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{{work}}
{{DOTA}}
[[File:pentagon_2_9639.png|frame|Probably not [[The Pentagon]] you had in mind.]]
''The Pentagon War'' is a hard [[Science Fiction]] novel, still in progress,{{when}} that had its start
In 1980, at the tender age of 15, a troper named Tracer (no, not [[
Important safety tip: Don't try to [[So You Want To/Write a Hard Science Fiction Story With Space Travel|write realistic space SF]] before you've studied high school physics.
Nevertheless, the story became one of my favorites, and wouldn't leave my mind. I fleshed out the alien species, trying to make them really ''[[Starfish Aliens|alien]]''. I made a [http://www.rogermwilcox.com/pentgame hex-map-based war game] out of it, using a lot of ideas I gleaned from ''[[Star Fleet Battles]]''. I built an entire [http://www.stellar-database.com astronomy website] to answer the question "how far is it from star X to star Y?". I toyed off and on with turning it into a full blown novel to be ''proud'' of. I hammered on the plot elements to make 'em pass the [[Realism|reality check]], both from a "is that physically possible?" standpoint and from a "what kind of moron would do such a thing?" standpoint. And, when my eyes first gazed upon the earlier version of the [[Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness]] page from this very
For the most part, it's the hardest piece of SF I've ever written. There's no [[Artificial Gravity]] (other than via rotation or engine thrust), no [[Tractor Beam|tractor beams]] (mostly), no [[FTL Travel|warp drive]], no inertialess drive, no [[Inertial Dampening]], no [[Reactionless Drive]], and ''certainly'' no [[Teleporters and Transporters|transporters]]. With the exception of the technology behind the fusion reactors, there's not a single item used in the space battles that couldn't be realistically designed with known science today. (Well, okay, there's the focused magnetic beams, but we don't talk about them in polite company.) Space is ''[[Averted Trope|not]]'' [[Space Is an Ocean|an ocean]]. The spacecraft all have accurate delta-v budgets given the nature and quantity of their fusion fuel. It takes ''time'' to go from a standing start to 1% of the speed of light.<ref>Three-and-a-half days, if you accelerate at 1''g''.</ref> Engagements are fought at ranges of thousands, and even millions, of kilometers. Even the Bussard ramscoop technology on the true starships takes the realistic density of the interstellar medium into account, and pays at least token homage to the drag problem.
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No relation to ''[[The Pentagon Wars]]''.
{{tropelist}}
* [[Alien Arts Are Appreciated]]: The name ''Mercurand'' was coined by combining Mercury, the fleet-footed messenger from [[Classical Mythology]], with Gellimand, the Centaurian personification of light.
** A similar etymology lies behind ''Marsidor''.
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* [[Artificial Intelligence]]: Fighters can pull over a hundred G's, and as such are unmanned. They are piloted by an onboard "Semi-Intelligent Controller", or S.I.. These are expert systems capable of tactical decisionmaking, but are not truly sentient.
* [[Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence]]: {{spoiler|Arnold Hasselberg, some decades after he falls through the rogue hyper hole.}}
* [[Asteroid Miners]]: The entire population of Human-Centauri lives
* [[Asteroid Thicket]]: When {{spoiler|UV Ceti IV}} is destroyed in chapter 2, it flies apart into a close-knit planet-sized mass of small rocks. Unlike the Asteroid Belt in the Sol system, these pieces of flying debris ''were'' close enough together to present a serious navigation hazard.
* [[Attack Drone]]: Fighters are huge and unmanned, with their own onboard [[Artificial Intelligence]]. There are also smaller, single-weapon-carrying spacecraft called "Drones" that are remotely controlled by a person (or a Fighter), but these appear rarely if at all.
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* [[Call a Smeerp a Rabbit]]: In chapter 13, Torra Zorra describes the ''baaai(t)i'' native to its species' homeworld as "Centaurian lichen."
* [[Casual Interplanetary Travel]]: A trip to Jupiter on a liner with a QC&C engine takes about as long as a trip to Hawaii on a [[The Love Boat|cruise ship]], and costs about as much.
* [[Casual Interstellar Travel]]: Averted, at least until the advent of linked hyper
* [[Colony Drop]]: The original Centaurian plan at Second Contact was to shift the orbits of some Earth-crossing asteroids 'til they intersected the Earth. (They had to eliminate Earth's ability to deflect asteroids first, though, which proved more difficult than they expected.)
