It's a shame we're gonna hafta kill Shinji Sanjeet, because now I can't make a LRS masturbation joke :V

Ling being in a Tachikoma instead of an aircraft also means my dreams of Asuka and Rei reenacting the test flight scene in Macross Plus goes unfulfilled.
 
Poor Ling. Another victim in a long procession of them.
I don't really see how she can walk away from this in recoverable pieces.

Henriette and Ling are having a happy reunion. That is to say, Ling is happy about being able to smash in Iterator Langley's bitch-ass face. Henriette would not like having her face ruined. She's just recovered from all her traumas and would like to continue being able to think of herself as pretty, tyvm.
I would like to point out that being the proximate cause of the bloodbath that would be a Technocracy invasion of North Korea won't do Henriette's traumas any good. And that is going to happen if she pops off nukes in Tokyo. More pragmatically, the chaos thereof may well allow Ms Clockwork accelerate her timetable further, since wartime means fewer people question her codes.

Can't really think of an appropriate writein though. Sorry.
 
So remind me, what is our plan once/if Ling dies and Sanjeet goes all Instrumentality on our ass?

Well, we could--

Wait fuck, Yinzheng is on their side. Damn it.


[X] Yes: She needs to know she's being beaten. And as a non-emoneut, telling her what's about to happen might... get her to make a mistake. Yes. Ling is not mad. Not mad at all.

Ling: "Iterator Langley is a bitch who needs someone to slap her in the face. That is what many people who have interacted with her have said in the past. Therefore, I will bitchslap Langley on their behalf."

Henriette: "You know, you could just drop the justifications and say you hate my guts. You're not fooling me or anyone except yourself."

Ling: "The Computer says hate is inefficient*." *pauses* "The Computer approves of my course of action. It is the logical and correct thing to do."

Henriette: "And here I thought I was the one who was supposed to have trouble admitting their feelings."



No fusion missiles, because we still need to kill the Godzilleva and I'd rather keep them as our trump card against it.


*Piero is of the opinion that Iterators with their beep boop "hate is inefficient" shtick are being very silly, because he knows from experience that rage and hate are actually very effective motivators depending on what you want to do.
 
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But Corn, don't you want to make another godling, this time in Tokyo?
We did not even blow up Tokyo TV tower. How can we anime?

And furthermore, if Henriette does unfortunately gets her face smashed in, it would be a perfect excuse to get that Prog Appearance enhancement to repair the damage and make her prettier. :V

Take that Ling!
 
[X] Write-In: Attack from point blank. You didn't add all that extra maneuverability to your ARC II simply to avoid getting hit. You did it to maximize your ability to blow shit up. Dance around the tank's cones of fire and hammer those weakspots far beyond the enemy's ability to self-repair.

No, I don't suggest that as a joke option. It's using our advantages as much as possible. The nuclear option is an easy win button with outsize consequences, (both for the assault and after,) and the called shots option has a high chance of simply wasting a turn if the rolls go bad, leaving either calling in Piero or doing something else.

Henriette has Legendary Piloting, meaning she will escape if her vehicle is blown up, but she won't survive afterwards if that tank isn't destroyed beforehand. Henriette has already used her equipment to get into engagement distance, so the best option now is to turn those defensive advantages into an offensive advantage. This turn was Henriette using MAXIMUM DODGING, so now it's time to switch it up to MAXIMUM IN-YOUR-FACE.
 
Uh, shit. Didn't we have a thread goal of not nuking any more cities if possible? Going to have to think about this.
 
[X] Write-In: Doom Through Zoom And Boom
[X] Yes: She needs to know she's being beaten. And as a non-emoneut, telling her what's about to happen might... get her to make a mistake. Yes. Ling is not mad. Not mad at all.


"Pilot Langley," Ling sends by DNI. She finds it much easier than speaking normally, but most people can't handle communicating this way. It'd take them many, many seconds to talk like this - but here and now both of them are plugged into high end war machines and are thinking faster than meatbags can.

"Pilot Clarent," she gets back, a familiar 'voice' in her mind. "I'm surprised. You're handling yourself differently."

"Yours is not." She can't track down precisely where the signal is coming from - but then again, she's shielded herself too. The damage to her mimetic camo is heavy too, so she's not got as much to lose. "You're still overconfident. And an inferior Iterator. And a deviant individual. And-"

"I'm sorry."

