Joined: Sun Feb 24, 2008 2:10 am Posts: 1531 Location: Ye Olde England
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
NAME: Makintire "Maki" Hino AGE: 9613 Cycles
VISUAL IDENTIFICATION: Having spent most of his life in low-grav orbitals Maki measures in at almost 240 centimeters tall, pale sunless skin further cements his place as a spacer, but the intricately tattooed pattern of eyes on his bald-shaven head is what truly sets him apart from others.
BACKGROUND: (Give the system your memories and biography. Something about a pilot's ship or possessions generally reflects them.): "Deephab ToBo α-18 is unique in many ways, that it spends most of its orbit in deep space being one, and only draws near to a planet once every five years being another, but the most notable uniqueness that can be noted in its occupants. They spend more time in zero-gravity than would even be normal for a spacer, this leads to them having incredible spacial awareness, and generally on reaching maturity they will begin work operating mining pods or as fightercraft pilots." Maki followed the norm, and over time has spent a good thousand cycles piloting a light security craft, but recently has been press-ganged into military service in the latest wave of drafts.
RESOURCE ALLOCATION: "SAND BARREL" DISPERSION LAUNCHER - A simple turreted launcher located on the starboard of the Dobrynya, loaded with canisters that detonate into a cloud of charged ferrosilicate nanoparticulate. Though relatively short-lived, the cloud is capable of dispersing energy weapons fire, and anything foolish or unfortunate enough to enter the cloud will find exposed sensors and electronics fouled and rendered inoperable until the built up particulate can be cleaned off. The downsides to this system is that the dispersion effect is two way, so outbound energy weapons fire will be dispersed just as much as incoming.
"Dobrynya, ready to launch."
Tue Dec 15, 2015 1:08 am
caekdaemon
Data Realms Elite
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 3:00 pm Posts: 4144 Location: Hell.
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
Amazigh wrote:
NAME: Makintire "Maki" Hino AGE: 9613 Cycles
Taking a guess, I'm assuming each cycle is a day, meaning your character is around 26 years old...?
Wed Dec 16, 2015 11:54 am
TheKebbit
Joined: Sat Jul 04, 2009 10:24 pm Posts: 3939 Location: NORTH
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
Code:
Local nodes confirm that you are on Menippe of the Typhon system. TEMPS ATOMIQUE INTERNATIONAL 64-BIT TIME: 4000000213e38e2e UTC 2452-10-11T13:52:11+00:00
ROLL ONE
A gentle rumble of life as the sun barely creeps over the horizon. Chopper blades are warming up for the day's hard work. It is a peaceable hour on a world whose colonists always knew it was a jewel.
This is Walden, the impeccable, imperial nerve center of human occupation: a brilliant city like flashing knives towering over lush tropical jungle. Glittering skyscrapers of steel and composites merge seamlessly into industrial zones - docks hang inches over the water, robotic arms tending to brightly-colored research vessels and submersibles. Banners of electric cloth show the proud seals of the Solar Party in red, green and gold, though the phosphorescence of plankton in the blasted artificial bay competes in the night with their glow. Ecology meets industry here; automated crawlers, drones and helicopter fleets work over this wild paradise, tapping drugs and exotic genotypes from the bounty of Menippe, a garden world more habitable than Earth in its beautiful prime.
You are entrenched to protect her. In this planet's only transorbital defense bunker, a unit of the Reserves huddles around three massive atmo carriers - the Halberd, the Kilimanjaro, and the Berliner, each rigged to carry six Kropotkins into inevitable battle with the Stone Pact.
Cpl. Macintire Hino=.STATUS/.] A deep, resonant hissing. You were asleep, and now you aren’t. Your breaths are starting to come up short. This doesn’t happen often.
Okay, let’s put this together. You’re in your bunk, swaddled in spare reflective blankets and antiflak sheets. Your tongue is dry. The water is starting to peel off of it. The hissing was coming from your own tissues. Your eyes are starting to itch. What’s going on?
They partitioned the barracks – an ugly holding chamber hewn from the solid rock of the Jormungandr cave system – into untidy little “rooms” with walls of heavy plastic tarp. Agglomerations of tents and little structures pockmark the space beyond the bunker. Out there, the jackboots of patrolmen crunch stones in the gloom. Your space, of course, is right next to Annalise’s, in the well-heated corner of the cavernous hall beneath the oxygen vent.
A strained gasp from her sector. It’s your copilot. She should be awake too. You’re wheezing, hard. This is no good.
SOLDIER
HARDWARE ARMS - N/A ARMOR - Naval Jumpsuit Dark blue Nomex with ID across the left breast, rank and your serial number on the shoulder. Fireproof, not bulletproof - stiflingly warm, with a pullover hood to protect against scalp and neck burns. - Ground Uniform Fatigues in urban tones that break up your outline in a haze of pixelated grey. A heavy-duty harness compatible with most exoskeletons and a toolbelt for preflight maintenance. Ample room for insertion of ceramic plates and additional body armor. AUGS - N/A EQUIPMENT - N/A WETWARE - CONDITION [NORMAL] - VLOC22 Mutation Cluster Your bloodline runs thick with exotic oxygen carriers not native to the human species before the first starflights; distorted lung morphology and elevated levels of nitric oxide in your system give you a strong barrel chest and blueing, robust flesh that glows with immunity to hypoxia. An artifact of your deep-spacer heritage, your genotype gives you an extra few minutes to react to ship atmosphere catastrophe and increases your endurance beyond what a dirtborn human can support. WOUNDS None yet. AUGS - Euler Lobe Surgically implanted when the state declared you an adult, this organ was grown from your fetal stem cells and accompanied your passage into manhood. A wet element of heavily folded neural matter placed in an artificial hollow just below the cerebellum, the Lobe deepens your proprioception and gives you a truer inner representation of 3D motion in free space than your feeble, deceptive inner ear – with care, you are able to orient your body toward gravitational fields by comparing spindle nerve responses in each of your limbs. This twitching spatial hypersense is something that warps your dreams and makes you a natural navigator. PSYCHE - CONDITION [STABLE] WOUNDS None yet. ADVANCED SKILLS - N/A RESOURCES - N/A
SHIP
