Actually, to be perfectly honest, on later reflection, having the duration to integrate go up with collected stuff makes the whole thing a *lot* more friendly to Fenspace at large. You'd still have a bunch of Danes unhappy at you, but, well, they're Danes - and there's a lot of people who climbed out of the well to escape them. Type A still wouldn't like you much, but probably wouldn't turn on you too badly, in much the same way as how they don't turn on the professor, in spite of the really quite impressive sums on *his* head (though with a bit less intensity on all parts). Type B would consider you just another Fen, if rather odder than most. Type C would *still* think you were cool, and wouldn't be nearly as worried about getting close to you. significantly friendlier all around.
Killing a submarine crew in cold blood just to get the ship, though (or any other ship's crew, for that matter) will get you in a world of trouble with *all* the wrong people. If you're wiling to take one without nuclear technology on it, that makes things easier, as they are not neccessarily under guard in the same way. Also, what kind of a monster are you?
The planetpuller as described more fully isn't actually breaky - particularly if you say that it can't target anything other too small to have a gravity well.
Stealing ships still isn't going to be *trivial*, mind you, especially since your primary craft at that point is quite large, and therefore slow. Speed drives don't work so hot in atmosphere, and larger still means slower. It also means more visible on radar. You'll have a lot of mass they'd have to chew through, but it might well not be handwaved yet. Of course, many of these issues go away if you wait until after you've had some time to develop in space, and have one of your runabouts built.
Actually, it might work better, to fit into the theme of "accumulation by mistake" if you were to start by flying parallel to the surface of the earth, rather than perpindicular, as you intended. Hit a reasonable-sized boat that either has nobody on it, or everyone on deck. If theyre on deck, they can leap into the water as the boat starts flying away, and be close enough to shore to survive until rescued. Upon hitting the boat, you make a course correction, and head straight up... hitting an abandoned space station.
Gray goo is a bit scary for this universe, especially as a combat thing. If you could find some way to make it, though, it might be a reasonable explanation for the Katamari effect, though, and for the slowdown. For this batch, you started with a lot of them, but they don't reproduce, or only reproduce slowly and with specific limits. The more ship there is, the further spread out they are, the slower they work. Order of work is to first secure any new junk, then seal, pressurize and connect (if and when possible environmentally), then modify for fit. Over time, you get the Escher effect, but that's only if you haven't absorbed anything recently.
On the other side, given that, it would be reasonable for "stores" to include handwavium. If you had somethign set up to keep adding to the available supply, it seems reasonable that the friendly nanites might handwave the things that they found (if not already handwaved) in the bits that got absorbed. Of course, people wouldn't really know what the things were until after they went exploring You're character would probably have a pretty good intuitive grasp, though.
In general, things that violently reshape entire opposing ships (assuming they haven't crashed into you) feel a bit extreme to me. I'm not *sure* about this one, though, so I'd like feedback from others.
I dunno. I'd have to look at it in full again to be sure we'd caught everything, but it looks, at this point, like a viable character. There certainly aren't any more problems with the fundamental theory of the thing.
Killing a submarine crew in cold blood just to get the ship, though (or any other ship's crew, for that matter) will get you in a world of trouble with *all* the wrong people. If you're wiling to take one without nuclear technology on it, that makes things easier, as they are not neccessarily under guard in the same way. Also, what kind of a monster are you?
The planetpuller as described more fully isn't actually breaky - particularly if you say that it can't target anything other too small to have a gravity well.
Stealing ships still isn't going to be *trivial*, mind you, especially since your primary craft at that point is quite large, and therefore slow. Speed drives don't work so hot in atmosphere, and larger still means slower. It also means more visible on radar. You'll have a lot of mass they'd have to chew through, but it might well not be handwaved yet. Of course, many of these issues go away if you wait until after you've had some time to develop in space, and have one of your runabouts built.
Actually, it might work better, to fit into the theme of "accumulation by mistake" if you were to start by flying parallel to the surface of the earth, rather than perpindicular, as you intended. Hit a reasonable-sized boat that either has nobody on it, or everyone on deck. If theyre on deck, they can leap into the water as the boat starts flying away, and be close enough to shore to survive until rescued. Upon hitting the boat, you make a course correction, and head straight up... hitting an abandoned space station.
Gray goo is a bit scary for this universe, especially as a combat thing. If you could find some way to make it, though, it might be a reasonable explanation for the Katamari effect, though, and for the slowdown. For this batch, you started with a lot of them, but they don't reproduce, or only reproduce slowly and with specific limits. The more ship there is, the further spread out they are, the slower they work. Order of work is to first secure any new junk, then seal, pressurize and connect (if and when possible environmentally), then modify for fit. Over time, you get the Escher effect, but that's only if you haven't absorbed anything recently.
On the other side, given that, it would be reasonable for "stores" to include handwavium. If you had somethign set up to keep adding to the available supply, it seems reasonable that the friendly nanites might handwave the things that they found (if not already handwaved) in the bits that got absorbed. Of course, people wouldn't really know what the things were until after they went exploring You're character would probably have a pretty good intuitive grasp, though.
In general, things that violently reshape entire opposing ships (assuming they haven't crashed into you) feel a bit extreme to me. I'm not *sure* about this one, though, so I'd like feedback from others.
I dunno. I'd have to look at it in full again to be sure we'd caught everything, but it looks, at this point, like a viable character. There certainly aren't any more problems with the fundamental theory of the thing.