You guys remember the toy rockets that you would fill with tap water and them pressurize, so that they would launch into the air?
Japan has a toy RPG like that.
I want one of these SO BADLY.
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com

"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."

Innovative Fenspace Industries (IFI) was an Australian construction company set up, early 2008, to exploit the possibilities of near-Earth construction in space, using handwavium-based tools and industry.  Their first big project was intended to be a luxury hotel, with the core built on Earth, launched to L5, then construction completed there.
Unfortunately, while they had excellent engineering skills, they lacked on the business and financial side, and by mid 2008 they were forced to sell the project and the part-completed hotel core to an O'Niell organisation, to become an L5 private home, O'Neill Station.  The core was launched 9th November 2008, and successfully placed at L5.  They spent two months, working through Christmas and the New Year at triple-time rate, so by early January 2009 they could give a rough station completion of end of March 2009.  The station officially opened 8th April 2009.
Unfortunately, back on Earth, things hadn't gone smoothly.  IFI collapsed with allegations of mixing drugs, catgirls and Warhammer 40k, 2nd of January 2009.  Existing projects (including O'Neill Station) were pretty smoothly taken over by CHOAM.  The management had seen the writing on the wall, and they were already in serious negotiations.
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind

Hey guys. I think some of you are readers/fans of the EPU material and Ben "Gryphon" Hutchins. 
Maybe you should know that he's had some serious medical issues. I won't detail the whole thing here because Gryph did himself here, and here. I had NO idea of this stuff until just a few days ago myself, as I hadn't been over to the EPU forums in a couple of months. But kind of a shock to hear about. 
Well he had his surgery yesterday, and it was dicey. VERY dicey.  Gryphon is out of surgery but he's in a medically induced coma. There were.... complications. 
Megazone posted on his FB page here about it. 
In part, MZ says:  

Quote:All I have are the details his clearly shaken mother relayed to me by phone, but apparently his renal vein tore during the surgery and he had a massive bleed which they had trouble staunching. They had to transfuse a lot of blood and she said he coded and had to be resuscitated twice on the table. They did decide to proceed with the primary objective and removed the kidney, and apparently that went well and they believe they got the entire mass and it doesn't look like the cancer had spread. So at least that is good news.
...
...
I'll pass on further news as I get it. Right now just think positive thoughts. He's not out of the woods yet, but they're going to be keeping a close eye on him in the ICU. Since they stopped the bleed, removed the kidney, and managed to resuscitate him, hopefully he's past the worst of it.