* [[Con Lang]]: Averted. A few Centaurian words appear in the text, but only the details of its pronunciation (never its grammar) are described.
* [[Cool but Inefficient]]: Bussard scramjets exist, and are ''much'' more economical for interstellar voyages than starships powered by
* [[Cool Gate]]: The hyper holes.
{{quote|At last, as the invisible ringed edge of the hyper hole passed over his limo from nose to engine, the shifting view crept past Carter's eyes. He couldn't feel it, of course; there was nothing to notice. As far as every atom, every photon, every subatomic virtual particle inside the spacecraft was concerned, the distance between the two linked hyper holes simply didn't exist. But he still appreciated the grandeur. Beneath him lay the human-ruled yet Sol-wary empire of Sirius; above him, the far stranger quasi-religious democracy of Human-Centauri; and somewhere in the middle were four-and-a-half light-years of parallel space that neither man nor instrument could detect.}}
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* [[Earthshattering Kaboom]]: A hyper bomb can produce one of these, by igniting nuclear fusion inside a planet.
* [[Eternal English]]: English is the ''de facto'' human language, although folks from North Mars still sometimes learn Mandarin Chinese for reasons of tradition.
* [[Exotic Equipment]]: Centaurian penises and vaginas are remarkably similar in size and shape to the human equivalents. Non-reproductive sex between humans and Centaurians ''is'' theoretically
* [[Explosive Decompression]]: In the sense of rapid pressure loss, not bodies unrealistically blowing up.
* [[Face Heel Turn]]: {{spoiler|Jennifer Doe}}
* [[Fantastic Arousal]]: A Centaurian can get aroused very rapidly to the sound of another Centaurian's mating call, especially when in heat. The sound is a simple, gutteral ''"groooonk!"'', surprisingly easy to imitate. Only mating calls that sound ''identical'' to a Centaurian's own will fail to have an effect on it (this is a defense mechanism to prevent two Centaurians that share a close genetic relationship, e.g. siblings, from mating with each other).
* [[Fantastic Measurement System]]: Just a tiny bit. A speed of one [[wikipedia:Per mil|permil]] is 1/1000 of the speed of light (300 kilometers per second). Other than that, [[The Metric System Is Here to Stay]].
* [[Fantastic Slurs]]: Humans who dislike Centaurians refer to them as "xorns," after the monster in [[Dungeons
* [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]]: Of the portal network variety. Hyper holes can be linked together in pairs. Entering a linked hyper hole instantly transports you out of the one it's linked to, even if the two hyper-holes are in different star systems.
* [[The Federation]]: The Solar Federal Government controls every planet in the Solar system, and used to control the colony at Sirius before Sirius declared independence. Maybe it's more like [[The Republic]]. Sometimes acts more like [[The Empire]].
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* [[Generation Ships]]: The few decades of human interstellar expansion before the advent of hibernation technolgy.
{{quote|'''Arnold Hasselberg:''' "I had to ''live'' aboard that spacecraft. Even with the time dilation, that was five years out and five years back. I got married and divorced twice on that trip, and produced a daughter and twin sons in the process."}}
* [[Get On With It Already]]: Nearly the first ''half'' of chapter 7 is one long [[Info Dump]], covering the entire history of Human-Centauri, Centaurian social structure, the first year of the War, the potential time-paradox implications of linked hyper holes, and (for all I know) the virtues of flossing your teeth.<ref>not that Centaurians ''have'' teeth</ref>
* [[Heavyworlder]]: Earth is the most massive solid planet in all 5 populated star systems. Compared to Centaurians, whose homeworld only has 0.8''g'' surface gravity, humans are heavyworlders. (Centaurians still have surprising grip strength with their 4 four-tentacled hands, though.)
* [[Homemade Inventions]]: The Mad Scientist built the {{spoiler|Zero Drive}} [[Iron Man (film)|in a CAVE! With a BOX of SCRAPS!]] ... er, with the spare parts shipped to him for his Phased Antimatter Bomb project.
* [[Human Popsicle]]: Centaurians naturally hibernate when their body temperature falls below 5 °C. Humans have "submetabolic sleep" technology to avoid the boredom of multi-year interstellar
* [[Humans Are
* [[I Didn't Mean to Kill Him]]: Or {{spoiler|her}}, in this case.
* [[Info Dump]]: And how.
