They are not in.
I have no idea if they are or not. But I wouldn't put it past him.
Awesome! There's somewhat less edge there!BTW JMper, still need to catch up on the BelleBatt thread at spacebattles. You have a lot of pages there. Keep up the good work on your story.
Attention Senior Admirals and forum users, i have received grave news from A:AFS, apparently the hiatus was due to Hieda deciding whether or not to continue the story.
Long story short, in an A/N in chapter 251, he has decided to continue the story and finish it at chapter 500, you may view said A/N at your....displeasure.
Technically 249 but it's still far too many.
*shrugs*Heh...some of his reviewers were also complaining about this thread and why we hate this story and how we should "get a life" and all that crap.
I was making a joke.That reviewer was talking about us individuals to get a life, apparently he fails to see that we have merits and reasons as to why we criticise this fic....but y'know...White Knights.
The author also states that he intends to spite us because we want the story to be done and dusted, so the show must go on he says....as to why I write this tidbit?...well its insurance just in case you guys don't want to read the A/N.
A/N:
I could have very well ended the story right here at chapter 250. The thought definitely crossed my mind during this brief break I took: Damon's dead (for the fourth time), meaning the story itself should be dead too. There are other stories of mine that desperately need tending to.
And then I remembered someone telling me that Fanfiction only lets your story have a maximum of 500 chapters. Since I'm halfway there, I may as well see what's at the end. Because it's only normal to write another 250 chapters. What do you mean, people don't write 5-million word stories?
Not to mention there's an entire forum of people out there somewhere in Internetland who want nothing less than me dead in a fire and this story deleted from the ends of the earth. So just to spite those particular individuals, the show must go on.
But I wasn't just being a lazy potato these past few chapterless days: I've been busy doing some maintenance on my story and is auxiliaries to get everything completely up to date with the entire story as a whole. Here is a list of the following tasks that have been updated about the story:
-Ch. 250 has been slightly updated, added a few more lines of dialogue for Damon and Blackwood.
-Ch. 169 Stat Sheet has been updated to now include all stats for ship girls introduced into the story so far, including the British/German fleets
-A:AFS TvTropes character page is being updated regularly to include all ship girls introduced so far
-Critical Research Failure issues listed on A:AFS TvTropes YMMV page addressed and/or corrected
Below are the reasonings behind the changes made because of the CRF points stated above:
A nuclear war between Iran and the United States that triggers the rest of the world into a nuclear World War III
This is the basic, underlying premise of the entire story, and one that many detractors have a huge problem with before they get anywhere deep into the story. I've stated it before and I'll state it however many times I need to, this story was written on a mere whim, with no real deep thought put into the plot at the time of its genesis. Curse my ignorance of modern nuclear geopolitics all you want, but at the end of the day, this is just another stupid fanfiction, not the next hot topic of debate in today's international politics. Therefore, I will not be changing the premises simply because it's far too late for that. It's flawed, yes, but at this point changing the entire story just to fix this is unreasonable, even by my standards.
Travel times mentioned in the story are unrealistic, given the in-universe nature of the nuclear apocalypse and the resulting decay of modern highway infrastructure, vehicular debris, and frequency of radiation pockets.
I'll be honest - I didn't really put too much thought into how long it would take for the characters in the story to get from Point A to Point B. The only times when I really seriously put in some thought into this was whenever the characters would be flying from one location to the other, so I would take into consideration the speeds of whatever vehicle they were flying on and a VERY rough estimate of the distances they were flying to calculate their ETA's. And I'm not a hardcore mathematician, so calculating the ETA's down to the millisecond isn't something I'm particularly keen on, unfortunately. I was even considering at one point just not even bothering with all the ETA calculations and just write in very vague phrases of time progression like "after a while" or "later that evening", but that's boring narration, and I feel like the readers deserve at least some kind of detail. If the ETA's don't add up to be exactlywhat they ought to be, given varying circumstances, then there's nothing I can or will do about this, because frankly I don't want to be spending entire afternoons doing the math for these kinds of things, not to mention there are so many times when the fleet/characters are on the move that going back and fixing them all in the first place would take me a long time. Plus, I detest math, so that doesn't help.
