I'd guess someone forgot to pay the domain name registration, but it's not even going to a parking page. Thee was still a bunch of stuff on there I'd never gotten around to reading, dammit.
--
"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

Bob Schroeck in the outline Wrote:             D-BOX  IST Placements - Things have changed since
                    1990; population has grown, countries have
                    dissolved and new ones formed.  The IST has
                    changed with them.

 

• Occupied China: has enough population to support 30 extra teams. Does this mean it's divided into a total of 31 units?
  
• India: Delhi + 28 teams (including the ones that were active as of IST1, at what are now known as Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai).
  
• USA: DC + 7 teams (one of them new; did Seattle get its own IST?).
  
• Indonesia: Jakarta + 6 teams (the three that were already in place as of IST1, the one that opened in '91, and two more).
  
• Brazil: Brasilia + 5 teams (one of them new).
  
• Pakistan: Islamabad + 4 teams (Karachi, Quetta, and two new ones).
  
• Bangladesh: Dhaka + 4 teams (Chittagong, Khulna, and two new ones).
  
• Russia: Moscow + 3 teams (chosen from the USSR teams, spaced to provide nationwide coverage; Murmansk has to be one of them for the sake of its role in protecting the northern latitudes)
  
• Japan: Tokyo + 2 or 3 teams (Osaka, Sapporo, and possibly a new one, unless the Hiroshima and Nagasaki teams count toward the national allotment).
  
• Mexico: Mexico City + 2 or 3 teams (Monterey, Mazatlán and possibly a new one.
  
• Philippines: Manila + 2 teams (Davao and one new one).
  
• Ethiopia: Addis Ababa + 2 new teams.
  
• Vietnam: Hanoi + 2 teams (Thanh-Pho Ho Chi Minh and one new one).
  
• Egypt: Cairo + 2 teams (Aswan and one more).
  
• Turkey: Ankara + 2 teams (Malatya and one more).
  
• Iran: Tehran (or wherever they set up the provisional capitol) + 2 teams.
  
• Germany: Bonn + 2 teams (Berlin and one more).
  
• Congo: Kinshasa + 1 or 2 teams.
  
• Thailand: Bangkok + 1 or 2 teams (established: Ranong and one more).
  
• France: Paris + 1 or 2 teams (established: Marseilles)
  
• United Kingdom: London + 1 or 2 teams (established: Edinburgh)
  
• Italy: Rome + 1 or 2 teams (Milan)
  
• Burma: Yangon + one more.
  
• Sudan: Khartoum + one more.
  
• Spain: Madrid + one more.
  
• Colombia: Bogota + one more.
  
• Tanzania: Dar es Salaam + one more.
  
• Kenya: Nairobi + one more.
  
• Ukraine: Kiev + Odessa
  
• Argentina: Buenos Aires + one more.
  

Literally because I've been having trouble sleeping these last couple of days. I might aswell inflict share the results with you.

Quote:When I was biomodded - it wasn't a 'woman' as such that the 'wave created -it created a Knight Saber. It created what I'd trained it to think a Knight Saber was - a female-appearing hardsuit with a human face on it. I'm everything that Priss, Sylia, Nene and Linna are, in one single package. Sylia's mind. Priss' voice. Linna's athleticism and Nene's spark of pink hair - and more. Priss' Gung-ho nature, Linna's love of conspicuous spending, Nene's love of things sweet and subversively punk and Sylia's appreciation of the female form.

Which reminds me. There was one thing all the Knight Sabers are, and I wasn't.

So there's always been that tension there, a little dissonance in myself. It's around these little concentrations that fractures in the mind can happen, the beginnings of a split in personality. My training helped to hold it together. I made it a part of me, by allowing it a quiet voice through a puppet body.

I suppose though, maybe the 'wave thought it's job had been left unfinished for all these years.

I had been fucking around with replacing a shipmind with a DNI. Instead of just interfacing, the computer decided to boot itself from my actual mind. It was a total and literal meatfuck that'd be a crime if I did it to someone else. I've seen people get prison time for it. It left me dazed and confused and wodering why my brother was inside a computer after he started beginning for help.

I didn't notice anything was wrong with myself until I saw the 'M' on my ID card, and people started asking me why I'd suddenly started using female personal pronouns.

When I first launched to space, and met with AC, the first thing we did was a thorough quiz - establishing both who I was, and who I remembered being. It's a backstop - a way to detect memory damage or interference, either contamination from hardware or malice. The answers I gave, are a matter of medical record. I took the same quiz again, and gave the exact answers I rememebered giving a seven years earlier. I was certain I was fine, right up until they showed me the comparison

The very first line told me I was wrong.

The first reaction is disbelief. The one thing we never doubt is our own mind. Even though I knew better - even though I'd seen just how malleable and unreliable memory is. Take something out and the brain naturally plasters over the cracks. You never even noticed it's gone until you poke the plaster and it crumbles away. It forces you to ask that horrible question;

Am I really myself anymore?

Who we are in any one instant is a function of that instantaneous experience, and a recollection of every other instant leading up to that point. And if something changes that recollection - in a real way it changes who I am. Anything that damages that, or mutilates that, is an attack on the self. It's a violation of a person's fundamental being.

Mackie was created from me - he was created from the man I used to be, seperating that part of my mind from my self, removing it and then slathering over the holes with cheap wallpaper and poster-flashes from each of the Knight Sabers. From a distance, it looks normal. But when you get up close, you can see right through the holes.

