Who wants to help me pretend I'm smart?

Well, I have a number of tricks for writing stories. If you were to cross-check with Doitsujin, you'd find that I go into elaborate detail as to how things work, but the truth is that I won't use more than half of my theories in written text. But it's nice to know these theories in case you do need to go a little deeper than you originally planned.

To further this point, I shall start by mentioning the two biggest tricks I use in this area.

1) Capitalise on what others have done before.

People that don't know much about science will believe anything that is spoon fed to them if you make it SOUND realistic. What makes it even easier is going with popular ideas already made. I know scientific people that really believe the technology of Star Trek is possible. If you were to design scientific theories BASED on those particular existing ideas. People are even more likely to believe it than a reinforced model.

2) Don't explain what you don't need to.

This works REALLY well with first person stories. The example I used with Doitsujin I believe is something along the lines of "The Elandyl have mastered FTL travel, but stuffed If I know how it works. I translated the word 'quark' and the rest of it just went over my head."

Suddenly, it doesn't matter how the FTL drive works. It just does, but the character can't explain it. He's a diplomat with an interest in computers.

Using those two principals, I get away with blue murder. (metaphorically)

I've also recently realised exactly how important it is to have your story layed out in dot points before you start writing. I went back and did that and WOW, suddenly I know where I'm going.

Anyway, Hope I've been of some help.

Well, I don't want to use the same crap that everyone and their dog has done before. Which means fusion, annie plants, and (sadly) improbability drives and bistromathics are out.

Actually, I have an idea for a power plant that could not conceivably work in reality, making it perfect. All born from a strong desire to use "terragauss" in a sentence. That's such a fun word.

Regarding fusion and antimatter, think about it the other way round. How do you want to get all the power you need? Realistically, those are the only methods of efficient energy productio, although the latter one is far more efficient - then again you need to produce the antimatter somehow. Oh, and Cold Fusion is out of choice, that's an urban legend.

So, regarding improbability drive, that's... Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, isn't it? But what's Bistromathics? Same source?

Regarding cool-sounding names, do you think that's really necessary? I just remember all the technobabble and hundreds of fictional chemical elements in Star Trek.

Then again, if you want no realism at all, forget what i said...

Bistromathics is from the... third book, I think. My sister has my copies of the Hitchiker's Guide books right now...

Basically, the theory is that in a restaurant numbers more or less stop obeying the laws of physics and whatnot, so a small bistro is built into the ship and that's how it works. Only imagine it described much better, I'm no DNA here.

And c'mon, I'm using a unit of magnetic flux density to measure power output, how realistic do you think I'm gonna make this. (At least, I think that's what a gauss measures, all the stuff I read was waaaaay over my head)

And I won't be getting as sad as Star Trek. Like the Heisenberg Compensator they have in the telaporters. Near as I can figure it's just a portable voodoo shaman. Though I do have a good mind to measure computational speed in units called "Torvalds."

Ok, so it was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Allright, then.

Regarding sci-fi technologies, i can give you a brief (and quite understandable) of all the relevant technologies (primarily thanks to those long discussions with Starfyre ). Just e-mail/PM me about it.