Really the only way you'll get me to change these things is if someone goes back and finds every single instance of a travel ETA I've put into the story and calculates every single one of them correctly or within reasonable parameters given the story's setting and in-universe circumstances. But none of you will do that, so I don't have to worry about this. But in the off chance that someone is insane and courteous enough to do this, then I will gladly go back and put in correct ETA's.
In Chapter 1, Damon can't shoot his MK-14 left-handed unless the rifle itself is modified for left-hand casing ejection.
This is a bit ambiguous on the part of my writing, so I apologize for this...two years late, it seems. The narration depicts Damon wielding his MK-14 with his left arm, but I only intended for that particular scene in the chapter to depict him simply holding his rifle in his left hand, not shooting it left-handed (for the record, I'd always imagined Damon to be right-handed). My knowledge of firearms is nowhere near as good as it should be to be writing a story like this, but I at least know the MK-14 has a default right-hand casing ejection port.
Damon tells Murakumo that he's "immune" to radiation. In addition, radiation should normally take thousands of years to clean up, so decontaminating two continents' worth of it should be impossible, or at least highly improbable.
I will wholeheartedly admit I was totally unaware that "radiation immunity" is not a thing, and that instead the correct phrase is "radiation resistance". Very recently, after noticing this point, I've switched my narration to say "resistant to radiation" henceforth. Excuse my lack of proper medical knowledge and lingo.
I also was not aware that radiation can't simply be "cleaned up" or decontaminated easily.
To many of you, this may seem like the most obvious fact about radiation in the world, but I'll freely profess I was oblivious to this. However, just like the above point about the premise of the story, a possible nuclear war instigated by the United States and Iran, however flawed this is, it's not like I can do anything about it now, 250 chapters in. So again, you'll have to forgive me for this, but this, too, I cannot and will not change.
In Chapter 2, it's mentioned that Damon's mother passed radiation on to him while he was still developing as a fetus, which should usually result in either an abortion or cancer for the fetus.
Again, another one of my unfamiliarities with the true nature of radiation - you can see a pattern here, can't you. This has been corrected, the mention of Losira passing radiation off to Damon when he was a fetus has been removed.
Except this was mentioned in chapter 3. You could at least put the correct chapter number to help me find it if you're going to point this out, right?
In Chapter 4, Damon states that about 90% of basic firearms training is bullshit.
This I will gladly change, since I've taken basic firearms training courses in high school and understand the importance of proper firearms handling. I guess at the time of writing the chapter, I thought it would be in-character for Damon to say something like this, but now, this looks dumb even to me. This has been fixed.
Also in Chapter 4, Damon talks of a Russian pilot who defected to the United States during the post-war purges and had brought his Mi-24 with him, and how it was very useful in transporting heavy cargo, specifically vehicles and debris.
I was always aware of the Mi-24's attack helicopter nature, but I guess I should have researched its cargo towing capacity first before saying something like this. This has been fixed.
In Chapter 5, the U.S.S. Alabama is mentioned to still be operational, which in reality she cannot be due to her conversion into a museum ship.
It appears that my knowledge on museum ships is also sorely lacking. One of these days I may take the time to visit one just to see what one's like. This has been fixed.
In Chapter 6, Murakumo doesn't immediately recognize the audio dots and dashes as Morse when she ought to recognize it immediately, given her historical warship nature.
I was thinking about just leaving this as it was, because I could have said that Murakumo's long nineteen-year-dormancy may have rendered her unable to recall certain things about herself as a ship girl, similar to how a computer that hasn't been turned on for a long time takes some time longer to boot up. But I eventually decided against it, since it doesn't seem likely that the technology behind constructing a ship girl would really let this happen. This has been fixed.