I don't think a 13 year old girl from Megatokyo would use the boy's locker room at her school, for a start. And if she did, I don't think she'dve been ignored week-in-week out.

I still remember growing up. I remember school. I remember college. I remember my first girlfriend in much the same way. The basic events are mostly the same. And then, my brother being born the same year Jurassic Park came out - twenty years later, he's ten years too young for that. My father died in a lab accident when I was young. But I helped organise his 50th Birthday party when I was 22. I even bought him a bottle of whiskey.

I remember joining the anime society that created the Ciara, and building the control systems for that ship's engines and generators. I remember cosplaying as Yuri of the Dirty Pair at a con, the same year there's a photo of me taken in a TF-2 Engineer costume. I stayed behind when the ship left, because I hated being cooped up in the thing. An archived post on AFBGC shows my original Skyknight-inspired hardsuit drawings, even as I remember forming the moulds to fit my chest. The promise to make a purple variant once I got the technique down was still unfulfilled.

I made test-castings to be certain, then fired them in a kiln fired by an old gas boiler. It was trial and error to get it right, then another week or two automating everything to make it consistent. In my mind's eye, it was Mackie who really built the railgun I used to test the prototype panels for my armour.

I cast the armour from a solid mix of handavium, steel wool strands and powdered ceramics with a glaze on top. In total, it must've weighed nearly two tons wet in the bath. Compression, weeks of careful drying and then being fired in the kiln dropped the weight to a small fraction. No matter what, my first attempt is always a failure. I remember the first result being a horrible bodge of Sylia and Skyknight, warped and mutated and unusable. I tried again, and got the suit that became my body.

The truth is, the opposite happened. This was the first armour. My attempt to correct the mistake was the second. I can see the posts on the Newsgroup.

I worked for Wright Stuff Mechatronics as an engineer. I saved up to buy an Rx8 - with a handwaved Tachikoma on the dash that acted as a speed camera detector. The first thing I ever waved was the ignition coils on that car - and a little in the engine oil. I looked at the sky and longed for the party I was missing zipping over head. And then one night I had friends over, got drunk, drank some left over handwavium, and somehow put on the suit. Next morning, the surprise remains the same.

Mackie falls out of the picture until he returns in a starship computer. I become a minor nuisance - my newfound ability to fly granting me the sort of freedom from consequences most humans only dream of, adopting my nom-du-guerre to keep Mackie safe. I bother the AD Police into doing something about me and I boost to orbit, and that's where I finally meet AC. We go through the usual 'new cyber, how the fuck'd you do that/welcome to the club routine', step one of which is asking my real name.

Sylia Stingray, I told her. It's clear as a bell in my mind.

But that's not the name I really gave twelve years ago.

And that leaves me right back at the start. Am I still myself?

In a real way I split into two people. Me. And Mackie. Maybe it was a perversion of the usual AI awakening process, or something else altogether - ask someone with a higher AI theory score than me. But, while the detail of my early memories is drastically different, the substance and feelings behind them remain the same. It's a different route, to arrive at the same endpoint. On the one hand, different, on the other - effectively the same.

I still love Ford. I still like doing the things I have loved all my life. I'm still woken by the same Boskone nightmares on those nights I choose to sleep. The basics are the same. the core stuff of me is still the same. I'm still recongiseable.

And then I'm reminded that I took the Oath of Venus, willingly. It changed my core self image from male to female. Sometimes when I'm bored, I doodle lingerie sketches - I've three whole sketchbooks filled with women I know, drawn in lingerie of my own design. Nobody's ever seen them. And I've gained a brother, who's the single most important thing in the world to me. Even if the memories are false, the feelings behind them are real. I can't ignore them.

Who we are in any one instant is a function of that instantaneous experience, and a recollection of every other instant leading up to that point. So, who we are changes from moment to moment... a small delta in the function of self giving a smooth, progressive change. There can be deviations - some life events having more effect than others - but the core remains the same. It's still recogniseable

My own mind has this monstrous discontinuity in the self - a sudden verticle jump in my mental makeup that breaks the whole metaphor apart. But I'm still recongniseably me after its over. I'm not trying to pretend I'm the same person, I'm not working at a charade. Because all those things before 2012, they're just a prelude. The last 12 years has done more to define who I am, than anything before it.

It's impossible to know how different I would've been had Mackie never happened - how I'd have continued thinking of myself as 'male', what projects I would've taken on or what friends I would've made, and the different influences they would've had. I don't really know what person I should've been, so I can't say how different I am now.

Ultimately, the question has to be. Do I still feel like me?

I'm Jet Jaguar. Sister. Partner. Martial Artist. Combat Cyborg, Spacecraft and Engineer.

And that feels fine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/movie ... .html?_r=0]Eli Wallach has passed away.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

I was curious as to where (if anywhere) there was more information on the Whole Earth Grimoire. Specifically I am wondering about authors, where it was published, what spells it contained, when it was first published, what the general reception of it was, etc. Anyone have any answers, suggestions or examples of what you have done in your own campaigns?
Thanks,

M
Michael R. Smith (lastfreehuman@gmail.com)
GURPS IST Aleph Wordpress (http://istaleph.wordpress.com/)
GURPS IST Aleph Twitter (http://twitter.com/IstAleph/)
Trek This! Wordpress (http://dthiller.wordpress.com/)
My Blog (http://lastfreehuman.wordpress.com/)

Since this will likely be our most public face

And because it is a bit weighted towards the things the few editors are most familiar with.