blackaeronaut Wrote:Sorry guys.  Things have been kinda hairy on my end.  :p
The
primary finish of most Roughrider ships (with the notable exception of
Blackbirds) is mirror-finish chrome in honor of the Apollo Astronauts,
whose capsules were finished in a similar manner.  On the Peacemaker,
it'll still have the blacked-out area over the nose simply to keep any
glare from the Sun out of the command crew's collective faces.  Of
course, this is gonna be one of those matte black finishes.
The Air Force roundels should be replaced with Republic of Texas flags
and the SAC shield with the Gonzalez Banner.
Every Peacemaker is a flagship, so it would only be appropriate that the
Unit Patch would be proudly displayed as tail art.
And, of course, replace USAF and US AIR FORCE with RR and ROUGH RIDERS.
(EDIT:
Oh yeah, and nix the checker marks on the landing gear doors, tail-fin
tips, and the yellow on the propeller hubs and engine intakes.  I don't
think I've ever seen a picture of a B-36 like that before and it looks
ghastly to my eyes.)
F-EZigs are carried on pylons under the
wings, between each engine (with the last ones outboard of the fusion
torch engines).  Properly fitted, a Peacemaker can touch down and take
off at a 'Dane-side airfield with its F-EZig accompaniment docked.
By
all means, Star, hack away.    And I don't lay sole claim to the
F-EZigs.  If I like what I see, I'll just say, "Yeah, Roughriders got
those, too." 
One final thing... Ben wouldn't be so evil as to
make that many people operate on a forward-deployed basis like that...
He'd give them several small facilities, hidden in the Belt on which
they can rest, recuperate... and, when needed, scramble and come flying
like bats outta hell.  It wouldn't even have to be an asteroid.  It
could be a small space station.  Nothing huge, probably on the same
scale as the ISS because it would have food, living quarters, plus parts
and munitions for the entire squadron.  (At this point, I'm gonna say
that a typical Roughrider Squadron is two Blackbirds, twelve F-EZigs,
and a Peacemaker.  Peacemaker carries eight F-EZigs each and each BB
piggybacks two more - their hulls are so short, after all.)
Long
duration configuration on a Peacemaker would probably be three-of-four
modular bays fitted with a living unit (racks for the entire crew plus
eight fighter pilots, plus galley and hygiene) and one heavy missile
unit (incase they run across something really tough).
For
more flavor, Peacemakers, despite being well built machines, are quirked
to break down in some bizarre way.  However, during the design phase
Ben did foresee a need for them to be easy to work on. 
Therefore, most breakdowns can be repaired in-flight by the flight
engineer.  Therefore, you can have the engineer grumbling about some
repair he/she just finished up (easy to work on, yes - convenient, no).
For
the flight engineer... you could use that character I thought up that
riffed off of All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku... she was the one
that started out as a farm girl who just wanted to help her dad out by
making sure the tractor never broke down again... and got herself a very
unique kind of catgirl biomod.  (The 'bio' part of that is debatable as
she is roughly 20% cybernetic now.)  Ah, yes!  Here she is: http://drunkardswalkforums.yuku.com/topic/5426
Someday I am really gonna have to do a better job getting some of this stuff wikified so it's not a big question mark.  :p
EDIT2:
Just for scale, Star.  Nothing really brings home the sense of scale on this thing like this picture.  Yes, those are chairs they're sitting in.

Consolidated Failure - 26/Jul/2012
December 2011, Asteroid Belt.
All alone in the dark.  Arthur waited.  The faint hiss of the air system.  The smell of summer days, that the bus always had.  And, the acrid smell of burnt-out electronics.
They'd used some sort of EMP weapon.  Easy enough if you had access to enough power.  Short-range though, and there'd been nothing on the radar.  A disguised space rock?  The bus depended on a lot of hard tech, and that had fried.  They'd even killed the co-pilot, the Alice Phone - didn't look as though that was as hardened as they hoped.
*Knock* *Knock* *Knock*  Better go and let them in.  They'd just do more damage, otherwise.
---

