ICE BLUESHIFT MOST SECRET (INDIGO) / EYES ONLY ICE BLUESHIFT NEED-TO-KNOW ABSOLUTE ISE INTERNAL ONLY TRACKED-COPY DOCUMENT NOCONTRACT NOFORN SPECIAL SECURITY PROCEDURE BASILISK FIDELIS Proceed (+/-)? + SUMMARY: [SSP image eluded from file] ICE BLUESHIFT agents are specially developed units of the Fifth Directorate intended for deployment under exigent circumstances requiring extremal
Poisoned Weapons: See Combat Pragmatist – the eldrae would, once again, like to point out that being honorable should not correlate strongly with being an idiot. Nor should being an idealist mean that you are obliged to give up all the efficacious advantages. As the book says: if you have to
Ballistic Brewery, ICC to Hanth & Mallon Restaurants (Pádíäz System), ICC, greetings. Valmiríän Oricalcios, Thank you for your interest in our selection of fine beers for the discerning spacer palate. To be sure that we can satisfy your requirements, let me explain to you how the Ballistic Beer process works.
Point Defenseless: Utterly averted. The automated point-defense systems – usually plasma lasers or other Energy Weapons, for their speed and reaction time, gridded across the hull – will rip to pieces just about anything that gets within their range in an colorful orgy of photonic destruction, unless it’s extremely fast, capable
So, while it now seems to have disappeared from the Internet, my article on Non-Standard Starship Scuffles appears to have come in for some little criticism: First, for having FTL in it; and Second, for assuming that space battles will take place in open space, the commenter apparently not seeing
Pocket Dimension: Alas, outside virtual reality, this seems to require basement universes (requires very high-energy physics, being worked on) or dimensional transcendence (requires emergent ontotechnology, also being worked on). Being worked on very enthusiastically by starship manufacturers, I note, because holy mother of crap what would being able to keep
Plug’n’Play Technology: Played mostly straight, at least in the Empire. They’ve had a lot longer to work on it – and for various technologies to stabilize – and the consumers are both savvier about this sort of thing (because tinkering, integrating, and even Home Invention is so common) and
CALMIRÍË, ELIÉRA – The Imperial Senate today rejected unanimously the petition of the Temporary Tyrancy of Ódeln for admission to the Empire as a stage-1 colony world. Announcing this decision, Incorruptible Secretary Tirill min Dinkoss stated, “While the Imperial Charter permits flexibility in local governance beneath its core principles, provided that
Planet Spaceship: Some of the largest city-ships (and, of course and rather more frequently, drifts and drift clusters) can reach large asteroid/small moon size fairly readily. Offset somewhat, non-moving-under-power-habitat-wise, because when you’re in space, it’s not like you actually need to connect structures together to make ’em
MET+0:02:20 “Ah, Flight, we may have a problem here. Give me the telemetry numbers on thrust, commanded versus actual?” “Skyreach, we show 92% actual versus 100% commanded. We’re running diagnostics, but assume you are still go at this time.” “Status on the Roughneck?”, Laras queried the
(Incidentally, if you were wondering what I was doing this weekend, I was attempting to nail down the characters for my next ongoing longer series. I think I have a good handle on four of them, as of now. The fifth… is troublesome.) Planet of Hats: Trying very hard to
The Plague: In the ancient pre-Imperial past on Eliéra, the Gray Contagion, a wasting disease with the same sort of morbidity and mortality as the Black Death. It was responsible for one of the two great prehistoric population diebacks there (the one not caused by the astrobleme/ensuing Winter of