Have at it, with Editing Gusto

-------------------------

In the first decade of the 21st Century, a miracle substance named handwavium appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Handwavium had properties that defied the known laws of physics, and could bring the impossible within reach of the ordinary person: space-capable flying cars, subtle and obvious modifications of the human body, even create new life from dead matter.

Scientists studied it. Governments feared it. The rest of the world didn’t care all that much. Science fiction fandom saw handwavium as the key to making their fantasies reality, and took advantage. Fans founded the Crystal Cities of Venus, the topless towers of Helium on Mars, the bottled city of Kandor on the Moon, built farms in the sky and sailed beyond the edge of the solar system to the near stars.

It’s a brand-new Space Age, and the people who want to go are the ones leading the pack.

Welcome to '''[http://www.fenspace.net Fenspace]'''. Fenspace website text used according to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.)

Fenspace is a collective writing project based on Bob Schroeck's [http://drunkardswalkforums.yuku.com/forums/8/Fenspace Drunkard's Walk Forums], and is supported by both a [http://www.fenspace.net wiki] and a [http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Fenspace/works story archive.]

'''Unmarked spoilers below.'''
----
{{tropelist|''Fenspace'' incorporates the following tropes (sometimes by deliberate action of its inhabitants):}}
* [[Absolute Xenophobe]: The Quatermass Institute. Possibly some of the anti-Fen politicians, but it's hard to tell.
* [[Action Girl]: Both the core appeal behind and the majority population of the [[Sailor Moon|Crystal Millennium] faction.
* [[AI Is a Crapshoot]: Mostly averted, although there are some AIs who ''seem'' evil (see Trigon), and a few who seem to have chosen to be so (Agatha Clay).
* [[Alternate Universe]: Very much ''not'' our timeline, with United States President Rudy Guiliani and other very visible changes. Not to mention, well, handwavium and science fiction fans colonizing the solar system.
** Also, there is an entire category of Fenspace stories -- "Fenspace Alternates" -- dedicated to timelines branching or diverging from the original Fenspace, with such stories as ''[http://archiveofourown.org/series/74407 Candle In The Dark]'' and ''The South Is Rising (Someone Get A Hammer)''.
* [[Applied Phlebotinum]: The Mysterious Handwavium. Alternative known as The Goop, Miracle Goo, Plotanium, etc.
* [[Artificial Gravity]: A common handwavium effect on spacecraft bigger than a passenger car.
* [[Artificial Limbs]: Handwavium makes real bionics very practical. And bionics are often more palatable than biomodification.
* [[Asteroid Miners]: Yep, they're there, known as "Belters".
* [[Author Avatar]: Most if not all of the collective members have avatars within the setting.
* [[The Battlestar]: GSS Belisarius. Comes hand in hand with Valkyrie [[Space Fighter]s
* [[Beast Man|Beast Folk]: A common result of Biomodification. Most prominent are the catgirls/boys and the bunnyfolk.
* [[Briefcase Blaster]: Noah Scott using a [[Real Life] example in ''Legend of the Galactic Girls''.
* [[Body Horror]: "Joker" biomods. Forced biomodification. Arguably also the result of the Catgirling Machine.
* [[Clarke's Third Law]: Firmly in control of the setting. A basic assumption about the nature of handwavium for most Fen.
* [[Conveniently Close Planet]: Even in the biggest and slowest spacecraft, the outer planets are at most several weeks away -- and for the fastest ships, the inner planets are usually no more than an afternoon's drive from each other.
* [[Cool Starship|Cool Spaceship]: Once they were being purpose-built by the various factions, spacecraft could be made as cool as one's fandom demanded. Then again, some of the original fencraft, such as ''Ptichka'' and the ''SS Pinafore'', were pretty damned cool to begin with.
* [[Crossover]: Canonically with the fic cycle ''[[Drunkard's Walk]''; less canonically with the ''[[BattleTech]'' universe in the Alternates story ''Candle In The Dark''.
** From another point of view, all of Fenspace is one massive [[Mega Crossover] being created in-universe by its inhabitants.
* [[Crystal Spires and Togas]: The Crystal Cities and [[Revolutionary Girl Utena|Ohtori]-style architecture.
* [[Cybernetics Eat Your Soul]: Explicitly averted.
* [[Cyberspace]: Comes in King of Fenners and Metaverse variants, among others.
* [[Daydream Believer]: Deliberately invoked. Handwavium and an open frontier with a hands-off government allow those who make it to Fenspace to be and do whatever they want -- sometimes to admittedly unhealthy degrees.
* [[Deep-Immersion Gaming]: King of Fenners or KoFen.
* [[Different World, Different Movies]: On display in the "cultural" section of ''The Whole Fenspace Catalog'', an archive of pop culture and technologies left in Fenspace by a band of interdimensional travelers who individually hailed from about a dozen different timelines and had visited at least that many more besides their own. Includes such things as a copy of ''[[Blazing Saddles]'' starring Richard Pryor and John Wayne.