DESIGNATION:Dobrynya DRIVE/ENGINE - Two-Phase Chemical Rocket The Kropotkin’s ancient motor is cheap, durable, safe and expendable, operating on a solid/liquid hybrid system. A throttled pressure feed of red fuming nitrous acid feeds into an armored canister of hard rubber impregnated with aluminum powder; wells bored into the pre-cast fuel stack guide the acid to a smooth ignition, accelerating the vessel on long entry burns to combat. With a throaty roar that outdoes the power of liquid rockets and a less explosive failure record than solid boosters, this dependable engine suffers from an excessive thirst for propellant. For this reason the Kropotkin either serves defensive roles or is attached like a lamprey to a larger mothership, which supplies it fuel cores and oxidizer. WEAPONRY - Synchrotron Light Burner Long arrays of magnets in the guts of the Kropotkin wind and work a beam of electrons into twisting paths. These tortured particles clump and disgorge photons – packets of radiation from the “undulator” sum into a continuous beam of X-rays which slowly ionizes and ruins enemy electronics, poisons crewmen with radiation and boils away their armor plating with increasing efficiency the longer the SLB is kept operating. A boom at the front of the Kropotkin extends the undulator for additional power, but energy demands mean that this extra lasing stage is not always employed. An efficient and accurate primary weapon with low destructive yield. - “Sandbarrel” Dispersion Launcher A turreted electrothermal gun located on the starboard of the Dobrynya, loaded with canisters that detonate into clouds of charged nanoparticulate and metallized chaff. Though relatively short-lived, the resulting particle swarm is effective at dispersing energy weapons (up to the heavier systems that hurl gouts of plasma) and the chaff has additional radar-confusion properties. Anything foolish or unfortunate enough to enter the area of effect will find exposed sensors and electronics fouled, rendered inoperable until the electrostatically-crusted particulate can be cleaned off. Unfortunately, the scattering and absorption effects of the Sandbarrel are indiscriminate to friend and foe; energy weapons aimed outward will be muted just as much as hostile fire. - Missile Belt Fifty-two warheads hang across the middle of the Kropotkin’s structure like a wrestler’s girdle. A battery of dumb weapons with minimal heat-seeking capability, these missiles have variable cargo. Generally they carry metal penetrators that shatter an opening for a secondary charge of dense, destructive hydrocarbon crystal, but they can also be filled with sensor equipment or rigged to explode into hundreds of submunitions (a tremendous shotgun blast perfect for shredding satellites). STRUCTURE - Old Superframe The Kropotkin is an undignified, barrel-shaped vessel with a tendency to crack apart under combat stress. Its core, clobbered together from modular blocks whose designs have their ancestry in the earliest interplanetary spaceships, is brittle but easily repaired and maintained; the bulkiness and fragility of its venerable heart is off-set by the ubiquity of its replacement parts, its amenability to field modification and a generous wrapping of armor. -- Whipple Skin The Kropotkin’s first line of defense is a coat of simple shock shields – a layered network of metal plates sandwiched with a sharp wool of synthetic spider silk and carbon fiber, intended to fragment incoming kinetic munitions and diffuse their momentum over the maximum possible area of the ship. Effective mostly against micrometeors and small impactors – larger weapons striking the Kropotkin nearly always imply pilot death and total loss of the vessel. Nodules of reactive polymer foam are buried within the armor line to stem leaks and compensate for material loss. LOGISTICS - Stirling Radiothermal Generators Power aboard the Kropotkin comes from hot masses of decaying plutonium that drive a closed pumping cycle of inert gas, generating a stable and effectively permanent flow of energy for shipboard electronics and the SLB. This efficiency and mechanical simplicity comes at an ugly price - the "Handwarmer Protocol" declared with the first flights of the Kropotkin holds that the ship’s mass budget is too minimal to permit enough lead to perfectly insulate the crew. Pilots are provided a daily ration of DNA protectants and antibiotics, cloyingly sweet pills that keep their radiation sickness at a manageable level and guard against secondary infections. - Split-Bay Rearmament The Kropotkin’s limited operational endurance often puts it in a bind – but decades of bombing runs and planetary defense service have burned its innards into the memory of Earth’s ground crews. This unassuming ship can be cracked down the middle, its missile stock replenished and its engine topped up in record time – motorized access ports built into the frame mean that fuel and missile load can be addressed simultaneously without the risk of massacring repairmen in a bloom of flaming propellant. Cycling any Kropotkin picket in and out of combat status can be accomplished in minutes rather than hours. CREW - Copilot // A Coffin for Two The Kropotkin is fitted to carry two pilots – each blending the role of gunner, navigator and radio officer – in a cramped cockpit, every surface overgrown with snappable switches, flickering displays and acrid red lights. One will carry on if the other is killed. Both are already (minus the helmets) in their EVA suits, despite the thin, stale air pumped through the cabin. There will be someone sitting by you when your hull is breached and the five inches of fused glass-ceramic in front of you implode and your breath is sucked into the yawning nothing that you had forgotten surrounded you.
Cpl. Floyd "Flo" Matsumoto=.STATUS/.] There is water trickling into the A2 barracks. It begins as a dark drip oozing its way across the ceiling, but soon the smell of ozone fills the room and the window panes (which look out into the dust of the cave) begin to rattle under the rain that beats them so savagely. Another smell. Saltwater. No, sweat. No, something viscous, rich and red, accompanied by the rising taste of pennies.
It’s starting to pool on the floor.
No one else has noticed – they’re fast asleep, just like you were before an icy droplet fell on your lips. You’re lying on the bottom of a shelf of stone. You know the door to this structure is locked. Usually there’s no way you could get anything out of the soulless drone they have stowed above you. Tonight the machine pilot will have to make an exception and lift you to high ground.
Are you going to do something? You don’t remember seeing this much water in your life.
