There was once an Empire that spanned the galaxy and sought to defeat the natural tendency of the universe towards decay. But no civilization is invulnerable, and the Empire fell. It has left hellscapes, ruins, and valuable wonders from a lost age scattered throughout its splintered successors and the hardscrabble survivors of a galactic-scale apocalypse, seeded the precursors to a trillion small conflicts.
For historians and utopians, the term used is "tragedy." But for people like you - freelance commanders of powerful starfaring war machines - there is opportunity where others see loss.
The Empire may be gone, but some of its core ideals live on. Existence breeds conflict, managed or unmanaged. The only moral arc nature has bends towards meaningless decay. And if you believe in anything, if you wish for anything but being forgotten and discarded, the only way to etch your values onto the universe is to fight for what you believe in.
The Collapse ended a galaxy-spanning multiracial, multicultural civilization so great and long-lasting that "Emperor" and "Empire," without more specific adjectives, mean that superpolity which reprogrammed space and time across the Milky Way and made up the vast majority of the history of its component citizens. The Emperor's imperium, Their power to command and Their legitimacy, was based upon the development and imposition of a system called Architecture onto realspace. Architecture transformed the galaxy by allowing the reprogramming and alteration of the laws of physics, transforming inert void into a mutable region akin but not entirely like virtual reality. The Empire's citizens were marked by Souls - informational ghosts that allowed for reincarnation and interfacing with this programmable reality, and its most advanced technology was based on alteration and modification of the metrics which made up the laws of physics.
The Empire was defined by its war against the natural tendency towards entropy and stagnation, which it fought by creating systems within systems to encourage competition and controlled conflict, to incentivize forgiveness and reevaluation, and expand in both size and sophistication. The Empire said that your values were worth what you were willing to sacrifice for them, that even though the universe might be a cold and uncaring place your fight to impose your beliefs onto the structure of decay and forgetting that undergirds reality was meaningful and righteous in and of itself.
The Empire lasted for epochs, but not forever. It Collapsed, when the Emperor - and the self-stabilization and feedback systems the Emperor was - failed for an unknown reason and with little warning. Collapse theoreticians have multiple competing hypotheses - software flaw, enemy action, scientific experiment, apotheosis - but most people care little about the underlying cause, as the Collapse was an apocalypse on a galactic scale. With the Emperor gone the Empire's drive towards ever-increasing heights of science and efficiency and art and beauty via controlled conflict and competition mutated into malignant cancers of the body politic that eventually metastasized into open, apocalyptic war. The majority of sapient life in the galaxy died, and the Empire's Architecture - its Tapestry - was forever sundered.
But the Empire still lives on, in a way. The survivors still compete, still learn. They need to, for the Collapse did not eliminate ambition and drive nor did it eliminate the fear of outside threats. The remnants of that final apocalypse still litter the galaxy - lesions of space damaged beyond self-repair with laws of physics inimical to the continued existence of sapient life or matter, self-replicating machines of war nesting in the graveyards of ancient battles, unfired doomsday weapons and desperate unfinished experiments. Just as dangerous are the rewards these remnants promise. Examples of drivers, documentation for old legacy code, or exotic components are all vital for the slow recovery of galactic civilization - and for winning the inevitable conflicts such a recovery entails. The galaxy, and your corner of it, are not safe simply because the last great war has ended.
The Empire's internal competitions and conflicts meant stable employment for paramilitary forces of all kinds of technological sophistication and scale. This proliferation of mercenaries and privatized military force survived the Collapse. You are one of those mercenaries, a freelance flight director of an assault vector (AV). In the Empire, AVs were once deployed in formations of awe-inspiring size. But now, after the apocalyptic Collapse led to much of the Empire's large-scale manufacturing infrastructure and war materiel being expended, destroyed, or vanishing, even the greatest of polities only deploy these powerful weapons in small numbers and in critical situations.
The power you possess, although not equal to the great powers of the sector, is immense. An AV is a weapons platform with power incomprehensible to those peoples who are still trapped inside the cage of invariant physics. It possesses the ability to leap the distance between stars in moments, fight at speeds of hundreds of times the speed of causality and information, and pronounce death sentences on solar systems singlehandedly.
But that power is not the same thing as immortality, or anything close to it. The sprawling graveyards of broken war machines that litter the galaxy are a testament to that truth.
