Opinions, please, before I write something that tramples the setting's unspoken assumptions...
1) If your ship tows something, how does the towed item count toward your ship's mass, and thus its maximum speed?
(If the towed item doesn't count toward the ship's mass and top speed, then the Virgil Samms could put every other courier out of business by towing cargo containers around at 0.2c...)

2) How closely can ships stay in formation? Do the drives interfere with each other so ships have to have a noticeable minimum separation, can two ships touch while under full power, or something in between?

2a) How easily can two ships tow the same object? Is it simply a matter of hooking two tow cables to the object, or do the ships' engines need to be specially tuned to within 0.000000001% of each other's performance, or something in between? Or is it possible at all?

3) Is the standard ship's "speed" drive a gravity-effect drive of some sort?
(I know we were discussing this, but I don't recall coming to any consensus... The two extremes: If all the "speed" drives work on the same principle, then the 'Danes should be working on replicating the operating principles with hardtech. If they're all different, then ship repairs may be nearly impossible for lack of parts. Where on the sliding scale do we want to sit?)

-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Linkage
Lighthouse posted:
Quote:
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Will this event also give out extra prestige based on the number of members in the sg like last time?
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No, there will not be a prestige grant to SG's like last time's Double XP weekend.
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Well, that was not what I wanted to wake up to this morning. I guess the new GLI and GLL bases will be a bit more spartan than planned.

Global: @Jimmy Amp
"Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow's too lazy to form an opinion." -- Will Rogers

With many thanks to Bella, Min has leveled 50. :-)
She'll wait for Wide Receiver to be online this morning/afternoon to actually level, of course. Party to be held Monday evening, after 9pm EST. She thinks a costume contest would be fun in AP with celebrations to continue in the base lounge.
Thank you to everyone who helped get her this far.
HUGS! Min and Cindy

Character: Wire Geek, written by Kokuten
Notable Mundane Attributes:
*Yeah, I know a guy: For pretty much anything, he knows someone who can make it happen, or knows somone who knows someone.. not a fixer, a fixer _finder_.
*Yeah, I know a guy.. I'll have _him_ call _you_: Sure he can get you a thousand frammistats, or find someone who can supply you with young flesh (nutritional, sacramental, or sexual?) But you'll never get contact information, you'll get contacted. WG covers his sources religiously and in a most paranoid fashion.
Wait, wait, wait, do it _this_ way: WG learns systems rather quickly, though he's never really 'mastered' anything other than mining and oresmithing. Can-do good enough to get by on almost anything, and can learn himself up enough to get by.
It's all just Pascal to me!: WG cannot code, and has an active interest in not learning.
'Wavium Abilities: The 'Wavium biomod occured shortly before he left the planet, and worked out about as he planned. Going in a normal human, WG came out a dwarf.
You'll have... My Axe!: WG resembles a Tolkien dwarf, except he's usually wearing scrubby overalls, or black jeans and t-shirts. The resemblance is not just skin deep, he's relentlessly strong, works with earths and ores, and wields an axe to great effect.
Can't see shit, captain: While WG doesn't have very good far vision, his sense of touch, hearing, and smell, as well as his near vision, are very good. VERY good. Operating a bit outside the higher range of normal human ability, WG is able to effectively leverage his enhanced senses to work better with all manner of mining-related or technological tools.
Quirks:
Oh, did I say that?: WG can only handle so much personal interaction before the filters between his brain and his mouth start to fail. Depending on what he thinks, this may get him slapped, punched, or shot. These three have all occured before. This was a part of him, and it got signifigantly worse with the 'Wavium. Normally kicks in after three days of close quarters with strange people.
Oh, that's.. you?: Low Charisma. The Wavium left him lumpy and bumpy. Can pass in a crowd with well tailored clothing.. usually.
WOOO!: WG doesn't attend cons - but he's been known to throw very boisterous, short lived parties. Boisterous, to the tune of asteroids vaporized or gone missing, personnel showing up on the other side of the system afterwards with embarassing tattoos, and some of the best late-70's classic rock ever broadcast on conventional radio.
Because We Can!: Approximately 40% of WG's time is spent on projects that are.. nonsensical, nine times out of ten. A Trout-powered optical interpolation engine (should have gotten 50 or 60 megapixels of data out of a 2 megapixel image, ended up getting .05 megapixels out of a 2 megapixel image), a cosmic scale potato cannon (can fire the common potato at .3c, whereupon.. it immediately disintegrates in the cosmic particle wash), and on, and on.
Occasionaly, the nonsense projects pan out. Indeed, most of WG's profit comes from sales of a simple, easy to use communications module, which translates across almost all comm systems, and can clip into the interwave transmitters to rebroadcast, usually 802.11w, the current 5.8ghz wi-fi spec.
Ship:
Ship Name: Foundry Hephaestus