SOLDIER
HARDWARE ARMS - N/A ARMOR - Naval Jumpsuit Dark blue Nomex with ID across the left breast, rank and your serial number on the shoulder. Fireproof, not bulletproof - stiflingly warm, with a pullover hood to protect against scalp and neck burns. - Ground Uniform Fatigues in urban tones that break up your outline in a haze of pixelated grey. A heavy-duty harness compatible with most exoskeletons and a toolbelt for preflight maintenance. Ample room for insertion of ceramic plates and additional body armor. AUGS - N/A EQUIPMENT - Blowout Kit With half-familiar motions copied from your mother and father, when given access to the quartermaster you compressed together an array of survival devices into a ritualistic package that you think will save your soul. It follows you and, in the worst of times, will guarantee you – contained inside your cripplingly heavy military backpack are a collapsible temporary shelter, a solar still for the purification of precious water, high-density protein paste, flares, a spiked radio transmitter, vitamins, painkillers, and a long-barreled, lightweight disposable coilgun with fifty rounds of embedded ammunition. This cargo follows you on missions. WETWARE - CONDITION [NORMAL] WOUNDS None yet. AUGS - N/A PSYCHE - CONDITION [STABLE] - Unshakable A confusion of old Earth philosophies have amalgamated themselves in your nature. You have convinced yourself that your actions are aligned with the universe, in close contact with the noumenon-beyond-perception, as seamless and justified as the orbit of worlds around their suns. Decisive movement is easy for you because you are swept up by an ineffable force, and death - merely a change in matter - does not scar you. The land of peace is your birth country, but you know that only waging war with peerless skill can get you home. WOUNDS None yet. ADVANCED SKILLS - N/A RESOURCES - N/A
SHIP
DESIGNATION:Noble Truth DRIVE/ENGINE - Two-Phase Chemical Rocket The Kropotkin’s ancient motor is cheap, durable, safe and expendable, operating on a solid/liquid hybrid system. A throttled pressure feed of red fuming nitrous acid feeds into an armored canister of hard rubber impregnated with aluminum powder; wells bored into the pre-cast fuel stack guide the acid to a smooth ignition, accelerating the vessel on long entry burns to combat. With a throaty roar that outdoes the power of liquid rockets and a less explosive failure record than solid boosters, this dependable engine suffers from an excessive thirst for propellant. For this reason the Kropotkin either serves defensive roles or is attached like a lamprey to a larger mothership, which supplies it fuel cores and oxidizer. WEAPONRY - Synchrotron Light Burner Long arrays of magnets in the guts of the Kropotkin wind and work a beam of electrons into twisting paths. These tortured particles clump and disgorge photons – packets of radiation from the “undulator” sum into a continuous beam of X-rays which slowly ionizes and ruins enemy electronics, poisons crewmen with radiation and boils away their armor plating with increasing efficiency the longer the SLB is kept operating. A boom at the front of the Kropotkin extends the undulator for additional power, but energy demands mean that this extra lasing stage is not always employed. An efficient and accurate primary weapon with low destructive yield. - Missile Belt Fifty-two warheads hang across the middle of the Kropotkin’s structure like a wrestler’s girdle. A battery of dumb weapons with minimal heat-seeking capability, these missiles have variable cargo. Generally they carry metal penetrators that shatter an opening for a secondary charge of dense, destructive hydrocarbon crystal, but they can also be filled with sensor equipment or rigged to explode into hundreds of submunitions (a tremendous shotgun blast perfect for shredding satellites). STRUCTURE - Old Superframe The Kropotkin is an undignified, barrel-shaped vessel with a tendency to crack apart under combat stress. Its core, clobbered together from modular blocks whose designs have their ancestry in the earliest interplanetary spaceships, is brittle but easily repaired and maintained; the bulkiness and fragility of its venerable heart is off-set by the ubiquity of its replacement parts, its amenability to field modification and a generous wrapping of armor. -- Whipple Skin The Kropotkin’s first line of defense is a coat of simple shock shields – a layered network of metal plates sandwiched with a sharp wool of synthetic spider silk and carbon fiber, intended to fragment incoming kinetic munitions and diffuse their momentum over the maximum possible area of the ship. Effective mostly against micrometeors and small impactors – larger weapons striking the Kropotkin nearly always imply pilot death and total loss of the vessel. Nodules of reactive polymer foam are buried within the armor line to stem leaks and compensate for material loss. -- Gottschalk Bulkhead Carbon and silicon, sintered, frozen into a shield of thousands of jet black tiles welded as one brute scaffolding structure onto the face of the Kropotkin - proofed against both a white-hot descent into a planetary atmosphere and kinetic warheads, your Bulkhead is a primitive, expendable barrier that is replaced after each mission. This ablative armor exacts a mass penalty that makes your already-underpowered chemical rockets strain to move you, but the increased protection it offers gives you additional peace of mind. LOGISTICS - Stirling Radiothermal Generators Power aboard the Kropotkin comes from hot masses of decaying plutonium that drive a closed pumping cycle of inert gas, generating a stable and effectively permanent flow of energy for shipboard electronics and the SLB. This efficiency and mechanical simplicity comes at an ugly price - the "Handwarmer Protocol" declared with the first flights of the Kropotkin holds that the ship’s mass budget is too minimal to permit enough lead to perfectly insulate the crew. Pilots are provided a daily ration of DNA protectants and antibiotics, cloyingly sweet pills that keep their radiation sickness at a manageable level and guard against secondary infections. - Split-Bay Rearmament The Kropotkin’s limited operational endurance often puts it in a bind – but decades of bombing runs and planetary defense service have burned its innards into the memory of Earth’s ground crews. This unassuming ship can be cracked down the middle, its missile stock replenished and its engine topped up in record time – motorized access ports built into the frame mean that fuel and missile load can be addressed simultaneously without the risk of massacring repairmen in a bloom of flaming propellant. Cycling any Kropotkin picket in and out of combat status can be accomplished in minutes rather than hours. CREW - Copilot // A Coffin for Two The Kropotkin is fitted to carry two pilots – each blending the role of gunner, navigator and radio officer – in a cramped cockpit, every surface overgrown with snappable switches, flickering displays and acrid red lights. One will carry on if the other is killed. Both are already (minus the helmets) in their EVA suits, despite the thin, stale air pumped through the cabin. There will be someone sitting by you when your hull is breached and the five inches of fused glass-ceramic in front of you implode and your breath is sucked into the yawning nothing that you had forgotten surrounded you.
Cpl. Judith Trovare=.STATUS/.] You sleep in the shadow of a towering water processor that gurgles monotonously like an aimless stream, muffling pillows compacted around your head to the point of suffocation hazard. Your term at this base has been the grounds for one long noise complaint. Sleep is difficult.
It’s the dead of night, but it’s beyond dark in your tent.
You turn over quietly and wipe at your right eye, pressing at the globe and expecting a familiar explosion of color. Instead there is a hollowness. An ugly, filmy quality from a membrane over the socket that you pinch with a horrified expression gradually forming. What? The bandages are back? No. No.
There’s a steadily rising hum, a chatter. Old station sounds and a fluorescent light gradually brightening in your good eye. The dull roar of altitude-adjustment engines and crushed crowds. Where’s your copilot? Yes, Davisson. He’s in the next tent. There are angry voices and people brushing up against the cloth. What happened?
