r/HardSciFi

the thing that gets me about cosmic sociology is how minimal the starting point is. two axioms: survival is the first need of any civilization, and civilizations expand while resources stay finite. that's it. no claims about alien psychology, no assumptions about violence being inherent.

what follows is the chain of suspicion. not that other civilizations ARE hostile, but that you can never confirm they aren't. and once you add technological explosion into the mix, meaning a primitive civilization can leap to threatening capability faster than light-speed signals can travel, the math becomes brutal.

the conclusion isn't that the universe is full of monsters. it's that the dark forest law falls out of pure game theory starting from two premises most people would quietly agree with.

i keep coming back to how ye wenjie frames it. she doesn't explain the dark forest theory. she just hands luo ji the axioms and lets him work it out. the fact that he arrives at the same place she did says something about the logic being airtight.

anyone else think the chain of suspicion is the weakest link? like is there any way trust could actually form across civilizations?

Disclosure up front: I'm the author, this is my launch day, and I want to be honest about that rather than bury it.

The premise: in 2042, an asteroid strikes Mars and within days the planet develops a breathable atmosphere and liquid water. Nobody planned for this. Humanity mobilizes fast, and the first colonists arrive within months — not explorers, but specialists chosen for function. Engineers, agronomists, physicists, administrators.

Red Foundations covers the first ten years. The colony survives. What the book is actually about is what gets built to make survival possible, and how those systems quietly become the real power structure. The space elevator. The currency. The governance framework. Every one of them was designed to enable independence from Earth while creating a new dependency on Mars City instead.

The colonists eventually have to achieve independence twice — once from Earth, and once from the infrastructure that kept them alive.

One thing I tried to get right: the colony stays dependent on Earth for a long time, for realistic reasons. Nobody launches a revolution in Year Three. The political conflict is between factions who disagree about how to build toward eventual autonomy — not whether to blow things up.

There's also a first contact element. The asteroid that changed Mars was not standard solar system material. What it left behind is 4.1 billion years old and shouldn't exist.

Book 1 of a planned series. Book 2 is already written.

If any of this sounds like your kind of read: redfoundationsbook.com

I am trying to find some short stories that are easy to read and just introduce some interesting concepts. I haven't been able to find anything I like yet for some reason.

Hi all, this is my first post here. I’m an author interested in your thoughts around launch vehicles for getting characters from the surface of a planet up to a space station or whatever to begin their adventures? In my (embryonic) universe I’m considering shuttles that can reach escape velocity from the surface up to a low orbit point. But I’m not imagining rockets, more like an acceleration ring or similar to get the craft up to speed. I’m not going into detailed explanations (as it isn’t integral to the plot) but I need to reference a system that is plausible. Appreciate your thoughts!

What are the best hard sci-fi books that have quantum theory at the heart of the book?

Quantum mechanics, quantum computers, multiverse etc.

Edit: Forgot that Aldrin Cyclers are for Earth-Mars

For context, this idea is only when there is plenty of fuel manufacturing on the moon.

An Aldrin Cycler is great, but you still need a spacecraft with enough fuel and delta V to rendevous and dock to it. If we have fuel manufacturing on the Moon, then wouldn't it be better to offload the delta V requirements onto the cycler itself. This is hence not a cycler, but rather an Earth-Moon shuttle. Naturally, for efficiency, we also take advantage of aerobraking to help slow the craft down.

The mission profile is as follows. A crew launches to a space station, along with cargo supplies. This could be in a single, or multiple launches. Once there, the crew and supplies are transfered into the transfer craft, which is almost completely full of Hydrogen and Oxygen fuel. This necessitates technology to stop it from boiling off.

The transfer craft undocks, positions itself, and conducts a Trans-lunar Injection (TLI) burn, and heads on its way to the Moon. Once at the Moon, it conducts a Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI), and rendevous with a lunar space station in Low Lunar Orbit. This is very likely a polar orbit, so that the landers can ferry supplies and crew down to the South Pole base, and ship fuel back up to the lunar transfer craft, refueling it.

Once the transfer craft has been refueled, and the crew has rotated between the base and the space station, the craft undocks, conducts Lunar Orbit Departure (LOD), and heads back to Earth.

The craft would be in the shape of a slight cone, with the engines at the wider end. These engines, with nozzle extensions for vaccum efficiency, would retract within the cone, and be protected by a ceramic heat shield, with a second layer of active cryogenic cooling using liquid Hydrogen. The craft would enter the Earth's atmosphere wide end first, with the crew section at the thinner end. The trajectory would be such that it takes off enough speed that the craft skips off the atmosphere, and reaches an Apogee of 400-500km, where it can conduct a perigee raise maneuver (EPR), and enter a stable circular orbit, before rendevousing with the space station yet again. The crew can then return to Earth in the capsule/s that their replacement crew launched in a week earlier.

The transfer craft would be quite large, needing a fair amount of Delta V. I believe the amounts would be 3400m/s for TLI, 900m/s for LOI, 900m/s for LOD and at least 300m/s for Earth Perigee Raise. But, I believe that even with this mission profile, the benefits of not haivng to launch nearly as much fuel, and the reliance instead on lunar fuel supply, with its far smaller gravity well, would make for a cheaper mission profile.

All of this assumes an existing lunar fuel manufacturing, using deposits of water ice at the South Pole to produce Hydrogen and Oxygen fuel, presumably also using that fuel to propell the reusable lunar landers and maintain orbit for the lunar space station. This is hence clearly many decades off, which is why I post it here in Sci Fi

I am looking for an English to German translator for a hard science fiction book. The content can get quiet technical so someone with experience in translating scientific terminology will be great. Either please comment here so that I can reach out to you or DM me please. Or anyone know of a service/person who can do this.

Thank you kindly.