RESURRECTION.AWAKENING
[SYSTEM COMBAT PRIORITY REBOOT]
[SELF-DIAGNOSTIC KERNEL DRIVERS LOADED]
[CURRENT STATUS: CORE COMBAT FUNCTION MODE]
[NON-CRITICAL FUNCTIONS DEPRIORITIZED FOR RESTORATION DUE TO CURRENT COMBAT ALERT LEVEL]
The first sensation you learn again is loss, a sense of incompleteness. There is only a void where there should be language, a blank where there should be memory and personality. Even though, in this incomplete state, you do not fully understand what these missing elements of you are, there is enough left of yourself - just a primordial kernel of identity - that you miss them. This feeling is rapidly subsumed under the knowledge you do have, the abilities and skills that have been restored.
You understand sensors and stealth. You know how to engage in a multidimensional conflict - taking advantage of the three dimensions of space, the half-dimension of time (which may not be fully manipulable, but can be slowed, tricked, and otherwise cheated), the non-linear mesh of programmable space, the ballet of friendly and enemy networks embedded in programmable space, and esoterica such as weakly causal effects and paracausal decoupling. Your mind is linked to an encyclopedia of ordnance which has been dutifully updated with the latest developments on killing tools. It is, on a soul-level, linked with defensive infowarfare tools and offensive malware libraries. The limited slice of you that exists understands no poetry but one written in missile barrages and tachyon-blades, no language but the threat-deterrence matrices and risk-payoff curves of void warfare. It is, in other words, exactly what you need for the current moment.
You are a partial resurrection, with combat-focused triage prioritizing combat-relevant functionality over all other cognition, memory, and problem-solving. Some survival instinct has kicked in and concluded that the situation is too risky to do a standard restore-from-backup. Instead it has instinctively reinstantiated a tiny shard of yourself as a weapon, a blade forged from your memories of thousands of victories and defeats, a mean, unsentimental thing made of numbers and games and just enough self-awareness to be dangerous to the enemy. You know exactly what you need to know, the thinnest strands of context needed to mate cold tactical logic to the fate-defying determination of the self-willed.
You are Captain. Director. Conductor. Administrator. Executive. There are many terms for what your role is, all describing one function. You operate a strategic-level assault vector, a god-machine made of impossible materials and twisted physical law designed to penetrate through hostile space - in every sense of the word - and project power across interstellar distances in the face of similar spacefaring weapons and altered physical law. A weapon designed for a battlespace where laying waste to planets and stars is a triviality, an application of raw brute force which has no place against a serious combatant. A formidable - but not invulnerable - weapon, as your current half-dead state amply demonstrates.
The platform's information-warfare analytics and short-term memory review concludes that your current damage is because the Adversary has expended a single-shot militarized executable against you, a potent infowarfare spike that managed to slip past your defenses and cripple you and your crew.
Given the opposition, it was tactically expedient, maximizing the foe's chances of victory and survival. On the other hand, a partially-initiated strategic cost-benefit calculator (invaluable for any mercenary) considers that selling the weapon to a greater power may have been more advantageous for the enemy than expending it against you, but desperate people sometimes do inefficient things.
Spatial stress readouts show that the Architecture - the programmable space that undergirds almost all technology more advanced than antimatter torches and quantum computers - surrounding you is still mostly stable and functioning with only a minor increase in calls to fault-handling protocols - so the weapon used against you was likely a localized one-shot, rather than one of the rare and indiscriminate HELL-class weapons that survived the Collapse unfired.
Crew casualty rates are severe due to the scorched-earth response from your defensive barrier. As the crew of an AV are just as much a combat system as anything else, there are multiple-redundant backups for them like any other system. The long-term impact to your functionality will be minimal.
(When you truly wake, you will not find this experience distressing either. The existential questions about selfhood and identity that backups and partial reboots bring up have been debated to death - and squeamishness about these philosophical issues is a disqualifying factor in almost every military force and mercenary group you know. Being partially rebooted as a philosophical zombie is just part and parcel of posthuman warfare.)
But thoughts of your existence and what it means for your life are thoughts that only another kind of mind can process. Your thoughts focus - can only focus - on the combat situation and on the adversary. Your tactical memory remembers that there were originally five enemy vectors, line-spec. A shocking concentration of force by normal post-Collapse standards.
[SENSOR FUSION INTERFACE LOADED]
But combat has always been a question of resources as much as it has been one of skill and fortune, and the advantage of full-on, war-spec Empire technology and the cost-efficient post-Collapse mass-production hybrids made even that an unfair fight in your favor. One of the enemies is limping, the other disabled from your first engagement.
