.

I think a 'sticks' control scheme is workable, depending on terrain and what the mecha is intended to do. There are only so many ways to safely fire a rifle and take cover, for example, and the trick we as humans employ to walk safely on uneven ground is our sense of balance, all of which a good set of software can assist with. The sticks don't control the mecha directly (as with a plane) so much as be software interface peripherals. (In other words, the game 'QWOP' is what happens when you don't have that software/operating system making everything work in the order that they're supposed to.) Moreover, computer assistance would be required in space - the 'mocap' is feasible largely because everything is taking place on the ground.

I'd make the software the thing everyone wants - there are shortish people in every country, after all - since it'd have to be purpose-made, for a combat platform that simply didn't exist until now but is possible from an engineering standpoint, and I again reference 'QWOP' as an example why. (Consider what happens if the Earth-W pilots are forced to eject in any other country.)

The cause of the food shortage thing is easy - that war got really ugly in its later stages, and both sides started directly attacking each other's food and water supplies, so there's nowhere to actually plant new seeds and it's legitimately easier to go to the effort of raiding another dimension. Japan, for all its lack of natural resources, doesn't hurt for potable water (or at least clean enough by Earth-W standards); Jikuu Senshi Spielban actually made this the bad guys' justification for targeting Japan! Its projected decline in population should be a good enough justification for extra water Earth-W can come in and take.

I can think of three solutions. One would be an eventual food-for-tech exchange program between the two worlds (once cooler heads prevail - I'd recommend a coup d'etat lead by Masami's rival, who realizes just how pointless the dimension war has become). The second is a straight-up resettlement program where the Earth-W inhabitants come to Earth-A and are given... hm. Siberia? To farm. The third would be Earth-A climate restructuring teams going to Earth-W to rebuild the land there and make it possible to grow regular food there (though again with a seeds-for-tech program - I doubt Monsanto would complain much about suddenly getting an enormous new customer for its IP seeds).

'Dimshift', huh. Good word.

From a real Russian point of view, I imagine the Earth-W 'Soviets' would look like, er, fanatics. (Same goes with Americans and 'Westerns'.)

There are parts of the second story that seem far-fetched. I think it stretches disbelief to have a superpower like China allowing itself to be used as a proxy so easily (and the same goes for most independent states - no one wants to have to admit "yeah, they played us like a Flash Game"), especially by an ethically questionable force like the Earth-W 'Westerns'. For one thing, I think China presently has the resources to openly build a Tracer Frame corps on its own, without borrowing anyone's help, and would be glad to do it entirely on their own out of pride. I'd use North Korea instead - for the purposes of a story, they're just paranoid enough to try and play the 'playas', and they have a standing army that's far larger than they need.

(Alternately, the entire thing is a ruse on China's part to get the fanatic 'Westerns' out of the way. The sea invasion is anything but stealthy, and the Russia-US alliance is more than glad to dispatch them - the Russians because they're closer to the source, and the Americans because the 'Westerns' have corrupted their shared ideals so much. It doesn't leave a good taste in anyone's mouth, but clears away a major obstacle to peace. It also ends up being a bit of a Red Herring, as the real 'World War 3'-style battle takes place in Earth-W.)

The US's sphere of influence already extends into the Far East more than Russia would like, and vice-versa, but sudden excursions are frowned upon. (I would wait a few weeks and see how the Ukraine/Crimea thing plays out, though.) The US, or any country with enough power to worry the others for that matter, wouldn't go barging in without justifying it to the world - if anything, I'd have Russia demand that it be a joint incursion, since an extra-dimensionally assisted invasion is an Earth-A problem, not just any single country's, and the last thing either country wants is a 'friendly' fire incident. (Though of course the US and Russia will still not fully trust each other.)

Godzilla 1985 actually had a scene like this, where the Soviet (Russian) and American representative met the Japanese Prime Minister (I think) and offered to nuke Godzilla, who by that point was beginning to present a threat to the whole world.

'The Unsung Heroine' is kinda mundane, and could even refer to the Tracer Frame. If the story's going to be about her more than it is about the tech or 'war', 'Unsung (character name)' might work better?

Incidentally, what sort of name do you have lined up for the heroine? I kept calling her 'Masami' because she's 'straightforward' (= 'Masa'), and because it's easy enough to pronounce in English (with the Running Gag that the Americans she meets can never intone it correctly).

That too. The closest thing Earth-A has to Translator Microbes is a speech-to-text Google Glass^note not explicitly named as such, obviously app that automatically transcribes speech of a selected language into subtitles.

Except that the customer in question doesn't have legal tender to pay with.

