HANGAR

Reserved. Eh I'll hold off for now.

NAME: Judith Trovare
AGE: 26
VISUAL IDENTIFICATION: Shoulder-length brown hair, pale skin from a lack of sunlight exposure. She wears a pair of large round-frame glasses with only a lens on the right side.

BACKGROUND: Born with a cataract in her right eye, Trovare spent the first few years of her life half-blind until her lower class family managed to scrap enough money together to have her right eye fixed at a shady medical clinic in the crime-rampant isolated space station where she lived. While this was successful in removing the cataract, it left her right eye with a distorted eye lens, requiring a heavy optical correctional lens so she could see properly. Despite her less than stellar vision, she has a high attention to detail almost to a fault, making her adept in engineering weapons and instruments for spacecrafts. After making enough money producing and selling arms and equipment on the black market, she figured she'd try to go legal and help out the human race, first by joining the academy. One thing led to another, and now she's in command of a multi-person suicide can. Not what she had in mind, but it's a start.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION: Deep Space Sensor (DSS) - A sensor module designed as powerful long-range detection that can pick up the smallest objects in the darkness of space, the DSS was originally meant for detecting far-off, fast-moving minuscule debris that would could be a problem for space stations. Micrometeors, scrap metal, a rogue 50mm round that was fired from a battle scene 10 AU away. Often used by scavengers to detect artificial materials and thus ship wreckages, it's also been adapted by pirates to track oblivious trading vessels.

Sensors online, the Vranhal is ready for action.

Some notes!

You have a lot of freedom to invent details about your character's homeworld and past, within boundaries of sanity. The narrative takes place approximately around 2450 A.D. This is an RTD based around two primary phases - a stage where you fly your little attack vessels into combat against the Stone Pact, and a stage where you reside on base, accumulate resources and work with your gear.

Feel free to PM me or ask through some other channel if you need ideas for a starting bonus for your ship/crew.

Six players. The casualty count will probably not stay at zero.

Also reserved.

...didn't this get posted before? I'm almost sure it did; I remember the part about static fuzz in the intro.

I made a character for it then, so I'll just track the thread down and reuse them :p

EDIT : Hmmm. It seems this hasn't been posted before - or at least, the search isn't finding it...huh. I'll make a character soon, don't worry!

Son of a ♥♥♥♥♥, too late.

Game says six players, I counted five posts not counting Keb's and yours...in other words, there should still be a slot open :p

And here is my character! Don't worry, unlike Tiny Gods I'll be taking this seriously, so there won't be any humorous shenanigans, but I can't promise there won't be any witty one liners or anything from time to time. I apologize for my writing in advance - it's not my best work, but I've got the flu and this is probably the best I can do at this moment.

I hope you don't mind me taking a few liberties here, Keb, but you did say it'd be fine if it stayed within reason :p

NAME: Mike Richards of NSC-B33, pronounced Seebee.
AGE: 27 years, 8 months and 3 days.
VISUAL IDENTIFICATION: Mike is a thin and inhumanly tall man, with pale, milky white skin tarnished with the occasional dark blemish. His black hair has been bleached gray by the intense radiation of his homeworld, spared from falling out only by the intense usage of anti-rad drugs and other such therapies in his youth that have left a permanent mark in the form of an injection port on his left arm, to make the administration of intravenous medications all the quicker. However, his youth on a low gravity world means that he cannot easily walk in normal gravity environments without assistance, and so whenever he has to walk around in normal gravity he wears a simple battery powered mechanical exoskeleton that allows him to function as well as a normal human being, albeit a clumsy one. But when he is in a space suit and operating in zero gravity, however, he moves as if he were born wearing one, every movement as fluid and as natural as those a normal man might make inside a pressurized compartment.

BACKGROUND:

Mike was born into a life on a hard and dead world, a dwarf planet near the Oort cloud of its home system, its surface forever irradiated by the fury of a pair of neutron stars, his mother a mining technician and his father an atmospherics engineer. NSC-B33, a name that comes from being the thirty third binary pair inside a forgotten catalogue of neutron stars, would be like any other lifeless region in the universe were it not for the immense asteroid fields that littered the inner system, the resting place of a dozen shattered worlds, their mountain ranges and grand continents now being picked over by mining shuttles, carrion eaters come to feast upon the corpses littering a celestial graveyard. No one truly knows what caused such immense destruction - had an exoplanet wandered into the system and caused a catastrophic change in their orbits, or had it been the second neutron star that had come in and wreaked unparalleled destruction?

