“Space may be silent, but it’s easy to tell how the ship’s maneuvering from the noise inside. Cold-gas thrusters hiss. Hypergolics hiss too, with a harsher metallic note, bangs and pings. Hydroxy rockets, they roar. Solid packs are similar, but rougher, with underlying stutters and clicks. Fusion torches
Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Part of the problem – to an extent, sense being defined as specifically those kinds of it that apply in scarcity economies – the Empire and its economic peers have in relating to the rest of the galaxy, specifically those parts of it that aren’t
“Progress begins with someone saying: ‘There has to be a better way to do this’. This, then, must be the basis of techneprax morality: never to fail to ask that question.” – prologue, Eternal Progress, Ianthe Claves-ith-Claves Elinaeth
Marked Bullet: You can actually buy gun add-ons to engrave the flechettes (with elegant and situationally relevant haiku, even, in the case of the Eye-in-the-Flame Warrior-Poet Gun) – granted, it’s too small to read with the naked eye, and it’s almost impossible that it will be readable post-impact – as
LANDING, SARAGÓS – “The future of Saragós as an independent world today hangs in the balance, as the Iltine Union’s true intentions in keeping its primary fleet elements at home were revealed in a surprise attack on the freesoil world Saragós, on the rim of the Osis Deep constellation. Behind
For those with a curiosity as to why this automatically constitutes three or four crimes rather than one, at least in legal terms, the answer is that the Imperial legal system, unlike ours, works very hard to make its charges atomic. That is to say, each individual part of the
Marital Rape License: Hah. The only difference in Imperial law between non-marital and marital rape is that in the latter you go from committing three crimes, two of them capital, to committing four crimes, three of them capital (the extra one being Infiduciarity, which becomes capitalized due to the precise
Manipulative Bastard: The right (or wrong) kind of professional memeticist (or related professions, such as lawyers – the technical term for one kind, for example is nomomach, freely glossable “war-lawyer”). The Office of Warrior Philosophy, for example, is full of the militarized subspecialty of this, but it’s hardly the only
“Thirty-Two Tons, this is Clajdia SysCon, we’re going to need you to abort your next maneuver, recompute for previous burn time plus twelve minutes, crossing traffic drone freighter DF-01369. Over.” “Clajdia SysCon, Thirty-Two Tons, negative on that, we have traffic priority over drone freighters. Over.” “Thirty-Two Tons, Clajdia SysCon,
…an administrative question. So far, I’ve only been posting links to actual fiction pieces through Patreon. But as you know, that’s not all I post here. So, since that’s just an arbitrary choice, I thought I’d ask y’all about your preferences for it: [polldaddy poll=
The chfsssc, or rather the chfsssc‘s environmental armor, sat in the parking lot below the conference room, glowing dully red even in the bright afternoon sun, the low rumble-throb of its internal reactors clearly audible from inside. Around it, the tarry surface steamed and slowly melted in the radiant
Speaking of handy little Mathcad tools, this one is a generic delta-v approximator for planet-to-planet Hohmann transfers, based on the same mathematics as this Stack Overflow answer: http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1380/how-to-calculate-delta-v-required-for-a-planet-to-planet-hohmann-transfer As mentioned there, it makes various assumptions, including that the bodies’ orbits around their sun are