On the account of bauxite only being used by destroyers during their constructions, I personally don't care for that. Clearly I have taken huge liberties with the concept of ship girls in my story, so ingame properties of resources like bauxite do not concern me in the slightest. Besides, if this point is going to be made, then you have to take into consideration the role of steel in the story as well: ship girls can slap steel patches over a wound and bam, it's healed (after like twenty of them)! Wow, so magical! So nitpicking the role of resources in the story is a little silly to me, which may infuriate the game's purists, but hey, this is just a stupid fanfiction at the end of the day. After all, you can't expect someone like me who's never even touched the game its to really follow its mechanics faithfully at all. On top of which, the role of bauxite in this story, its function of boosting a ship girl's resistance to incoming damage, is mere story trivia, and it's not like it has played some kind of huge role in the story thus far, and I personally don't see it doing so in the future.
In Chapter 7, the programmers who built the ship girls to end conflicts as swiftly and quickly as possible are failures because that's not how the World War II warships were designed to do, and neither were the naval battles in which they participated simple hour-long ventures.
I'm not even sure if the person writing this took the time to think this through himself/herself. Yes, I understand that naval battles in the past took days or perhaps even months to conclude, and yes, I get that ending battles as fast as possible wasn't what warships were meant to do back in those days. But obviously this story isn't taking place in the 1940's, when naval military technology and contemporary naval strategy certainly enforced this school of thought. While the equipment that ship girls use in this story are certainly more or less replicas of the same weapons they used in the second World War, that obviously doesn't mean the tactics or the nature of war have carried over since then. This was deliberating writing on my part, and I'll say it again - the developers of the F.L.E.E.T. Project intended for the ship girls to end potential conflicts as swiftly and efficiently as possible. There are several reasons for why I did this:
1. Modern naval military technology (and just military technology in general nowadays) is, from what I can tell, designed to give their users the clear advantage in a battle or conflict, and if I am at all wrong about this, please enlighten me on this. A modern missile-guided destroyer is equipped with missiles (no shit) designed to knock out targets with one shot, rather than repeated shots from a 12.7cm turret (although they still do carry mounted guns just in case). Therefore, I don't see why it would be so unfathomably unreasonable for the developers to follow this particular military mindset and design ship girls this way. This, and you seem to be forgetting that the ship girls in this story, officially, were constructed to be auxiliary assets for the United States Navy (and who knows, perhaps auxiliary soldiers for the Army too, given how well they fight as infantry in the story), so in my head, at least, their ability to start and end conflicts as quickly and cleanly as possible makes perfect sense to me.
2. Even if you choose not to accept the aforementioned reason(s), the technology used to build ship girls is clearly not feasible IRL anyway and is basically a huge deus ex machina to establish ship girls as a prominent presence in the story. Protocols, cellular boosting, wetware technology in the form of Smartsteel (and have you even read Chapter 214? I'd hate to see how you'd react...oh wait, you probably haven't even gotten near it)...the point is, the technology that makes things like this even possible in the first place, for ship girls to possess them inherently, is a kind of technology that can very much so shorten the duration of a naval battle, or just about any battle, for that matter. Ship girls don't have clunky Morse code communication or detection abilities limited by the technology of the second World War, they have quite unrealistic abilities to make and end war. Shigure's Guilt Protocol? Kongou's Yamato Cannon? Javelin's Clarent? All of the naval battles that I have depicted in the story itself have also only lasted a maximum of a handful of hours so far due to things like these. I understand that even today's technology isn't perfect enough to keep battles within a few hours, but clearly this story is not using real life as some sort of basis for proper wartime tactics and strategy. If you think that this story was intended to be written as a guide for modern 21st century warfighting for ship girls, I must confront you by saying that you are sorely wrong, and that while I try my best to base the story on realism, clearly this requires a degree of suspension of disbelief on the reader's part, which perhaps you are unable to exhibit. No wonder so many of this story's readers act the way they do towards it.
In any case, this will not be changed.
Sheo Darren-Today at 5:51 AM
Did... Did he just take a shot at his own readers?!
Did that motherfucker just diss the intelligence of his own readers?!
Die in a fire, Paul. You did this to your readers. You do not get to blame them for your incompetence.
Also in Chapter 7, there are numerous inconsistencies regarding earthquakes in the Montgomery area.
These have been fixed.
Also in Chapter 7, there is some confusion regarding "audio frequencies".