The difference is academic in nature.

But not all is dead in hell, for at the very edge of the system, far away from the raging crucible of bone shattering gravity and deadly gamma radiation of the inner core, stands a single bastion of defiance. A dwarf planet, its surface covered in craters from past collisions with the remnants of its dead brothers and bathed with unimaginable amounts of radiation on every half hour, a thousand dead probes from a thousand dead civilizations littering the devastated landscape, a place where, despite all odds, a colony had not only succeeded in taking root...but thrived. Buried deep within the crust and isolated from the rest of interstellar civilization lies a single city that is deeper than it is wide, a tower of concrete and radiation shielding constructed from the surrounding veins of lead, building ever deeper towards the planet's core as they mine and refine, always growing, always expanding.

With radio transmissions drowned out by the screams of their twin stars and their courier drones peppered by micrometeoroids, their success was a silent one, but success all the same, and without so much as a word to or from their distant homeworld they had evolved from a small mine to a smelting and manufacturing complex, capable of growing their own food, refining their own fuel and manufacturing their own tools and craft, forever waiting for the homeworld to call upon them.

For a hundred years, the colony waited for a call that never came.

But the colony never forgot its heritage, its roots as a son of the Sun and of Old Earth. They carried on the ideals of the homeworld as best as they could remember them, and as each generation gave way to the next they passed their tales on to their descendents, refusing to let the dream die.

It was with tales of sparkling sapphire oceans and endless emerald plains that Mike was soothed at night when he was newborn. His parents might not have been the wealthiest in the colony, but they loved him as parents should, and Mike's childhood was as peaceful as one could expect, learning about the perils of radiation from a young age as all the other children of the colony before him had, quickly becoming familiar with the nausea of preventative radiation treatments, the smell of recycled air and the warmth of oxygen candles. His father taught him how the air scrubbers worked just as his mother taught him how the manipulator arms of mining ships could bore so precisely, but when the time came, when Mike was a man in his own right finally free of education's grasp, the latter won out and he found himself a miner, not in the dwarf world of his birth but in the rubble of the broken worlds, learning to man the manipulator arm of the craft he served on and how to control it as if it were a limb of his own.

For years he earned his living in the shadow of sundered worlds, working in the vacuum of space as the manipulator expert of a mining operation, realizing at last how the low gravity of their colony-world had made them into natural born spacers, and in the midst of those three years, during a three month break given to let their bodies have a chance to recover from the rigors of radiation therapy and to let them take a hard earned rest from their duties, that he had the time to take a walk through the most public of the colony's carefully maintained gardens...and it was there that he accidentally walked into a young woman named Cheryl Mercier, one of the colony's botanists, whilst admiring a flower bed. Quick apologies turned to compliments and an interest in her work, and before long they were walking together, not just that time but on other times, too, and walks turned into dates just as friendship turned into love.

Then at last the colony's calls were answered.

Not by Earth but by its heirs, who somehow managed to discover the colony's whereabouts by finding a single messenger drone that had succeeded in leaving the system only to have been so heavily damaged that it failed to get anywhere near its intended destination, drifting for years on end before being found by a single scout ship. With its stored data and messages corrupted by intense radiation and magnetic fields and with its backup systems having failed some thirty years before, the probe had almost been dismantled for scrap...till the ship's commander - who had an avid interest in the history of spaceflight - realized that the drone's path was one of those of an old and unused courier route, its trajectory taking it into a forgotten sector of space. Her curiosity peaked, the captain brought her ship about and followed the drone's path back to its source...and eventually, she found the long lost colony of NSC-B33, Seebee, but she chose against making contact and returned to her superiors...who in turn went out and reestablished contact with their distant kin.

