Thread: Some assistance please with research and others

I am writing a novel, modern day time frame, and I am going to involve military covert operations, terrorist activity and plots (middle eastern) and the full spectrum of the government (President on down). I am starting my research and dows anyone know of the current capabilities with satelite imagery?

Also, I want to be able to have the dialogue of my terrorists in their native language, but I am not quite sure how to put it in writing for an english reader. That is the thing that stumps me the most. I obviously don't want to just throw in arabic in the middle of the english language, but I am curious as to how anyone thinks I should proceed with it.

Thanks for all your help

I don't know the current capabilities of satelite imagery, but I will say that they are no doubt extensive. Still, satellite time is valuable and repositioning can be expensive. You might use reapers as a plot element. They are the current (known) spy drones. They have been used quite a bit in afganistan and iraq. There are also rumors of a secret new plane, but I don't know anything about that.

I suspect that intelligence and covert ops organizations probably use these much more than satellites.

link: General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well according to your dialog I might be able to help you. If your terrorists speak urdu I can translate it in an english format (For example, 'I can help' is translated as 'mein madad ker sakta hun'). But if they speak in arabic or something, I can't translate that.

I write early medieval fiction and my characters speak either Latin or Proto-German. Most of them are bi-lingual. Usually I do not find it necessary to specify which language the characters are speaking at any one moment. Sometimes I have three or more characters in a scene and one does not understand the language that the other two are speaking. I have the narrator mention this character's confusion/ignorance or I have that character act out their confusion/ignorance.

I recently read another author's work in my genre. That author italicized all of the dialogue that supposedly occurred in Latin and left normal all of the dialogue that supposedly occurred in German. I did not find the italics useful or necessary. The author had established that the main character was bi-lingual so it did not matter to me what language was spoken at any given time. It made perfect sense that the characters could communicate and that was all I needed.

Thank you all for the information thus far. Custard - I am currently in Iraq, and spent a few months on the Iranian border. To my understanding, is Urdu more limited to the Pakistanis and Afghanis? I know I will utilize both countries throughout my novels (I have a three or four book series in mind for this). I don't plan to use them inclusively, I am going to add many other countries that look at the US in a not so wonderful light.

I think what I will do is pretty much nothing to the language as long as the conversation is between people that understand the language that is being spoken. But if it is heard by someone that doesn't understand that language, I will have to use the english literaration.

Flapjack - thank you for the information. I am currently doing extensive research as far as the different capabilities of covert ops is concerned. I have some contacts over here that I am getting with over lunch, so hopefully I will have more insight into the types of things that is common knowledge and what is classified. This will help me decide what technology I will have to "invent".

As far as spy satellites go, there have been numerous techno-thrillers (both books and movies) over the past 30 years that have portrayed satellite imagery. The experts all say that the books and movies always get it wrong. It is one of those things where those who know do not say and those who say do not know. I suggest you portray the satellite capabilities exactly the same way as every other writer. That way you will give the audience exactly what they expect. This is one of the few times when your readers will not criticize you for getting it wrong. More often than not, your readers will not know that you are "guessing" or making it up. Even if they know that you are wrong, they will understand why.

They said back when I was in the USAF, that satellites could read all the writing on a cigarette pack laying in the open.
I would assume they can do more now.

Satellites are so advanced they replaced the spy planes.

Google earth is satellite images available to the public, so how much more advanced is the military's images?