SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread I

[Kartr_Kana]

I guess I should've put a smiley face in my post to show that I wasn't being serious. The Collectors are rather hard to get to from Hiigaran space, you've either got hyperspace shoals in the way or bugs who think ships are giant flying Calzones.

[Norade]

That and find out just how many $1,000 super ships he has!

That's a pretty expensive way of finding it out

Can't gain intel without starting a massive war... Besides, the collectors obviously have space oil WMD's.

[Grif]

Come to think of it, Collectors ARE pretty close to my space. Relatively speaking.

Now I need bigger ships. Can't have those $1000 ships wrecking havoc all over my space. You think the Umerians will sell me one of them beam cannons?

[PeZook]

No, you don't. Smart people keep their ships light and agile.

Really. You don't need big dreadnaughts.

We're pretty nice people, when you get to know us. Nobody who did was ever able to claim otherwise.

[Grif]

No, you don't. Smart people keep their ships light and agile.

Really. You don't need big dreadnaughts.

We're pretty nice people, when you get to know us. Nobody who did was ever able to claim otherwise.

Oh of course. You just assimilate them.

[DarthShady]

Mang why is everyone behaving so Anti-Karlack, talking about Coalitions and stuff. You would think we were out to eat the Galaxy or something.

...or bugs who think ships are giant flying Calzones.

Now you've made me hungry. Speaking of which, I just now realized we are pretty close neighbors. Your nations history amuses me greatly.

[Kartr_Kana]

I try! I'm going to polish it a little before I put it on my wiki.
Yeah were are rather near neighbors which is why Third fleet is arranged on a really tight frontage through the sectors facing the swarm.

[Siege]

Step one, a reunion between old friends, provided Siege is interested.

Do you really have to ask?

I sense the need to build an Anti-Collector Coalition and invade Collector space in order to preserve our Nations from the threat that the insidious Robots of Fear present!!

You are a clear and present danger to Sovereignty regional hegemony. Cease and desist your actions immediately!

Also, I don't think you can actually invade Collector space, seeing it's all shoals and shit.

[PeZook]

Also, I don't think you can actually invade Collector space, seeing it's all shoals and shit.

You actually can, it's just that hyperdrives have to work really,really hard to move across Shoals.

...while ours are optimized for Shoal operations (at the expense for being much slower than galstandard outside of them).

[Lonestar]

One more post in the prologue after this one.

[DarthShady]

Do you really have to ask?

This will be so much fun.

[PeZook]

Man, I love Dr. Blitzschlag

[Lonestar]

Dr. Blitzschlag has a low opinion of Q.

[Kartr_Kana]

I sense the need to build an Anti-Collector Coalition and invade Collector space in order to preserve our Nations from the threat that the insidious Robots of Fear present!!

You are a clear and present danger to Sovereignty regional hegemony. Cease and desist your actions immediately!

You're welcome to join the ACC and help rid your border of those pesky, inscrutable and highly dangerous AIs!

Also, I don't think you can actually invade Collector space, seeing it's all shoals and shit.

There seem to be fine networks of passable hyperspace channels to keep with the nautical theme and there are no better navigators then the Manaani!

[Steve]

I sense the need to build an Anti-Collector Coalition and invade Collector space in order to preserve our Nations from the threat that the insidious Robots of Fear present!!

You are a clear and present danger to Sovereignty regional hegemony. Cease and desist your actions immediately!

You're welcome to join the ACC and help rid your border of those pesky, inscrutable and highly dangerous AIs!

Also, I don't think you can actually invade Collector space, seeing it's all shoals and shit.

There seem to be fine networks of passable hyperspace channels to keep with the nautical theme and there are no better navigators then the Manaani!

There are major hyperlanes moving through all Shoal sectors, just not very many. And within shoal regions there are "spider-web" networks of passable lanes, but the thing is they're occasionally irregular, very small, and a bitch to navigate through. It's what makes patrolling Shoals like the Outback such a bitch to do.

[Steve]

A proposal for everyone. Since we're pretty much the only STGOD active currently, I was thinking of making a second IC thread specifically for formal diplomatic interactions to be publicly attempted and replied to. What do you think?

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

A proposal for everyone. Since we're pretty much the only STGOD active currently, I was thinking of making a second IC thread specifically for formal diplomatic interactions to be publicly attempted and replied to. What do you think?