The colony's reaction to finding their distant brothers was first of surprise and then of celebration; Earth had come for them at last...but then they learnt of what had happened in their century of isolation - the homeworld's power and influence was no more, the very structure that the colony tried so hard to emulate having collapsed years before...and humanity was under siege by an alien alliance, the Stone Pact. Proof was given, images of battles and of fallen worlds, images of the corpses of alien beings plucked from the hulks of destroyed craft.

At first, the colony's response was a pregnant silence.

Then, it was a question of how the colony might best serve the war effort; if they could not meet Earth, could not unite with their promised homeland, then they would do whatever it took to preserve its legacy, no matter the shape or form it took, and no matter the cost. Retooling their industries to support the human war effort as best they could, they immediately enacted conscription upon being told of the dire state of the war, and Mike, as an experienced pilot familiar with space travel, was amongst the first to be drafted into a fleet. Cheryl, as a trained botanist - a skill that was always useful for any fleet travelling far away from friendly ports - was amongst the second group.

And neither of them went to the same fleet.

Separated by fate, as the colony and the homeworld had been, she gave to him the one and only memento he keeps of his homeworld - a red rose, preserved inside the tiniest of stasis cylinders...and with a small handful of soil placed at the base, carefully processed from the rocky environment of their desolate home, and with it came a single grain of that most precious of things : A single particle of soil from Earth itself, taken from the handful that had been given to every colony ship on the day of their launch, a symbol of the fact that no matter how far they went, how distant they might one day become, there was always a little part of the homeworld with them.

And just as the spirit of Earth went with the first pioneers, those brave men and women who built new homes amongst distant worlds, so now does the spirit of NSC-B33 go with its on sons and daughters on a thousand different battlefields, with them in victory and in defeat, and with that sacred soil comes the hope that Mike might yet return home to love her again.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION: Modular Manipulator Arm - A complex manipulator built onto the side of the craft, with shoulder, elbow, wrist joints before a detachable "hand" that can be reconfigured to whatever task is necessary - it can be configured for grabbing a cargo block with a grappler, for slicing through hull plating woth a plasma torch or for doing fine mechanical or electrical work with metal fingers a dozen times smaller than those of men. Comes with the most commonly used attachments and the most commonly used spare parts.

"This is Resurgam to flight control, all systems check, requesting launch vectors."

Perfect! The heterogeneous nature of interstellar empire means that a lot of different backgrounds and conditions are possible, and a lot of outcomes fit within the flavor of the setting.

You are free to either describe the starting bonus (if it's a ship attachment) as precisely as Caek did or give a general description and leave me to work out the details. I will make some modifications to ensure that it fits.

By default, you will be provided an officer of uncertain quality to fly with you even if you don't select an officer from the beginning. Officer requests should be given in general terms of desired skills and character traits - unlike equipment reqs, they cannot be invented from whole cloth.

NAME: Yuri Prostraov
AGE: 21
VISUAL IDENTIFICATION: A somewhat short but otherwise charming looking man with a European's pale complexion, but tinged with a hint of brown. His dark hair and eyes don't stand out much against the crowd. While perhaps unremarkable in appearance, his silent and stark attitude speaks volumes; he appears to take this whole "space" thing pretty seriously. Short (in more ways than one) and to the point, Yuri is just here to fulfill his obligation to himself, his family, and his superiors.

BACKGROUND: An excerpt from his diary: "I remember when I was 7. My mother told me stories as I laid down in bed, stories of an old world humanity had once called home, a world they'd never left. She called this world Earth. The idea of this world was foreign and alien to me, having been born and raised on stations far away from such a place. Earth, despite her descriptions of vast fields and fresh air, brought to mind images of a prison, a locked cell waiting to be escaped.
So, I was all the more captivated when she told me that the first man to escape this cell was my ancestor, and namesake, Yuri Gagarin. I think she, my mother, did this on purpose. Since I grew up without a father, perhaps she knew I longed for a role model to strive after. Let me tell you, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
Yes, I wanted to be the first into space, too. Hah! What a foolish child I was. All those dreams died a long time ago, along with my mother. But, at least I'm here. Might as well make the most of it while I still can."