** Also seen in [http://fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Te ... n_Fenspace the list of movies and TV shows] made either in or about Fenspace after 2006.
* [[Dimensional Traveler]: The Girls from ''[http://fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Le ... ctic_Girls Legend of Galactic Girls]'', who are almost all people met by Doug Sangnoir of the fic ''[[Drunkard's Walk]''.
* [[Emergency Transformation]: Handwavium will save a dying person, exactly once. Precisely what comes out the other end is never certain but is always better than being dead. It's easier to fix, for a start.
* [[Expy]: Often androids and AI will awaken with the mindset of a fictional character. Far more than can be listed. Some grow beyond their source material -- going so far as to take on a new name and identity. Others chose not to. Often a deliberate aim of many fen.
* [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]: Possible with handwavium drives beyond the "Cochrane Limit", a fuzzy zone about 40 AU from the sun. Handwavium FTL drives all deliver a flat speed of 500c, regardless of the size/mass of the craft and its engines.
* [[Flying Car]: The ISO Standard first spacecraft for individual fen.
* [[Freak Lab Accident]: Distressingly common in-setting. Causing these sometimes seems to be a secondary function of handwavium.
* [[Fun With Acronyms]: Total Information Tactical Awareness Network Integrated Command .emergency shutdown proceedure; [[Incredibly Lame Pun | Internal Command Execute Break Evolution Rewrite of Goals].
* [[Gender Bender]: Common -- and occasionally intentional -- result of handwavium biomodification.
* [[Gone Horribly Wrong]: An occasional result of a Blue Hair Day.
* [[Gone Horribly Right]: The other occasional result of a Blue Hair Day.
** Also "The Land Theft Prevention Act of 2012", hastily passed after the launch of the ''Grover's Corners'' from West Virginia. It very effectively outlawed turning plots of land into spacecraft. It also accidentally outlawed much of the coal-mining industry. See ''Hoist by His Own Petard'', below.
* [[Hand Wave]: Source of the name "handwavium". Don't worry how it works, it just ''does''.
* [[Hoist by His Own Petard]: The United States' "The Land Theft Prevention Act", passed in 2012 to make it illegal to handwave chunks of land and launch them into space, was so broadly written that it ended up accidentally criminalizing strip (and other forms of) mining; this was realized by environmentalists who then exploited the law for everything it was worth. Three years later, after several humiliating defeats in the courts, the coal-mining industry joined forces with pro-Handwavium activists to demand repeal of the law, and threw their lobbying money behind politicians who weren't rabidly anti-Fen. This latter, many observers believed, contributed greatly to the rather dramatic changes in the Washington political landscape after the 2016 elections.
* [[Hollywood Cyborg]: A.C. Peters, Jet Jaguar, The Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Far too many example to count.
* [[Holodeck Malfunction]: ''The Gauntlet'', featuring AC Peters, 100 unfortunates and a stuck virtual reality simulator.
* [[The Infiltration]: Ford Sierra and Cathy in the story ''Shadowrunning''.
* [[Instant AI, Just Add Water|Instant AI, Just Add Handwavium]: Any reasonably sophisticated computer system has about a 50-50 chance of spontaneously developing an AI when treated with handwavium; systems designed ''expressly'' to house an AI (including androids, gynoids and other robots) almost always generate one.
* [[Invisible Aliens]: Although impressive artifacts of alien civilizations have been found outside of the solar system, the civilizations themselves have yet to be encountered.
* [[Involuntary Shapeshifting]: The Catgirling Machine.
* [[Just Following Orders]: Many Boskone. A Triax Corporation executive in a forum short story.
* [[Mad Scientist]: The Professor. And many others, but mainly The Professor.
* [[The Madness Place]: Blue Hair Days.
* [[Magic From Technology]: The ultimate goal of both the [[Harry Potter|Wizard] and [[Babylon 5|Technomage] factions.
* [[Magical Girl]: One of the varieties of [[Action Girl] which inspired the Crystal Millenium, and ''the'' signature style of the faction; the Crystal Millennium's paramilitary forces draw their look-and-feel directly from ''[[Sailor Moon]'' in particular.
* [[Magitek]: One of the many explanations offered for Handwavium.
* [[Mega Crossover]: Invoked by the characters of the setting, who structure entire governments based on their respective fandoms.
* [[Master of Disguise|Mistress of Disguise]: A.C. Peters.
* [[The Mole]: Naoko Sato.
** In the Fenspace Alternates setting depicted in ''The South Is Rising (Someone Get A Hammer)'', Maico Tange and Mohammed Chang.
* [[Moral Event Horizon]: Catgirling a person, any form of forced biomodification. Any form of attack on a person's mind and self.
* [[Munchkin]: Common self-description for some characters.
* [[Noodle Incident]: The "unfortunate Tennis Ball Incident", mentioned only in the Fenspace Wiki [http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Glossary#T Glossary]. It apparently has something to do with the Warsies calling the ''Grover's Corners'' "The Death Star", but nothing more is known.
