Month: March 2012

Trope Update: Escape Pod

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Original trope here; a comment left on the original posting of it was:

“Now you have me wondering about parentally-assisted pods: “Well, we have just enough emergency reserves to give this ship a delta-vee of 0.1 km/s… or we can use the same joules to give 10 km/s to an escape pod.”

That could conceivably be useful, if you have a way of dumping large amounts of KE into a pod without turning the occupants into strawberry jam.”

Interesting thought – and it probably could be done using their vector-control inertial dampers, although that’s a lot of systems to put into the pod, and if you don’t put them in the pod, the sort of thing you’d hate to rely on once the mother ship got all shot up.

But even then, even 10 km/s isn’t going to get you anywhere (even away from the AM explosion) very fast, except in situations where you’re already close enough to somewhere that they can, equally, get someone out there to help you in about the same time-frame, better equipped than the pod probably is.  (And if you aren’t, you might as well stick close to the resources, however damaged, that you have got; and if nothing else, that at least does include a bigger radar/thermal signature.)  So while I can see the possibility, I’m still not sure what it buys you, in practical terms.

Trope Update: Decontamination Chamber

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Original trope here; a comment left on the original posting of it was: “What’s happened to people who try to claim that those microbes are weapons?”

I reply thus:

“A weaponized microbe in an appropriate warhead or containment packaging is freight.”

“A weaponized microbe in your gut/skin/breath/etc., on the other hand, is an act of biological or ecological warfare, and therefore an act of war or terrorism.  Your confession is appreciated.”

Boom.

 

Trope-a-Day: Super Soldier

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3

Super Soldier: Most successful galactic militaries and mercenary organizations tend to have a favorite package of military-specialized genetic enhancements, nanoviruses, and implants; these days, receiving at least the “military-basic” upgrade package (a whole shopping list of enhancements on top of the already impressive alpha baseline, for the Empire’s version) – usually sometime around the midpoint of basic training, once they’re reasonably sure you’re not going to snap on them and quit – is more or less necessary to compete on the battlefield, especially as regular not-in-the-combat-exoskeletons infantry.  (Although, commonly enough, those troops have their own upgrade requirements.)

The Rains of Magen (3/3): Bits

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It was raining on Magen three months later, the dismal, sleeting, heavy blatter that always came as the months wore on towards winter.

But the planet’s perpetual, churning overcast existed at a considerably lower altitude than the 995th floor office of Lyrith Kazesh, TriDyne’s Vice President of Computation. The bright sunlight streaming in the window from Magen’s unfiltered yellow-white sun, however, did nothing to ease the mind of Vark Reth-1928, waiting in the VP’s outer office while the future of his project – and more immediately important, his personal future – was decided.

*             *             *             *             *

Six hundred floors below, where the rain was beating hard against the outer walls, in the dedicated lab space allocated to the Project, Terek 318-1224 went about his business, emptying the trash receptacles and ensuring that document and media waste, and any discarded hardware, was properly routed to the confidential incinerators. He hummed as he worked, oblivious to the looks of annoyance from some of the operating staff – his clearance to work in the secured machine areas of the Project had meant a significant rise in per diem for a worker of his classification, and all was well in his little world.

*             *             *             *             *

All was anything but well for Vark, in Kazesh’s office above, receiving the VP’s tirade. “You received your present classification, and authority over the Project – not to mention your options – on the basis of your performance with parallel architecture machines. You assured me, and I assured the Board, that you could crack the proteome encoding on the — on the samples we recovered.”

“What are you bringing me instead? A fiasco. Nonsensical output, computations that differ every run, requisitions for replacement hardware? A two month overrun?”

“Last chance, 1928. Make it work. You have two weeks to make your pet cluster deliver what you promised me, or else the Project is scrubbed. And you go back to being listed among the assets. Now get out.”

