Just got an email about it. I submitted a story back when the contests first started but of course didn't get published. I would like to give it a try again but I doubt they want something action oriented with a nice space battle.
I'll see what I can find. My submission to Strange New Worlds was set up in a Talk Show format with an adult Jake Sisko and two other guys discussing the merits of various historical Starfleet Officers. Kirk, Sulu, Picard, Sisko, Janeway.......
Just a matter of taste I suppose, Starship Troopers is one of my 2 or 3 favorite novels, but every time their's an action sequence, I skim - I'm just more about the exposition and the characters than the "action"
Space battles are a great. "The aliens ship moved in at warp speed, so of course it wasn't picked up on any sensors because its light cone hadn't reached its target yet. As it approached it fired it lasers, which of course are completely silent in space. They also only travel at the speed of light, so the photons just sort of piled up at the front of the ship's warp field, drifting slowly downward because of the firing angle until they got left behind. Then the attacker zipped past the target and 10 microseconds after that the laser beams bore in. They impacted on the hull aft of the loading port and steel instantly vaporized. Milliseconds later a small hole formed and air began leaking out. Two seconds later, with the attacker six million kilometers distant, about 20 times the distance from the Earth to the moon, the first officer responded to an automatic alarm and said "What was that?" "What was what?" "Something buzzed right past us." "Really?" "I think so." "Where is it now?" "Probably halfway to Mars." "No use trying to spot it then." "Nope."