I was not aware of the technical definition of "audio frequencies" and have therefore changed the phrase to "audio disturbances" for the sake of clarity. I certainly didn't mean to cause some confusion from this.
Also in Chapter 7, Murakumo and Damon head from the Hyundai Manufacturing Plant to Montgomery Regional Airport in half an hour when in reality it should take them at least two hours on foot.
Unless they're running. The wording is very vague, I admit, I should have written Damon's line as "We're running" instead of just "we're on foot". Damon is a mutated human, and
Murakumo is a ship girl, so they don't have a problem with running at race pace with full equipment on, averaging a little over four minutes per mile. If either Damon or Murakumo didn't have superhuman strength/endurance, obviously I wouldn't have made this mistake - just for future reference, I do actually track the characters' paths throughout the story using Google Maps, I have a good idea of what the distances are that they cover, even if my ETA calculation isn't all that great. I have made the appropriate adjustments to the dialogue regarding this.
Also in Chapter 7, there are some errors regarding .50 caliber ballistics of Damon's DSR-50.
These have been fixed. Regarding the ballistics CPU, I played a lot of Black Ops 2 back in the day, so you can see where that went wrong - I've just removed all the mentions of the ballistics CPU from the story entirely since I feel that if I have no idea how something works, it's best just not mentioning it in the first place. However, the DSR-50 will keep its five round magazine, the main reason being the narration has already described Damon and later Zuikaku using this DSR-50 and has narrated them using five-round mags, so going back and fixing all them and correcting the context around them is just too big a hassle for me to feel its worth. Just assume he's using a modified set of magazines for the rifle.
Also in Chapter 7, there are some ballistics inconsistencies regarding Damon shooting the gun out of the bandit boy's hands.
Fixed - now, the narration describes Damon still shooting the gun away from the boy's hands, but the .45 GAP round shatters upon contact with the rifle and sprays bullet shrapnel onto his arms, and the boy runs away with the appropriate injuries.
Also in Chapter 7, Murakumo is stated to be "profiling" people when normally that can't be done with visuals alone.
I think you're thinking too hard into the technical terms of the word "profiling", and as such, this leads me to believe that this point of concern is just you nitpicking, but for the sake of absolute clarity, I have fixed the wording from "profiling" to "observing" to maintain a more neutral ground.
Also in Chapter 7, Damon is stated to be running along a telephone wire when that shouldn't really be possible.
I guess it sounded like a good idea two years ago, but now it doesn't, now that someone's gone and pointed that out. This has been changed to depict Murakumo simply tossing Damon across the street from roof to roof instead.
In Chapter 8, Damon's mention of three days traveling from Houston to Montgomery is questionable; snipers don't use .22 bullets; the highway infrastructure described near the Baptist Medical Center South is incorrect; Damon would have died if he said he was shot in between the lungs with a .45 ACP because that's where the heart is; and that nukes couldn't have destroyed all of the satellites in the atmosphere.
Damon's mention of three days has been changed to be more vague, since there's no suggestion of how long it realistically would have taken him and Murakumo.
The sniper's rifle and ammo have been changed to make more sense to a scoped AR-15 platform rifle using standard STANAG 5.56x45mm. I'm fairly certain STANAG can penetrate normal truck windshields, even though I'm not a ballistics expert.
Highway infrastructure description fixed. For some reason, I vaguely remember making sense, because now that I look at it a second time through Google Maps, it sure as hell doesn't now.
Highway infrastructure description fixed. For some reason, I vaguely remember making sense, because now that I look at it a second time through Google Maps, it sure as hell doesn't now.
Unless the bullet hit Damon below the heart, in between the bottom folds of the lungs. Granted, in order to survive this, his lung should have gotten clipped by the bullet too, otherwise it would have struck either the celiac artery or the hepatic vein, but hey, that's still technically "in between the lungs", so I don't need to change this, since Damon can legitimately say he was shot there and still survive. Hell, it could even be that he got shot in between the lungs above the heart too, but below the heart makes more sense here.
