SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread II

[MKSheppard]

So so so glad I'm nowhere near this. Damned collectors.

[Steve]

Awesome, Oskuro. Glad to see you back.

We haven't done much with the Orkz, really. Well, I think the kitty-girls have had some skirmishes with Ork bandits, and they've featured in Jester's storyline. But I think you'll like the way Jester wrote the Orkz in the Badlands.

[Steve]

STEVE:

His surname is basically a weird mc-germanized pronunciation of 'masturbator'.

I'm not surprised. Oh well, it fits anyway.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Man... the 2nd SDN Worlds STGOD game was 2 fucking years ago and started on Aug 22, 2008.

Time really flies eh? We should have cocked a bottle of wine and sat down and thought about it around a campfire a month ago, without our guns and nukes of course.

[PeZook]

The Prussians? Man, goddamned Germanic warmongers!

[Shroom Man 777]

They'll be too late anyway. Now, come on. Go forth and kill!

[KlavoHunter]

Aaaaand I'm back.

Long story short, my ISP-provided router died back in July, and only yesterday did we get a replacement. Hooray for work ethic during summer! Now on to the pain in the ass that will be demanding a refund for the two months worth of connection fees.

My apologies for vanishing to everyone involved in SDN Worlds 4, and particularly to Steve, who helped me get me up to speed for the game.

Jeez, now I have quite a bit of reading to do.

Yayyyy, my orky-poo is back!

[Simon_Jester]

Good to have you back, Oskuro; I think you will find that my portrayal of your distant Badlands cousins to reflect credibly on the honor of the Orkish people.

T-haus is in U-27.

I still think shoals have varying intensities and currents. So you can have meteorologists in weather stations inside meteors who will read shoal currents and shoal conditions. Shoal condition 1! Shoal condition 2! Like storm conditions!

Sounds almost like the Warp...

Maybe the warp is what happens when you take a sector of hyperspace and marinade it in GRIMDARK for a few million years...

[PeZook]

Time for some diplomacy

[Oskuro]

Glad to be back. Now on to catch up with the internet. Oh, and also, on to try and find the stuff I had written for the Orks, which must be (hopefully) lying around the disk recovery file dump. Because turns out the power spike that fried our router also did a number on one of my drives.

Incidentally, since the Orks are so anarchic, I personally don't mind what other writers do about them. Heck, dress them in pink frilly dresses for all I care, I can always write that away as "That Klan we rarely talk about".

[Simon_Jester]

Well, I hope that you will not merely not mind my material, but actually like it.

Orks appear prominently in the later portions of my Glowworm arc, which you can find indexed in my post in the Plotline Index thread. There's also "Boss Migwazza, A Biography," indexed under "miscellaneous."

[Oskuro]

As I just said elsewhere, I really should dead-treefy (print) all the stories and read them during my daily commute

[PeZook]

Get the Kindle Edition!

[Darkevilme]

The Collectors truly go out of their way to confuse people don't they. I mean who the hell goes to deliver diplomats using super huge warships, other than the Byzantines of course.

Ah well on the plus side it probably means there wont be shields to have to deal with when it comes time to return the favour and probe the collectors.

[KlavoHunter]

Sorry, there is no official Klavostani contingent joining the Second Battle of Tannhauser Gate.

Any mercenaries in the area who are otherwise unoccupied and lacking sufficient sanity to willingly go into an engagement with Collectors... Well, they are there and can be hired, but there's not a ton of them.

[Siege]

That's probably why the mercs haven't showed, then .

Also, I'm having serious doubts any stealth cruiser could sneak into a system like Shin-Hokkaido, which is a heavily industrialized part of a 7,000 point sector, and currently occuppied by something on the order of 20-30,000 points worth of warships, without anyone noticing. I mean, that's one hell of a lot of sensors sweeping for any dirty tricks the Collectors might try to pull -- you'd imagine a cloaked ship would stand out regardless of how excellently sneaky it is. It's a bit like parading a B-2 over the world's densest concentration of advanced mil-spec radars; I'm pretty sure that violates some of them Laws 'o Stealth that Simon drew up.

