These fit in right after Maico's visit to Grunthal.
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Quote:“Panzer Kunst masters. I can name five off the top of my head, and the only one still publicly practicing is Jet Jaguar,”________________________________
“Yeah. She runs that training school out of that old mine with her partner and four other women. Survival Shot’s a gas. Just don’t get a simmunition to the ass. It hurts more than the real thing!”
Maico found herself giggling.
“It might be worth my while talking to her. If she trained them, then she will have to know who they are,”
And, Maico noted privately, she does have connection to Great Justice.
“Don’t count on it. We don’t talk about our customers unless presented with a warrant, I doubt she will too. If she did, I doubt any of the big customers they rely on would want to work with them.”
“So talking to her would be a bust then?”
“Probably. For one thing, we’d know it was her. She has all the subtlety of a JCB. Did you see the busty redhead they had dressed as Yoko Littner with that Anzio on their stand at Republicon? People didn’t just go there for the shiny helicopters...”
“Right so. Maybe if we follow the technology train to its final destination. Who could put together the hardsuits they wear?”
“You know Jet Jaguar began the Stingray project....”
“And there’re plenty of gearheads who’ll happily build one for a fee, and plenty capable of modifying one up to that standard. Name your mad? It’s open-source.”
“Not at the level these ladies operate. Look at the footage. One of them can hover with a gravity drive and has a bulletproof forcefield.”
“Maybe they contributed their changes back to the main project stream,”
“Haha... Hah. Hah. ….. Hah. There, that’s the appropriate level of mockery of your comment. Somehow I doubt it.
“Well, biggest hardsuit builders are Steganovich Steelwear in Crystal Tokyo. Might be worth digging up the latest ‘Following the Curve’ post to see if anyone’s been public about having that sort of forcefield,”
“It looks like a mass effect field... which also explains the hovering. And why it doesn’t seem capable of doing both at once.”
“But of course. Who makes Mass Effect gear?”
“Who built themselves a rather snazy Normandy? Catgirl Industries out of Jenga.”
Maico made a note in her planner to prepare emails to Steganovich and Jenga. This was going to be a long, hungry series of trips.
-----
Crystal Tokyo was always just a little bit hot and clammy, despite the best efforts of the air conditioning system. It was the oldest of the Crystal Cities and by far and away the busiest, with a bustling level of activity that swept her along through transparent carbon corridors.
Lights embedded in walls cast a diffuse glow, whole walls forming into sheets of light.
Stengovich Steelwear was close enough to the main concourse to be ‘succesful’, but not close enough to be important. Maico paused outside, gazing at the store models. For Senshi and Knight alike, a sign advertised. The male version was a stunning silver with blue accents. There were the traditional replica models too. White, Blue, Green, Red. 2040 Fen catered to as well.
Though she did have to wonder at how useful an armour would be with a bare midriff like that.
The door opened with a gaseous sigh and she stepped inside. 2 Sammies were ogling a cutaway exposing the motor-truss understructure. The model inside was a plastic ideal that only biomods and prosthetic bodies could possibly reach.
High fashion, cast in metal. Options included Evangelion-style, Iczer-style, 2032, 2033, 2034 or even 2040-series. They promised to try make a custom variant for any sort of form fitting armour, for an extra fee of course..
The gynoid at the front desk stared out with vacant, glassy eyes.
“Can I help you miss?” she intoned. lit might’ve been a recording.
“Yes. I’m Maico Tange. I’m here to see Vyacheslav Stengovich. I have an appointment at ten.”
“But of course,” it said, unblinking as it stared. If it wasn’t programmed, Maico could’ve sworn it was mocking her. “Please take a seat. He shall be out shortly.”
A few well thumbed magazines offered a quick diversion while she sat herself in a plush, pink fabric chair that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Doctor’s office. The Sammies were discussing the relative discomforts of skinsuits.
“And look at the hips on that armour. It makes the butt look huge,”
“The whole piece looks like a pair of panties,” the second giggled. “And check out those heels.”
“Sexy. And Safe,”
Maico rolled her eyes.
“Miss Tange,” the android called out. “Mister Stengovich will see you now. Please come through into the workshop,” It indicated towards a doorway with a floorish from her hands.
Vyacheslav Stengovich was a refugee from 1973. That was Maico’s first thought. That moustache, that hairstyle with those sideburns, the brown-tinted glasses and an oversized, neatly pressed lab coat.
“Ah, Miss Tange. You’re hear about the Knight Sabers, I presume,” He had a soft, smooth voice.