The words strike Ling like a kinetic impactor. She doesn't have a response. Because she's focussing on her weapons management and trying to track down Henriette, of course.

"No, really, I am." A sigh - a false vocalisation injected into a DNI-to-DNI conversation. "I was a pretty awful person as a teenager. I went after you because you were a threat to... to what I wanted. Because you'd sometimes beat me in sims. And I am sorry for that. Since we last met, I've had to grow up a lot. Basically, I was kind of a bitch to you. So I have a lot of things to say sorry for."

"Your apologies mean nothing." Ling deploys a high power ground penetrating radar to hunt for the annoying voice. She just needs to keep her distracted, until she shoots her down in flames.

"I talked quite a lot with Major Jane Clarent. Before this current thing, I mean. I didn't know what it meant to be a Clarent before. I thought it was just a surname. And then I talked more with her after she realised what the traitor Gregor was up to."

"Stop attempting psychological warfare on me."

"No, that's the truth." Henriette pauses. "It makes sense why they'd pick you for their little attempted coup. You believe what you're told. You don't ask inconvenient questions. Here - have the actual facts on the ground."

Ling immediately purges the file squirt. She's not an idiot to open an EM-warfare package like that.

"Urgh, you didn't even read it, did you? Well, long story short, we're the ones directly following Command's orders. You've been tricked by a corrupt Progenitor into supporting a coup against the Technocratic Union. And I don't blame you." There's a soft chuckle. "You don't have a disloyal bone in your body. And you're much younger than Jane and haven't learned to overcome what they did to you, like she has."

Ling's stomach feels hot. Not the kind of hot it feels around Sanjeet. The kind of hot it feels around Yinzheng Li. In fact, Henriette Langley is sounding wrong. Wrong-wrong-wrong! She's too soft. She sounds almost kind. Henriette doesn't sound soft. She's never kind. She's spiky and unkind. Is that even her, rather than some drone imitating her? But no, it's handling just like her.

Which is to say, really annoyingly.

"I don't want to have to hurt you," Henriette's voice says. "You're just following orders. If you power down your unit, you won't be sanctioned for this. And if it helps, I'll also let you slap me a few times. I deserve it."

"You can't make me turn traitor just by promising to let me slap you." Without asking, Ling's brain provides the mental image of her bringing her hand into Henriette's face. It does feel... good.

"Would punches do instead?"

"You're making fun of me!" It comes out as an exclamation rather than a flat statement.

"Look, I'm trying to say sorry to someone who's literally betraying the Union right now." Henriette appears to have reached the end of her infamously short amounts of patience. "I'm trying to give you a chance. A chance you deserve because I know more about what happened to you Clarents than I did when I was a bitchy teenager. Are you going to power down or not?"

[RESPONSE GOES HERE]



THE FOLLOWING SECTION IS ONLY USED IF HENRIETTE'S ATTEMPTS AT APOLOGY DO NOT WORK.

IE THAT PROBABLY MEANS IT'S GOING TO BE USED, 'CAUSE HENRIETTE AIN'T ONE OF THE PARTY'S SOCIAL MONKEYS


High up above at the edge of the atmosphere, Henriette finally listens to the warning bleep of her systems and cuts out of her ascent. The air is thin up here, and she checks that her heat shielding - fitted by her sister for use against plasma weaponry - isn't compromised.

And then she flips 180 degrees in one vehicle length, and starts accelerating downwards, adjusting for the motion of the earth. Aiming directly for the multiped. Her inertial shift system glows green, trailing ionised particles. The first sonic boom comes moments into the dive.

And in her wake follows a collapsing mass of air, a pressure wave that has more in common with the front of a nuclear blastwave than any mere sonic boom.

Despite the enforced paralysis, the corners of Henriette's lips curl up. It's probably just from the acceleration. She's certainly not looking forwards to see if she can shift her inertia in the fraction of a second she'll have to avoid pancaking herself straight into the multiped. That would be mad.



The orders are already on the line for the Watchers and Media Control in Japan.

