Sci-fi setting

An opera is meant to tell a story, the setting is just dressing.

You can ask those questions about sci-fi though.

There's plenty of ways to justify regular soldiers.

They probably wouldn't use guns at all if they were stuck at that level, air's a valuable resource in space and you can't have blackpowder smoking it up

Yes.

Spelljammer isn't even sci-fi. It's openly and explicitly fantasy.

Sure you can. You have to filter the air either way, and you can vent it once you have. And air is less valuable than water.

Because with all those things humans are literally not important even if there is an interesting conflict, which there probably isn't.

>constructed servitors running all menial tasks, including military
>transhuman transcendence with people swapping from body to body and computer to computer
>godlike artificial general intelligences
>technological singularity in general
Which opera - or rather, horse opera, has anything like these?

>And air is less valuable than water.
What. Hydrogen and oxygen are cheap as fuck, while nitrogen - the stuff that makes up 72% of air - is not.

People who do these sci-fi settings don't do basic research. They just want a relatable classic narrative in space for the cool factor. If you were to include all those concepts, it would be entirely alien since there's no way anyone today would know what it would be like. We're all brainlets compared to the theoretical future human.

It's the point, Space Opera isn't about functional physics, it's about doing cool shit of old stories in space and weird planets. To me, half of the fun is assaulting the spaceship from the open window.
If you have robots to do things, you can't have Cindyrella in spaAce unless they're so retarded that having a washing machine it's having an humanoid doll washing by hand the clothes. If you can send robots or drones to explore or robots to war you can't have Simbad style adventures, or Xenophon's "Ten Thousand" in space/weird planet.
Moving from body to body and computer to computer kills space travel, and that makes it another genre.
You are trying to have things from sci-fi in a genre that is about how the girl in your image got dropped in space for being Psylocke, which is dangerous and terrible, just to be taken in by an attractive space pirate and his weird gang, and go adventures that will end having they regain his throne from his evil brother.

>how the girl in your image got dropped in space for being Psylocke, which is dangerous and terrible
You mean cute and fun.

get off my website

What kind of plot could you possibly have in a setting where everyone lives as a digitised conciousness in a system administrated by a perfect god-machine? By this point you've basically solved every problem that could ever exist.

Can't make regular soldiers defect with a computer virus.

You certainly can.

Tron.

Selective non-interference by the perfect god-machine to allow the consciousnesses to not go insane.

Bam, you can do a lot of things, if you don't risk the stability of the system. Still can't kill people since they get shunted to virtual hell for a bit, but you can do a lot of power plays.

>Which opera - or rather, horse opera, has anything like these?
Mass effect?

Play stars without numbers
The base setting has allowances for all of this

>what is the Culture
you fucking weeb

Really not space opera.

I mean, you COULD classify it as space opera? But it's not really the right sort of aesthetics for that.

Wasn't this one of the problems some star trek seasons suffered?

Any "hard" SciFi setting that seriously discusses the ramifications of most technologies that exist in such a setting would result on a world that is so entirely alien and incomprehensible to ours, that it'd be very hard to make any compelling story about it all. The further into the future you go and the more technological marvels you introduce, the worse this gets. Most authors also completely forget or severely underestimate the thousands of small changes and inventions that will completely alter the way society works. Fourty years ago, nobody could have imagined western society as it is today, with near perfect connectivity and the countless consequences of everyone having a supercomputer in their pocket. Hell, forget fourty, let's say 18 years ago when PDAs were still complete shit.

If you want to tell a compelling story, it's reasonable to draw a line in the sand and try to explain the rules and concessions of your setting in a reasonable way instead of chasing the dragon of "realistic hard scifi"

if she's in zero gravity, why are her tears running down her face

This is why I had trouble caring about characters in the ring world books

You don't use up nitrogen. It rarely needs replaced.

Not to mention that most scifi/space opera is an encapsulation of the values of a certain decade.
Star Trek reflects the rapid social progression of the 1960s, Alien and the original Star Wars trilogy depict a rusted beat up future where resources are scarce for many, a reflection of the 1970s fuel crisis, the Star Wars prequels reflect the proxy wars of the 2000s, and like it or no the Star Wars sequels represent the rise of neo nazis with the First Order and "dangerous white men" with Kylo Ren.

Didn't watch episode 8, but I saw the far left in episode 7's casting.

>there's constructed servitors running all menial tasks including the military
>they're not miniaturised gynoids in pretty dresses

For what purpose?

Clearly she's accelerating BRAAAP

You guys need to check out Orion's Arm. It has all this shit: orionsarm.com

I mean, Kylo Ren is only not a modern school shooter concern due to the fact he stabbed them instead.

AI oftens ends in disaster, maybe they tried it and it didn't work or just avoided it.
Dunno about the others, possibly religious/spiritual reasons for not wanting to combine human and machine in that way. Maybe in a world full of technology being made of flesh and blood is the best way to not be influenced by hacking etc.

That's defeatist.
Absolute perfection is impossible, but we're still able to recognize well thought out premises and consequences and we will appreciate them as an audience.
There's this picture book from close to a century ago that predicts cybercrime, automated farms and other stuff. Just because the computers depicted in it are huge that doesn't mean the thought that went into the predictions doesn't make it good scifi.

>that it'd be very hard to make any compelling story about it all

iktf I have some ideas for a transhumanist world but you wouldn't be able to run it as a game or write a book because it wouldn't make any sense.