A little transparency is always a good thing. Not all diplomacy has to be carried out under the table. I say go for it.

[Simon_Jester]

The Battle Barge points were published days ago. You had plenty of time to change them.

I'm not really complaining, I was more joking about how my ships are no longer the bruisers they were originally intended to be. Of course between laying them down and working on stats for them my focus changed and while I have debated cutting my numbers of lesser ships back some I am more or less willing to go into the game with what I have.

For my own (admittedly random) part, I think you're fine. What really matters, IMO, is being able to assemble effective fleets. Which requires either large numbers of well coordinated light combatants, big honking heavies, or a blend of the two. The individual ship costs matter less than the aggregate.

My ships top out at $600, plus each has a small escort of ultra-lights with them that are $185 worth of combat power total, so potentially $785 worth of warfighting in a complete package. Strategic flexibility, yay!

Cool. I organized all my ships such that everything above a Heavy is integrated into a large task force; the task forces' aggregate value is in the $1000 to 1500 range.

Me? I know we're not on the best of terms, but the biggest ships I have are $155 "Destroyers".
Swinging by for a "friendly visit" might cow us for a while.

Yeah, I saw that. That said, you do have quiet the swarm of ships in the $100 range so the space raptors could try to swarm a larger ship. That is if each Captain weren't to busy hoping that if enough others die he might get a promotion. xD

The trick here is that when you try to wolfpack a ship that size with smaller ships, it's going to kill quite a few of the little ones before the fleet as a whole can close in and engage. Even more if there's a proper escort.

So looking at a battleship like that, a flotilla commander with nothing heavier than a destroyer will think "Yeah, we could probably kill that, but a lot of our people would die doing it." That's your deterrent right there, on the tactical level.

Come to think of it, Collectors ARE pretty close to my space. Relatively speaking.

Now I need bigger ships. Can't have those $1000 ships wrecking havoc all over my space. You think the Umerians will sell me one of them beam cannons?

Remember, that ion cannon was, all by itself, the main battery of a ship that punches at 1500$ offensive value. You might want to settle for something a bit smaller, something you can fit more of into your hull. Umerian capital ships, for example, use a cluster of three to six beamlines instead of one really big high-current one.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wants to fluff their ships as using Umerian-built particle beam weapons is welcome to, with a few case-by-case exceptions who mostly wouldn't want to, anyway. In your case, you'd probably wind up being sold something a bit less sophisticated,* one of the previous generation of proton cannon rather than the (very) new and (somewhat) classified ion cannon.** On the other hand, some of those proton guns were big suckers, and you can always build around a battery of them. The thing that really got the Umerians to push the edge of the envelope technologically on the ion cannon design was that the NenAltKik wanted one beam weapon as the main battery for their system defense ship. That meant either using "advanced beamline concepts" or making the thing so ridiculously large that not even a race of freaking tyrannosaurus rex would be willing to build a ship around it.

*The Union of Four Stars has a mutual defense treaty with the Technocracy, and they were willing to fund military R&D in order to obtain the first fruits of the program, a combination which is very efficient at getting Umeria to share recent and classified weapon designs.

**Umeria relies on a number of factors to keep a lead in particle beam technology. It's as much a question of keeping a lead in machine tools and control software as anything else, though; like the British circa 1900, how we make the guns is not the big secret. The secrets lie in the manufacturing and supporting technology; not everyone else will be able to duplicate our methods even knowing how we did it, any more than, say, China can trivially duplicate the Apollo moon landings without going through the needed infrastructure development.

I try! I'm going to polish it a little before I put it on my wiki.
Yeah were are rather near neighbors which is why Third fleet is arranged on a really tight frontage through the sectors facing the swarm.

...grumblegrumblegrumble freaking Beast...

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

The Imperium's warp gun could be fired at full 1000$ damage. Though I thought $1500 damage from the ion cannon would imply a 1500$ ship or platform?

[K. A. Pital]

Omega loves cutting off your dicks!

