Month: May 2012

Trope-a-Day: BFG

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BFG: Oh, several.  Let’s start with “that created by any excuse to shove antimatter rifle-grenades in your sluggun (see: Abnormal Ammo) or battle carbine and cut loose”, shall we?  There are also a variety of multibarrel miniguns, and yes, hypothetically even some that you can shove antimatter rifle-grenades into (see: More Dakka).

Specific examples would include the S-11i Mamabear, a souped-up sluggun which requires heavy bone reinforcement of most species in order to cope with the recoil, but can pull off one-shot kills on just about anything you care to name; the E40 Motherstorm, a very overpowered electrolaser that is unsafe at any setting, but very useful against mechanicals if the environment will let you use it; every single hunting weapon ever on Paltraeth, the kaeth homeworld, where the apex predators are oversized velociraptors with natural scale-mail plating; and the EI-12d Valkyrie target designator, which on its own is a tiny weak modulated laser, but which if there’s an orbital defense grid or an assault cruiser owning the local orbitals, can unleash more hell than everything else in this entry added together.

In the Fire Breathing Weapons category, the plasma-belching sets-fire-to-everything-around power-armor-mounted weapon of doom that is the KF-11 Dragonspume.  Even if its primary use is taking down cyberswarms and nanoswarms through thermal overload.

In the vehicle-mounted weapons category, that minigun-class weapon which is fitted to a G7-BU Sunhawk (see: Cool Plane) and which necessitates – as does the main weapon of the aircraft to which it is a homage – some special care in using to avoid find yourself flying backwards.

And any number of the one-off custom designs from Eye-in-the-Flame Arms, whose weapons designers (drawn, substantially, from the Cyprium-ith-Gislith line) consider the existence of any practical purpose for the weapon distinctly secondary to generating more and more extreme levels of overkill.

The Job Free Market (1/3)

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So, you want a job in the Empire?

Of course you do. At least half of the people in the Associated Worlds have at least thought about it. Pay rates are infamously high, tax rates are infamously low, and it is generally agreed that there’s no finer place for the ambitious to get rich quick.

The easy part is that there are no artificial barriers to stop you. You don’t need a work permit, you don’t need a work visa, and you don’t need to bribe the Minister of Work. You don’t even need an entry permit; assuming you aren’t on their list of undesirables, you can simply go there and start working.

The hard part is that you don’t want a ”job” in the Empire. In fact, it’s best if you forget you even know the word ”job”. The sort of employment familiar in most polities – an exchange of money for time, in which you work under direction – offends the libertist Imperials in a deeply philosophical way; they don’t practice it, they assert that the closest thing they do have to it is indentured servitude, and they will not appreciate the suggestion that they might like to start doing so with you.

In any case, everyone who might consider you fancies that they are looking for someone with dynamism, wit, entrepreneurial spirit, and vaulting ambition, and if you sound to them like someone who wants to just sell his time and be told what to do, you won’t even get an interview.

So, you’re not looking for ”a job”, you’re looking ”to work”, and this distinction is a lot more important than it might sound.

How is work organized in the Empire, then? Contracts. (You will have to learn to read and understand contracts yourself; while it’s possible to obtain pocket-obligator software, people won’t wait for it to explain the simple and standard to you.)

In Imperial law, every person is also a business; everyone is automatically self-employed. These people/businesses are contracted to perform specific tasks for specific remuneration (on the basis of completion, productivity or time).

Unlike the employment model you’re familiar with, the contracting businesses take little interest in how the work is done, only that it is done. Tools, techniques, workplace, working hours, how many contracts you work on simultaneously, and so forth are all largely up to you – but you also hold all the responsibility for the job being done on time and to specification. The obligations of contractor to contractee, and vice versa, are strictly those found in the contract.

– Working in the Worlds, Kernuaz Alliés

Trope-a-Day: Fire Breathing Weapon

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Fire Breathing Weapon: Plenty of ’em, up to and including flame tanks.  For two reasons: one, fire is scary, and since there are very few species indeed willing to charge directly into a wall, cloud, or ocean of fire, they make excellent area-denial weapons against light infantry.  Without having to kill anyone not led by General Stupid, even.  And two, they’re great against nanoweapons and other swarms in general, because it doesn’t take all that much fire to make them exceed their heat budget and stop working.  And since nanowarfare is quite popular, such a convenient way of dealing with it is most useful.

No Place Like It

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Tinf?  It’s a thermal hell of a planet.  It’s sheathed in thick clouds of helium and methane and sulfur dioxide, scattering rain that’ll etch metal.  Actinic Kortinf whips the atmosphere, thick as it is, into hurricane frenzy during the day, making ions enough to thrash the ground with lightning bolts of a size you’d never see on one of your milk-mild garden worlds.  The leaden oceans melt shortly after dawn and are boiling by afternoon.

