Or giving them something to do.

It's a rough thought. And because for every one of the big mass producers of hardware, there're the smaller people


While there are several groups capable of mass production of self-designed hardware, the prior investment required is beyond many of the garagiste Gearheads. After the success of the licensing agreement covering the OV-200 project and the Gagarin class, WireGeek realised that these Garagistes were a large potential market, which could fill up some of Hepheastus' unused capability, while opening a new revenue stream.

The Hepheastus Affiliate Program allows the smaller gearheads to sell equipment to the mass market, with Hepheastus taking a ten-percent cut of the profit once the cost of manufacture is covered. HAP products are sold and promoted by the original designer, with Hepheastus themselves handling the construction and ultimate delivery of the product.

Affiliates are naturally required to share full technical details of their designs with Hepheastus, though such information is treated as highly confidential. Some of the garagistes however, still prefer to go it alone however, especially if they feel they have the Next Big Thing, or feel they may make more money selling their trade secrets directly to one of the larger concerns

In the 2020's, 77 Frigga sell Havocs, Hokum and JF-21 series through the Hepheastus Affiliate Program and are typical of the smaller groups catering to smaller markets, or the more individualistic Fen. They may sell in a year what the larger groups sell in a month, but it's still some money that's useful for other things.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

I really hate posting anything here in the politics forums these days. But I consider this to be too important not to. This story is not being told by the "mainstream media". In fact it is being actively ignored. But you truly need to hear about this  -   here’s Erick Erickson of Red State.org on Friday:

Quote:Ever hear of swatting? It’s a tactic used by left-wing activists and others these days to spoof phone calls in order to get SWAT Teams to show up at houses. It has happened to several conservative activists.
Consider this your must read of the day. It is LA County Prosecutor John Patrick Frey, who blogs as Patterico, describing just what harassment he and his family were subjected to by the online left.
The mainstream media, which has greater sympathies with the left than
the right, would prefer not to cover stories like this. But it is
getting to the point where they ignore the ongoing, sustained harassment
of conservatives because they are conservatives.

Quote:Sunday night as my family and sister’s family were around
the dinner table and playing outside, sheriff’s deputies pulled into my
driveway responding to an accidental shooting at my home.

One deputy was in the driveway. Another blocked the end of the
driveway with his car. A neighbor tells me another was up the hill from
the house.

There was no shooting at my home. Someone called 911, claimed to be at my home, and claimed to witness a shooting at my home.

As the one deputy and I spoke, the other deputy walked up the
driveway, positioned himself behind the car in the driveway, and kept
his eyes on me and his hand on his gun. My three year old ran between us
all thinking it was so cool to have a police car in the driveway with
its blue lights flashing.

Luckily, after I had starting writing about Kimberlin, I advised the Sheriff’s Department to be aware this could happen.

It was a prank, but not just any prank. This is a prank left-wing
activists are increasingly deploying against those who dissent from
their political views. When Barack Obama told his supporters in 2008 to
bring guns to knife fights, some of his supporters took him more
literally than I assume he intended.

The stories of what is happening are not getting much traction
outside of right-of-center blogs and the occasional opinion column at
the Wall Street Journal, D.C. Examiner, and Washington Times.

Quote:At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front
door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and
come out with my hands up.

When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to
put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately,
they did not mistake it for a gun.

They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They
handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE
HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE?

I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive.

Deputies led me down the street to a patrol car parked about 2-3
houses away. At least one neighbor was watching out of her window as I
was placed, handcuffed, in the back of the patrol car. I saw numerous
patrol cars on my quiet street. There was a police helicopter flying
overhead, shining a spotlight down on us as I walked towards the patrol
car. Several neighbors later told us the helicopter woke them up. I saw a
fire engine and an ambulance. A neighbor later told me they had a
HazMat vehicle out on the street as well.

Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her
downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the
children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with
her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to
make sure they were alive.

The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had
pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife.
The sheriff’s deputies who arrived at my front door believed they were
about to confront an armed man who had just shot his wife. I don’t blame
the police for any of their actions. But I blame the person who made
the call.

Because I could have been killed.

The weirdest part of the whole thing was that I halfway expected this
might happen. Because I was not the first one it had happened to.

Quote:Although I am an L.A. County Deputy D.A., it is certain that I was
“swatted” because of my blog and not because of my job. As Andrew
Breitbart noted, this happened to two people within the course of a
single week: a man in New Jersey and myself. Both of us had had contact
with Andrew Breitbart. Both of us were writing about the same story. And
both of us received email threats days before we were swatted. The
threat to me said, in part: “Please think about your family. This story is not worth it. I can assure you that.”