Damon's dialogue has been fixed to be more vague on the whole lack of international communications so that his words don't imply that all of the world's satellites were shot down or destroyed in the nuclear war.
In Chapter 9, "Freeway 231" mentioned in the story is actually US Route 231. In addition, it's improbable that Damon would know if roads "feel" good enough to traverse over.
Freeway 231 has been changed to US Route 231. It's a little hard to know that, going only off what's written on Google Maps, and it's not like I actively go around clicking all the roads to see what their proper names are. Damon's dialogue regarding the highway feel thing has also been fixed - reading over it again, it really does just seem awkward to read, so I got rid of that bit.
Chapter 10: there are a few errors involving Damon's Ural as depicted in the story; "taking a left onto Interstate 75" is technically incorrect; there are a few errors with the interchange junction of I-75 and Route 278; there's no such thing as a "civilian" assault rifle.
The Ural details have been fixed; the Interstate 75 detail has been corrected; the narration has been changed to make more sense; "assault" has been removed from the phrase "civilian assault rifle" (I should have taken a second to think about this).
Chapter 11:
I went back to Chapter 10 and corrected the ending dialogue to have Damon mention having a few IED's in the bed of his truck. Since I don't want to try to deal with a topic I know very little about, I cut the whole homemade IED thing out and have made appropriate changes throughout Chapter 11. Even though Chapter 11 has a reasonable premise for why there would be fresh chems in the university campus, the issue of a proper stabilizer convinced me to just cut this part out altogether; it's just more convenient and safer to just assume Damon's truck came with a few ready-made IED's.
Murphy's Law has been changed to Finagle's Law. Though, I grew up knowing this as Murphy's Law, so expect me to write it as "Murphy's Law" again in case I mention it in future chapters because that's what I learned growing up.
Damon is a mutated human; his night vision isn't exactly "normal" if his eyes have it without the assistance of NV goggles or other ocular augmentation. He doesn't get affected as much when lights get shone in his face or if he sees lights while in NV mode. If there's another, more proper term for this, let me know. Infrared, maybe? Eh, it's just easier calling it night vision for the sake of consistency.
Maybe for a normal person a .45 GAP round isn't meant to be fired with one hand, but Damon isn't a normal person. Even though I understand you truly despise Damon as a character, please try not to forget that Damon is much stronger than your average human, so he can get away with the "knife-and-pistol" stance with a .45 GAP gun. I will keep this noted, however, for future mentions of this stance, in case it's not Damon doing this.
Damon stabs his karambit into someone's skull by jamming the curved tip in first, with a forward thrust, and then flicking his wrist up to jam the blade all the way up through the brain. Very inefficient and most likely not recommended, on top of not being the proper way to use a karambit, I know, but Damon can get away with this, since this kills his target instantly.
Chapter 12:
I don't know why you brought up the girl who got hit by the nail bomb - it's already written there that she immediately started pulling out the nails from her arms and face, so I'm confused as to why you made a problem out of something that was already written the way you wanted it, unless I'm looking at the wrong part of the chapter here, but there's only one girl getting hit by a nail bomb in the whole chapter...
Amatsukaze now kicks the pilot of the Little Bird out of the chopper, instead of her sawn-off kicking him out.
Assume that the DSR-50 is just using M-2 rounds (used against personnel and unarmored targets), so Damon's not shooting down the Little Bird, even if he is trying to do exactly that. So I don't see anything I ought to change here.
The dialogue regarding the C-4 has been changed so that they've been acquired from the enemies' supplies instead of just being found randomly outside a building. It probably makes more sense this way instead of seeming like a small deus ex machina.
In Chapter 114, Benjamin Korotayev's first name should be written as "Veniamin" or "Venyamin".
Fixed, Hibiki's Fleet Log now displays Korotayev's name in its natural Russian variant.
However, just keep in mind that for actual story purposes, unless the narration explicitly mentions Korotayev being addressed by first name in Russian, he will still be called Benjamin.
Again, special thanks to TvTropes user eagle108 for looking over the story.
This almost looks like a patch update for an online game or something. Anyway, BACK TO KILLING! - er, writing.
-Akyuu no Joshu