RESOURCE ALLOCATION: Disruption Pulse Cannon - When colony law enforcement wants to bring someone in alive, this is what they use. When the DPC fires it releases several different types of energy, the most well known of which being electromagnetic, targeted at disrupting and disabling systems and subsystems throughout the ship on contact. While intended as a non-lethal weapon, prolonged use on a single target can disable life support for long enough to result in the death of the crew, and the safe salvage of the ship's parts.

NAME: N1-C9-L5 "Nico" of WCH-40
AGE:24
VISUAL IDENTIFICATION: Although he was born on a high gravity world Nico stands at almost 1.9 meters tall due to the various drugs and stimulants pumped into him during his youth, raised as a soldier he's strong and intimidating with an emotionless look in his eyes. However the thing most people remember after first meeting him is the crude robotic prosthetic replacing his left arm.
BACKGROUND:
Not all colonies were sent with pure intentions. WCH-40 was deemed too hostile to inhabit by preliminary scans, it's terrain was mostly jagged rock with a polkadot pattern of hundred meter high rainforests, stormy oceans with tides raised by the two moons and resources buried deep in the planet's crust. To compensate the atmosphere had an above earth amount of oxygen and the gravity was a walkable 1.3g. All these attributes made the planet a perfect choice for a very specific kind of colony though. Deals were made and hands shaken, throats slit and funds raised, and eventually a ship departed from earth's orbit to make it's way to WCH-40. The men and women aboard unaware of the the antics surrounding their destination.

The ship's AI unit however was fully aware of it's goal: to create a populace of soldiers and officers more loyal and capable than any other human army ever. Ready to be summoned back to earth by whichever government had greenlit their existence. Upon arrival at their destination the original colonists were kept in criostasis while the many robots and a few planted special operators spent the first thirty years building a self sustaining automated base and training area. Meanwhile the ship had started cloning it's remaining passengers so they could serve as the first wave of recruits. Divided into Legions at age 12, each focussed on a different aspect of warfare, the young clones lived harsh disciplined lives.

Showing great spacial awareness and reflexes during his youth the -as of yet unnamed- Nico was transferred into the 9th Combatgroup of the 5th Legion in 2238 and from then on known as N1-C9-L5 quickly earned got the callsign "Nico". The 5th was dedicated to space warfare and the 9th specialized in small to medium size multi crewed combat vessels. New recruits received basic spacecraft training with everything from maintenance to tactical training in their first years while simultaneously doubling as gunners for the older students. By the age of sixteen the focus shifted towards flight training, where Nico showed considerable skill in outmanoeuvring fellow students in the asteroid belts surrounding WHC-40. Marked as promising by his mentors Nico was allowed to take boarding training at age 22. Here too his manoeuvring skills showed when combined with a good memory of spaceship construction and plastic explosives, walls became entry points towards vital areas.

When the call finally came to fight not other humans but an alien threat the inhabitants of WHC-40 were ready. Thousands of infantrymen, hundreds of armored vehicles and dozens of atmospheric fighters were loaded aboard the massive transports ships to be reunited with the rest of humankind. In the first months of actual combat Nico scored over 30 kills while developing a relationship with "Fox", the slim 22 year old gunner and engineer that was always just an arms length to his left. His life took a turn when his first mission as squadron commander of the 9th protecting a fleet of miners was rudely interrupted when two of the miner ships turned out to be less friendly than the rest. Having few weapons of their own the miner vessels initiated their ambush by ramming the ships closest to them, with Nico's taking a hit from the port-side, destroying the armour and denting the hull. Both occupants quickly donned their helmets and opened fire with the turret while the energy weapons charged up. Small calibre solid ammunition intended to intercept light missiles and small asteroids pinged of the armoured hull of their vessel until it found a weak spot in the area damaged by the ramming impact. The 3mm rounds passed through the hull which sealed almost immediately afterwards thanks to the gelatinous compound sandwiched between two layers of steel. Fox's suit was shredded and she died within seconds, in a futile attempt to save her from the fullmetal rain Nico covered her head with his left arm, suffering several wounds. This wouldn't stop him though as he took over Fox's gun controls with his left hand and slew the attacker with several well placed shots from the railgun turret and SLB's.