* [[Insufficiently Advanced Alien]]: When Centaurians first encountered us primitive, backwards humans, they had already harnessed the power of controlled proton fusion in the QC&C reactor, and built interstellar [[Ramscoop
* [[Interplanetary Voyage]]: Linked Hyper Holes have turned interstellar voyages into little more than interplanetary trips, and nuclear fusion engines have turned interplanetary voyages into jaunts lasting only a few days.
* [[Interspecies Romance]]: Sort of. Centaurians in heat can be quite ... passionate ... when they hear their species' mating call. Unlike the Centaurian language, the mating call is simple and gutteral enough that humans can imitate it. Ken Tractor discovered the consequences of making this sound casually....
* [[In Working Order]]: At their second "meeting", 14 years after [[First Contact]], the people defending Earth damaged one Centaurian spacecraft badly enough that the crew had to abandon it in orbit. Human engineers nevertheless managed to salvage their nuclear fusion engine and reverse-engineer the secrets of the Quantum Confinement & Constriction (QC&C) field from it.
* [["It" Is Dehumanizing]]: Then again, the simultaneously-male-and-female Centaurians aren't human, and most of them wouldn't want to ''be'' human.
* [[Jet Pack]]: Sort of. In chapter 2, Arnold Hasselberg wears a space suit equipped with maneuvering thrusters. With very badly positioned controls.
* [[Johann Sebastian Bach]]: While waiting in line for the Sirius/Human-Centauri hyper hole, James Carter plays [http://www.rogermwilcox.com/Pentagon/Wir%20Eilen.mid "Wir Eilen Mit Schwachen"] from Cantata #78 to pass the time.
* [[Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better]]: Spacecraft-killing missiles destroy their target by running into them really fast. The Centaurian secret weapon is a kind of guided slug (inspired, in part, by the Observatory's secret weapon in [[Arthur C. Clarke]]'s ''Earthlight''). The inevitable Centaurian counterattack after First Contact started with high-velocity slugs launched at Earth's ICBM silos, with the intent of taking away humans' ability to deflect
** An earlier option, which the Centaurians couldn't find volunteers for, was to put plain old starships on collision courses with Earth. At 94.3% of the speed of light, an impacting spacecraft will do as much damage as its own weight in ''antimatter''.
* [[Knight Templar]]: Jennifer Doe, when she {{spoiler|tries to murder Ken Tractor}}.
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** In the early days of Human-Centauri, ''plastic'' was likewise an expensive and hard-to-get material, since the (lifeless) asteroids of the system had no petroleum. Hydrocarbons, such as plastic, had to be synthesized the hard way.
* [[The Only One]]: Torra Zorra is the only one whom {{spoiler|Arnold's "ghost" can use to communicate}}. This, of course, kind of interferes with Torra's plans to finish its tour of duty and make a baby or two.
* [[Our Wormholes Are Different]]: Hyper holes are flat, permanent 200-meter circular holes in space that lead, through an infinitely thin layer of hyperspace, to a parallel space in which time and matter have no meaning. They are created by the detonation of a hyper bomb. If two hyper bombs are pointed directly at one another and set off at the same time, the two holes they create are "linked"
** Just be careful not to stick anything across the outer circular boundary of one of these hyper holes. Any material that crosses the plane inside the boundary instantly comes out of the other hyper hole; any material that crosses the plane outside the boundary doesn't. If your arm were sticking out past the boundary when you entered the hole, you'd be in the new star system but your arm would be back in the old star system. Not a pretty sight.
* [[Operator Incompatibility]]: Workstations designed for Centaurian use will have 360-degree video displays, surround keyboards, and pedals that accept input from the biological wheels in the user's
* [[Perfect Pacifist People]]: Human-Centaurians think of themselves as this, but in reality they're more like religious zealots.
* [[Photoprotoneutron Torpedo]]: Proton cannons (which actually fire an electrically neutral hydrogen plasma), the radiation gun, the phased antimatter bomb.
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## ''Mercurand'' making its way to Sol space across Sirian space, so that its trip to UV Ceti would be shorter. (The chapter where this happens is even ''named'' "Gauntlet".)
