military
So, I gather moreān a few laser fans are coming to visit these days, so just to save time, hereās the canonical reason that lasers are the āverseās secondary weapons system, not its primary one: (It turns out that this is really a recapitulation of points raised
advertising
āThere is no engineering reason, given appropriate design safeguards against cross-contamination, why one should not simply bolt a base-model food-fabber onto the back of a portable latrine. Since most excretions make good chowfab feedstock for the excreting species, biochemistry being what it is, this is merely an efficient application of
worldbuilding
For those mildly bothered by the ambiguity in the size of the Empire heretofore present, Iām here to relieve you of that ambiguity. It isĀ precisely 243 systems in size, of which 226 can be found in the list below, the other 17 being ecumenical colonies whose name and
functional lightspeed
functional lightspeed (n.): A curious quirk of relativistics; thanks to time dilation and distance foreshortening, when a lighthugger on a sufficiently lengthy voyage achieves 0.707 lights, the wall-clock time experienced by the crew exactly matches the length of the voyage in the empire-time frame, thus creating the mathematical illusion
worldbuilding
So Iāve been playing around a bit with nuclear reactor design, as one does. Thinking about the gap in the portfolio between the high-performance and high-unfriendliness molten-salt designs mentioned for use in power armor, and the low-power pebble-bed designs used for distributed medium-power applications, and wondering what exactly the
Admiralty Intelligence
From: Vorin Telnicev, Archives, Admiralty Intelligence To: Rilis Tsurilen, Overwatch, Admiralty Intelligence Subject: The Sixfold Abomination I regret to say that Archives has no confirmed information on the precise thinking behind the Galianās abomination of āall that walks on six legsā. It was declared shortly after the Falish Traverse
mindcasting
Seen in a post office on Maiath (Tasein Ways): CUSTOMER ADVISORY The postal service is not accepting shipments of biologicals, especially live biologicals, for shipment via packet torpedo at this time, or at any other time. Customers are requested not to attempt to bypass this restriction. Despite the events depicted
Stratarchy of Data Warfare
GAN-LAK-NAK (HANTH CLUSTER) ā The capital of the Aklaknak Cluster was in chaos today after multiple issues have wreaked havoc on its governance automation, local correspondents report. Currently these issues include the deletion of all data relating to sophonts whose names begin with the letter āKā from Revenue Generation Service databases,
Senate
On this day in which we here in the US observe the attempt to make law a 497-page document issued too late to read before the vote, in the form of a non-searchable PDF with handwritten, barely-legible marginal annotationsā¦ ā¦an observer from a far distant land might turn to another,
ethics
A reader sent in a trio of interesting articles discussing the nature of property and wealth in a stateless society ā and while the Empire isnāt one, obviously, being a joint-stock diarchy, it draws from a lot of the same memeplexes. And so it seems that a discussion of these
temporal mechanics
From Neithe Daphnotarthius the Elder to Neithe Daphnotarthius the Younger, greeting. This message is not the manuscripts you expected to be delivered the day after having your brilliant idea, regretfully. Please understand that the problem we encountered with your brilliant idea was that it was actually anĀ idiotic idea: it
Imperial Navy
(With due apologies to the author of GURPS Lensman, whose work I am shamelessly imitating and which put this thing in my head in the first placeā¦) āOblong shape and squared-off prow, Writ with words from stern to bow. Drive the mass and make a hole ā Thatās a Gallie