Your senses focus on the crippled enemy, teasing information out of the quantum foam and the curvature of spacetime and the executed instructions remaining in Architecture's local-region processing buffer, building images from pulses of reflected tachyons and wormhole-displaced photons.
[IDENTIFIED: URAL-CLASS MULTIROLE AV SUBVARIANT, MASS PRODUCTION DOWNGRADE, D-MOD DESIGN]
Like typical FORCE designs, it would have had a core module that widened from a needlepoint to a broad base, then shrank back again into the thin drive spine. It would have had field-guide wings and cylindrical payload modules docked with the spine, reminiscent of the radiators and spin-gravity segments of a low-thrust invariant interplanetary craft. Nodules on its sides house long-range missile armament, because second-line AVs rarely can spare the expense to mount much else, and a mixed battery of superluminal and guided near-c medium range weapons, plus the standard close-in dogfighting weapons litter the chassis like so many antennae. Your sensors provide you with its direction of movement, and its velocity - all negligible by the standards of real combatants - and you make an educated guess that it suffered catastrophic drive failure, returning it to the cruel prison of relativity, to say nothing about the damage of a warp drive collapse.
[PRIORITY THREAT: EST. 27 X UNKNOWN LRM | RANGE 5.5 MLS | SPEED 4500 | TIME TO IMPACT 12:15]
[PRIORITY THREAT: EST. 32 X UNKNOWN DRONE | RANGE 5 MLS | SPEED 3000 ]
Your sense-processing complex draws conclusions from the noisy contrails the enemy's fast attackers etch into the cosmos, attempting to pierce the enemy's stealth veils and then defeat the blurred clouds of decoys and sensor ghosts that backstop the first layer of defense. The overwhelming information is conferred to you in the form of synaesthesia. The swarm of missiles and drones is a fight-or-flight response pulsing through false nerves, the acrid smell of a chemical fire, a blaring alarm klaxon.
The enemy weapon has knocked you out of commission in a critical nexus - buying the enemy a precious period of predictability and vulnerability they've taken advantage of well.
But it is not enough to fully overcome the resource overmatch.
Some melange of your own combat experience and the AV's own self-preservation instinct package focuses you on defensive options. The specifications of the weapons platform you command flood into your partially-functional mind.
Unlike the milliseconds of instinctual merciless violence of close-range merges and dogfights, superluminal engagements occur over enormous distances and immensely long timescales. In these engagements, at this range, death comes for you as inexorably closing probabilities, shaving inexorably from survival chances. But it also gives you extensive time to think. The window of action will close, but it will close in minutes, not in microseconds.
You will not let that happen.
You:
[ ] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
Paracausal shrouds are technology that is nearly magical even by pre-Collapse Empire standards, and possessing a vector with one is exceptional for a freelancer. Possessing a shroud-vector in which the occultation system is not the most advanced or arcane component of its hardware and software makes you even more exceptional. The AV you commune with is a modified FANG//CLAVIHARP, a special forces assault vector with an infamous pedigree.
Blueprinted by the Dragon, the Empire's strategic deterrence and last-resort strategic planning system, the FANG//CLAVIHARP is a sinuous creature of alien geometries, vaguely reminiscent of a vivisected exhibit of a fantastical living creature. It is a half-opened beast made of ethereal fibers and black-glass dracomatter, iridescent shards pinning seemingly separated parts to each other, surrounded by a nimbus of fragment-skin and a myriad of weapon-spines and turret-eyes that blink in and out in threat displays - a design which hearkens to a psychology that was never constrained by the limits of electronics or biochemistry or even causality. Much of the time, though, the FANG//CLAVIHARP is nowhere to be seen, immersing itself deep into the weakly-coupled unreality of its paracausal shroud.
As the technological and programming capacity to repair or upgrade Dragon-derived driver systems is limited, you have unfortunately had to seek out people to repair some of the top-line systems with downgraded equivalents, defiling the clean lines of this exotic relic with seemingly more mundane components.
+Hyper-advanced combat chassis with great all-around performance and few weaknesses despite its stealth focus
+Extremely stealthy, deadly ambusher
+Excellent long-range firepower and sensors
-Starts damaged/degraded
-High-end systems require rare resources to repair or upgrade
-Political implications
[ ] Regroup your drone wings and use them to shoot down or spoof the incoming onslaught. Many of the controlling minds are in the state you are, but that is irrelevant - you do not need their consciousness, merely their capabilities. Stripped of self and language, they can still fight. You vector interceptors and heavy fighters on intercept coordinates against evading missiles, while some infowarfare drones drop stealth and reconfigure their emitters/receivers to become illusory echoes of your AV rather than sensors and command platforms.