*             *             *             *             *

And down below in the lab, where a cooling fan had plucked it out of the air and whirled it to rest between one golden leg of cluster processor 83-12-17 and another, a thin carbon film wound around a hair fragment shorted those circuits, flared to life just long enough to scramble a few bits of data, turning the results of a handful of operations to incomprehensible garbage, and then vaporized.

And elsewhere in the cluster, another.

And another.

Trope-a-Day: Backpack Cannon

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Backpack Cannon: Found in a couple of forms.  The primary one for those of us whose body plans resemble the ones we’re used to, which is to say, vertical, involves using a backpack to hold vertically-launching smart missiles and other such guided support weapons that don’t need to be aimed in the direction they’re firing in.  (Fortunately, combat armor, powered or otherwise, avoids the problem of setting yourself on fire doing this.)

The other form is regular heavy weapons for those people with horizontal primary body axes, which isn’t every quadruped, hexaped, etc., but is a strong working majority.

Twilight of the Gods’

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The dim red star at the center of this system is named Argyran.  This establishes something of a theme; the system as a whole, being planetless, is also named Argyran – or Argyran Depository, after the corporation which owns it lock stock and barrel; Argyran Depository, ICC.  And the drift which orbits just within its single belt, in a slight change to the nomenclaturical theme, is Depository Station.

The lack of imagination given to the naming of these things was almost certainly a product of the system population, which rarely exceeded a few hundred at its height, none permanent.  The Argyran system had been sold shortly after its discovery to a storage corporation, attracted by the quiet star and sparse belt that made its local space conveniently low in particulates and radiation.  The surplus materials, stored goods, time capsules, archives and cryonauts, each in their specialized packages, that orbited thus undisturbed required very few sophonts to tend them, or even to secure them.

The lesser of the two groups of these drifted at the fringe of the system, pacing Depository Cluster C9-1447 out in the cold orbits.  The interdictor cruiser, CS Blitz of Liir, was not a corporate ship; rather an IN vessel assigned to guard this specific cluster due to the high risk – despite the crew’s boredom – of “unauthorized reclamation”.

The first of C9-1447’s drifting packages, its fractal sponge structure visible through the enswathing nanosheathing, was a ktelaki faction-hive, surely ancient enough to predate their emergence into space.

The second, tumbling next to it, a pair of antique stone obelisks, their carvings almost worn to invisibility beneath the sheen left by the thousands of hands that had touched the stone.

The third, and the largest in the cluster, a vast cylinder half the length of the entire cruiser, a perfect core of earth taken from a planetary surface along with the temple that stood upon it, snatched up as one piece; the Liirian Holiest of Holies.

And more. The oil-globed machine that had been the focus of a cult on Plavad Minor.  The mad clone-prophet of Pevelisk, frozen in cryostasis.  The diamond-encased reliquary whose container was woven through with quantum security mesh to demonstrate that, despite their captivity, the sacred relics remained unseen by sophont eyes.  And yet more, the holy sites and artifacts of a dozen worlds, taken, secured, and left to drift on a long slow journey to nowhere at the fringe of Argyran Depository.

When their owners learn to play nicely with others, then they can have their toys back.

Trope(s)-a-Day: Awesome, yet Practical & Boring, but Practical

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Awesome, yet Practical / Boring, but Practical: Rather than attempt to come up with a large ad-hoc list here, I shall just point out that the Empire’s hat, or one of them, is largely based on playing the former as straight as possible while averting the latter, inasmuch as the people responsible for making things know their own cultural predilections quite well, and thus that making it awesome (or at the very least sprinkling it with some awesome like fairy dust) will sell infinitely more units than its boring but equally functional equivalent.

(Others simply go the route of “what do you mean, it’s not Simple Yet Awesome?”, such as pointing out that the hanrian, the second-sword, has been the canonical short blade/combat knife/utility knife/first general-purpose tool for millennia, from practically the Iron Age until now In Space, and the design has changed remarkably little over all that time.  Anyone want to argue that that’s not awesome?)