SOLDIER
HARDWARE ARMS - FRAME-1 Reaction Autogun [60/60 ROUNDS, BELT COMPLETE] An intelligent personal defence weapon created from a mix of military hardware and your own designs – when active, this computer-controlled automatic flicks hungrily toward any biological sources of heat in a wide cone to your front. Daisy chains of infrared sensors and a disintegrating belt of pistol-caliber ammunition bulge from pockets in your ground uniform while the FRAME-1 remains securely attached to your shoulder, ready with a single command to reduce a Stone Pact freak or rebel militiaman to a bleeding mess. Designed with rapid improvement in mind, your homebrewed targeting software is imperfect but highly adaptive, displaying elements of animal sentience. ARMOR - Naval Jumpsuit Dark blue Nomex with ID across the left breast, rank and your serial number on the shoulder. Fireproof, not bulletproof - stiflingly warm, with a pullover hood to protect against scalp and neck burns. - Ground Uniform Fatigues in urban tones that break up your outline in a haze of pixelated grey. A heavy-duty harness compatible with most exoskeletons and a toolbelt for preflight maintenance. Ample room for insertion of ceramic plates and additional body armor. AUGS - I/O Neuromotor Junction More pragmatic, determined and paranoid than most, you were forever inclined to tamper with your body and mind for defensive ends. Gold contacts in your shoulder – and a small, sterilized hole bored with a bone drill – reveal a direct connection to an extracted motor nerve that you trained yourself to fire with exquisite precision. A variety of simple electronic devices (including some of your flight instrumentation) can feed into and receive input from that nerve directly with the help of widely-available electromyography software. Your FRAME-1 is a possible option for nerve control, but the possibilities are really as great as your imagination; devious plots for installing external memory, new senses and lethal armaments spring radially, naturally from this single root. EQUIPMENT - N/A WETWARE - CONDITION [NORMAL] WOUNDS None yet. AUGS - N/A PSYCHE - CONDITION [STABLE] WOUNDS None yet. ADVANCED SKILLS - N/A RESOURCES - N/A
SHIP
DESIGNATION:Vranhal DRIVE/ENGINE - Two-Phase Chemical Rocket The Kropotkin’s ancient motor is cheap, durable, safe and expendable, operating on a solid/liquid hybrid system. A throttled pressure feed of red fuming nitrous acid feeds into an armored canister of hard rubber impregnated with aluminum powder; wells bored into the pre-cast fuel stack guide the acid to a smooth ignition, accelerating the vessel on long entry burns to combat. With a throaty roar that outdoes the power of liquid rockets and a less explosive failure record than solid boosters, this dependable engine suffers from an excessive thirst for propellant. For this reason the Kropotkin either serves defensive roles or is attached like a lamprey to a larger mothership, which supplies it fuel cores and oxidizer. WEAPONRY - Synchrotron Light Burner Long arrays of magnets in the guts of the Kropotkin wind and work a beam of electrons into twisting paths. These tortured particles clump and disgorge photons – packets of radiation from the “undulator” sum into a continuous beam of X-rays which slowly ionizes and ruins enemy electronics, poisons crewmen with radiation and boils away their armor plating with increasing efficiency the longer the SLB is kept operating. A boom at the front of the Kropotkin extends the undulator for additional power, but energy demands mean that this extra lasing stage is not always employed. An efficient and accurate primary weapon with low destructive yield. - Missile Belt Fifty-two warheads hang across the middle of the Kropotkin’s structure like a wrestler’s girdle. A battery of dumb weapons with minimal heat-seeking capability, these missiles have variable cargo. Generally they carry metal penetrators that shatter an opening for a secondary charge of dense, destructive hydrocarbon crystal, but they can also be filled with sensor equipment or rigged to explode into hundreds of submunitions (a tremendous shotgun blast perfect for shredding satellites). STRUCTURE - Old Superframe The Kropotkin is an undignified, barrel-shaped vessel with a tendency to crack apart under combat stress. Its core, clobbered together from modular blocks whose designs have their ancestry in the earliest interplanetary spaceships, is brittle but easily repaired and maintained; the bulkiness and fragility of its venerable heart is off-set by the ubiquity of its replacement parts, its amenability to field modification and a generous wrapping of armor. -- Whipple Skin The Kropotkin’s first line of defense is a coat of simple shock shields – a layered network of metal plates sandwiched with a sharp wool of synthetic spider silk and carbon fiber, intended to fragment incoming kinetic munitions and diffuse their momentum over the maximum possible area of the ship. Effective mostly against micrometeors and small impactors – larger weapons striking the Kropotkin nearly always imply pilot death and total loss of the vessel. Nodules of reactive polymer foam are buried within the armor line to stem leaks and compensate for material loss. LOGISTICS - Stirling Radiothermal Generators Power aboard the Kropotkin comes from hot masses of decaying plutonium that drive a closed pumping cycle of inert gas, generating a stable and effectively permanent flow of energy for shipboard electronics and the SLB. This efficiency and mechanical simplicity comes at an ugly price - the "Handwarmer Protocol" declared with the first flights of the Kropotkin holds that the ship’s mass budget is too minimal to permit enough lead to perfectly insulate the crew. Pilots are provided a daily ration of DNA protectants and antibiotics, cloyingly sweet pills that keep their radiation sickness at a manageable level and guard against secondary infections. - Split-Bay Rearmament The Kropotkin’s limited operational endurance often puts it in a bind – but decades of bombing runs and planetary defense service have burned its innards into the memory of Earth’s ground crews. This unassuming ship can be cracked down the middle, its missile stock replenished and its engine topped up in record time – motorized access ports built into the frame mean that fuel and missile load can be addressed simultaneously without the risk of massacring repairmen in a bloom of flaming propellant. Cycling any Kropotkin picket in and out of combat status can be accomplished in minutes rather than hours. - Deep-Space Sensor A bulbous sensor module bolted to the top of the Kropotkin, comprising SQUID magnetometric devices, LIDAR, radar and sensitive gravimeters. Designed as a powerful long-range early warning system for the smallest objects in the void, the DSS was originally meant for detecting far-off, unpredictable, fast-moving debris that can be as dangerous to any space station as an artillery barrage. Micrometeors, scrap metal, rogue munitions from the war against the Pact and enemy ships alike are illuminated by the DSS’s mix of detection methods. Often used by scavengers to detect artificial materials – and by extension ship wreckage – it's also been adapted by pirates and rogue states to track oblivious trading vessels. CREW - Copilot // A Coffin for Two The Kropotkin is fitted to carry two pilots – each blending the role of gunner, navigator and radio officer – in a cramped cockpit, every surface overgrown with snappable switches, flickering displays and acrid red lights. One will carry on if the other is killed. Both are already (minus the helmets) in their EVA suits, despite the thin, stale air pumped through the cabin. There will be someone sitting by you when your hull is breached and the five inches of fused glass-ceramic in front of you implode and your breath is sucked into the yawning nothing that you had forgotten surrounded you.
Cpl. Yuri Prostraov=.STATUS/.] You’re asleep in the battered collapsible unit next to the elevator sentry post, the poor aluminum shelter that you and Sign call home. A lurch, and your eyes snap open. A sick rolling feeling, like evasive action in an atmo assault jet, screaming across the sky at Mach Four and plastered to your seat. Your stomach turns and you feel like you’re about to sink spine-first into your mattress.
A second wave. Your iron bedframe shudders, tips and falls - onto you. Crunch. You’re spinning out. Where’s Sign? She got pulled out of her bed straight to the ceiling, still comatose in slow-wave sleep. You shove the bars off of your bruised chest and see stars streaking by the window. This isn’t right. Your orientation is broken. Which way down?
You’ve got to pull her back to ground without killing yourselves. How?