“Their hardsuits especially
“Well I can tell you one thing,” he said, airily, “It wasn’t me. Their hardsuits are armed. Crystal Millenium arms-export laws prevent me from building anything with that level of firepower,”
Amomentary expression of dissapointment passed across Maico’s face. But at least it wasn’t a ‘we can’t confirm or deny’ firewall.
“It’s alright. I was hoping you might have some insight on who did, or what went into the suits. “
His face light up. It was a mad’s excitement, no doubt about it. The chance to explain their obsession. “Do I? The whole ML has been hopping. Come in back to my office,” he beckoned with his arm, “I’ll show you what we’ve got. “
They passed through the workshop, passing a variety of computer-aided machinery Maico couldn’t identify and the frames of three half-finished suits suspended on hangars. One male, two female.
“What’s the general feeling about them?
“They’re a bunch of assholes. FOSH Parasites” said Stengovich with a sneer.
“Oh?” That was a surprise.
“They’ve taken an open-source design, made some improvements we could all benefit from, then refused to re-contribute their changes back to to the main stream. Unlike me,” he finished with a haughty swagger.
Maico felt herself sigh.
“Anyway. Come on in here and I’ll show you,”
The office, was wallpapered with blueprints of hardsuits. Checks and re-checks. He sat at a computer terminal, booting it up. Standard holographic 3D, with an air-tactile interface.
“Perhaps you should start from the beginning,”
“Well, the first Stingray suit was built by that Knight Saber cyber, Jet Jaguar.... well, not the first Crisis Replica but you know what I mean. Anyway, someone saw it, and asked her if she’d build one. Jet released the design plans under the LGPL instead. The Stingray Project itself grew out of the builders list.”
“I see,” A second mention of Jet’s name. “Is Jet Jaguar still active on the list.”
He snorted. “Sometimes. Technically she’s on the project committee, but getting her involved is like pulling teeth.”
He nodded, “ Anyway, the first suits themselves were based off the Stingray armour from the Whole Fenspace Catalogue. The problem with the WFC suits is that they’ve been sanitised of everything offensive. All the weaponry’s been stripped out.”
“And the relevance of this is?”
“Well.... that makes them tough to build because the weaponry is so integrated. They basically had to be redesigned almost from scratch to work right without armaments. There’re a few supported plugins, like Kohran’s weapons packs, and the Sunday-Punch kit, but they’re still additions to the sanitised version. Loaded modules, rather than compiled into the kernel, to use a computer metaphor,”
“I see,”
“Now these Knight Sabers.” He brought up a rough technical scetch of Saber White’s suit. “These Sabers are running with fully integrated armaments. These are full Stingray suits. Whoever built these knew how to fill in the gaps in the WFC design, or had access to the unsanitised versions.”
With a few strokes of his fingers, he brought up the same video of the Sabers. “I’ve seen this before,” Maico stated.
“Yeah,” he nodded, “And there’s just enough for us to be able to tell that these are well beyond the capabilities of the mainstream suits. These things are beyond our roadmap, at least a generation ahead, maybe two.”
“Oh my,”
“Yeah, they’re real cool,” he smirked, “zooming the video in to Saber Green with a pinch, “This level of accuracy and speed is impossible to achieve with the standard system. If any of these women were wearing a standard suit, they’d be stumbling over themselves,”
“Can you tell me who might’ve been able to build something like this?” Maico asked him
“Name your mad,” he said, with an annoyed shrug. “That’s all I can say. Really. It’s someone with a hell of an obsession, and enough mechatronic knowhow to put it together. There’s some similarities to the suits used by the Roughriders, but even they’re just the standard model with cermet armour and a smattering of plugins,”
Maico thought for a second. “Could you tell me, how might they have gotten so much performance?”
“I really don’t know,” he growled.
“If you had to guess,” Maico pushed. “If I had an idea of the sort of technologies, it might give me a lead.”
“Well,” he wiped the sweat of his brow with his free hand, ruffling his fringe. “Hardsuit tuning is a pretty exact science. That’s how I made my name. Anyone can build one, but the level of fine tuning needed to get one right shows who the real experts are,”
The implication was, that he was one. Stop bragging.
“The Stingray design was always finnicky. They have the potential to be better than Iron-Man types, but only when they’re very finely tuned, and operating within a narrow range. The difference between a tuned hardsuit and an untuned one is as much as twenty percent over a standard course,”
“And tuning involves?”
“The expert system has to be trained to match the wearer’s own personal techniques, their own natural movements. The centre of mass of the hardsuit and wearer together, has to be tweaked to be as close as possible to that of the wearers when naked. Actuators need to be balanced in the limbs to compensate for any imbalance in the wearer’s natural strength. It’s also best if the wearer is female.”
