Talk:A Frigga Syndrome

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It does seem like a recent HBO miniseries borrowed a little bit from this - doesn't it? Or maybe it's just a common reference pool. Supposedly, that is a legitimate extract from Legasov's memoirs. I cannot verify that as I don't speak Russian and just nicked a translation I found. Originally, the reactor accident sequence was at the start of the story, but ripping a bit from HBO has it at the end now.

It's not stealing, it's 'Inspiration'

One of the criticisms I remember reading of Fenspace has been that Handwavium lets you do things without really paying a price. You don't have to be competent. You don't even have to be good - it makes things happen. But it just sort of gives you the veneer of things happening without really doing anything. Meta-wise, it's great stuff when you need XYZ to happen for your story to work, but if the story's entirely handwavium it sort of falls flat on its face, because nothing really matters anymore.

Handwavium doesn't solve the problem - it enables the problem the audience wants to read about. And a lot of hard lessons are easily forgotten. And a level of respect for technology and science is being lost. There will always be problems that can't be handwaved away.

The story borrows a fair bit from some actual accidents to at least try and give a sense of reality. One of the actions taken by the operators - switching coolant pump power to the coasting turbine is exactly what the operators at Chernobyl were testing the ability to do - while the ruined core melting into the coolant water is the big disaster the Chernobyl liquidators were trying to prevent. At the same time - some handwavium is involved. Almost like the reactor was designed to have just this kind of accident.

The only real concession to handwavium is that the radiation is vented to space rather than across most of Europe - and that it's a fusion reactor which is altogether more radioactive inside at first. Had this reactor been on Earth, large swatches of land would be massively irradiated while whole populations would be left as walking ghosts slowly rotting alive. On the other hand, the reactor was safely contained away from the station's population by the simple expedient of a containment wall.

The reactor is handwavium. It exists to have the problem.
The problem is rooted in reality - where politics, human factors, constrained budgets and bad practice colide.
The solution is rooted in the problem - actions taken by people under threat and showing courage and cleverness to tackle their problem - rather than magic anti-radiation dissolve-the-atoms handwavium.
And there're consequences. Ranging from a chance of cancer in 20 years, to radiation burns, to losing some reputation, to someone basically being turned to a 'ghost'

Having a problem I went to the trouble of setting up in another shared setting get sort of crushed by the application of a Mary-Sue, rather than some real thinking, turned me off the setting.

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