At one point, the Chinese leadership would indeed try to back out... only to be overthrown by their own people who they themselves whipped into nationalistic frenzy just a few weeks/months before, showing that no logic and political maneuvering can overcome centuries of pent-up ethnic hatred released at the right moment. That is precisely why The Remnant chose to spark the war in the Far East: there's so much bad blood there that if open conflict erupts, it'd be hard to extinguish without lots of people dead.

When I said Russia is mobilizing, I didn't meant on Japan's side. If China starts to lose too badly, Russia would join the fray on their side to keep the US out of their backyard but if China holds their ground... Russia just happens to be holding a special military exercise in Siberia, condemns the war and pledges neutrality due to seeing no need to send young sons of Mother Russia to their deaths fighting for someone else's cause (read: "we couldn't care less what those twin bunches of slit-eyed pridurki are doing and we're not going to play policemen beyond our own borders like a certain other country").

The US knows very well what kind of game Russia is playing and are forced to play along due to the fact that even if the JSDF wouldn't be constitutionally forbidden from offensive warfare^note which also requires the interdimensional counterattack to be a clandestine operation, as they'd never get authorization from the Diet, sending their allies ahead while they themselves do nothing would cause massive public outrage. Thus, the alliance digs in and gears up for defensive warfare against an opponent who has reserves.

In essence, The Remnant is convinced that since Earth-A was spared nuclear annihilation, it means the local US must have fallen to communism and are therefore fair game. On the other hand, they find out the hard way that taunting the JSDF by comparing them to the Imperial Japanese Army is not a good idea.

Kōsaka Hayate (高坂颯).

edited 19th Mar '14 4:42:05 PM by amitakartok

Plausibility is not so much how possible it could be (if you say we can jump to another dimension's Earth and steal from it, it is done) but rather if a civilization with the ability to jump between planets in different dimensions would ever sink to doing so, given what else they should be capable of.

I guess that come down to just how difficult the process really is, as presented by the story.

Right, why couldn't they find an unpopulated Earth where humans never evolved or became extinct a long time ago?

Earth-W wouldn't be paying for their genetically modified seeds directly with legal tender - they'd trade for them. (In the case of Monsanto, what'd probably happen is they'd trade some war-fueled tech know-how in return for a government footing the bill for the seeds. Ideally above-board, since a clandestine movement of that much foodstuffs would be difficult to disguise, and a company of that size will try to play the sympathy card publicly with a deal like that.) I'd use a cultural exchange - an in-universe version of stories like what you've come up with, for example - to build some Earth-A capital.

Neither the Chinese people nor its leadership are zealous enough to do something like that in that way (China has 50-something recognized ethnic groups - 'pent-up ethnic hatred' will require a few pages of explanation), and the ethnic friction it has with Japan now is gradually becoming 'historical'. To put it another way, China presently has the military might to back up its threats towards Japan, but also the good sense to not start World War III with a country they have established trade routes with, and the national pride to put someone on the moon (I'll bet a Coke that it'll be a woman, just to rub it in ) even if there's not much accomplished by doing so. They're aware that they can win through economics alone.

I'd advise against it regardless, but to make it work you'd have to have the Earth-A Japanese government do something well above and beyond mere 'tactlessness' to justify that storyline. It's a question of whether you want tensions simmering over between now and 2055, when they come to a head as part of the dimensional threat, or have a number of (Earth-W prompted false-flag?) incidents that cause a sudden boil.

Russia has enough economic interests in Asia that staying out of that 'second story' battle would have long-term consequences with their trade partners there. Alternately, it's looking for an excuse to acquire Tracer Frame tech off the battlefield, but it's hard to stay out of a war so close to one's borders. It'll have something to do with how and where Earth-W attacks Earth-A - if it is recognized as a worldwide threat, then Russia has no reason not to contribute militarily.

On the other hand, if you had the Diet temporarily allow Japan to wage aggressive war against the interdimensional threat, that would serve as enough justification for China to prepare its military and/or rile up some nationalistic feelings in the population if the Tracer Frame operations get a little too questionable.

...? That's not normally read as 'Hayate', though. (Either way, isn't it more of a boy's name? "...No! Hayate's a girl's name! And I'm a girl!" *beatings commence* )

How do you plan to tell the story?

Yet.

Russian solution to raids in their territory was to drop a FOAB on the fuckers (causing them to freak out as they thought this universe somehow developed low-yield pure fusion nukes). No further raids occurred, making it not their problem anymore.

That might actually work: China finds out from The Remnant that their neighbors are overstepping their self-imposed pacifistic mandate and proceed to massively overreact?

I have no idea what character it is written with; I found it with this one.

You're thinking of Hayato.