SOLDIER
HARDWARE ARMS - N/A ARMOR - Naval Jumpsuit Dark blue Nomex with ID across the left breast, rank and your serial number on the shoulder. Fireproof, not bulletproof - stiflingly warm, with a pullover hood to protect against scalp and neck burns. - Ground Uniform Fatigues in urban tones that break up your outline in a haze of pixelated grey. A heavy-duty harness compatible with most exoskeletons and a toolbelt for preflight maintenance. Ample room for insertion of ceramic plates and additional body armor. - Custom EVA Rig The command chair in your Kropotkin is cut down to a skeletal frame to accommodate the bulk of your extra EVA gear, a hard pressure suit purchased with your own funds from a corporate supplier, featuring composite cladding, detachable thermoregulation hoses that connect to your ship’s atmosphere unit and a manned maneuvering unit loaded with quarts of hypergolic fuels that ignite spontaneously when mixed. This investment has extended your health and sanity, vastly improving your odds of survival on ship destruction and hopefully allowing you to burn your way to the safety of a friendly vessel if all is lost. The inner surface of its reflective visor displays inertial guidance information (your constantly-calculated position relative to your ship) and is etched in one corner with an instruction from your grandfather Valya: “BE BRAVE.” AUGS - N/A EQUIPMENT - N/A WETWARE - CONDITION [NORMAL] WOUNDS None yet. AUGS - N/A PSYCHE - CONDITION [STABLE] WOUNDS None yet. ADVANCED SKILLS - Kepler’s Gift Orbital mechanics and the workings of spaceflight unfolded in your mind early. When the passenger shuttle that took you to cadet school was flung by a momentum exchange tether (a terrifying spinning length of steel and stranger fibers) at thousands of miles per hour into dead void, instead of the crushing doom of a panic attack you felt elation and understanding. You think in frozen pictures about the dance of rockets and heavier starships: your “wild guesses” are uncannily accurate, your maneuvers are supremely efficient, your mastery of your instruments allows you to extract power from gravity wells with bizarre approaches that lesser pilots would deem impossible. RESOURCES - N/A
SHIP
DESIGNATION:Vostok DRIVE/ENGINE - Two-Phase Chemical Rocket The Kropotkin’s ancient motor is cheap, durable, safe and expendable, operating on a solid/liquid hybrid system. A throttled pressure feed of red fuming nitrous acid feeds into an armored canister of hard rubber impregnated with aluminum powder; wells bored into the pre-cast fuel stack guide the acid to a smooth ignition, accelerating the vessel on long entry burns to combat. With a throaty roar that outdoes the power of liquid rockets and a less explosive failure record than solid boosters, this dependable engine suffers from an excessive thirst for propellant. For this reason the Kropotkin either serves defensive roles or is attached like a lamprey to a larger mothership, which supplies it fuel cores and oxidizer. WEAPONRY - Synchrotron Light Burner Long arrays of magnets in the guts of the Kropotkin wind and work a beam of electrons into twisting paths. These tortured particles clump and disgorge photons – packets of radiation from the “undulator” sum into a continuous beam of X-rays which slowly ionizes and ruins enemy electronics, poisons crewmen with radiation and boils away their armor plating with increasing efficiency the longer the SLB is kept operating. A boom at the front of the Kropotkin extends the undulator for additional power, but energy demands mean that this extra lasing stage is not always employed. An efficient and accurate primary weapon with low destructive yield. - Disruption Pulse Cannon On the rare occasion that colonial law enforcement wants to bring someone in alive, this is their tool of choice; but the DPC has an alternate history as an esoteric anti-material weapon derived from brute-force physics. This fragile, complicated piece of artillery produces cylindrical blasts of electronic extinction from a clip of intricate shells which use extreme high-density plastic explosive to crush a conducting ring, briefly generating an incredible magnetic flux that overloads nearby electrical systems. 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. Detonation of the shells close to a target vessel can be used to trigger fires in onboard equipment by heating onboard wiring; proximity radio fuses and input from the Kropotkin’s sensors tune the range at which each DPC shell explodes from its victim, and this can be modified to a lethal degree. To artificial intelligences and some of the more heavily cyborgized Stone Pact crews, it is a weapon of torture. - Missile Belt Fifty-two warheads hang across the middle of the Kropotkin’s structure like a wrestler’s girdle. A battery of dumb weapons with minimal heat-seeking capability, these missiles have variable cargo. Generally they carry metal penetrators that shatter an opening for a secondary charge of dense, destructive hydrocarbon crystal, but they can also be filled with sensor equipment or rigged to explode into hundreds of submunitions (a tremendous shotgun blast perfect for shredding satellites). STRUCTURE - Old Superframe The Kropotkin is an undignified, barrel-shaped vessel with a tendency to crack apart under combat stress. Its core, clobbered together from modular blocks whose designs have their ancestry in the earliest interplanetary spaceships, is brittle but easily repaired and maintained; the bulkiness and fragility of its venerable heart is off-set by the ubiquity of its replacement parts, its amenability to field modification and a generous wrapping of armor. -- Whipple Skin The Kropotkin’s first line of defense is a coat of simple shock shields – a layered network of metal plates sandwiched with a sharp wool of synthetic spider silk and carbon fiber, intended to fragment incoming kinetic munitions and diffuse their momentum over the maximum possible area of the ship. Effective mostly against micrometeors and small impactors – larger weapons striking the Kropotkin nearly always imply pilot death and total loss of the vessel. Nodules of reactive polymer foam are buried within the armor line to stem leaks and compensate for material loss. LOGISTICS - Stirling Radiothermal Generators Power aboard the Kropotkin comes from hot masses of decaying plutonium that drive a closed pumping cycle of inert gas, generating a stable and effectively permanent flow of energy for shipboard electronics and the SLB. This efficiency and mechanical simplicity comes at an ugly price - the "Handwarmer Protocol" declared with the first flights of the Kropotkin holds that the ship’s mass budget is too minimal to permit enough lead to perfectly insulate the crew. Pilots are provided a daily ration of DNA protectants and antibiotics, cloyingly sweet pills that keep their radiation sickness at a manageable level and guard against secondary infections. - Split-Bay Rearmament The Kropotkin’s limited operational endurance often puts it in a bind – but decades of bombing runs and planetary defense service have burned its innards into the memory of Earth’s ground crews. This unassuming ship can be cracked down the middle, its missile stock replenished and its engine topped up in record time – motorized access ports built into the frame mean that fuel and missile load can be addressed simultaneously without the risk of massacring repairmen in a bloom of flaming propellant. Cycling any Kropotkin picket in and out of combat status can be accomplished in minutes rather than hours. CREW - Copilot // A Coffin for Two The Kropotkin is fitted to carry two pilots – each blending the role of gunner, navigator and radio officer – in a cramped cockpit, every surface overgrown with snappable switches, flickering displays and acrid red lights. One will carry on if the other is killed. Both are already (minus the helmets) in their EVA suits, despite the thin, stale air pumped through the cabin. There will be someone sitting by you when your hull is breached and the five inches of fused glass-ceramic in front of you implode and your breath is sucked into the yawning nothing that you had forgotten surrounded you.
Cpl. Mike Richards=.STATUS/.] An alarm bell is ringing in your mind. You shift under your reflective blanket, ill at ease, the first beads of cold sweat starting to collect on the lines of your forehead. This heavy gravity is making you sick. Reassignment to planetside duty hasn’t been easy for you, a brittle spacefarer with weak bones.
You sleep in a converted ammunition locker with thick walls of deadened steel. But there’s a buzzing tonight – a grating, staccato sound that resonates in your teeth, that refuses to leave you be. A wrongness. The whole base must be on edge.
