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space pilot character seed
07-29-2013, 01:12 PM
"Flyaway"
"Going Dutchman" - floating away from your mek/ship/etc untethered and with only your vacsuit's air - is the not so secret terror most spacers refuse to even speak of. Not so Flyaway, after experiencing it once by accident that crazy b* does it for fun! (S)he's not stupid about it, always takes a spare patch kit, beacon, and bubbletent, but apparently being alone in the black with the hab lights just another distant star is 'just enough sky' for 'elbow room.' Flyaway's agoraphilia never quits!
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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Not really related, but an interesting idea for a setting detail - the various alien races/nations/whatever groups all have their own tricks to eke out advantages in their tech base - Space Dwarves build big f* ships with big f* guns that fill the sky around them with metal like a giant pseudo-Scottish "F* You" sign, Space Elves prefer a more refined approach with ultra-high-speed weapons that have amazing precision, the Humans have fairly average guns, but the ammunition is modified for various special ef
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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effects - so when an outside threat forces them into a full alliance and they pool it, you get dreadnoughts with excellent craftsdwarfship that menace with spikes of guns, lots of big guns, more guns than that, which fire upscaled human specialty rounds at elven speed/range/accuracy, and that's only looking at the weapons systems. They call these ships "Scrapers" because they dumped everyone's barrel of tricks in a pile, then scraped the barrels for a few more dirty tricks each.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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...text box limit?
EDIT: Ah, there it is.
I like that second idea, too. Of course, it needs a faction that doesn't even have guns.
What? We don't! It's not our fault your ships can't survive a few small space-time distortions! If you primitives could build anything tougher than a mud hut, it wouldn't be an issue.
(When you have a sufficiently-engineered FTL drive, you have a way to make negative space wedgies in enemy ships... that, or pull tricks you normally see biotics use. Warp, anybody?)
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That's a nifty idea too - maybe they're the common enemy? - but please, use proper technical language, not that newsfeed slang. It's called an "inverted space wedge" because it uses a negative distortion of spacetime to tear the target apart with antigravitic repulsion.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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It might technically be called an "inverted space wedge," but the comedy-news shows kept calling it an "inverted space wedgie" - the name had to change to preserve what little dignity we had left!
Then there's the Space Trolls who throw rocks at you - big, dinosaur-killers if they can find an enemy base; or smaller, metal-jacketed rounds dug out of asteroids and fired from railguns at enemy ships. (The asteroid they dig the rounds out of makes for good ablative armor on the face of the ship farthest from the railgun, too.) You'd think it was the Dwarf ships that had the mining equipment, but no...
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Not necessarily.
There's a couple fun tricks you could pull with a drive like that, depending on the principles it uses. I tend to favor kinetic shearing effects, myself- a spherical 'push' surrounded by 'pull' effect is wonderfully elegant- but dropping a wormhole inside the target works just as well. Come to think of it, so does dropping them in a 10,000G field for a second or so, and letting their inertial compensators explode. Maybe flash-aging their antimatter containment pods? Stasis-locking the 'neck' of a multi-hull design, or the nose of a single hull? Bending space so that the enemy rams its prow into its keel?
If your space wizards had sufficient superiority, they could even Urenbeck Catapult their opponents into the nearest stellar body.
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Or, open a wormhole past the event horizon of a black hole, and see what happens when a normal-matter ship encounters a naked singularity.
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"Now I know the big brother's role is usually to threaten horrible violence," I began, "but honestly, sis is the most brutally lethal person I've ever heard of when she loses her temper. So, even though it'll only be to deny you the sweet oblivion of death, all I'll do if you hurt her or tomcat around is pick up your mangled flesh and make sure you get to a hospital, so you'll have many painful years to look forward to as a bedridden cripple." Smiling a shark's grin, I gave the half-extended hand he'd
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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apparently entirely forgotten about a low-five, and concluded cheerily, "Don't worry bro. I'll have your back, even if it's broken in three places."
Adjust pronouns as neccesary.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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People go on about 'the true Hyuuga bloodline,' well, what if a secondary source of Neji's beef with the clan was that she got all the eyes, none of the chest, and a voice on the deep end of the range, so everyone assumes 'boy' no matter how long and glossy she keeps her hair, or formal and polite her language even when absolutely ready to chew up swords and spit kunai? It makes no less sense than any other "X is secretly a guuurl!" fic, which is rampant for Naruto, fanon for Haku, & not unknown for Gaara.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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on the topic of 'drive system as weapon', there was a part of a Trek/B5 fic on Spacebattles (TaskForce 43? something like that), a group of Federation Warships tossed into the B5-verse accidentally.
Skipping the set up, the Feddies were trying to talk down the main Mimbari fleet from committing genocide, and when the fight started, a trio of smaller Federation ships swept the length of the Mimbari fleet just barely into warp. The subspace distortions wreaked havoc on the Mimbari's crystalline ships (and also messed up the engines of the 3 Feddie ships).
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Oh yeah, wake attacks are lots of fun - in classic, AD&D2E Spelljammer, anything over 100 cu. ft. generated a 1g gravity field, usually in a plane where the waterline would be on a ship but 'wherever it's most convenient' in practice. Certain ships most noteably Spelljammer, Comma The have a funkier shape, in it's case a J that followed the manta-with-tail-ala-scorpion shape. Do a close flyby of a smaller ship, and your gravity field makes it seem like they just capsized and got turned back upright.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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