I don't mind the Chamarran ship being there, but I reserve the right to write a bit about a ship noticing it being there. (I promise I won't blow it up though -- far better to let other people be properly intimidated by what happens if you play by Koprulu Zone Rules! )

[Darkevilme]

It is a terrible thing when your orders are to shadow a ship that's going into a situation that will put stealth systems to such a test like this. The Sneakily is trying to avoid being detected by hanging back beyond the Collector fleet so 'in theory' should be able to avoid showing up on the active sensors you're bathing the Monoliths in. But...yeah, this is a crazy stunt they've never tried pulling before and the Solarian's have a better understanding of hyperspace physics than the understanding that made the subspace baffle on the Blade cruiser.

[Steve]

Honestly, darkevil, I want to hear your defense on the cloaked ship's presence before I pass judgement on it. The Imperium is much closer to the area and capable of interacting; you are 16 sectors away. That's a 16 day trip at military flank; it's still probably a week trip at flank hyper... and it's probably more than that, since the 16 sector bit is a straight line and I doubt you'd go through the Pfhor Empire.

Would you really have ships ranging all the way to Imperium and Solarian frontiers? Because if not, the only credible way that ship gets there is if it is of Light tonnage value range and came by Warp Gate. And I doubt very much it'd be unknown to the Solarians then.

[Darkevilme]

Honestly, darkevil, I want to hear your defense on the cloaked ship's presence before I pass judgement on it. The Imperium is much closer to the area and capable of interacting; you are 16 sectors away. That's a 16 day trip at military flank; it's still probably a week trip at flank hyper... and it's probably more than that, since the 16 sector bit is a straight line and I doubt you'd go through the Pfhor Empire.

Would you really have ships ranging all the way to Imperium and Solarian frontiers? Because if not, the only credible way that ship gets there is if it is of Light tonnage value range and came by Warp Gate. And I doubt very much it'd be unknown to the Solarians then.

The Sneakily does it and its sisters were stationed on the edge of Collector space watching for Monoliths cause they're under orders to find one and then try to do monumentally stupid things to it in the name of mad science. They spotted one pass by and followed it. This ship didn't go all the way from the Hierarchy, it went at painful speed from near collector territory. Albeit in doing so it's screwed up its hyperdrives such that returning to shoals will probably vaporize it without repairs in the meantime.

[Simon_Jester]

Next Doctor Susie is up, title being: To the UmerNet!

Contains some comments on Shepistani society and the aftereffects of the Amplitur War. Also a quote from a senior Umerian condensed-matter physicist who bears a striking resemblance to a bald Kevin Spacey, currently director of LEXCOMP.

Thanks once again to Mayabird for combined proofreader-muse duty.

[Steve]

BTW, King Charles of Fynn was hardly as important or influential a monarch as Jean-Baptiste was, but I expect the neighboring states, even the interstellar powers, would dispatch someone to the funeral, to be held on the 26th of February 3400. As it is I intend for King Edward and his wife to be there, but that is because of the shared loss (the same Hyperspace Incident that claimed King Edward's parents, parents-in-law, and older brother killed the Queen and Crown Prince of Fynn); I expect the Ascendancy and France would more likely send a younger sibling of the standing monarch or, perhaps, the Heir-Presumptive or Heir-Apparent at very most, for instance. Depending on how they viewed Fynn and the slain King.

[Steve]

*posts more Fynn/Sector X-13 stuff*

Turning and turning in the widening gyre....

[Shroom Man 777]

It would be awesome to see the Collectors react adversely to the sudden arrival of the Chamarran stealth ship. Like, misconstruing it as a sneak attack attempt and making it go BOOM!

[PeZook]

Heh..."someone expendable"

[Shroom Man 777]

Use ROBOT RIVER as the Collector envoy! Or the T-X.