Since the Aethos setting does not require paranormal powers, I've decided to throw the first few chapters up for comment. This should be a sufficient introduction and give people stuff to tear into.

What little I had a chance to read just now looks mighty damn promising.

This setting fascinates me.

I could try to make a CGI render of aethos if you can give some decent descriptions of the overall object. I could try to make some sort of image and even add an atmosphere shell if you want. I'd likely see about making the mesh in blender than importing and rendering and texturing in bryce.

I was thinking of a d"demented soccer ball" with each polygon having a different color and texture to make it look like each section was stolen from a different planet. Some would be desert, martian like, some would be green and verdant, etc.

The white dwarf stars orbiting it would be easy, here, have a look at how I'd make them:

www.blendernation.com/links/make-an-expl...-space-with-blender/

Add in the belt and the supervolcano sized thrusters and it might be done. I know some blender masters I could contact for tips if I needed it.

As far as a bibliography goes, I'm thinking that "Pushing ice" by Allistair Reynolds would be a good suggestion for it.

A. C. Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" is an obvious choice, but I'd have to ask that the recommendation be limited to the original work and not to the awful, terrible "sequels".

"The Eternity Artifact" is a great novel about humans exploring an advanced alien artifact of planetary scale, it's a great hard SF novel and would fit into a bibliography for Aethos quite nicely.

Thanks for the suggestions. If you want to take a stab at trying to render it, go ahead. Remember that in order to look halfway cool, you're going to have to "star trek" the visual scale so that the suns are not just points of light in the distance. And Aethos is mostly uninhabited and gray. The inhabitated polygons are a definite minority and would all be the same approximate color at a given latitude (equatorial, tropical, temperate, arctic, etc.)

Yes, they make camouflage textures for blender that could be used, with scaling, to make terrain as seen from orbit.

Another trick to add scale and detail I'm thinking on would be to add clouds to the atmosphere shell, it might be a little hard but UI have a few ideas, like adding a sphere, selecting some sections of it and adding a particle effect to them to create patches of clouds.

BTW, about how many artificial moons do you think aethos has?

PS since you said you're going to do an illo of the earth poly and it's neighbors I'll generally wait till that's sketched to get the shape right, but I might try some experiments with some techniques in the meantime.

Greg, one thing I was thinking: How long does aethos spend in a system plundering it? I'd imagine the ancients would have a good idea, as would some of the other races established on aethos. I ask because I was wondering if the human government might try to build an exodus vessel to send a large number of humans to a world in the system aethos is decelerating into if there was a viable spot to send them to.

As I see it, a lot of humans still hate the aeth for what they did, and for effectively stagnating them. If it were possible to disembark a few thousand humans into a system aethos was stopping in they might just to know they were spreading humanities seed around and freeing themselves from the aeth's dominion.

I suppose if it were possible there'd be a viable place to set up a human colony a lot of people would be willing to try it, and it could be a useful tool for the human government to use to maintain unity.

It would not have to be another earth, but even something as close as mars would be acceptable under the conditions the humans on aethos are under.

The total plunder period is at least months, but Aethos is going slow enough at that point that it will spend years in close enough proximity to be accessible by medium-tech craft. This is actually a long-term scenario posited elsewhere in the manuscript, so you'll get to it eventually.

Another trick would be to make a slightly larger transparent sphere, cloud it up and then layer it in Photoshop.


Dozens to hundreds, but they are too small to be more than pinpricks of light at this scale. They only exist around the suns and constantly exert microscopic course corrections to keep the constellation from destablizing.