HIGH URGENCY
PREPARE COVER STORY OF MICROMETEOR BURNING UP IN ATMOSPHERE ABOVE JAPAN
LIAISE WITH VE AS NEEDED FOR SUPPORT FROM NASA ET AL
EXPECTED BRIGHT LIGHT, SONIC BOOM
DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT ALLOW RUMOURS OF NUCLEAR WEAPON USE TO SPREAD
CROSS REF PREV INCIDENT "Chelyabinsk-20130215"



The boom shatters glass across the area. The surrounding buildings, already weakened by the fighting, sag and collapse in clouds of shattered concrete. The weaponised lab experiments were never made to face this kind of noise and many collapse from ruptured ear drums. Piero grits his teeth and shakes his head, mildly disorientated.



[Henriette - Forces 4 - As an all-round self-proclaimed badass with a thing for getting to pilot lots of walkers, Henriette is familiar with the weaknesses and strengths of spider-walkers like this one. Like all modern military hardware, their external sensors are weak against overpressure and pressure fluctuations - and spider walkers have it worse, because in extreme cases their legs shear off due to the stress of the body being applied to the narrow connective joins in the legs. Now, normally you could only get that kind of overpressure with a nuclear weapon, but Henriette has a reactionless drive. All she needs to do is buzz the multiped fast enough and low enough and her sonic boom will shatter everything around her. Like the ground. And nearby buildings. And the external sensors and the legs of the multiped. You'd have to be a legendary pilot to pull off something like this, but hey, fuck you she is. Enhanced by Int + Piloting, requires a fair amount of time to calculate the best approach and then get a sufficiently large run up to build up the needed speed (hence why she's already setting this up while she talks to Ling)]
 
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I am somewhat concerned that people actually want to close in with the big spidertank, considering the spidertank probably has better melee options than our VTOL which notably did not take the PUNCHY ROBOT package.
 
That sonic boom run is also a great stunt for dumping a whole lot of inertia into a weapon shot. Or dump it into the the sonic boom itself as part of the same rote so the it's not just overpressure but impact in the attack. I'd like some sort of inertia dump included because a dead stop from hypersonic is the sort of thing that should strain that system otherwise. A pancaked spider in a crater is a cool visual for the attack outcome too.
 
What the heck. I'll support it.

[X] Write-In: Doom Through Zoom And Boom
[X Yes: She needs to know she's being beaten. And as a non-emoneut, telling her what's about to happen might... get her to make a mistake. Yes. Ling is not mad. Not mad at all.
 
I am okay with Maneuver GraMX.

[X] Write-In: Doom Through Zoom And Boom
[X Yes: She needs to know she's being beaten. And as a non-emoneut, telling her what's about to happen might... get her to make a mistake. Yes. Ling is not mad. Not mad at all.
 
[X] Write-In: Doom Through Zoom And Boom
[X] Yes: She needs to know she's being beaten. And as a non-emoneut, telling her what's about to happen might... get her to make a mistake. Yes. Ling is not mad. Not mad at all.
 
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This may well be an awful plan, just to make it clear. It was hammered out while my code was compiling.

Just for one, it has a not-insignificant chance of Henriette accidentally turning herself into a projectile.

Bandwagoning behind it isn't necessarily the best of ideas and it can no doubt be improved.
 
That sonic boom run is also a great stunt for dumping a whole lot of inertia into a weapon shot. Or dump it into the the sonic boom itself as part of the same rote so the it's not just overpressure but impact in the attack. I'd like some sort of inertia dump included because a dead stop from hypersonic is the sort of thing that should strain that system otherwise. A pancaked spider in a crater is a cool visual for the attack outcome too.
In particular, I think this is a good idea. Let's see... we didn't take the railgun or the spinal cannon, right? Do we have a major primary weapon like that?

I don't really want to dump it into the sonic boom, because at that point we've crossed the line from "looks kind of like a nuclear blast" to "straight up is a nuclear blast". That's a lot of delta-vee, and I want it going into something that'll penetrate armor and dump most of its energy into Technocracy stuff and not leave much for the Masses to pick over, instead of leveling half the city.
 
In particular, I think this is a good idea. Let's see... we didn't take the railgun or the spinal cannon, right? Do we have a major primary weapon like that?