Knocking at the door. You look. The face of the major at the window splits into a rubbery smile. He’s armed, and taps the glass with the grip of his handgun.
“Open up, buddy.”
Over his shoulder is a towering military policeman in a black visor. The MP holds up an unintelligible paper covered in red marks and motions for you to step outside.
Where’s Shevchuk? Your copilot? Have they spoken to him? Yes, they have. He’s got a hand up to his face – yes, bleeding from the nose. All over his uniform.
Are you going to see what they want, or do you have something else in mind? Your frame is looming over your bed. It’ll take a minute to warm it up.
SOLDIER
HARDWARE ARMS - N/A ARMOR - Naval Jumpsuit Dark blue Nomex with ID across the left breast, rank and your serial number on the shoulder. Fireproof, not bulletproof - stiflingly warm, with a pullover hood to protect against scalp and neck burns. - Ground Uniform Fatigues in urban tones that break up your outline in a haze of pixelated grey. A heavy-duty harness compatible with most exoskeletons and a toolbelt for preflight maintenance. Ample room for insertion of ceramic plates and additional body armor. -- Mobility Exoskeleton Powered by lithium-air batteries, this motorized frame permits you a normal range of motion in a variety of surface gravities – and, as a free-standing skeletal system, can be equipped with a computer core to provide simple autonomous labor. Self-collision detection and feedback systems prevent you from twisting your own limbs into paste. The stability and control your exoskeleton offers beyond ordinary flesh – perfect rigidity and endurance as high as the battery count – gives you the ability to work with heavy power tools and foundry equipment that unaugmented workers cannot manage. AUGS - N/A EQUIPMENT - N/A WETWARE - CONDITION [NORMAL] WOUNDS None yet. AUGS - N/A PSYCHE - CONDITION [STABLE] WOUNDS None yet. ADVANCED SKILLS - Free Space Engineer Neither brain surgery nor rocket science: instead, rocket surgery. Repair and modification of fast-moving space hardware in the orientation-free emptiness between planets is a finicky task where mistakes are, without fail, both lethal and expensive. There are some, however, whose nerves are up to the task and whose mastery of remote technology allows them to work smoothly just light-seconds away from a hot combat zone – you are such a man. Your manipulators are just an extension of your frail human body. With control levers firmly in hand, you can reskin a Kropotkin’s armor banks in twenty minutes, cut the fiery heart out of a wild nuclear core or slap a rogue satellite safely into the atmosphere to burn. RESOURCES - N/A
DESIGNATION:Resurgam DRIVE/ENGINE - Two-Phase Chemical Rocket The Kropotkin’s ancient motor is cheap, durable, safe and expendable, operating on a solid/liquid hybrid system. A throttled pressure feed of red fuming nitrous acid feeds into an armored canister of hard rubber impregnated with aluminum powder; wells bored into the pre-cast fuel stack guide the acid to a smooth ignition, accelerating the vessel on long entry burns to combat. With a throaty roar that outdoes the power of liquid rockets and a less explosive failure record than solid boosters, this dependable engine suffers from an excessive thirst for propellant. For this reason the Kropotkin either serves defensive roles or is attached like a lamprey to a larger mothership, which supplies it fuel cores and oxidizer. WEAPONRY - Synchrotron Light Burner Long arrays of magnets in the guts of the Kropotkin wind and work a beam of electrons into twisting paths. These tortured particles clump and disgorge photons – packets of radiation from the “undulator” sum into a continuous beam of X-rays which slowly ionizes and ruins enemy electronics, poisons crewmen with radiation and boils away their armor plating with increasing efficiency the longer the SLB is kept operating. A boom at the front of the Kropotkin extends the undulator for additional power, but energy demands mean that this extra lasing stage is not always employed. An efficient and accurate primary weapon with low destructive yield. - Missile Belt Fifty-two warheads hang across the middle of the Kropotkin’s structure like a wrestler’s girdle. A battery of dumb weapons with minimal heat-seeking capability, these missiles have variable cargo. Generally they carry metal penetrators that shatter an opening for a secondary charge of dense, destructive hydrocarbon crystal, but they can also be filled with sensor equipment or rigged to explode into hundreds of submunitions (a tremendous shotgun blast perfect for shredding satellites). STRUCTURE - Old Superframe The Kropotkin is an undignified, barrel-shaped vessel with a tendency to crack apart under combat stress. Its core, clobbered together from modular blocks whose designs have their ancestry in the earliest interplanetary spaceships, is brittle but easily repaired and maintained; the bulkiness and fragility of its venerable heart is off-set by the ubiquity of its replacement parts, its amenability to field modification and a generous wrapping of armor. -- Whipple Skin The Kropotkin’s first line of defense is a coat of simple shock shields – a layered network of metal plates sandwiched with a sharp wool of synthetic spider silk and carbon fiber, intended to fragment incoming kinetic munitions and diffuse their momentum over the maximum possible area of the ship. Effective mostly against micrometeors and small impactors – larger weapons striking the Kropotkin nearly always imply pilot death and total loss of the vessel. Nodules of reactive polymer foam are buried within the armor line to stem leaks and compensate for material loss. LOGISTICS - Stirling Radiothermal Generators Power aboard the Kropotkin comes from hot masses of decaying plutonium that drive a closed pumping cycle of inert gas, generating a stable and effectively permanent flow of energy for shipboard electronics and the SLB. This efficiency and mechanical simplicity comes at an ugly price - the "Handwarmer Protocol" declared with the first flights of the Kropotkin holds that the ship’s mass budget is too minimal to permit enough lead to perfectly insulate the crew. Pilots are provided a daily ration of DNA protectants and antibiotics, cloyingly sweet pills that keep their radiation sickness at a manageable level and guard against secondary infections. - Split-Bay Rearmament The Kropotkin’s limited operational endurance often puts it in a bind – but decades of bombing runs and planetary defense service have burned its innards into the memory of Earth’s ground crews. This unassuming ship can be cracked down the middle, its missile stock replenished and its engine topped up in record time – motorized access ports built into the frame mean that fuel and missile load can be addressed simultaneously without the risk of massacring repairmen in a bloom of flaming propellant. Cycling any Kropotkin picket in and out of combat status can be accomplished in minutes rather than hours. - Modular Manipulator Arm A fifty-meter servomotor arm built onto the side of the craft, with shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints before a detachable "hand" that can be reconfigured to whatever task is necessary – several extra hands are locked to the external hull of the Kropotkin, ready for replacement. Three options have already been fitted to the Resurgam: a brute grappler for handling cargo blocks, a plasma torch for slicing and shaping hull plating, and a finer “secondary” assembly of three smaller arms intended to work control panels and structural locks. Preloaded with cases of commonly used spare parts, several large sheets of stick-on reactive armor covering, and 3D maps of standard Earth Authority hulls that let the most simple repairs occur without pilot intervention. CREW - Copilot // A Coffin for Two The Kropotkin is fitted to carry two pilots – each blending the role of gunner, navigator and radio officer – in a cramped cockpit, every surface overgrown with snappable switches, flickering displays and acrid red lights. One will carry on if the other is killed. Both are already (minus the helmets) in their EVA suits, despite the thin, stale air pumped through the cabin. There will be someone sitting by you when your hull is breached and the five inches of fused glass-ceramic in front of you implode and your breath is sucked into the yawning nothing that you had forgotten surrounded you.
