One Double-Edge of Hard Sci-Fi

 I just wrote the intro chapter to my first full-length novel.  It's going to be a longer, more involved adventure of the Misevelin Salvage team, with a lot more characters and stuff going on.  This is something I've been waiting to start on for a while, because I wanted to spend a little time working on short stories and novella-length works before diving into a full novel.

However, what I want to talk about in this post is how difficult it can be to write in a medium-hard or hard sci-fi system.  I've already set up that there is no artificial gravity, and that most ships don't bother to install a rotating part, since most space flights are relatively short (due to Shelf space travel--FTL, basically).

Outopos, A Short Story (about 3100 words)

 

VeeTwo held her gaze on the small concrete structure and visualized a trigger being pulled. A few seconds later, there was a flash of light, a plume of infrared emissions, and then it was over. The last human holdout, the final store of some fragment of their history, was destroyed. All that was left now were occasional small groups, limited to Bronze Age technology, at best. The Silicon Civilization had won.