“And that would give how much of a performance boost?”
He snorted through his nose. “That gives you the rated performance. To go beyond that, well...” he trailed off for a moment. Rapid fire manipulation of the holographic display brought up text files and mail archives. Maico could see he was pulling down lists of plugins. She half-glimpsed files as he flicked through them, listing milestones and technolgies being research.
“Best guess,” he began again, “They’re using some form of neural induction set in the helmet,”
“Someone told me Saber White hard to have direct control over her actuators,” Maico confirmed for him.
He grinned and seemed to giggle inside himself. “I knew it! Ah.... sorry.” He glanced around, shamefully looking for any other witnesses to his little outburst, “But having an NI set, would let the suit respond to the wearers intentions, rather than merely processing and following muscle signals. It’d drop the active lag to near zero. It wouldn’t account for all the boost, but’d give some.”
“And...”
“You’d have to upgrade the processing hardware. The ES would have to be overhauled to handle the NI interface, and that’s a lot of coding. They use a different thruster arrangement, which means the flight dynamics are changed, they’ve rewritten the flight stability subsytem from scratch.. These weapons require a brand power supply since they appear to be electromagnetic, at least double the current output”
He stopped for a breath. “The armour. It appears to be just battlesteel rather than cermet. But it’s a lot thicker in certain areas, especially shoulder pads and joint covers. And they have to have upgraded the motor-trusses to make them move so fast with the added mass of that armour which means even more...”
He stopped mid-sentence, an idea striking like lightning. Maico opened her mouth to ask him what it was
“You might want to check out heaphestus to see if anyone unusual is ordering large stocks of custome forged billet. Almost everyone building custom hardsuits gets their blanks forged there, and then machines them down to size. The presses required are obscenely expensive, and anyone using one in combat goes through armour very quickly, so their order will show up.”
“Thank you,” said Maico, “That might actually help,”
“Now, to finish it off... Pinky there.” He zoomed in to the image of the pink Saber with a pinch, before plucking her free of the video. A few quick manipulations had an extrapolated 3D model standing free. It gave a cheeky wave. “Pink takes things to a new level. Take a look at her backpack. No thruster exhausts, she replaces that with a Mass Effect system. What she does have, are a set of heat-sinks. Big ones. You can see the intake shrouds over the fans. Something in there puts out a lot of heat. There’s a real powerful computer in there, probably something not intended to be made mobile, and those antennae make for a complex multi-function radio and sensor set.”
He sighed, easing himself back into his chair. “Merge it all together as one, rather than just a collection of bag-on-side plugins, add some real deep magic and then combine with years of obsessive work to refine it all. You might get close to their performance.”
“Do you think Jet Jaguar could’ve built the Saber’s hardsuits?” Maico asked him.
He blinked for a moment.
“Nope,” he stated. Firm, solid, concrete answer. “She’s a hobbyist. This is someone else with more time and energy to dedicate to things, someone doing it professionally. and taken years to do it.”
“You sure?”
“As sure as I am that I am a man. Why?”
“I figured, since Jet’s a Crisis Fan, started the project and I have reason to believe she might have trained the Knight Sabers.
“Hmmm,” he began to stroke at his chin. The image of Saber Pink waved again. “Maybe if she had help, it might be possible. The sort of person who could pull this off either has the connections needed to acquire some hefty hardware and keep it quiet, along with the time to pull it off.... and I really am talking years unless they’re a complete genius mad.” He sighed, “And the ones I know have accounted for themselves,”
“Could you give me an example of Jet’s work please?”
“Sure,” He said. He tugged another text file up out of the archive. “Her last contribution to the project was a new plugin she called Voomer. It’s an ANN based system, replacing the expert system. It’s also a total crapshoot whether it works or not. Most found they were just fighting against it half the time, but those who got it to work for them found it boosted performance. Nobody can fix it for themselves because the ANN images are just binary blobs.”
He gave another distasteful snort.
“Binary blob?”
“Software without the source code. A compiled image. Usually from someone who has something to hide. Especially annoying for those who believe in the dream of open-source because if it’s broken, we can’t get in an fix it for ourselves. We can’t make improvements. We can’t stomp out bugs and cull security flaws. We rely on the package creator for that, and they rarely bother.”
And Maico sensed that was the nose of one huge camel of a rant trying to slip into her tent if she let the nose stay there.
“It’s actions like this that harm...”
“That’s enough, thank you,” Maico interrupted him, as gently as she could manage. He seemed to glower at her. “That should be more than enough, thank you very much,”
“Your welcome.”
He seemed satisfied to have at least had the chance to talk briefly.
----
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