Then at night the temperature crashes again, and the flash-floods come with dusk.  Aurorae light the sky all night, walls and curtains of color, green and yellow and blue and red as the atmosphere discharges again – Kortinf puts out too many rads that reach the ground during the day, so we can only come up to clean off the lava and tend the arrays at night.

And continuous radio noise, so you chaps with the wireless interfaces couldn’t hear yourselves think – nothing but hash all the time, from the lightning by day and the aurorae by night.

Leave?  Chaos, no!  It’s just like home!

– Alyáné Janaris-ith-Janaris, Sialhaith-adapt technician

Trope-a-Day: Cool Plane

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Cool Plane: As a first note, I should point out that the development of aeronef aircraft was bent out of shape on Eliéra because of its lack of fossil fuels – and given the demand for them for lubrication, chemical feedstocks, and so forth, the price of large quantities of them to burn was, ah, not exactly favorable.  Meanwhile, it did possess plentiful radioactive elements, which is one reason why airships were much more popular (and still are for regular passenger/freight transport) in the early days, simply because it’s so much easier to find room for a nuclear steam engine in their mass budget.

But that also meant that when aeronefs were developed apart from the original experimental models and limited-production-run special vehicles, they tended to be in odd areas of the technological envelope by our standards, like nuclear-electric ducted-prop designs, hydrogen-burning turbofans (later propfans), both hydrogen and nuclear thermal (i.e., essentially an air-cooled reactor, Project Pluto-style) ramjets/scramjets, and aerospike rocket engines – sometimes in combination on the same airframe.

As a side note, helicopters are largely excluded from this, because the Empire’s technological development went down a different road to fill their niche.  While the concept does exist in the form of some test models and experimental aircraft, their functional niche is filled instead by tilt-rotors and tilt-turbines.

Some various examples follow:

  • The I-2 Starbolt, the first dedicated space interceptor – which is to say, the first plane which was designed to sortie from aerospace cruisers in low orbit rather than from the ground.  It wasn’t the first aircraft to technically be able to achieve low orbit (those aerospikes, don’ch’know?), but it was the first that could repeatably sortie from it, enter the atmosphere, fly a useful mission profile, and return to its mother ship.  Technically, it’s been overtaken by a lot of its successors in the transatmospheric fighter/interceptor and bomber roles both, but the grand old flying-wing that was the first to manage that particular damn cool trick still gets the respect.
  • While it is a tilt-turbine, and therefore arguably fills the ‘helicopter’ role rather than the ‘plane’ one, the G7-BU Sunhawk is a shameless homage to the A-10 Thunderbolt.  (And one that gets more appreciation than the A-10 does from its own organization, since its particular role is operated organically by the Legions rather than by the Navy, and every legionary knows full well that, in the words of Schlock Mercenary, “When the going gets tough, the tough call for close air support”.)
  • The K-50C Roustabout cargo plane, the giant dedicated freighter beloved of the Stratarchy of Military Support and Logistics, and by every civilian transport company that’s ever had to face the problem of getting things to places fast on-planet.  It’s a giant, brutish, unbelievably massy monster of an aircraft that flies in the manner of a jet-powered brick, which is to say, by the sheer force of its eight engines.  But it can get more stuff to wherever it’s needed faster than just about anything else in the sky.  If you need, say, an entire prefabricated autofac complex dropped somewhere by the day after tomorrow, you call for these guys.
  • The Fireflash 220 semi-ballistic dart is the one commercial plane in the Imperial air fleet whose accommodations are as Spartan as, say, our typical business-class cabin, with added eight-point acceleration harnesses.  That’s because it’s the plane that takes you from one side of the planet to the diametric opposite side in under half an hour, which it does by being closer, in design, to an ICBM than an aircraft.  It takes off and makes a hard burn using its rocket engines, consuming its entire fuel load in just a few minutes.  The engines then cut out, and it goes purely ballistic up into sub-space, then re-enters the atmosphere, aerobrakes, and glides in for a landing on a suitably lengthy runway on the other side of the world no more than 20 minutes later.  (It’s also notorious as the only plane that needs to get landing clearance before it takes off, because once that engine burn happens, it’s committed – it’s either going to land at the place its ballistic course takes it to, or it’s going to crash there.  Most of them do provide a second runway within its extremely limited vector-change capability, but as for diverting to another airport… forget it.  Despite this, though, it has a great safety record.)
  • At the top end of the flying-wing club, one finds the variations on the theme of the S-1 Rennae superwing – a flying-wing, nuclear-engined aircraft several stories high, the size of a large building.  They can land and take off, but they almost never do unless there’s an emergency; they’re designed for in-flight maintenance, and as long as fuel pellets keep being ferried up to them, they don’t ever really need to land.  They’re mostly used as permanent but mobile airborne installations – the Emergency Management Authority owns a couple to use as mobile disaster headquarters that can orbit the site of the disaster and drop quick-response teams right on top of it, and unlike an airship, can get to it quickly, for example.  Another serves as a flying hotel/cruise liner.