Throwing Down the Gauntlet

> One difficulty with writing High Frontier-type fiction is that
> orbital habitats make such excellent homes and solve so many
> problems. For example, there's little logic in waging a war of
> conquest to take over someone else's land if it's less expensive to
> simply manufacture additional land for yourself. How much science
> fiction plotting is driven by wars which, even if only implicitly,
> involve the desire to acquire someone else's territory?

Right. Which is one of the reasons I went for the family sitcom
format. The conflict is more of the the "why do you and Dad always
treat me like a baby?" or "why would a girl say she crazy about me and
them just dump me like that?" variety. I guess a cop show could be
done. About the only way to justify a war theme with habitats is to
have fanatics who want to destroy all infidels. Fanatics who don't
want to acquire the infidels' land, but simply want the infidels to die.

> I gravitate more to "man against the elements" myself, but even that
> has challenges. The threats which most people find scary about
> space like radiation, explosive decompression, and meteoroids can be
> easily engineered for. You can't easily threaten protagonists with
> stuff like this without assuming the design engineers were
> incompetent idiots, which is a bit dishonest.

A bit, yes. I was going to have an episode where the family sees a
movie that does exactly that (meteor destroys habitat), and the little
girl is scared that it might happen for real. Then she learns how
easy it is to engineer for such things, and that indeed the habitat
designers have done exactly that.