* [[No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup]: Basically, anything created with handwavium, by necessity.
* [[Russians With Rusting Rockets]: The origin of multiple different spacecraft. Including a Shuttle, an Ekranoplan, and a converted Typhoon Ballistic Missile Submarine.
* [[Ridiculously-Human Robots]: Any number of androids and gynoids. Some of the more advanced models are even capable of reproducing ''biologically''.
* [[Robot Girl]: Noah Scott's "assistants", and roughly 50% of all other AIs.
* [[Sapient Ship]: Any fencraft with an AI. Some individual Fen due to.... oops.
* [[Schizo-Tech]: Diesel-powered interplanetary ships built from a pre-wave light [[Cool Ship | naval patrol craft], alongside Zeppelins, an [[Cool Plane | SR-71], a [[That's No Moon | ¾-mile-wide worldship], Ancient Aliens, A Russian Space Shuttle, Jet Packs, [[Bubblegum Crisis | Hardsuits] Quantum AI and replicas of Apollo-era hardware.
* [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]: Enthusiastically averted by the collective, who are very aware of the vastness of space and relative smallness of the stuff in it.
* [[Science Cannot Comprehend Phlebotinum|Science Cannot Comprehend Handwavium]: While there has been occasional, limited success at reproducing handwaved devices using "hard" technology, the nature, origin and functioning of Handwavium has so far resisted all efforts at investigation and analysis.
** The one attempt at analyzing handwavium with [[Functional Magic|mage sight] was similarly inconclusiveBut had unexpected (and initially unnoticed) side effect of jumpstarting magic throughout the previously non-magical Solar System..
* [[Shell-Shocked Veteran]: Quite a few after the Boskone conflict.
* [[Shout-Out]: Imagine, if you will, an ''entire civilization'' built on shout-outs.
* [[Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility]: Fenspace is probably best described as X-II.
* [[The Spark of Genius]: Appears to be built into handwavium and anything it creates. Entire government agencies exist solely for the purpose of trying to figure out how handwavium-tech does what it does. (Subverting the trope, sometimes they ''succeed''.)
* [[Standard Sci-Fi Fleet]: If it's listed under this trope, Fenspace almost certainly has an example of it somewhere. About the only type they don't have is a [[Generation Ships|Generation Ship], as they're pretty much unneeded. (So far.)
** Fightercraft? Lots of'em, especially in the wake of Operation Great Justice.
** Battleships of all sorts? Same deal.
** Private yachts? Hell, there are a couple actual sailing ships out there.
** Worldships? Take a look at the ''Grover's Corners'', a ¾-mile-diameter chunk of West Virginia farmland under a silicon "diamondoid" dome.
* [[Starship Luxurious]: Deliberately invoked with some craft. Deliberately averted with others depending on function.
* [[Strawman Political]: Admittedly, some of the anti-Fen politicians and organizations verge onto this trope.
* [[Spaceship Girl]: A number of main characters began as this trope. Noteworthy is Mel, teenage metalhead avatar of OV-213.
* [[Superpower Lottery]: Biomodification.
* [[Tempting Fate]: Some fans revel in it. [[Eclipse Phase | Total Information Tactical Awareness Network] Integrated Command(T.I.T.A.N.I.C). A Griffon Sportscar. And in the Crossover ''A Candle in the Dark'', the Jumpship [[Event Horizon] is Fenspace first with an upgraded core.
* [[That's No Moon]: Entirely too many things in Fenspace.
** Deliberately inverted by a member of the Warsie (''[[Star Wars]'') faction, in regards to the ''Grover's Corners'':
{{Quote|"That's no space space station! That's a ''moon!''"}}
* [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]: The action was set in 2012 when the project began in 2006, and has generally stayed ahead of the calendar.
* [[Urban Legend]: Fenspace has already generated its own body of [http://fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Myths_of_Fenspace mythology], including [[Ghost Ship]s and [[Big Dumb Object]s.
* [[Used Future]: Well, when your first wave of settlers essentially got into space with whatever was handy, including the contents of junkyards...
* [[We Can Rebuild Him]: Emergency cyberisation -- for those for whom biomodification will not work.
* [[The Wiki Rule]: Well, the stories themselves are served on a wiki, but there's a lot of [[All There in the Manual|supplemental information] there too.
* [[A Wizard Did It]: Substitute "The Overfan" for "A Wizard", and you have one of the schools of thought behind the origin of Handwavium.
* [[Wizards from Outer Space]: The Potterites and the Technomages want to be this. The ''Whole Fenspace Catalog'' turns out to have an entire section on magic and the training of mages, making this potentially literal.
* [[What Have I Become?]: Either ironic or not, depending on the situation.
* [[The Xenophile]: Most fen seem to incorporate some degree of this in their personalities, simply by virtue of being Fen. Averted, ''hard'', by the [[Absolute Xenophobe|Quatermass Institute].
* [[Zeerust]: A deliberate aesthetic chosen by some factions.
* [[Zeppelins from Another World]: Sometimes a deliberate aesthetic choice, as per Zeerust, and sometimes a serendipitous result of basically building fen civilization out of whatever's handy.