The leader was a woman, done up in a mixture of pirate and high tech.  The three followers were more mixed, but, thought Arthur, shouldn't be underestimated.  The leader's eye-patch was probably authentic, given the nasty scaring around it.  No!  It wasn't an eye patch, it was an 'eye drive'.
"I am the Dread Pirate Roberta!"  Seemed a bit over-done, thought Arthur.  "So, you are going to kill me?"  "Tell me why I should make an exception!"
"I'm an industrialist by the name of 'Arthur'.  If you're smart you can get a good ransom for me.  Dead, I'm not worth anything like as much."
She grinned.  Arthur noted that she'd carefully blacked-out some of her teeth. Obviously a cos-player.  The thugs were standing around, still fully-suited up, likely ready for nasty surprises.  There was a faint glimmer about one of them, that Arthur guessed as a force field.  Looking again at the woman, she was wearing a 'Wright Suit' - 'Interesting', thought Arthur, 'Rich pirate'.
"Take off that suit.  I know it's a spacesuit in disguise."  Remarkably well-informed pirates, thought Arthur, as he undressed.  The woman watching with interest, as you might watch a performing animal.  Then smiled again, as Arthur stool there in vest and underpants.
"Nice."  And she gestured.  The man with the glow did something to an armlet, and energy fizzed and crackled around Arthur.
"Much better", said the woman, looking at Janet in her underclothes, with a broken, smoking, belt, falling to the deck.  "You made two mistakes.  One, I know what to look for to spot a holo disguise.  Two, we've already got an 'Arthur'."  'Bingo!', thought Janet.
"You can take your helmets off, now, boys."  The woman gestured widely.  "Take a look around, and see how big a fish we've caught."  Janet counted, as they obeyed, and one man kept watching her, with more than casual interest.  The man with the glow had dead eyes, but while he looked at infinity, he seemed to move around OK, and the third went up the stairs to the upper deck.
"Becca?", called the one from above, "I think you need to come look at this." "It's 'Roberta'!  How many times do I have to tell you!"  And, finally, none of them was looking directly at Janet.
Leaping to one side Janet slammed down a hidden switch.  The gravity shut-down, and all the air rushed out of the lower deck of the bus, through the suddenly open emergency door.  'Now they're fighting against the environment, not just me', she thought.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man who'd been watching her fumble his helmet, then start to panic.  'One down.'  Everything was in slow motion, as she reached out, knocked the top off a container, and let vacuum spray the contents all over the leader's helmet.  Which went opaque.  The emergency force-field should keep the air on the upper deck, and the man who went up there.
The way the man with opaque eyes was moving implied he was thinking as fast as her.  Yes, he was surprised, but he'd almost instantly recovered.  However, he was obviously used to moving around in gravity.  And, Janet had trained for this.
'Gravity Punch!', though she'd thought it, rather than shouting it, and, anyway, vacuum.  Bouncing twice she plowed into the man, backed by all the power of her speed drive.  Used like this it would burn-out in minutes.  He slammed backwards into the stairway, which he'd stepped towards, then she kicked him in the neck, where his re-donned helmet joined the suit.
As she kicked she felt a tingle, and that foot went numb.  EMP?  She'd check later.  Another flip and she was stripping weapons and tools off the leader, who at least seemed to have some idea about moving in zero G.  One of her tasers in the right spot in the 'Wright Suit' fixed her.
The third thug had stood at the bottom of the stairway, watching the action. He'd been smart enough to put his helmet back on, even though he was in atmosphere.  His head moved, obviously assessing the situation, as she flew slowly towards him, dressed only in her underwear, one fist raised, and glowing.  Carefully he unlatched his helmet, and put his hands in the air.
After two minutes of vacuum Janet re-pressurised, to a fifth-atmosphere with enough oxygen to keep them alive.  She'd let the man on the stairway inject himself, after reading the instructions he was a lot happier, and now he was 'on ice'.  The voyeur, she thought he'd be OK, also 'on ice'.  Their leader, her taser had done something nasty to her cybernetics, and she hadn't regained consciousness, so Janet had to inject her.
As for Mr Dead Eyes, he seemed to have a broken neck.  Janet injected him with a metabolic slow-down drug rather than the full suspended animation dose the others got, but he got the full waved duck-tape coat, only leaving his face exposed.  EVA, wearing her Wright Suit as well - her 'Arthur' holo cloak was toast - led her to a van-sized space rock, which turned out to be camouflage.
Inside was a micro-base, run by an AI that claimed to have a bomb strapped to its brain.  It said it hadn't reported what happened, and had caught the full transmission from the eye drive; if she removed the bomb it'd be eternally grateful.  Janet had learned a lot about self-destruct mechanisms, so rolled mental dice, and gave it a go (Arthur would have done).  She'd rigged a powerful wide-band transmitter to scream her location if she didn't return to the bus and re-set it, so if the AI was working on a mutual-destruction ploy that'd be bad but not totally fatal.
Someone had rigged a thermite bomb to the AI, and a clever one at that.  Janet sweated, but spotted the secondary trap at the last moment.  The AI then admitted it'd been 'driving' Mr Dead Eyes, but it hadn't got any choice - the leader always carried a dead-mans switch.  And, seeing as the bomb hadn't gone off it presumed she was still alive.  Which is why it trusted Janet.  Janet doubted the logic, but wasn't going to argue.
---

That gave her a total of twenty pirates.  All but one on ice.  And, this last crew had done major but repairable damage (those FTL communicators were just too fragile) to the bus.  Or, 'Q ship' she guessed she should call it.  Finally she'd gotten some pirates she was pretty sure knew about Arthur.  And, it'd be best to get Mr Dead Eyes, and the AI she'd unplugged, to some competent medical attention.
Time to head home.
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind

The Vault
This appears on the surface to be quite a conventional prison, run on quite enlightened grounds.  Prisoners are expected to find good use for their time, in exercise, work or study; suitably qualified inmates can also teach.  There is ubiquitous surveillance, but that isn't too surprising in a prison.  The Vault is made up of a number of Annexes, distributed around in geographically separate locations, which are all tied together so with a bit of admin work prisoners can interact.
If fact, this is all a virtual environment, running at just about real world quality.  The bodies of the inmates are in a protective and regenerative suspended animation state, and their minds are stimulated to a conscious state, though running a bit slower than real time.  The staff are AIs, running multiple instances, each with individual characters.  Except the Warden, who runs the place.  The underlying system is based on the "Metaverse" virtual world.
Non-AIs can be hooked-up to the system, to visit or interact with the inmates; teaching might be done this way.  Some inmates may work in gardens, or on (simulated) external projects.  If needed, inmates may be released, though all undergo a "medical examination" on leaving, where they are awoken back to real life.  The process on entering The Vault isn't dissimilar.  The various parts of The Vault, the Annexes, are tied together by a net of FTL communicators (the 'very difficult to find the end-points' variety).
Quite major efforts are made to ensure that inmates benefit from their confinement.  The aim is that they leave at least as healthy as they arrived. And, no longer criminals.  While physical activity may not give full benefit, research shows rehearsal of activities does improve them.  Mental activity will have much clearer long-term effects.
The Vault was first built in Kandor City, after it became clear that the first design for a Supers prison, the 'Phantom Zone Projector' project, just wasn't acceptable.  The Annexes are multiple underground structures, each of which consists of 'perpetual' power supplies, a redundant array of waved server farms, which runs at least one AI and the simulation, and the actual inmate confinement area (ICA).  The ICA has its own triplet of 'perpetual' power supplies and primary and backup suspension units, with dedicated medical support units.
Few annexes have more than a couple of dozen prisoners, though they are all rated for fifty.  The annexes are heavily shielded, and are rated Moon-quake proof; on Earth they'd be considered pretty good nuclear shelters.
Access to the annexes is via KAR (Kandor Automatic Railway), and every so often, 'for administrative reasons' (also personal interaction problems), prisoners are moved between annexes (in their sleep).  Inter-annex communication is pretty good (holo conferencing might be allowed), so this shouldn't cause too many social problems.  The recycling is pretty good, but if needed KAR also delivers all needed supplies.  Prisoner release is done via KAR to one of several Kandor City official buildings, after a 'medical examination'.
Prisoners are placed in an annex via KAR.  A number of carefully annonymised transports, five to eight in number, are sent out in quick succession, and only one contains the prisoner.  All the transports will be automatically cleaned before further use.
Note that The Vault also holds criminal AIs, and it is made quite clear to these they will be operating in a highly constrained environment, and regular backups will be taken of them.  Their privacy will not be intruded on, but if things go wrong they may find themselves 'running' a previous version of themselves.
A variety of drones are provided for AIs to interact with other prisoners, and if they are resident in a fixed body, that's what they'll believe themselves to be using (maybe with some hard-wired constraints to prevent escape).  If they didn't sleep before, they'll find they've acquired that ability, and need.
Prisoners with really unconventional metabolisms, say due to a biomod, will end up in one or more specialised annexes that have customised facilities.  They may be suspicious that they acquire the ability and need for regular sleep while they're in The Vault – but this may be good for their long-term mental health.
The Simulation
The Vault looks like a holo-enhanced immense underground cavern, with an artificial day and night cycle, to the prisoners.  There are a number of other structures visible some ways off, but it isn't clear if these are real or fake, due to the 'holo haze'.  Over time, it will become clear some of these are other Annexes.  Presumably some are guard buildings.
Hazy figures and non-human shapes can been seen moving between the structures when the light is right – these can be assumed to be concealed guards and guard-bots.  People sometimes come and go via light electric buggies.  When people move between Annexes, or enter and leave The Vault, they drive for a while through a holo fog, taking a number of turns, at forks and cross-roads on their path.  Prisoners are moved between Annexes while asleep, and other prisoners don't get to see them come or go.
There are about fifty people, AI and not, who know this is a simulation.  Some were on the design team, that was given the 'underground cavern' specification and told to make it secure, some on the (anonymous) ethics over-watch group, some on the actual running staff.  Yes, they know that sooner or later the secret will get out – some are amazed it's lasted this long.
Dr. Asmodeus Grey was on the design team.  But, he hasn't told anyone else.  He considers it amusing, and is keeping the knowledge as a 'card', in case he needs it. (He's worked-out how to become a prisoner, and leave when he wants to, for example.)  In fact, he killed a number of criminals who found out, and he didn't think would be closed-mouthed enough about it.
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind

KAR, the 'Kandor Automatic Railroad', was a critical part of the rapid construction of The Watchtower, Old Town, and later the greater Kandor area; Kandor City in general.  KAR took and takes material from the surface and sub-surface mines, to the buried autofabs, processed material to the build yards, and where needed also moves personnel and medium-sized machinery around.  Over time machinery has been deliberately redesigned so it will split into modules convenient for KAR transport.
Early attempts to control the rapidly expanding network were mixed.  The initial monolithic system was quickly replaced by a distributed net of controllers, but none of the classic programming methods made these operate well.  Eventually a system based on a genetically programmed logistic net, which continually simulated future load, and evolved routing schemes, proved to work quite well.
Unfortunately, various contractors learned to 'play the system'.  They tweaked orders and routing priorities so their competitors just couldn't keep up with them.  When this was unravelled the system was re-designed, after the style of the 'Tor Project', so cargo was moved and routed anonymously; all 'routing frauds' promptly collapsed.  Theft of material in transit nearly completely stopped, as well.
There were complaints that you didn't know exactly when your goods were going to arrive.  That KAR was deliberately blocking people's attempts to track their goods in transit (a number of the control systems seem to take a malicious pleasure in this).  But, everything seems to have worked pretty well for quite a few years now.
The 'Ghost of the Lost Commuter' is an urban legend, and a desperate face, looking out from a personal transit car, waving for help, or banging on a window to be released, is believed to be a practical joke a few people find amusing.  A news crew spent weeks trying to track one down, and eventually found a number of cars with disposable holo projectors, configured to show a 'ghost'.  Kandor City Tourist Department declined to comment.
The personal transit cars have proved a popular, though a little slow, way of moving around the rim of Kandor City, to a network of places under the nearby Lunar terrain, and most recently to areas within the crater.  Their free use for light goods has helped a lot of local business.  Transit charges are only made for moving heavy, commercial, goods, and to those who have maliciously abused the system.
When needed cars are automatically routed-off for cleaning and repair.  Short-term logs, thoroughly erased, are kept of those entering and leaving cars. Carefully separated statistics are kept about the need for cleaning and repair after transit.  No logs are kept of who has travelled where.  AIs with designed to be erasable short-term memories watch the stations for security and safety reasons.
Commuters are sent a warning if they start causing statistically significant extra work.  They have to start paying for travel and are eventually charged with malicious abuse if these warnings are ignored.  This system was all carefully secured and anonymised after a transit official was blackmailing businesses with threats they'd find themselves paying for travel.
In more recent years the Heavy Cargo Transport system on the crater rim has become more lightly used, as if possible goods are split into medium-loads to go on KAR.  If you want to move around quickly, then you'll use the Kandor City Maglev trains, as they run on the surface, whereas most of KAR is underground - tourists typically prefer that as well.  KAR is one of the things which has contributed to Kandor City staying green.
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind

 So due to a large fire in our building me and roommate are kinda out of a place to live for a few days until the authorities can assess the damage and will let us back in. Given the location of our unit reletive to the fire we should hopefuly only have to deal with water damages, given there was a partial collapse just above our unit we may be kinda outta luck for more than the stated minimum of 24 hours heh. I just hope my computer is alright @_@
 So yeah no Terr for a couple days.

This is mainly a distraction, it does allow Doug to 'sneak' a motorcycle into hard to fit places.

While this does not raise any zombies, any corpse within AOE will at least try to sit up.