>Space Opera
>No one actually sings
Explain this shit to me.

When you get to a certain tech level transhumanist stories literally become near alien-like tales of impossibly incomprehensible entities engaging with other impossibly incomprehensible entities.

Which can be interesting as a short story but makes for TERRIBLE long-term content that finds your audience with no means to relate to what's going on since it's all so entirely devoid of anything we would register as actual conflict.

>he hasn't read the Neverness series, one of the founding fiction works inspiring the transhumanist movement

Nice argument, but it was disproved in detail three decades ago.

OK lemme explain it like this.

Try to tell a guy from the 1800's a war story where it's just robots moving at beyond the speed of sound firing missiles that likewise move at beyond the speed of sound hitting targets where people we're looking to kill MIGHT POTENTIALLY BE STATIONED based on an intelligence agency that's designed solely to find out about dangerous individuals involving multiple things including a grand information network that covers the planet.

"I mean that's just our modern reality" okay.

Explain computers to someone from that time. Then explain global telecommunications. Then explain the internet. Then explain wifi. Then explain how ALL OF THAT can fit into the palm of your hand. Then explain drone warfare.

It almost seems like hardscifi requires you to account for so many alterations in infrastructure that creating an accurate depiction of it would require you to write an entire book just detailing setting material rather than writing a proper story, to the point where you're sacrificing the latter so that you can explain to us what the former is like.

"Imagine a really fast mortar gun firing really fast projectiles based on the testimony of an intelligence-gathering agency, also they monitor the mail, which is now magical and instantaneously transports."

The mental image you've created there is still vastly different from the reality and misses a lot of nuance you'd still need to explain to make any of this seem accurate.

>Space Opera

There you go. While I like some realism or aspects of realism, Space Opera is generally, well, a fucking opera. It's elevated, it's not generally hard sci-fi, where these things are more common.

>Servitors running menial tasks
I mean, it can delegate a lot, but you often have to entirely revamp society to work a different way in that case, and a lot of sci-fi draws from our time or ideas of how things work, or are even a form of commentary. It is, however, often present in support or smaller roles, rather than full automation, which an argument can be made for.

>Including military
One, soldier as a story or character archetype is way too valuable, explorable, and exploitable to give up in many cases. This is especially true since a good chunk of even (Or especially) hard sci-fi relates to war and how technology affects it, and us through it. Meanwhile, there's also the matter of scale; sometimes you can't fund it, sometimes you follow rebels against robotic militaries, whatever. Sometimes it isn't as interesting or insightful to just go "it's all drones lol," especially since that thinking has only come incredibly recently, in the scheme of things. That's also before you get to the fact that the way man wages war vs. how machines would is a very interesting theme to look at.

As long as man exists, men will kill and go to war; there's more than enough men for it.

>Transhumanism, AI, singularity
Depends on the setting. It's often there, softly, or is just not the setting to examine it in. Especially the more extreme bits there. However, it is popular more and more with time, and in pretty much everything outside classic space opera stuff.

>Is it just to reenact Age of Sail stories except in space?
Yeah, pretty much. There's a reason we love space pirates.

Star Wars at least does the first; 90% of shit is droids, and the whole automaton army was a major thing in the prequels.

Your image is weeb trash with poor perspective. Hips where?

Not really. Telegraphy and telephony was already taking off in the 1800's. Hot air balloons had already seen use in military applications. Artillery with indirect fire capability was already a thing, and guns could be fired based on information given by a third party.

Spies were commonplace.

Same song and dance, different century and circumstances.

>openly and explicitly fantasy
>implying fantasy didn't have sf elements from the start because the boundaries weren't set in stone

Yea seems like it. Although the thing that annoys me the most is that Space Faring Humanity is basically the same as modern humans both Culturally, Politically, and Physically.

You think by the time humans developed FTL travel we would at least upgrade our bodies to be more adaptable to other planets, and the cultural norms be highly different than just regular western values in space. But nope it isn't.

Cultural norms and the Political environment never stays the same. Yet in most sci-fi settings I have read Earth is basically a American or Western style democracy with the same nations combined into larger federations on Earth.

How do we that western style democracy would stay the permanent political status of human nations. The culture of humanity could change to some other part of the world and the majority of Human nations could become monarchies again in the future due to mass political change again, and humanity's space Empire would be a union of several Large Kingdoms on Earth banding together to protect each of their colonies from Alien Species.

Heck would humans even call themselves humans in the future? Or a different word is used to describe the Human Race because the international language changed from English to some other language [ex: Insan in Arabic, or Rénlèi in Chinese].

Heck would our Skin tone would stay same in different shades brown? or due to genetic manipulation, change in diet and atmosphere our skin to some other color like different shade of purple?

You have all these crazy thing that could be done yet most sci-fi series goes the same boring route.

The English word Opera is a loanword of the Italian word Opera... which is a loanword of the Latin word Opera, which is the plural conjugation of Opus.
Operas implicitly involve song and dance, but that's by convention not by definition.

Why did you post a picture of Rogue Trader?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you've never so much as looked at a spelljammer product.

Space Opera is ultimately about the human condition before anything else. Technology is secondary to stories about love and war. The setting serves the story, not the other way around.
And because of this the characters have to remain recognizable to a contemporary audience, so you can't get too drastic with what you change about society.