[Grif]

Remember, that ion cannon was, all by itself, the main battery of a ship that punches at 1500$ offensive value. You might want to settle for something a bit smaller, something you can fit more of into your hull. Umerian capital ships, for example, use a cluster of three to six beamlines instead of one really big high-current one.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wants to fluff their ships as using Umerian-built particle beam weapons is welcome to, with a few case-by-case exceptions who mostly wouldn't want to, anyway. In your case, you'd probably wind up being sold something a bit less sophisticated,* one of the previous generation of proton cannon rather than the (very) new and (somewhat) classified ion cannon.

Abit less sophisticated will do. My biggest hull is $350 so that ion cannon is slightly out of my reach at the moment.

I did design a dreadnought around firing 2 fairly large energy cannons at the expense of all other weapons. For fluff sake I guess I should call em Umerian proton cannons (tm).

[Simon_Jester]

The Imperium's warp gun could be fired at full 1000$ damage. Though I thought $1500 damage from the ion cannon would imply a 1500$ ship or platform?

The Union of Four Stars commissioned that ion cannon for a system defense monitor that sits in their home star system and can't leave. Presumably Akhlut worked this out with Steve; the ship cost 1200$ but punches at 1500$- the cost savings being because it can't leave the home system.

So Akhlut's got what is, in effect, a 1500$ defense platform orbiting his homeworld, and it uses an eight-kilometer Umerian ion cannon as its main armament. Presumably there are secondary weapons and a lot of defensive protection around the cannon; I can't speak to the details of the design.

I have no such ship, and do not plan to build such, though we're going to be laying down a series of ion cannon armed dreadnoughts soon that use the same technology on a smaller platform (thus, lower firepower). Barring anything exotic from anyone else's superheavies (which I know little to nothing about), that would mean that Imperium warp guns are still, so far as I know, the heaviest energy weapons on a mobile platform in Known Space, and I have no intent to challenge this supremacy for the foreseeable future.

Abit less sophisticated will do. My biggest hull is $350 so that ion cannon is slightly out of my reach at the moment.

I did design a dreadnought around firing 2 fairly large energy cannons at the expense of all other weapons. For fluff sake I guess I should call em Umerian proton cannons (tm).

Your call.

Bear in mind that we are far from the only people in the galaxy who can make big capital ship guns, and we know it. We just specialize in making one particular type of big guns: charged-particle beam weapons. If you want to arm your ships with giant mass drivers or bomb-pumped ultrawave blasters or whatever the heck, they'd have nothing to do with Umeria. If, on the other hand, your nation prefers to rely on imports for heavy capital ship guns, we're always happy to play along. Perfectly fine in my book.

[Thanas]

Everybody - sorry for not taking part in this so far. My spare time is currently eaten up by the world cup and work.

I'll try and get everything (including prologue etc) up until friday.

[Akhlut]

The Imperium's warp gun could be fired at full 1000$ damage. Though I thought $1500 damage from the ion cannon would imply a 1500$ ship or platform?

The Union of Four Stars commissioned that ion cannon for a system defense monitor that sits in their home star system and can't leave. Presumably Akhlut worked this out with Steve; the ship cost 1200$ but punches at 1500$- the cost savings being because it can't leave the home system.

So Akhlut's got what is, in effect, a 1500$ defense platform orbiting his homeworld, and it uses an eight-kilometer Umerian ion cannon as its main armament. Presumably there are secondary weapons and a lot of defensive protection around the cannon; I can't speak to the details of the design.

Yep, worked it out with Steve some weeks ago. He agreed for about a 30% increase in effective value in exchange for a complete lack of mobility.

And aside from the particle cannon, the ship is absolutely bristling with other weaponry and advanced armor and shielding.

[Grif]

Your call.

Bear in mind that we are far from the only people in the galaxy who can make big capital ship guns, and we know it. We just specialize in making one particular type of big guns: charged-particle beam weapons. If you want to arm your ships with giant mass drivers or bomb-pumped ultrawave blasters or whatever the heck, they'd have nothing to do with Umeria. If, on the other hand, your nation prefers to rely on imports for heavy capital ship guns, we're always happy to play along. Perfectly fine in my book.

Yes, my ships are armed with exactly that, charged-particle beam weapons. Though I had no prior idea your nation planned to specialise in such weaponry. But since my nation isn't exactly at the forefront of military technology (and no plans to be such in the foreseeable future), it makes sense for them to import advanced weaponry. It's just a happy coincidence that someone else in the galaxy is supplying said weapons. Makes finding spares easier too.