The problem with dogfighting at significant fractions of c is that humans just don't see fast enough. Any weapon has to be aimed by a high-end AI somehow or other or it'll never hit. Any visual of the situation has to be the zoom-out view. It's maybe an interesting idea, but you totally lose the immediacy of it.
Oh, and rob - a few other issues with the dogfight. First of all, due to the limits on handwaved weapons, your railgun pretty much has to be hardtech, as do the missiles that the enemies are using. Otherwise this is suddenly a *much* bigger deal than some paperwork. People significantly restructure their planning because of *rumors* that the professor has weapons-grade handwavium. This is going to cause them some *serious* difficulties in terms of penetrating 'waved hulls in the first place. Second, depending on how the speed issues work out, the relative speed from your ship to the railgun slug imay pretty much have to be significantly less than the speeds with which you and the raider are hurtling across the battlefield, alone or by comparison. Third... why is it a crime to fire railguns out as far as you were? Maybe I'm missing a bit out of one of the history posts, in which case, please correct me, but I'm not getting this. Earth doesn't care enough to include it in a treaty because it's a railgun slug - it's not like it can penetrate the atmosphere anyway. Generic Danelaw doesn't apply out that far in space, and even if they tried to force the issue, the folks over at UP wouldn't be enfocring it. The Fennish Conventions certainly aren't going to be doing the moral equivalent of taking away people's right to bear arms, and even if they decided they wanted to, they wouldn't care about it being close to earth or not unless the Danes were going to get *really* uptight about it - which they wouldn't. Fourth... how big was that slug, anyway? I'm not seeing how it could possibly have both size and muzzle velocity enough to even *pretend* to make a handwaved hull care and still be even a little concealable.
With respect to the Prof, and Why He Is What He Is - well, yes. I *did* put it in as a hypothesis rather than a Truth, and I totally agree that 'tis better to leave it entirely up in the air - right up there with *most* questions about Handwavium and How It Works (What It Does is somethig we do need to establish from time to time, but the many versions of How, I think, it is beter to leave uncertain, or, if that cannot be the case, All Of The Above Unpredictably.) Even the stuff that the Professor knows, he ain't... well, no. That's not quite right. He *is* telling, with great enthusiasm, and at great length, to anyone who shows enough interest, or even gets caught in the blast radius. It's just that they ain't *understanding*.
Later edit: Rob! Very Important! The very first limitations that we put on the Plot Devices, back before we knew *anything* about them, was that they *could not be blown up for Great Justice*. Period. Dead stop. I am sorry for the required rewrite, but no Kaboomite for you.
Also... I think I see the problem with your generation of the girls. I hate to say this, because of the damage it might do to the character concept, but it's entirely too controlled. AIs are not something that you can generate like you want them to be. You can put in guidance, certainly, and have a decent chance that the guidance will have a degree of influence, but then you put the goop in and the goop does what it wants to. Your robots couldn't possibly be perfect builds off of established characters except totally by mistake. If they could, we'd have a simple, straightforward way for the Danes to build reliable, predictable AI, and this would Break The Universe in a bad way. On the other side, you did pump in a lot of guidance. Your robots *could* reasonably be the characters as seen in (take your pick of) strongly biased fanfic. Ranmastrong, for example - and not in the "sweet, lovable, kind, perfect" direction. It would be possible to amp up Li's pyromania to the point where she'd fit (I've not seen the source. It's *possible* she's there already) (Unfortunately, as noted above, she'd be limited to hardtech-level booms, and that doesn't leave much space for mad science.) (This degree of pyromania would, incidentally, pretty much require that people either exert effort to stop her from blowing up things she Really Shouldn't, or get creeped out by her dreamy monologuing on the subject.) Yoriko's Gossip would need to be at similar levels - to the point that you'ld have to stop and go back and get her a time or two while walking through the crowd at a Con if you were moving significant distances across the floor from an established point A to an established point B. Yayoi needs at least one quirk of similar intensity. Sora's sensitivity would need to be strong enough to trigger a fairly intense fight or flight response. Basically, quirks should be extreme enough to be funny. A man restraining his car, because it was driven into a homicidal rage when someone dented it through carelessness? That's funny. A guy having to lock his ship down because otherwise it might try to recreate a Star Wars tunnel run through the halls of the Con? That's funny. A mad scientist whose companions are constantly and unintentionally foiling each others attempts to kill him? You get the idea. Also, Loyalty to the primary character never counts as a disad in a bought minion. Actually, in this world, Loyalty doesn't count as a disad at all, and nearsightedness is minor enough that it counts as a one-pointer. The reputation is a 'not so much' too, given that few if any of his enemies are likely to plot against him specifically in the long term, let alone go into enough detail to first find out these things about his assistants and then dig through the (as you've pointed out, not all that popular) source material for psychological clues to use against them.
Also, Haruhi question... there *is* a Haruhi manga/show in this universe, right? If there is, how would you justify that the writers got so much correct, given that Kyon and co seem to Really Want to keep some of this stuff under wraps?
Oh, and Bob, love the concept, but... How? If you've got that much land to hide it in, I guess I can see having plenty of time and space to grow handwavium without anyone really bothering you. Sure. It's your land, you can take it with you, sure. Given the right style of goop, you could even goop the dome segments before you set it up, and let them fuse after, sure...and use some other kind of goop that did the permeate and saturate thing with the ground, even, to bring along your little chunk of topsoil... but how you you set up a geodisic dome that big in the first place? What kind of building materials would you use? What would you do for labor? The thing's enormous!