## The Leonian Fanatic Brigade, attacking Alpha Centauri A III.
* [[Sapient Ship]]: Any spacecraft with a built-in S.I. becomes one of
* [[Science-Related Memetic Disorder]]: The Mad Scientist
{{quote|He wore his ''nome de guerre'' as a badge of honor, for "Mad Scientist" was more than a mere hearkening back to some old movie archetype. He really ''was'' mad. His sanity teetered on the brink of outright schizophrenia. It was what gave him his edge.}}
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{{quote|The Heliopause, the farthest reaches of the solar wind, three times more distant from the sun than Neptune — take that whole enormity, surrounding the solar system on all sides like a distant, distant shell, and shrink it to the size of a grapefruit. At this scale, the sun is a microscopic dust mote at the center with the Earth orbiting half a millimeter away from it; yet the Alpha Centauri star system would be another grapefruit sitting 130 ''meters'' away — the span of a city block. And Alpha Centauri was only Sol's ''nearest'' neighbor in space; this unfathomable gap grew ever-larger for the more distant stars.}}
* [[Secret Weapon]]: The {{spoiler|liquid metal gun}} mounted in the nose of ''Gellimand 3'' in the first Alpha-Centaurian attack on Sol.
** Zelta-Dee's directional screen, and Zelta-Cee's radiation gun, also
** Sirius's acid gum gun, which made a brief appearance in chapter 7, also counts.
* [[Sensor Suspense]]: When James Carter's limo tries to [[Run the Gauntlet]] across now-hostile Sirian space, his pilot can only detect threatening fighters and missiles as blips on the limo's radar or passive-thermal detectors. What these blips ''mean'' is more than enough to make Carter sweat.
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* [[The Smurfette Principle]]: Lt. Colonel Jennifer Doe is the only female who isn't a throwaway character. And she only existed in the 1980 original because the author wanted to introduce a "J. Doe" and then "shock" the reader by revealing that the J didn't stand for John.
* [[Space Battle]]: Chapters 5, 6, 9, 14, and 15.
* [[Space Brasilia]]: The Human-Centauri Habitat Ring is sort of this, of
* [[Space Cold War]]: In the years leading up to the War, Hyper Bombs played the same role in interstellar diplomacy that nuclear weapons did during the mid-to-late 20th Century (since a single Hyper Bomb could destroy a planet). There was also a string of failed Arms Limitation treaties named "SALTY", and diplomatic leaders named "Brezhnev" and "Jimmy Carter", in case you missed the analogy the first time.
* [[Space Cossacks]]: The first colonists at Human-Centauri were sort of like this, although they formed a real nation rather than just a [[Ragtag Band of Misfits]].
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* [[Token Non-Human]]: Jennifer Doe's deployer crew only contains two Centaurians, whom she only makes minimal accomodations for.
* [[Too Dumb to Live]]: Sol and Alpha Centauri are planning to detonate hyper bombs simultaneously, which will (in theory) create a permanent link between the two star systems. An intrepid filmographer in his own spacecraft wants to get the best possible shot of the detonation, from right behind Sol's hyper bomb. You can guess the rest.
* [[Tractor Beam]]: The seldom-used Magnetic Snares, and {{spoiler|the guidance system of the Liquid Metal Gun's bolts}}, are sort of like tractor
* [[United Space of America]]: The Solar Federal Government is this, since it evolved from the World Federal Government (which, in turn, evolved from the U.S.). It even has an intelligence branch called the Solar Bureau of Investigation.
* [[Universe Chronology]]: Also in the [http://www.rogermwilcox.com/stories/Pentagon_war_history.html author's notes].
* [[The Unpronounceable]]: Centaurians have four mouths, and they use all four of them when they speak. You'd need a barbershop quartet to pronounce their language correctly.
** Conversely, Centaurians' lack of a sense of smell means they also lack sinuses and nasal cavities. When they try to speak human languages, it souds like a hubad with his dose stuffed up.<ref>It sounds like a human with his nose stuffed up.</ref> It also gives them an accent reminiscent of [[Rocky and Bullwinkle|Bullwinkle Moose]] or [[Pee
*** This means their native words don't have M's or N's in
* [[Utopia Justifies the Means]]: If a Citizen of Human-Centauri is diagnosed as having the "emotional plague", he/she/it will either have to endure a long and rather painful therapy to bring him/her/it back into the fold, or be exiled from the Human-Centauri Citizen Areas.
* [[The War of Earthly Aggression]]: Over a century before the novel starts, a civil war breaks out on Mars. Earth eventually intervenes and subjugates ''both'' sides. Later, Sirius declares independence, and Sol sends a small force to try and bring the rebels back under Solar control; Sol loses.
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[[Category:Troper Works]]
[[Category:Science Fiction Literature]]
[[Category:The Pentagon War]]▼
[[Category:Literature]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pentagon War, The}}
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