Created by Nicholas Casler (Wiregeek, Kokuten)
Registry Number:HSF-000
Base Hull: ten acres of good Alaskan glacial moraine, Portland/Handwavium Cement substructure and framework, pseudo-organic pseudo-geodesic air shield.
Drive Type: Speed (Adjusted Mass reactionless engine) (max velocity 0.001C)
Owner of Record: Dwarven Mining and Metalsmithing Unltd.
Flag of Record: Hephaestus was an unflagged private vessel until such time as the Fen flag was available.
Purpose: Mining and metalworking, heavy salvage and repair.
Launched: September 20th, 2009
Crew:
*Wire Geek 'Geek' (Notional Captain, chief of mining and salvage)
*Sparky (Chief of operations)
*'Doc' Raven (Chief of repair and maintenance)
*Hermes (AI, majordomo and computer core)
Supplementary Crew:
* Freyja (AI, chief medic, morale officer)
* Vioarr (AI, chief pilot HSF-009 stealth scout)
* Millie (AI, chief pilot HSF-006 dispatch boat)
* Dwarves (Staff and employees)
Known Vehicle Quirks:
* I'm sorry, Dave: Hephaestus is VERY finicky about its position. Asteroid fields are fine, a meter of 'Wavium concrete and a lovely resilient dome tend to just ignore the little bastards, but you want me to park this close to the sun _why_? It'll blacken my beautiful concrete!

* Let's Go!.. Slowwwwwly: Hephaestus is a platform, not a fightercraft. She is VERY, very slow, and is sensitive about it.
* My Children!: Hermes is host, in her role of the majordomo of Hephaestus, to flocks of shuttles and smaller vessels, and she is VERY protective of them.
* It's cold - why is it cold?: The flesh-and-blood original crew came from Alaska, and keep the ambient temperature at a comfortable 50 degrees farenheit.
* I'm BORRED: Energy production and AI core speed drop noticeably when there is no active production going on. Hermes wants to be _doing stuff_, but fortunately isn't too picky about whether it's reducing an asteroid, converting a battleship back into battle steel bar stock, or decorating for a bash.
Known Crew Quirks:
* Not Invented Here: Hephaestus is a center of design and engineering - but they tend to be hard to convince to do it any way but their own.
* Wait, dwarves?: The 'crew' of Hephaestus is composed of several dozen dwarves, short stocky miners and ironworkers par excellance. Noone knows where they came from, and WG aint' talkin.
Faction: Non-Aligned, mercenary.
Home Port: Self-ported, hails the orbital shipyards at the Moon when major repairs or deliverys are needed, and no hauler is available.
Current Location: Asteroid Belt, approximately 1AU out from Mars orbit, in opposition to Mars current position.
Status: ACTIVE
Trivia:
* Hephaestus is a semi-mobile mining and refinery platform.
* Hephaestus is also one of the largest producers of raw Handwavium currently extant. Most of it is for internal consumption.
* Hephaestus' most profitable product is 'Battle Steel', an iron-based Handwavium metal stock that sees common use throughout the Fenspace, and the cutting and welding tools for same.