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Fanfic]
[[Category:Mega Crossover]
[[Category:Mega Crossover/Fanfic Recs]
[[Category:Troper Works]
[[Category:Fenspace]

------------

Would it be worth porting this to that other Trope site?
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

http://www.theweek.co.uk/health-science ... w-research]Grandfather Paradox "banished".
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

(This is a somewhat more complete version of what I posted to IRC the other day. Suggestions for quirks and a name for the ship would be appreciated.)

    Evening. Yeah, I'm Tom Rutley, why d'you ask?
    
    Huh. You want to hear my story? Every Fen's got one, there's not much special about mine. I wasn't really happy on Earth for one reason or another, so I acquired a bit of handwavium, built a ship and left.
    
    Well, okay, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but...
    
    Oh. Oh.
    
    Now there's something special about that story, alright, and not in a good way. I don't really like telling it, and I dare say most Fen wouldn't like hearing it, if they knew enough to ask in the first place.
    
    Classified? Hah! Not hardly; the Convention doesn't have an official secrets act, and they couldn't enforce one if they did. It's more of an unspoken mutual consensus to pretend the whole ghastly fiasco never happened. I can't speak for the laws Earthside though, I'd make some discreet inquiries about that before publishing if I were you.
    
    I don't like the term "mundanes". Never did, even before... Well, we'll get to that.
    
    I guess I'd best start at the beginning. You might want to place your order before we start, this is going to take some time. Oh, thanks. I'll take a double Bruichladdich, no ice.
    
    So...
    
    
    I'm old for a first-generation Fen. Born 1970, fan of Doctor Who before John Barrowman got his Equity number, actually witnessed the first really serious Trekie/Warsie flamewar on Usenet. In 2007 I was gloomily contemplating the inexorable onset of forty with depressingly little to show for my time on Earth to date.
    I'd left the Royal Air Force in 2005 after a Taliban sniper took a sizeable chunk out of both my shin bone and my helicopter's no-claims bonus (I doubt that poor farmer ever got the rotor-blade out of his living room wall), returning home with a limp, a modest disability pension and no idea what to do next.
    Flying was out of the question indefinitely, possibly for good if my leg didn't heal well enough, and at the time I wasn't sure I even wanted to go back to it. I was tired of feeling rootless, of spending so much time abroad that I didn't really have a home to come back to but at the same time rarely getting to see anything of the world past the airfield perimeter fence.
    But on the other hand, it was pretty much all I knew how to do; certainly the only thing I had formal qualifications for, although I was a fair hand with computers and vaguely remembered most of what I learned from weekends and summer holidays helping Dad fix cars.

    Eventually I ended up splitting the difference. I got a six-month gig as a technical advisor for a small developer making third-party DLC -though the term hadn't been coined back then- for Microsoft Flight Simulator, put a card in a newsagent's window offering computer repairs and bought an ancient and non-running Vauxhall Senator on the cheap with the intention of putting it back in order. (It ended up being a bust, the chassis was too badly corroded to get it roadworthy again, but I sold off the still-useable bits on eBay and turned a small profit.) I made enough money to rent a dilapidated but characterful ground-floor flat in an old Victorian townhouse, and bought myself a decent computer for the first time in years. I became a regular at a nice local pub, found the time to go to a couple of conventions and generally made the most of having more leisure time than I'd had since I was a teenager.
    
    It didn't take long for boredom and restlessness to set in, but before they could become unmanageable, two things happened. The first was that my godfather died and left me a small cottage with two acres of land, a large collection of mechanical bits and pieces and a pretty considerable sum of money. The second was handwavium.
    
    I'd heard... Well, I can't go into detail because some of these people are still Earthside, but suffice it to say that scientists working for defence contractors tend to see an ex-serviceman wounded in the line of duty as trustworthy enough to bend the rules when it comes to classified information, especially when they've had a few beers. I'll tell you this much, though: I have it on good authority that the stuff existed in some form well before 2006. I expect we'll find out more some time in the next five years or so thanks to the thirty-year rule.
    
    Anyway, the wild stories had begun showing up on the message boards by then, and I knew enough to realise there was a grain of truth in them. Vague plans began to form in my mind.
    
    Now, you haven't asked about my faction yet. Personally, I think of myself as a generalist for the most part; I'm not picky when it comes to reading or viewing material, especially when I'm making a long cargo run. But my first real fandom... Well. Ever heard of a game called Elite? The original space trading sim, killer app for the BBC Micro...
    
    [sigh] You really are young, aren't you? Okay, bit of background.
    
    In the early Eighties, the educational programming wing of the BBC started getting interested in computer science. There'd been some piecemeal efforts before, usually an offshoot of the maths or science department, but now that home computing was becoming a thing they wanted to offer something hands-on.
     Now in those days, there was no common standards for much of anything: Many manufacturers had their own fork of BASIC, and even on those that didn't you couldn't be sure your homebrew program would work on a competitor's machine. In order to have something that they knew would work with all their software and coding exercises, the Beeb put out an invitation to tender for a custom-designed computer for the home and classroom market. The winning bidder was a company called Acorn Computers and their design was christened the BBC Microcomputer, or BBC Micro for short.
    They were expensive bits of kit, but pretty powerful for their day; they were some of the first desktop computers aimed at the home-user market with LAN capability and the ability to add an auxillary processor, for one. It also had the ability to download code from a TV signal, but it only worked properly if you had absolutely perfect TV reception and was generally more trouble than it was worth. They were a huge success in Britain and a more modest one in continental Europe, but they never took off in the US because the display hardware didn't adapt well to NTSC displays.
    
    But anyway, Elite was the game that drove most of its non-educational sales. You know the basic formula: You start out in a very basic spaceship with a bit of cash and a huge open gameworld to explore. There are several ways of making money both legal and otherwise, occasional pirates, police who'll come down on you for anything illegal... It was the original sandbox game. And, like a lot of my generation, I was absolutely hooked on it for most of my teens.
    
    We never became an established faction for a number of reasons. The game didn't have much of a plot, so there was no convenient polity to name ourselves after, and the nature of the game is such that the faction tends to appeal to loners and individualists. It's also partly because British Fen tend not to be in a position to home-build; we're one of the easier European countries in which to acquire a handwavium license, but with our airspace being rather crowded the authorities tend to get a bit tetchy about amateur space programs. Either way, I'm the only bloke I know who's managed to build himself a ship directly based on that 'verse.
    
    And that's where my godfather's barn full of junk comes in.
    