Cpl. Nico “Smith”=.STATUS/.] You sway back and forth miserably in your dreams, tugging at controls that break down in your splinter-filled hands. You’re sealed in the cockpit. Back and forth, weaving between waves of missiles and invisible streams of lethal particles. The turning forces are too high. Your ribs are crumpling. The bile is rising in your throat. Blackness curling at the edges of your vision. Screens are going out too, giving up hot sparks, the reek of burning plastic. But you just know if you can get out of this trap, you’ll be able to get to the medevac quickly enough for them to scrape together…
A stray mining torpedo catches you and you are killed instantly endlessly. Smeared across the stars. You snap awake, surrounded by bottles and ash in your bed. No one shares this tent with you. You were demoted, not trusted to fly with other human beings. Your copilot Aleph is bottled up in a processor bank two sections across from the barracks.
… ”Nico?” Sounds like old times. No. Can’t be. Where is she? You feel a warm, warm hand on your shoulder. You roll over in bed and there are bits of her all over everywhere
You open your mouth and nothing comes out.
Did you kill her? What do you do? Are you going to tell anyone? Where’s your arm? You’ve got to clean this mess up. You can’t even tell if it’s Fox.
SOLDIER
HARDWARE ARMS - LAC-5 “Stone Burner” [5/5 BOLTS, CLIP AT FULL POWER] A trophy from better days in the war. Magnetic pinch geometries looted from the Stone Pact were incorporated into the design of this plasma weapon, a bulky linear railgun that emits jets of blinding ionized destruction, scorching flesh and bone in a broad, irradiated cone from the mouth of the Burner. Plasma confinement issues and atmospheric blooming render its effective range and armor penetration modest. The poor precision of this inelegant rifle, however, does not undermine the truth laid out in the famous war photographs, the awful heroism of bloodied and pinned Earth Authority regulars vaulting into the breach and transforming their Pact counterparts into broken carbon. Each fuel cell is the size and weight of a brick, worn in a bandolier across the chest and connected to the Burner by heavy cables. ARMOR - Naval Jumpsuit Dark blue Nomex with ID across the left breast, rank and your serial number on the shoulder. Fireproof, not bulletproof - stiflingly warm, with a pullover hood to protect against scalp and neck burns. - Ground Uniform Fatigues in urban tones that break up your outline in a haze of pixelated grey. A heavy-duty harness compatible with most exoskeletons and a toolbelt for preflight maintenance. Ample room for insertion of ceramic plates and additional body armor. AUGS - Servomotor Arm (Left) A generic computer-controlled prosthetic, military-issue, the kind that are machined in the thousands all across human space. Instructions pass to its motors through a bundle of nerves that were preserved by the medics in your ruined stump – you were trained extensively enough in forcing the arm to do its duty that it is no longer a severe impediment. A thin network of pressure and heat sensors (concentrated most heavily at the fingertips) line the olive drab membrane of waterproof plastic that is wrapped around its skeleton. EQUIPMENT - N/A WETWARE - CONDITION [NORMAL] WOUNDS None yet. AUGS - N/A PSYCHE - CONDITION [WAR-WEATHERED] WOUNDS - Fox They killed her in high orbit over the bloated gas giant Ausate. You won’t be the same again. You fought together and lied together. Now her broken body won’t leave you be. ADVANCED SKILLS - Kinetic Killsight You paint the target, flick the trigger and carefully arc kilos of destructive mass into the enemies of humanity. High-speed destruction is your forte – your weapons computers and you form a seamless unit, a precision machine that wires flechettes, “brilliant” rocket-fueled KK impactors and autogun slugs directly to the heart of the Stone Pact. Gravity, too, is a friend – a notorious strategy of yours that netted you several frigate kills was the use of blasts of metallic garbage to seed entire orbital paths with ruinous shrapnel. Momentum and murder combine themselves in your expert work. RESOURCES - N/A
SHIP
DESIGNATION:Fox’s Vengeance DRIVE/ENGINE - Two-Phase Chemical Rocket The Kropotkin’s ancient motor is cheap, durable, safe and expendable, operating on a solid/liquid hybrid system. A throttled pressure feed of red fuming nitrous acid feeds into an armored canister of hard rubber impregnated with aluminum powder; wells bored into the pre-cast fuel stack guide the acid to a smooth ignition, accelerating the vessel on long entry burns to combat. With a throaty roar that outdoes the power of liquid rockets and a less explosive failure record than solid boosters, this dependable engine suffers from an excessive thirst for propellant. For this reason the Kropotkin either serves defensive roles or is attached like a lamprey to a larger mothership, which supplies it fuel cores and oxidizer. WEAPONRY - Synchrotron Light Burner Long arrays of magnets in the guts of the Kropotkin wind and work a beam of electrons into twisting paths. These tortured particles clump and disgorge photons – packets of radiation from the “undulator” sum into a continuous beam of X-rays which slowly ionizes and ruins enemy electronics, poisons crewmen with radiation and boils away their armor plating with increasing efficiency the longer the SLB is kept operating. A boom at the front of the Kropotkin extends the undulator for additional power, but energy demands mean that this extra lasing stage is not always employed. An efficient and accurate primary weapon with low destructive yield. - Rail Cannon Extracted from his previous command, this weapon and its dense ranks of capacitors replace the old rocket belt around the hull of the Kropotkin. Firing either multi-point bundles of armor piercing flechettes tipped with tungsten or weighty, destructive impact rounds that shatter over the hulls of enemy craft, the turret offers supreme offensive power but suffers from resistive heating and a strong mass penalty incurred by its ammunition reserve. Rapid fire risks melting the parallel rails or releasing enough waste heat to burn the pilots – shots released into a bent railgun are guaranteed to tumble, with catastrophic results. Fired manually via an extra stick in between the two seats of the cockpit, with haptic feedback mechanisms that guide your hand toward sensor contacts. STRUCTURE - Old Superframe The Kropotkin is an undignified, barrel-shaped vessel with a tendency to crack apart under combat stress. Its core, clobbered together from modular blocks whose designs have their ancestry in the earliest interplanetary spaceships, is brittle but easily repaired and maintained; the bulkiness and fragility of its venerable heart is off-set by the ubiquity of its replacement parts, its amenability to field modification and a generous wrapping of armor. -- Whipple Skin The Kropotkin’s first line of defense is a coat of simple shock shields – a layered network of metal plates sandwiched with a sharp wool of synthetic spider silk and carbon fiber, intended to fragment incoming kinetic munitions and diffuse their momentum over the maximum possible area of the ship. Effective mostly against micrometeors and small impactors – larger weapons striking the Kropotkin nearly always imply pilot death and total loss of the vessel. Nodules of reactive polymer foam are buried within the armor line to stem leaks and compensate for material loss. LOGISTICS - Stirling Radiothermal Generators Power aboard the Kropotkin comes from hot masses of decaying plutonium that drive a closed pumping cycle of inert gas, generating a stable and effectively permanent flow of energy for shipboard electronics and the SLB. This efficiency and mechanical simplicity comes at an ugly price - the "Handwarmer Protocol" declared with the first flights of the Kropotkin holds that the ship’s mass budget is too minimal to permit enough lead to perfectly insulate the crew. Pilots are provided a daily ration of DNA protectants and antibiotics, cloyingly sweet pills that keep their radiation sickness at a manageable level and guard against secondary infections. - Split-Bay Rearmament The Kropotkin’s limited operational endurance often puts it in a bind – but decades of bombing runs and planetary defense service have burned its innards into the memory of Earth’s ground crews. This unassuming ship can be cracked down the middle, its missile stock replenished and its engine topped up in record time – motorized access ports built into the frame mean that fuel and missile load can be addressed simultaneously without the risk of massacring repairmen in a bloom of flaming propellant. Cycling any Kropotkin picket in and out of combat status can be accomplished in minutes rather than hours. CREW - Copilot // A Coffin for Two The Kropotkin is fitted to carry two pilots – each blending the role of gunner, navigator and radio officer – in a cramped cockpit, every surface overgrown with snappable switches, flickering displays and acrid red lights. One will carry on if the other is killed. Both are already (minus the helmets) in their EVA suits, despite the thin, stale air pumped through the cabin. There will be someone sitting by you when your hull is breached and the five inches of fused glass-ceramic in front of you implode and your breath is sucked into the yawning nothing that you had forgotten surrounded you.
