See this Pic: Ideas?

[Floyd Looney]

Could you frame a story around this pic?

[Floyd Looney]

War in the Clouds


In an attempt to "fix" so-called Global Climate Change the worlds nations agreed to actions that resulted in an ecological disaster. Their attempts to fix what was not broken led to the things they feared most happening by their own hands.

Today, 2219, the ocean is a dark brownish green, dead animals litter the surface very little of it is oxygenated. Entire cities became uninhabitable due to the foul smell and bacteria in the air. Soon the changes made to the atmosphere began having an adverse affect, the world really did begin to warm up. Too much!

Crops failed, forests died, lakes and rivers dried up. Clouds were now omnipresent and blocked a lot of the light. Soon the safest place to live was up in the air. The human populatio dwindled from nearly 7 billion to fewer than 700 million.

Much of Eurasia became controlled by the Eastern Empire. There were no more countries from France to Korea to the tip of former Thailand. It was all Empire. South America was its own nation and generally allied with North America, Australia and United Greenland (including the frontier provinces of former UK and Ireland).

The Eastern Empire boasted of its massive aerial naval fleet that consisted of battleships and carriers and bombers. The ships were also carrying many of their families, they were like entire towns and villages being carried inside of them.

The "western" alliance built their own fleets, of course, being afraid of waking up to seeing hundreds of Eastern ships blocking out the sky. The western powers had just held a high level meeting when word came that 1,000 Eastern ships had just invaded Japan. The shrunken Japanese islands had fallen with hardly a fight.

Now the Eastern Empire had their sights set on western lands. Three massive fleets were being assembled. One in asia, one in europe and one near Africa. The western alliance fleets did not come close in size and scope, but they would fight.

[Floyd Looney]

Landless

The world had no land. There was nothing down there except higher air pressure. As a matter of fact the air pressure at the center was enough to crush most of our toughest vessels. No one in their right mind would have thought to colonize this planet, Aerus, but times were desperate.

The vast majority of the few million residents lived in the floating ships or on the platform cities. It never occured to the colonists that someone would gather an army and build a fleet. No one who came here ever wanted to form a government, they came to escape them.

Until Adamo Taxamin that is. He was born a refugee of a mother from Italy and a father from Turkey. They had moved from settlement camps in Egypt to Yemen to Ukraine. They were never accepted and soon they put their son, then 9, on a ship off-world. It was at great sacrifice to themselves.

Adamo Taxamin quickly learned that there were no settlement camps on Aerus. There was no relief service, no trucks to hand out rations. He quickly learned that only work gave one something to eat. This was something he could do.

Adamo found work on a freighter, the lowest of the jobs they offered. He would clean the waste tanks, collect the meal tins, help with the laundry deliveries (women's work!). He worked his way up the ladder from the bottom decks where he never saw the sky to the middle decks where there were portholes.

When he was 15 he finally reached the lofty status of deckhand, outside work! He even found himself often sleeping outside and he learned that all his work had made him strong. But he also saw that things could be done better and he wanted to fix it. He wanted... he wanted his own ship!

Having his own ship would not have been enough, there was no end to the determination to have more. Adamo was driven to have more and to exert his will. From a helpless refugee boy to a man with real power.

Now he was 30. He looked upon his tremendous fleet, all at his command. The lives of tens of thousands of men and women were his to control. To send into combat, to their deaths if need be. For their deaths were not in vain, but for glory and for the benefit of all Aerus.

Adamo Taxamin, Emperor of Aerus. That was his wish.

[Attero Dominatus]

Seems like you already got the idea for the story.

You can make those air battleships plausible though. Build them around gas-tight chambers made of carbon nanotubes and then remove the air inside. Vacuum produces lift just like hydrogen and helium do. The Vacuum lift chambers would no doubt be prime targets and would be concentrated in the center of each ship's structure and surrounded by heavy armor plating. Bunker-buster type shells and warheads would be the main type of ammunition.

Just one leak would not be a catastrophic failure. A ship would likely have many lift chambers for redundancy (just as older dirigibles like the infamous Hindenburg had several hydrogen bags inside of its main structure), and would certainly be able to stay aloft on half of its chambers. When a breach occurs, dump some ballast (likely water) to reduce the mass and regain neutral buoyancy. This would make battles long and spectacular, especially when you through CIWS type weapons and jamming into the mix, and fighters and drones.

[Floyd Looney]

There are actually 2 different story ideas up there. I think Adamo Taxamin could be a really good character.

[Attero Dominatus]

I was half awake when I read those. But I like the Adama Taxaman one the best. I like the idea of colonizing the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.

[Floyd Looney]

I stole that idea a little from Saturn Rukh, the book. If you took out some of the sex and boring parts it'd be a wonderful animated film.

[Attero Dominatus]

The picture gives me an idea of my own. The colonization of a brown dwarf. Structures would be held aloft by the massive convection currents and protected from the intense heat by powerful heat exchangers that run the coolant through turbines to generate electricity and then pipe it up along space elevator cables to radiators on a space station in geosynchronous orbit and then sent back down. No idea how to make a story out of it though.

[Floyd Looney]

That also sounds very interesting. That whole apparatus you described sounds plausible but fragile.

[Attero Dominatus]

It would be fragile, but the defense of a fragile structure containing something precious would make for great suspense.

My original idea was to use negative-mass-matter to suspend something above a neutron star, but further reading into the theories about this type of matter have shown that it would be attracted to gravity just like normal matter. It is just as well because said structure would have to be unmanned due to a neutron star's gravity and radiation.

[Floyd Looney]

Hhhmmm.. did you see "The Problems with Warp"? I posted it in the bottom forum. Your welcome to post anything about brown dwarfs if you want to.

Yes, that would be an interesting story. If it is unmanned perhaps it powers a Jump Gate? Maybe those stars are one of the few ways to go through hyper-space?

hhhmmmmm