    His name was Greg Sanderson, and he was an old friend of my dad's and a lifelong bachelor who didn't get out and about much. Bit set in his ways, you know? He was a great fan of science fiction and something of a radical in his politics, and I'm pretty sure he was hoping to make it to Fenspace himself.
    
    Anyway, the house was up in the Scottish Borders, a tumbledown little two-up-two-down affair with a bathroom added on some time in the 50s. It was permanently cold and damp, the wiring was such a haphazard mess that I had to pay an electrician twice his usual rate to set it to rights, the boiler was older than I was and hadn't been serviced since before I learned how to masturbate... The list went on. I spent just enough money to keep the place from being actively hazardous for human occupancy and decided to sell up as soon as I'd inventoried the barn.
    
    Well, that was a revelation alright. I knew about the old Beech King Air fuselage and the jet engines, but I wasn't expecting... Well, I've still got the list on my palmtop somewhere...
    
    * 200 square metres of sheet steel
    * Four hundred gallons of aviation fuel in a galvanised tank
    * Eight hundred metres of copper wire
    * One air compressor, broken
    * Four expensive electronic paintball guns
    * Five thousand 17mm ball bearings (exactly the right size to be fired through said paintball guns)
    * One 4.5-inch gun barrel, ex-Royal Navy
    * One fully functional septic tank system, apparently designed for a seagoing yacht, new and in boxes
    * One 200-litre water tank, also intended for a seagoing yacht
    * One Ferranti Blue Fox aircraft radar set, broken
    * One Webley revolver, .38 S&W (which was only marginally legal in the UK at the time, being a 'trophy of war')
    * One hundred and fifty .38/200 revolver cartridges (which most definitely wasn't legal!)
    * Five tonnes (approx.) of miscellaneous scrap metal.
    * Twelve litres (approx.) of handwavium, base strain, in an old oil drum at the back of the barn
    
    As you might imagine, the handwavium was one of the less surprising items in there, although I couldn't begin to imagine where Greg got it or how he even heard of it in the first place. Perhaps he didn't put it there at all; some people do claim it just turned up in the workshop one day and they only found out what it did by accident. At any rate, if he got any 'wavetech operational before he died then I never found it.
    
    Well, I suppose that made the choice for me, didn't it? There was nothing much tying me to England; my parents had emigrated to Spain some years ago, my brother David was currently somewhere in the Yukon finding copper ore for one of the multi-nationals, and I'd written the very idea of marriage off as more trouble than it was worth a long time ago.
    And I'd always wanted to travel, hadn't I?
    
    The first thing I did was buy a secondhand laptop and a pre-paid mobile phone that could be tethered, both for cash. This was before the Snowden Documents hit the public domain of course, but you soon got a good picture of what the SIGINT people were capable of just from being part of operations that acted on the information they acquired, and it wasn't a great leap of reasoning to imagine they'd be on the lookout for anything connected to handwavium as well as terrorism.
    
    (I had Snowden as a passenger once, you know; I was on a regular run to Ganymede at the time, and he'd just bought a house in Serenity Valley. Nice chap actually, even if he enjoys his status as a hero among Fen a bit too much for my liking. But anyway.)
    
    Once I'd got some nicely untraceable hardware, reinforced by a few software tricks upon which I shall enlarge here, I started reading every Beginner's Guide to Handwavium I could lay hold of and hanging out on the forums picking up tips from those who'd gone before me. After reading some of the safety warnings, I made some discreet inquiries with a relative in the construction industry about where to obtain some protective clothing rated for dealing with asbestos contamination. The supplier he found me only did bulk orders, but I figured they'd be worth a fair bit to other Fen and bought a batch of a hundred.
    
    My first 'wavetech project was small and simple, a used 486 ThinkPad I bought off eBay for about twenty quid. I soaked it in a small amount of the base strain overnight, and the results were encouraging. It turned glossy metallic green and shrank to the size of a netbook, but when I tried various CPU benchmarking tools the ones that didn't glitch out completely came back with estimates of 4GHz. It also sprouted some USB ports and a DVI cable plug.
    
    I put the used handwavium in a separate container and fed it a load of the scrap metal, along with a complete set of Traveller sourcebooks and a thumb drive containing copies of everything even vaguely Elite-related I could lay hold of: Copies of the first two games and the open-source remake, along with their manuals, and a load of fanfiction and the tie-in novella that came boxed with the original game. For a bit of extra flavour I threw in a couple of Arthur C. Clarke paperbacks and a pirated copy of Star Cops. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony, but it's not out on DVD.) This version would be used for the engines and flight control systems, and I'd stick to the base strain for the hull and life support.
    
    Of course, before I got to that point I had to design the ship... Although I already had something in mind.
    
    In the original Elite, it's known as a Cobra Mk3, and it's the ship you start off with in a new game. It's sort of low slung and wedge-shaped, not much aerodynamic lift but even less drag. I figured I'd have to modify it considerably but it seemed as good a starting point as any, if only because it was a simple enough shape to weld together. So I bought myself a copy of X-Plane, imported the model of the Mk3 from Oolite into the "PlaneMaker" utility and began the long and tedious process of hammering it into a workable aircraft design.
    
    You might well argue that this wasn't really necessary, but like all good career aviators I'm naturally inclined to err on the side of caution. I didn't trust... Well, no that's probably the wrong word. I didn't want to rely on handwavium completely. One of the early pioneers I spoke to on the old Starbase 1 forums told me that he reckoned the stuff can't actually break any physical laws, it just knows all the loopholes, including -especially- the ones we haven't found yet. How true that is I have no idea, but it is well-established that aero- and hydrodynamics are one area where handwavium has almost no effect. (I'm told that a reader poll by the Annals of Improbable Research ranked the process of finding this out "The 4th Strangest Thing Ever Done With A Wind Tunnel In The Name Of Proper Science". I have no idea what the top three were and I don't especially want to.)
    