Last edited by TheKebbit on Thu Jan 07, 2016 3:35 am, edited 14 times in total.
Fri Dec 18, 2015 5:31 am
CaveCricket48
Joined: Tue Jun 12, 2007 11:52 pm Posts: 13144 Location: Here
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
> Peer outside the tent, try not to make myself seen. Get a look at what's outside.
Fri Dec 18, 2015 5:50 am
caekdaemon
Data Realms Elite
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 3:00 pm Posts: 4144 Location: Hell.
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
So everyone gets two personal traits at the start, either items or skills or augmentations?
Let's hope my two help me fulfil my dream of being a Starfleet Engineer :p
Fri Dec 18, 2015 8:42 am
CrazyMLC
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 4:20 am Posts: 4772 Location: Good news everyone!
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
> Can't have my copilot breaking on me, now can I? Push myself up to the ceiling and protect her from debris with my body, and break her fall if we come crashing down.
This is wrong. I need to get out of here. >Attempt to rise that bucket of bolts as I check on my supplies. Determine how quickly this fluid is rising-and how much time we have. whisper: Drone. Get up, something is not right.
Sat Dec 19, 2015 5:53 am
caekdaemon
Data Realms Elite
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 3:00 pm Posts: 4144 Location: Hell.
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
Hey Keb, I've got a question that should be easy to answer, but is important; how does FTL work? Looking at the components of our ships I assume they're sublight only, with the carriers and other large vessels being the FTL capable ships, but I was hoping you could give us some more detailed information. Is it a Star Wars style hyperdrive, or are there lanes and the like that need to be considered?
Mon Dec 21, 2015 11:50 am
TheKebbit
Joined: Sat Jul 04, 2009 10:24 pm Posts: 3939 Location: NORTH
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
A mix of FTL and relativistic engines are employed across the universe, but humanity primarily relies on the Alcubierre drive (a space-folding engine that builds up huge charges of radiation as it flies) and a grid of stable wormholes of varying diameter that form links between vital systems. Your current system is a major node on the Earth Authority network, with wormhole lanes projecting almost to the interstellar frontier where the assault fleets are locked in pitched combat with the Stone Pact.
There is a visible difference between an ordinary "spaceship" and what NPCs will refer to as a "starship" - the latter is vastly larger, defined by the alien geometry of modern Alcubierre drives, heavily armed with weapons of mass destruction, often completely self-supplied and captained by humanity's best. The atmo carriers in your squadron are not true FTL-capable starships but can (and do) traverse wormholes.
STL engine technology is similarly variable. Ion, plasma and chemical thrusters linger in military applications, while nuclear thermal rockets dominate - the majority of ships are powered by nuclear fission, a smaller fraction use fusion, and the very tip of the fleet's spear runs on confined annihilation of antimatter.
Mon Dec 21, 2015 8:00 pm
caekdaemon
Data Realms Elite
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 3:00 pm Posts: 4144 Location: Hell.
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
Ah, so the wormholes act as interstellar highways for a lack of better terms, through which the vast majority of traffic both military and civilian travel through, whilst standalone FTL drives are the equivalent of off-roading, got it
Mon Dec 21, 2015 8:11 pm
Amazigh
Data Realms Elite
Joined: Sun Feb 24, 2008 2:10 am Posts: 1531 Location: Ye Olde England
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
>Look up. Is there anything obviously wrong with the vent? >Get up. Check on Annalise.
Wed Dec 23, 2015 4:37 am
TheKebbit
Joined: Sat Jul 04, 2009 10:24 pm Posts: 3939 Location: NORTH
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
The first roll is complete! Caek and maart3n, you can action now.
I really like the idea of minirolls. You may see a few of these as we go along.
Wed Dec 23, 2015 5:20 am
caekdaemon
Data Realms Elite
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 3:00 pm Posts: 4144 Location: Hell.
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
"I'm coming, just give me a sec, let me get into my suit first so I don't break my bones climbing out of this thing. My homeplanet has half the mass of Luna, and that means..."
Mike sighs as he struggles to climb out of bed, long legs tangled, then he limps into his exoskeleton...and the jerky, unnatural movements of a man unaccustomed to regular gravity become almost as fluid and smooth as those of a normal human being. He strides over to the door, tethered to the wall by the suit's grey charging cable, and opens it without much difficulty, saluting the major before glancing at his copilot's bloody face...then he turns back to his superior and stands up straight.
"...with all due respect, if this is about another fight with the technicians from the 22nd Reserve Wing, sir, they probably started it."
Odds are it might be just another bar brawl that took part outside the base last night, so there's no reason to be concerned. Stay calm, stay cooperative and just talk it through.
Wed Dec 23, 2015 1:50 pm
maart3n
Joined: Tue Dec 23, 2008 8:04 pm Posts: 1545
Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
"No! No! No! No! You're not real! This is not real! I love you, please don't leave. You're dead! " Throw a few bottles around for good measure.
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Re: WE FLY BY DIMMING SUNS