Edit: Changed dome type, terrain type, current location.
Edit: Changed biomod date for WG.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

I finished the email from my father, and sat back to consider the implications. As a relative newcomer to Fenspace, having made my 'jump' on September 20th, 2009, I was not as socially in touch with my 'people' as I could have been.
However, the news from Earth, well, it had some interesting complications to the relatively happy existence the fen had been leading. I took a draft of my beer, and opened a new message.
From: Wire_Geek (Wiregeek@the_airbase.net)
To: nttp://fen.current-events.disc
Subject: Earth Technology Report - November 2012
To Whom it May Alarm.
I recently recieved an email from an anonymous source on the dirtball we call 'mamma'. In my source's usual inmitibal style, he has enlightened me upon the threats and problems that 'people like me' who 'love that anime junk' may face.
I assure you, while the source is not the least bit 'Fendly', and indeed are violently allergic to the 'wave, they are trustworthy.
In the United States, you may notice a lot more air traffic. It's there, and it's not gonna go away. Here's the fun part - the new birds are 'wavium enhanced. The U.S. government has finally started showing full scale results from it's experiments in Handwavium. We don't have exact figures, but the 200% performance increase is relatively stable across the board, except for ground pounders such as tanks. Apparently, the Keith Laumer _Bolo_ books made an impression on _someone_. The new tanks are still only 200% (estimated) faster, but that 200% puts them up to an approximate 300mph on good land. The weight of the tank has stayed the same, but the rumor mill has these tanks throwing almost seven times the range with three times the projectile weight as their immediate predecessors, which you may be familiar with from the Iraqi conflicts. The rumor mill had nothing to say about armor composition, strength, or thickness, other than this little beast represented the 'end of the weakness of the top'
My source only had a few choice tidbits for me from the rest of the world, but they are.. disturbing.. in their implications. In Germany, there is a new model of Panzer that has been shown driving through all manner of modern and ancient tank traps, with an almost elegant disregard for them. The tank is known on the rumor mill as 'juggernaut'.
Bits of France have been intermittently disappearing from the Internet, and noone has much of anything to say about why.
There have been several massive explosions in New Russia - and smaller explosions on the other side. Ballistic radar tracks appeared on the internet claiming that these were absurdly-long-range artillery tests. Planet-based KEW, anyone?
Africa is.. well, ask a Blue Blazer. My source said that there's been a whole LOT of fresh green coming up recently. I wonder what's happening down there...
My Source, and my Self, remind you that the Earth is a dangerous place, no matter what your errand. Be Careful, and can someone pick me up a carton of smokes next time you're down?

Yours in Discord,
Wire GeekWire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

two for BtVS:
post-Chosen, the Scoobs set out to find the new Slayers and set up their own version of aWatchers' Council - but in BtVSland, one ofthe fundamental truths is that any formal organisation WILL become corrupt, probably sooner than later. Who and how, and what's to be done?
Lots of authors off Spike, but who'll fill his destiny? How about VampyWillow?SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

Well, those of you who weren't online this evening, we had a little battle going on in the Pocket D Arena.
Minuet trounced Mother Meyai (Wide's psycho ex) 4 times in a Duel. Guess Min gets to keep him :-)
Got me thinking, we really need to try a Legendary vs Infamous battle. Maybe 3 on 3.
Possibly Team ups?
Bella, Min and ??? vs Lady Nogitsune ( does she get her ninjas?), Hexane and ????
-Cindy

Imagine my surprise when shlepping through the FF.Net directories to find that Mark has activated an account and is posting his old stories including what he says is the complete "I'm Here to Help".
Found here.

