This one's been coming for a while, really. The following material is part of a retcon of the Soviet Air Force that KJ and I have been working on for the last month or so. If you've been on IRC you've probably seen us hashing stuff out at least once. The whole point of this is to fix a really bad decision I made way the hell at the beginning of Fenspace, where I populated the VVS with people who weren't interested in the project. It's an old habit, and it's a really shitty habit at that. So, six years later we're going back and doing the Rebuild.
So, we've got a lot of ground to cover, time to get rolling:
In the beginning, there was The Game.
The Game was a huge, sprawling conspiracy-fantasy online RPG that had been running since 1990. Like most things on the internet, players came and went, drama erupted every now and then. The Game more-or-less ended in 2004, but the last iteration of players had grown fairly close over the course of things and so stayed in contact. They hung out on a small IRC server run by a former player, occasionally talked about The Game and maybe-someday-when-the-time-is-right reviving the concept for a new generation of internet users and just generally hanging out.
In 2006, the wave crested and the players started thinking along certain lines. One made discreet inquiries towards getting a ready supply of handwavium. Another already had a supply and started experimenting with it. And a third started wondering about the possibility of doing something really extraordinary with handwavium. Everything came to a head in the spring of 2007, at a rare face to face meeting between the players. The ex-gamemaster came with an audacious proposal: buy surplus space hardware from whoever was willing to sell, patch it together into a working spaceship, apply handwavium and see what happened.
Not everybody in the group of players agreed with the plan. They liked it as a general thing, but their lives were pretty comfortable right then and there on Earth, and honestly they didn't feel like they had anything to gain by gallivanting off into space. Others thought it was a grand idea, but didn't think they could detach themselves from their obligations.
Out of the players, five had enough fire and little enough to lose to go ahead with the plan, and two more decided to tag along and get everything on film for posterity's sake. These seven formed the core crew of the good ship Ptichka, the masterminds behind her refit and the original Oshkosh Terror Gang.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
So, we've got a lot of ground to cover, time to get rolling:
The Core - the OG VVS
In the beginning, there was The Game.
The Game was a huge, sprawling conspiracy-fantasy online RPG that had been running since 1990. Like most things on the internet, players came and went, drama erupted every now and then. The Game more-or-less ended in 2004, but the last iteration of players had grown fairly close over the course of things and so stayed in contact. They hung out on a small IRC server run by a former player, occasionally talked about The Game and maybe-someday-when-the-time-is-right reviving the concept for a new generation of internet users and just generally hanging out.
In 2006, the wave crested and the players started thinking along certain lines. One made discreet inquiries towards getting a ready supply of handwavium. Another already had a supply and started experimenting with it. And a third started wondering about the possibility of doing something really extraordinary with handwavium. Everything came to a head in the spring of 2007, at a rare face to face meeting between the players. The ex-gamemaster came with an audacious proposal: buy surplus space hardware from whoever was willing to sell, patch it together into a working spaceship, apply handwavium and see what happened.
Not everybody in the group of players agreed with the plan. They liked it as a general thing, but their lives were pretty comfortable right then and there on Earth, and honestly they didn't feel like they had anything to gain by gallivanting off into space. Others thought it was a grand idea, but didn't think they could detach themselves from their obligations.
Out of the players, five had enough fire and little enough to lose to go ahead with the plan, and two more decided to tag along and get everything on film for posterity's sake. These seven formed the core crew of the good ship Ptichka, the masterminds behind her refit and the original Oshkosh Terror Gang.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"