The Pentagon War: Difference between revisions

* [[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 and Dragons|AD&D]] that they vaguely resemble.

* [[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]].

* [[First Contact]]: Occurs over a century-and-a-half before the story begins, and involves humans getting jumpy and blowing up a peaceful Centaurian exploration starship. The Centaurians didn't take this very well.

** The first three chapters of ''The Pentagon War'' itself take place years or decades before the novel's main action, and deal with the discovery of hyper holes and the invention of linked hyper holes.

* [[Pronoun Trouble]]: Centaurians, being both male and female at once, are referred to as "it." This can lead to hard-to-follow sentences like "Torra Zorra walked through the swinging door; it hit it on the way out."

* [[Psycho Serum]]: The Mad Scientist took hormones to deliberately ''keep himself mad.''

* [[Ragnarok Proofing]]: The prototype {{spoiler|Zero Drive}} was on a planet that was completely destroyed, only a few kilometers from ground zero. Not only did it survive the blast, it was completely operational when recovered 78 years later.

{{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.}}

* [[Sci Fi Name Buzzwords]]: "Quantum Confinement & Constriction." (Even though this is an accurate description of what that technology does, it's still got "quantum" in its name.) Also, "hyper bomb", "hyper hole", and "proton cannon".

{{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.

* [[Shattered World]]

* [[Shiny-Looking Spaceships]]: Justified, in that putting a reflective outer layer on a combat vessel means lasers won't burn holes in its armor.

** UV Ceti IV's moon is exactly 120 kilometers in diameter, the same as the [[That's No Moon|Death Star]] from [[Star Wars a New Hope]].

* [[Silly Reason for War]]: The war was started by a bunch of diplomats sitting around a table yelling "I declare war on you!"

* [[Starfish Language]]: The Centaurian language. Centaurians do use their mouths to speak, like humans do, but they have ''four'' mouths and use them all at once. Some syllables involve the use of ''chords''.

* [[Stealth in Space]]: Averted. Active Radar Absorption technology exists, but it won't keep an enemy from seeing your prodigious thermal emissions. {{spoiler|The one time a spacecraft avoided detection, it was coming out of the local sun ''and'' had radar-absorption turned on.}}

* [[Stun Gun]]: The stundart pistol is standard military issue. It fires a tiny self-contained Taser, whose voltage can be set for human or Centaurian physiology. {{spoiler|Unfortunately, it isn't always harmless.}}

* [[Subspace or Hyperspace]]: A single Hyper Hole, linked or not, is an infinitely-thin hyperspatial corridor into a Parallel Space. Parallel Space is 3-dimensional just like Real Space is, but time and matter have no meaning there. It's even questionable whether ''distance'' has any meaning there. However, it's possible for an object to be {{spoiler|"anchored" to Real Space while in Parallel Space, through use of the Zero Drive. Such an object is in a "limbo" between the two spaces, and operates on the other side of the energy curve -- in other words, it's made out of tachyons.}}