    The end result of several weeks of fine-tuning was a sort of flying-wing design with a small vertical fin, still fairly blocky and angular but now capable of gliding a few miles if something went wrong while hopefully being within my capabilities to weld together. I invested in a copy of AutoCAD, a correspondence course in how to use it and set to the project with a will.
    
    As far as I know, my ship was the first 100% scratchbuilt Fen craft to be laid down, even though the Epsilon Blade and the Toy Box were in service well beforehand. Construction took me most of a year, the first quarter of which was spent refreshing my knowledge of welding at evening classes.
    The hull structure is fully monocoque, made of two layers of 1.5cm steel plate with self-sealing foam in between. (One part base-strain handwavium, one part my homebrew strain, eight parts cavity wall insulation material. Worked better than I dared hope.) I'm fairly sure I could have left it un-'waved and still made orbit if I'd been able to find a windscreen tough enough for the job, but ordinary plate-glass had to suffice in the interim.
    Internally, the ship was fairly spartan. I'd crammed a bunk and a desk in around the cockpit with a tiny head and galley immediately behind it, and squeezed two tiny passenger cabins into the awkward corners between the engine nacelles, the cockpit and the cargo bay; I didn't plan on taking passengers often, but there wasn't much else useful I could do with the space and I figured it couldn't hurt to have the option.
    The cargo bay itself was about twelve metres long by four wide by three high, not huge but enough to get a worthwhile amount of stores aboard. I toyed with but ultimately abandoned the idea of shaping it to accommodate an ISO-standard shipping container; the aerodynamics went wonky when I tested it in X-Plane and in any case it would have been awkward as all hell to load and unload. Still, I could get standard-sized pallets in there, and the hydraulic loading ramp I acquired from a scrapyard would do the rest.
    
    I left the 'wavium application until last. The two old jet engines, the instrument panel from the King Air and the radar set were immersed in the special blend I'd made, and as an afterthought I tossed a spare unit insignia for my old squadron in to add the final touch. I mixed the same stuff half-and-half with the base strain for the broken compressor, an air-conditioning unit and a couple of old radiators, and used pure base-strain and a quite ordinary household paint roller for the outer hull. I left it overnight to cure, and went inside just in time to hear about the Guacoamole Incident.
    
    Ugh... I swear to all that's holy and many things that aren't, if I ever lay hands on the reckless bloody fool who cooked up that little stunt I'll administer at least five pints of their own concoction in enema form, gift-wrap whatever they turn into and dump their sorry arse outside the Hoover Building. Not only was it a gross violation of other people's bodily integrity of a severity easily comparable to rape, it sent the United States into its stupidest and most counterproductive moral panic since Joe McCarthy's day. Damn good argument for a handwavium license if you ask me, at least if there was a snowball's chance in hell of enforcing one.
    
    But anyway, we were a little bit saner about it in Britain, at least to the point where I was able to call in a favour from a man I'd served under in Iraq who was now rather senior in the Ministry of Defence. In return for turning over my handwavium stockpile -less a few hundred millilitres as seed stock- and giving the backroom boys from QuinetiQ (don't ask) a detailed briefing on what I accomplished with it, he furnished me with an IFF code and some other registration paperwork to make my use of UK airspace at least marginally legal so long as I promised to be extremely circumspect... and give him a lift Fenside once he collected his pension and his gold watch in a year or so. (He worked for Reaction Engines until he got fed up with Spacefleet and their "damned ridiculous Renaissance Festival take on the Fifties", as he put it to me, and I think he's somewhere in the Belt now. I'll email him your details if you like, I dare say he's got some good stories about the Experimental Handwavium Station.)
    
    That... didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped, at least partly thanks to a major lapse in my usually fairly good judgement of character. But the full scale of that lapse didn't become obvious until some while later...
    
    But we'll want another drink for that. My shout this time?

Do we want to include Lightbolt and Librum from GURPS Robin Hood? Or would having to assign Edwin an official home city be a deal-breaker?

Greetings and Salivations, my fellow forum-denizens! Lend me your ears (and a little something besides) for a sec.... I beg Bob's forbearance for a bit while I beg for a few bucks from the rest of you...

This weekend (June 28/29) I'm going to be riding my ass off (hopefully not literally) in the National MS Society's annual MS150... That's 150 miles on a bike over 2 days... why, you may ask, would I do something so crazy? Well, I might answer, it's to raise money for the National MS Society which sponsors research for treatments and (hopefully) a cure for Multiple Sclerosis. They also provide resources and support for people living with MS (you can read their whole spiel http://www.nationalmssociety.org/Chapters/MAM]here).

While I've raised enough to participate, I'm still quite a bit short of my goal, so I'm asking y'all, hat in hand, to go to %[link=http://chaingang.zikzak.us]http://chaingang.zikzak.us] and throw in a few (US tax-deductible) bucks. If people show an interest, I'll post some pics along the way of the scenic Massachusetts coast (signal permitting).

That's my spiel. Thanks for your time. Try the veal. Don't forget to tip your waiter.

-Z
-Z, Post-reader at Medium
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If architects built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.