Simply put, in the final episode of Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the villain created a giant portal that, if unchecked, would fuse every universe into one giant conglomeration. Buffy stops it by killing herself before it can do so, but before she does, a dragon escapes. In this timeline, that dragon is Nicol Bolas, and he plans on using the portal to gain Infinite Power from the multiversal collapse and in so doing regain his former status as a godlike energy being, like he was before the Mending nerfed the power of the Planeswalker Spark. So, he teleports Buffy into the ocean with a glance (to prevent her death from closing the portal), and sets about absorbing the Infinite Power.

Then Q, Oma Desala, the Wizard Marshall Zelretch (from the Nasuverse), and Luna (from the RPG Exalted) show up, having sensed the dimensional disturbance, and promptly get into a scuffle before the first two escort him to higher planes of existence to discuss things with other nigh-omnipotent beings, while Luna and Zelretch try to contain the dimensional damage and more and more entities show up to help them. Primus, from Transformers; Ed Greenwood, Elminster, Raistlin, and Mordenkainen from ADnD (there was a story in an old Dragon magazine about them all regularly meeting for tea at Ed Greenwood's house); Princess Celestia from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and so on and so forth. Nyarlthotep showed up to troll everybody, but didn't actually help overly much.

They find that while the merging is too far gone to entirely reverse, they can prevent the more ludicrously powerful universes from merging (like Gurren Lagann, Dragonball Z, Asura's Wrath, the Culture, the Xeelee, and so on and so forth), and destabilizing things too much. They also find that they can prevent the universe from imploding into a point of infinite under the weight of all of the infinite variations of every person ever simultaneously existing by selecting the "stongest" (which is to say, most canonical) timeline from those of the universes merging into it, and in the case of those with no real dominant timeline (like Mass Effect or Fate/Stay Night), it selects from the best ending for each character (which was a contribution by Princess Celestia, and resulted in the occasional bit of strangeness like both Paragon mShep and Renegade fShep simultaneously existing). Additionally, they prevented the merging from wreaking massive geological destruction by causing those worlds with divergent geography (like most fantasy worlds) to integrate based on thematic similarities and available landspace; for instance, Rokugan wound up in China since Japan is too small, and Khorvaire wound up in North America, while Xendrick fused with South America.

In orbit, things are simpler; Luna had already eaten or seduced and absorbed every possible Lunar god in the entire possibility of Lunar gods, and that cut down on alternate moons, though the Earth still wound up getting a dozen extra moons and a planetary ring from Khorvaire, along with the Mi-Go's hiveship from Cthulhutech. Settlements were rather more confused, as the Fen suddenly found themselves sharing the moon with people from a bunch of different Gundam Franchises, Transhuman Space, and Eclipse Phase (along with Luna's assorted subservient lunar spirits); the folks on Mars suddenly find themselves an extreme minority as they suddenly find themselves amongst over three hundred million people, most of which come from Eclipse Phase and Star Trek. Those inhabiting relatively minor asteroids do better, though some degree of fiction is likely on more major asteroids like Pallas, which is pretty much a colony of Transhuman Space's Chinese, and liable to be rather confused about why the surface of their asteroid suddenly has an atmosphere.

And amidst all this chaos, the Fen are alternating between "Oh fuck, an alien invasion, and at least three different varieties of killer robot hordes", "OMIGOD I COULD ACTUALLY MEET PICARD", and "With all these different transfictional Earth governments around, we need to take action to prevent war from breaking out over who is really in charge".

In regards to superhero RPGs/MMOs etc in general, but DCUO in particular - it's disturbingly easy to imagine some members of the Legion
of Doom bashing down the door to a hero's HQ, leveling their weapons or
powers or whatever at them, then calmly intoning, "We're on a mission
from Grodd".

Hold on a sec, I hear someone at the door... 

-Logan
--------------------
 
tramptrampTrampTRAMPTRAMP.....
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
--------------------

You don't want something like this happening:



After all, that's tyying up people who should be attacking the enemy...

(Yes, it's one of Shadowjack's.)

--
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

Postnuptial Disagreements:  Another Sekirei/Nasuverse crossover, featuring the son of Kayneth and Sola-Ui from Fate/Zero.  It's dark and bloody with a first-person protagonist who is arrogant, bigoted, and wants to be a magnificant bastard but doesn't have the experience to pull it off properly.  It also has lots of character development as the protagonist shows signs of growing beyond this.
----------
No, I don't believe the world has gone mad.  In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.

Katie Douglas is an even bigger Woobie then ever before. When she helped Steph break into the Eternal Prison, she made her Pinky Swear not to leave her behind.

Dear Devs, can we please take her back to Primal Earth where she'll be safe and no one will ever hurt her ever again? Please?

The top page and about a dozen other pages on the site have been updated tonight, and a new page -- chapter 7 of Drunkard's Walk V -- has been added.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

As always, forum members get a 24 hour leap on every other outlet:
Chapter 7 of Drunkard's Walk V.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Just saying...

Not right now, though.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.