Fleshing out a sci-fi setting - could use help

Hi, everyone.

I'm planning to write a hard sci-fi story to get some relief from all the fantasy I've been writing lately. I've been brainstorming about a penal colony on a toxic world. It's a mineral rich world (is this Master of Orion talking to me from the grave?) but the organic material is rare and consequently extremely valuable. This suggests interesting socio-economic dynamics, where habitats grow around mine sites or power generation units; the menu of the day is constant skirmishes for the limited resources using heavily armoured and radiation-shielded vehicles or possibly mechs.

If this is a penal colony, it should need a Warden to keep the prisoners from building ships to escape; a jailer would also act as a supplier of minimal organic material from the outside, provided they hand over very exotic minerals.

I'm looking for a discussion to flesh out this setting, technological as well as conceptual. You are welcome to comment on my ideas or post your own. You are very welcome to post any books or movies that you enjoyed that use technology that might be useful in such a setting. The setting needs to be gritty, people living on the very edge of survival (think Fallout or Matrix, possibly Dune, but scarcer, without any leftovers from the previous civilization). I hope this develops into a large discussion thread where sci-fi gems could be mined from.

Now... Fire away.

It's great to see constructive responses. I dug up my notes on it to give more information.

My primary plan is to make every aspect of life on that planet as hard as humanly possible. This is not just a jungle for wild beasts to play in; this needs to put existence on the edge of a knife every moment.

The Warden is in fact an autonomous, robotic ship. It dumps organic material in exchange for the most precious minerals but it always makes sure that there is not enough for everyone. "Scarcity is the meal of the day and if you don't like it, lie down and stop sucking on the oxygen."

The prisoners are forbidden to build spaceships. The Warden watches from orbit constantly. If any would build anyway, the habitat would be destroyed from above.

The planet is toxic to the point where no human being or animal or plant can survive on the surface. No native life (for the moment, though some thing is waving at me from the mists). I'm thinking corrosive (chlorine?) gasses, constant cosmic ray bombardment, tectonic shifts, sudden gas eruptions, that sort of thing.

Yes, it is a forced-labour prison but not quite as you might think. The people on that planet are the crew of a resistance warship that has decided to surrender instead of fighting to the death. This alone is reason enough for hatred among them; not everyone was willing to surrender and even those that did are now thinking that they should have chosen differently.

The primary colony on that planet is the warship itself after making a controlled crash on the surface. The ship is too damaged to take flight again. From there, the ship's crew starts to spread out in all directions, looking for power sources and minerals. All habitats are underground so the ground acts as a radiation shield, which can make tectonis shifts a real problem.

About power sources - I'm thinking nuclear fuel is the only one that makes sense. Wind or water are out of the question. Geothermal could be an option but what do you use for energy transport if water is too rare to use?

What kind of tech? That's a good question. I didn't fix the technology level yet as it could be important to the plot later. Lasers were meant more as mining tools than weapons. As far as weapons go, there is ample use of explosive projectiles, depleted uranium shells, railguns. I don't want to use any semi-magic technologies, not unless they make perfect sense from a scientific perspective.

The area where I'm looking for creative ideas the most (but not excusively) is in the exotic minerals; I want this planet to be something unique when it comes to raw materials. This is where I'm most interested in suggestions. One application that comes to mind is high-temperature superconductors; I hope someone has some more interesting ideas in that area. As much as I like the spice from Dune, that wouldn't be helpful in my case (unless I missed a few applications of it; I will have to read it again.).

Rags99 said:

First of all you get a golden cookie for the "master of orion" reference.

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Thanks. I actually started playing it again this week, albeit the second one. Right now, my Sillicoids are kicking the Trillarians' butts.

Rags99 said:

Rura Penthe (Klingon penal colony)

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I remember the movie. A frozen world is actually what the ship's crew thought they would be sent to, until their captors double-crossed them, brought them to the toxic planet and told to land or be shot into bits.

Bodies and organic waste definitely gets recycled but no system is perfect. You can't eat the same molecule a thousand times, not without adding energy of some sort.

Rags99 said:

It would be better to use robotics wouldn't it?

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I asked myself that same question. Obviously I need a good excuse for this plot to work. Testing such excuses is one of the reasons I created this thread.

The reason robots aren't used is because the atmosphere is full of charged particles. This makes remote control impossible, and any microchips that would make the robots autonomous would be fried by cosmic ray bombardment. Sensor equipment would also be too affected to give accurate reading. The cheapest autonomous units therefore are human beings who are dispensible since they are rebels against authority.

No, the planet too rough for robots is simply why no one had attempted to mine it already. And I think it makes a nice premise: "We're shipping you to a world that's too rough on mechanical beings. Good luck, soft organic thingies!"

As for the minerals being mined... Well, they use what they can and give the rare things to their jailors as instructed. Instead of this being some mystery compound, I could simply have a nasty twist: the mineral they're mining is worthless. It's simply something to focus on instead of thinking on how to hack the Warden ship and escape.

I've given a lot of thought on what will the jailors be like. For now, I call them Superiors, as they are superior in every way to the captives. There should be a very good reason for them to try to rebel even with the odds being so much against them. There must have been something fundamental, otherwise they wouldn't have risked it.

I was thinking that Superiors have some sort of neural link between them that enables them instantaneous communication across vast distances, sort of like an insterstellar internet. I could make them more Borg-like, which would make them more like machines. So far, this was not important to the plot as I'm concentrating on the prisoners and their existence. I'm willing to hear ideas and suggestions on that... Just saying.