I don't really want to dump it into the sonic boom, because at that point we've crossed the line from "looks kind of like a nuclear blast" to "straight up is a nuclear blast". That's a lot of delta-vee, and I want it going into something that'll penetrate armor and dump most of its energy into Technocracy stuff and not leave much for the Masses to pick over, instead of leveling half the city.
Very unlike a nuclear blast. We're not making the shockwave into an explosion, we're making it into a hammer.

Or perhaps a palm...
 
Yes, but that's not what a "dump the energy into the shockwave" Rote would do - that would just literally dump the energy into the shockwave, with predictable results on everything around you.

We don't actually have a focus to go Heavy Wind on Ling. We only barely have a focus for putting the energy into the shockwave with the inertial compensator; I'm not really seeing a good way of getting fine control over the air out of that.
 
Okay, important question, is Ling Clarent a character we actually want to keep alive? As big and complicated as this story has gotten, I feel like just straight up murdering a few side characters shouldn't be something we dismiss out of hand.
 
Okay, important question, is Ling Clarent a character we actually want to keep alive? As big and complicated as this story has gotten, I feel like just straight up murdering a few side characters shouldn't be something we dismiss out of hand.

Well, if we kill her:

1. Sanjeet is going to go full Instrumentality on our shit.
2. If she dies, she can be replaced.
 
In particular, I think this is a good idea. Let's see... we didn't take the railgun or the spinal cannon, right? Do we have a major primary weapon like that?

I don't really want to dump it into the sonic boom, because at that point we've crossed the line from "looks kind of like a nuclear blast" to "straight up is a nuclear blast". That's a lot of delta-vee, and I want it going into something that'll penetrate armor and dump most of its energy into Technocracy stuff and not leave much for the Masses to pick over, instead of leveling half the city.

Why would we want a major primary weapon? Our inertial dampening gimmick respects conservation of momentum while only throwing conservation of energy a vague, reactor-shaped handwave. Our goal is to apply sufficient amounts of energy to the spidertank. And since momentum scales with velocity while energy scales with velocity squared, we get the most bang for our buck by dumping our momentum into the lightest receptacle that can both accept it and avoid disintegrating through atmospheric friction / velocity-induced fusion.

I mean, I went to Wolfram Alpha and put in the numbers to find out what kind of KE dumping all our momentum into a 10g bullet would get us, assuming we're a hypersonic deathcopter (10000kg, mach 20). And then I tried to find my error. And then I tried to find it again, because the number was too goddamn high and I couldn't believe it. We're talking a single 10g bullet with energy equivalent to 4.5896 megatons.

So let's not go that far - I'd rather not deploy the equivalent of a nuclear weapon in order to avoid deploying an actual nuclear weapon. But I reckon that, toned down, it'd make a pretty good Forces focus, as well as an excellent focus for overcoming Clarent's point and reactive defenses. After all, we haven't seen any signs of Autochthonian-level hypertech in the spidertank yet, and Clarent's paradigm says that barring superluminal sensors, you can't see something coming until it's in your light cone. And at high c-fractional velocities, that's far, far too late.

Forces 4, Prime 3: We kill Ling with a bullet. Forces up to 4 for a highly-directed attack that hits like the bastard child of a kinetic energy penetrator and a dial-a-yield suitcase nuke. Prime 3 for "It's just... too fast. Faster than even an augmented mind can react, faster than your scanners can pick up, fast enough to ignore armor enhancements, fast enough that there's nowhere 'safe' where it can hit without mission-killing the tank." (i.e. counterspelling whatever wards Ling has up, whether they're Corr, Forces, Matter, Entropy or what have you).

Okay, important question, is Ling Clarent a character we actually want to keep alive? As big and complicated as this story has gotten, I feel like just straight up murdering a few side characters shouldn't be something we dismiss out of hand.

I want Ling alive, and off her emotion-suppressants, and finding out who she is under the heavy heavy layers of Technocratic brainwashing. But in a pitched battle, with her being nearly as good as Langley, and when we're desperately rushing before the actual heavy units can get brought up to the surface? I think that Henriette pulls the trigger, knowing full-well what she's doing.
 
That reasoning is precisely why I wanted a major weapon - because a heavy projectile would minimize the amount of stupid high damage we'd do, which is something I'm concerned about.

But sure, we can dump a significant fraction of our inertia into a bullet with that focus. I'm a little worried about the tunability of that effect, though - this is one of those times where we don't want to roll too high either.
 
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