While formally receiving no blame for the situation which resulted in the loss of 5 ships Nico was demoted due to the loss of his left arm and his less than expected results with his new co-pilot. After two months he found himself re-assigned to a unit flying Kropotkin class vessels as an instructional officer.
RESOURCE ALLOCATION: Railgun turret - Commandeered from his previous this weapon and it's capacitors replace the rocket belt around the hull of the ship. Firing either Armour Piercing Fletchettes or 300 gram Impact Rounds the turret is controlled by an extra stick in between the two seats of the cockpit.

"This is Fox's Vengeance to squadron: all lights are green, show me what you're made off."


I'm sorry, I got a bit too inspired by Caek's writing.

Reserve for first CORPSE REPLACEMENT.

NAME: Floyd "Flo" Matsumoto

AGE: 23

VISUAL IDENTIFICATION: Rather lanky, around 5' 11", no more than 125 pounds. Appears to be of mixed Asian-American decent. Shaved round head. Darker skin with several rough callouses. Deep creases in his head give him a much older appearance. Never found without his leather necklace adorned with several charms on it (e.g. Yin/Yang, several Japanese characters). Lips pulled into a passive smile.

BACKGROUND: (Give the system your memories and biography. Something about a pilot's ship or possessions generally reflects them.):

"Growing up in Old SoCal, Ma and Pa taught me to appreciate what we had. That's what the ancestors would want. My parents taught me the wisdom of the ancients. The Tao, the Dao, the Yin, the Yang, the Zen. All that jazz. (Confucius, however, was too submissive for their tastes.) Call me naive, but I took well to the old world teachings. Perhaps it was because I saw firsthand what happens when humanity breaks from the Tao.

I can still remember the day Pa confessed that we weren't farmers. We were scavengers of the salt. Our idea of a good harvest was discovering a convenience store beneath the dunes. To survive in the dust that long, that's how it had to be. The real farmers left SoCal for the temperate zone-or even offworld-long before.

After thirteen years of knowing no other life, REDACTED found us. We weren't to be trusted in the sand-entombed cities of old. We were grave robbers, disturbing the remains of a dead civilization. To be so far from the watchful eyes of REDACTED was forbidden. Neither I nor my parents were aware of the illicit nature of our lifestyle. I was born in the wastes, as were Ma and Pa.

REDACTED separated me from Ma and Pa. I stopped fretting over their fates fairly quickly. It's not worth sacrificing tranquility. They, like all of my ancestors, follow me through life on a spiritual level now. REDACTED took me to a detention center in REDACTED. They ordered me to a cold, stainless-steel bathroom. As instructed, I washed the grit from my hair-for the first time in my life. And yet, despite their best efforts, REDACTED couldn't wash away my wind-burned skin, or the innumerable lessons I learned in the sand.

You know how it goes from here. You take the aptitude tests, that put you where you are most needed. I don't know what it says about me, but they threw me in one of these sardine cans after my years at the academy. Not that I object. Ma and Pa taught me to appreciate what I have, and that's not much. I bring but a few trinkets with me. Artifacts from my travels. A few antique trinkets and charms referencing my beliefs. I need no more.

My service has been unremarkable thus far. I carry out orders. I refuse to make enemies out of my fellow man. It's not worth sacrificing tranquility. That being said, I have offered the teachings of the way to my comrades on many occasions...

Ask a child who savored the morning dew on his boots how little he desires luxury. Ask a child who stood before towering, thundering, sandstorms how little he fears danger. Ask a child who was torn from his parents how little he cares for personal squabbles.

I had no worldly possessions to leave behind in the dunes of California, but retained my instinct for survival. My parents are gone, but survived by their teachings. I still observe the ways of my past lives—my ancestors' lives overseas and my own past life in the dunes. When the storm arrives, breathe in, breathe out. Above all else, stay calm. Carve your survival out of the rubble. Prepare for the next storm. Breathe in, breathe out. And above all else, stay calm. "

RESOURCE ALLOCATION:
GOTTSCHALK BULKHEAD-Despite dating back to the earliest designs of the space age, ablative armor still offers its benefits. This large ceramic shielding at the front of Noble Truth absorbs atmospheric/micrometeorite damage to the front of the vessel. The Bulkhead also offers additional defense for strikes directed at the front.

"Noble Truth at the ready. Let's keep it clean and easy."