As it turns out, I've had a lot less time to work on anything than I expected, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone - not with the Lensmen and fannish influences. So, here's a little something for comment and fiddling.
Begin with a mixed type asteroid in a relatively short cometary orbit - the result of the collision of a carbon/silicon rock and either a very fragile Ni/Fe of roughly the same size or a number of them already traveling as rubble, long enoguh ago to have been mostly solid again by the time the original colony-building project found it. The orbit is offset some 30 degrees from the ecliptic and takes it from just inside Mars orbit and slightly under, to just outside Saturn orbit and pretty high as a result of the aggregate motions. As of SOScon, it's heading insystem and down, a bit inside the Main Belt and above it, though the only people who really know about it are the as-yet-unintroduced reavers.
The first colony module was a standard boxy thing made from cargo containers refitted as some approximation of living space, and had been owned by a less-reknowned collegue of The Jason, who wanted to try the whole asteroid-biosphere-via-modded-algae-and-plants thing, but didn't quite get it to work as intended. The strains developed tolerated the environment well enough and ate the the carbon-based rockstuff with help from the 'wave, and the smallish iceball towed into contact, and the surface skinned over well enough to hold atmosphere and loose peices until sturdier woody-mushroom type strains could become additional structure and really stabilize it - all of that was under way, and the first modded slime mold colonies released with added cleaning/pressure hull maintenaince type tropisms to really get it rolling... then some Not Nice people found out about it somehow, and thought it would make for a handy-dandy base of operations.
The original owner suffered a mischief sooner or later, but he'd always been kind of a loner so no one particularly noticed his dropping out of contact much, and his captors either got the classic glowing fungi and air-processor shrooms for lighting and air scrubbing in the ever-expanding cavern network from him directly or successfully cultivated them from notes and a first batch. Having the air in the place filled with spores that cause mild hallucinations and aggression until a new resident got accustomed to them didn't really bother them, being the sort of people they were. (And provides a convenient justification for why newbies are so eager to go out and bust shit up, when Reaver-style attacks don't really bring in a whole lot more than they expend in terms of rescources.) The occupied areas have to have special energised fencing to keep out annoying, smelly rovers, but that's not much trouble either, and the rock's location makes it a fine place to stage raids over a large part of the Belt and on traffic between it and the Inner and Outer system.
The surface is a whitish seashell-like material deposited by the structural fungi where it opens to no-pressure zones, with a thin layer of tough skin-like material over that. Inside, there's five main types of modded envirostuff besides the woody structural fungus, that's just part of the walls, filling in gaps and holding things together. Scums are excavator colonies, greenish and supported in a self-produced acid, eating away at dead end tunnels or weak stuff in the walls, where there's a carbon/silicon vein. Slimes are slightly more coherent and gel-like, traveling as fist-to-head sized flattened spheroids cleaning up dust and forming the airtight skin where needed if a crack opens, until the structural fungi can close it again. They spawn whenever a scum grows beyond the bounds of the exposed face it's eating. As they get larger and contain more solids, they get more like a jelly mold, ranging from the size of a small dog to man-size before the weak gravity (that just sort of appeared when the structural fungi got widespread enough, and follows no particular common direction except that "down" doesn't change abruptly) and patrolling for the bugs and small vermin that inevitably follow wherever people go in thigns that have space to hid them. The only threat they pose to anything alive enough to run away and large enough that a pseudopod can't completely engulf them (bigger than a rat, that is to say, and that for the largest Jellies) is their acrid odor (shared by all stages of the organism) and the possibiliy of eating holes in cloth or plastic left lying around. They are strongly avoidant of electricity, though, so charged screens surrounding areas where they are unwanted are quite sufficient to keep them at bay.
If only such were true of the slime on two legs that has taken up residence.

What do you think, sirs?
- CD
ETA: FOrgot the lightshrooms and airshrooms - lightshrooms are fist-sized and glow softly in the six primary and secondary colors, one per cap. Airshrooms are the size of a salad bowl and breathe like lungs, the fine inner ribs that produce the aforementioned spores also filtering and refreshing the air. They have enough animal/muscle traits to be edible and even nutritious to a degree, but are VERY hallucinigenic in that form, and mildly aphrodesiac as well as agression inducing. Again, not something the current inhabitants have a problem with, makes it all the more fun when some female captives are brought in.SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

For your consideration:
These series of stories that about what we are calling "Fenspace" is not Earth's first encounter with the "plot device" known as Handwavium. It may not even be the second or third.
Handwavium encounters in the past maybe, and probably are, responsible for the various pantheons of collected myths scattered about the globe.
Egyptians, Asians, Africans, Austrailian, Hindu, Aztec, Mayan, even native North Americans have their anthropomorphic dieties, and assorted artifacts.
In fact most of these have managed to survive (in some form) to the present. They might even recognize Handwavium when they see it. They probably know a few applications that most fen haven't encountered yet. They would certainly be able to pass for biomodded Fen.
Now immagine the reaction when they find that their descendents can be affected by further Biomodding.