Oh, and rob - a few other issues with the dogfight. First of all, due to the limits on handwaved weapons, your railgun pretty much has to be hardtech, as do the missiles that the enemies are using. Otherwise this is suddenly a *much* bigger deal than some paperwork. People significantly restructure their planning because of *rumors* that the professor has weapons-grade handwavium. This is going to cause them some *serious* difficulties in terms of penetrating 'waved hulls in the first place. Second, depending on how the speed issues work out, the relative speed from your ship to the railgun slug imay pretty much have to be significantly less than the speeds with which you and the raider are hurtling across the battlefield, alone or by comparison. Third... why is it a crime to fire railguns out as far as you were? Maybe I'm missing a bit out of one of the history posts, in which case, please correct me, but I'm not getting this. Earth doesn't care enough to include it in a treaty because it's a railgun slug - it's not like it can penetrate the atmosphere anyway. Generic Danelaw doesn't apply out that far in space, and even if they tried to force the issue, the folks over at UP wouldn't be enfocring it. The Fennish Conventions certainly aren't going to be doing the moral equivalent of taking away people's right to bear arms, and even if they decided they wanted to, they wouldn't care about it being close to earth or not unless the Danes were going to get *really* uptight about it - which they wouldn't. Fourth... how big was that slug, anyway? I'm not seeing how it could possibly have both size and muzzle velocity enough to even *pretend* to make a handwaved hull care and still be even a little concealable.
With respect to the Prof, and Why He Is What He Is - well, yes. I *did* put it in as a hypothesis rather than a Truth, and I totally agree that 'tis better to leave it entirely up in the air - right up there with *most* questions about Handwavium and How It Works (What It Does is somethig we do need to establish from time to time, but the many versions of How, I think, it is beter to leave uncertain, or, if that cannot be the case, All Of The Above Unpredictably.) Even the stuff that the Professor knows, he ain't... well, no. That's not quite right. He *is* telling, with great enthusiasm, and at great length, to anyone who shows enough interest, or even gets caught in the blast radius. It's just that they ain't *understanding*.
Later edit: Rob! Very Important! The very first limitations that we put on the Plot Devices, back before we knew *anything* about them, was that they *could not be blown up for Great Justice*. Period. Dead stop. I am sorry for the required rewrite, but no Kaboomite for you.
Also... I think I see the problem with your generation of the girls. I hate to say this, because of the damage it might do to the character concept, but it's entirely too controlled. AIs are not something that you can generate like you want them to be. You can put in guidance, certainly, and have a decent chance that the guidance will have a degree of influence, but then you put the goop in and the goop does what it wants to. Your robots couldn't possibly be perfect builds off of established characters except totally by mistake. If they could, we'd have a simple, straightforward way for the Danes to build reliable, predictable AI, and this would Break The Universe in a bad way. On the other side, you did pump in a lot of guidance. Your robots *could* reasonably be the characters as seen in (take your pick of) strongly biased fanfic. Ranmastrong, for example - and not in the "sweet, lovable, kind, perfect" direction. It would be possible to amp up Li's pyromania to the point where she'd fit (I've not seen the source. It's *possible* she's there already) (Unfortunately, as noted above, she'd be limited to hardtech-level booms, and that doesn't leave much space for mad science.) (This degree of pyromania would, incidentally, pretty much require that people either exert effort to stop her from blowing up things she Really Shouldn't, or get creeped out by her dreamy monologuing on the subject.) Yoriko's Gossip would need to be at similar levels - to the point that you'ld have to stop and go back and get her a time or two while walking through the crowd at a Con if you were moving significant distances across the floor from an established point A to an established point B. Yayoi needs at least one quirk of similar intensity. Sora's sensitivity would need to be strong enough to trigger a fairly intense fight or flight response. Basically, quirks should be extreme enough to be funny. A man restraining his car, because it was driven into a homicidal rage when someone dented it through carelessness? That's funny. A guy having to lock his ship down because otherwise it might try to recreate a Star Wars tunnel run through the halls of the Con? That's funny. A mad scientist whose companions are constantly and unintentionally foiling each others attempts to kill him? You get the idea. Also, Loyalty to the primary character never counts as a disad in a bought minion. Actually, in this world, Loyalty doesn't count as a disad at all, and nearsightedness is minor enough that it counts as a one-pointer. The reputation is a 'not so much' too, given that few if any of his enemies are likely to plot against him specifically in the long term, let alone go into enough detail to first find out these things about his assistants and then dig through the (as you've pointed out, not all that popular) source material for psychological clues to use against them.
Also, Haruhi question... there *is* a Haruhi manga/show in this universe, right? If there is, how would you justify that the writers got so much correct, given that Kyon and co seem to Really Want to keep some of this stuff under wraps?
Oh, and Bob, love the concept, but... How? If you've got that much land to hide it in, I guess I can see having plenty of time and space to grow handwavium without anyone really bothering you. Sure. It's your land, you can take it with you, sure. Given the right style of goop, you could even goop the dome segments before you set it up, and let them fuse after, sure...and use some other kind of goop that did the permeate and saturate thing with the ground, even, to bring along your little chunk of topsoil... but how you you set up a geodisic dome that big in the first place? What kind of building materials would you use? What would you do for labor? The thing's enormous!