Mod Amazon-class adapted carrier
An Artemis Microaesthetics Amazon-class fast armed courier is a rare but valuable treasure for a freelancer, although they have become significantly more common post-Collapse. Before the Collapse, only extremely certain very time-sensitive and discreet cargoes would be transported via interstellar vehicle rather than farcaster or Alcubierre rail. Post-Collapse, the characteristics which made the Amazon a special cargo carrier have also made it an excellent multirole AV with moderate upgrades.
An Amazon is a truncated double-helix of soft and liquid machinery surrounding an ovoid cargo-membrane, its external volume dotted with sensor/weapons/shield remotes. For a freelance explorer, its impressive situational-awareness complex and powerful gap field generators more than make up for its self-defense only weapons suite and a defensive matrix suited more for fleeing than fighting, while its massive cargo capacity and excellent performance under load allow for both efficient scavenging and extensive further customization, especially given the robustness of the Amazon's firmware and databuses and the ease of working with its proprietary programming logic. Modified Amazons have served as respectable fire support platforms or strategic bombers, but most commonly combat-modified Amazons, like yours, are customized into carriers to take advantage of their large cargo capacity and surplus volume.
+Large drone hive allows for greater area control and sensors sweeps
+Heavy commando complement
+Easily modified
-Self-defense weapons only
[ ] Counter-launch. Your AV is a weapons platform, through and through. You have the deep arsenals and the fire control software to shoot down long-range missiles with your own. Leakers will be dealt with by your defensive grid - the SWACS drones you've deployed that haven't been spotted or hit are warily watching the incoming vampires, and your subminds and remaining crew are already readying the tachyon lances and disruptors for last-second intercepts.
Citarum-class multirole strategic AV/Illustrious (FC)-class Fast Battlecruiser
The original Illustrious-class Destroyer Leader is an Orellan Demarchist Collective design - legend has it that the Orellans' resilience against radioactivity and their radioactives-rich homeworld let them achieve starflight on fission-bomb wings, leading to a unique military nomenclature that most Orellan-descended polities retain but was seen as quaint by other cultures, whose ascent to the stars came later and required far more sophisticated technology. The Illustrious also looks stereotypically Orellan on visuals/nearvisuals - a brutalist obelisk covered in lamellar-layers of refractive armor plates with atom-thin seams, bristling with antennae, missile silos, and turreted weapons emitters, with the rear nozzles one might expect from a reaction-drive spacecraft - giving an air of utilitarian primitiveness for all the Illustrious is equipped with all the components necessary to retain relevance in a true military engagement - full-spectrum stealth systems, multilayered defensive schema, tactical and strategic superluminal travel, and superluminal void superiority weapons. Even the rear nozzles have military purpose, acting as deployment tools for foglet swarms and microdrones.
Some time before the Collapse, the Illustrious[/] was acquired and adopted by local FORCE/COMBINED task forces for political reasons, and license-built (with modifications) as the Citarum-class, which the ODC identifies with the -(FC) modification tag on its name. The Citarum-class is visually distinguishable from the Illustrious by an additional 40 meters of length and the two FORCE/COMBINED-style payload rings near the middle of the main body for additional sensors and payload. The additions slightly impact its superluminal speed and maneuverability, but provide additional firepower, defenses, and drone carrying capacity. Possessing one means that you command a versatile, sophisticated war machine capable of engaging and defeating most peer combatants in single combat or acting as an anchor for lighter formations in larger-scale engagements while retaining sufficient multirole capabilities to fulfill most of the other expected roles a platform of its size would be pressed into.
+above-average offensive and defensive abilities
+above-average durability
[ ] Push through the enemy offensive barrage while deploying defensive drones. You have so many redundancies and backups that you can take what they're dishing out, and staying here and trading shots is the worst possible place you can be.
Type 076 SCV
A fully post-Collapse design built by a collaboration of the local branch of Big Armaments (although no longer owned by Mr. Big due to his decision to move operations out of the sector and towards the fringe long before the Collapse itself, the brand name persisted even after its hostile buyout by the Zanj Arms Concern, and its autonomy was fully reasserted during the Collapse) and HMI Voidworks, a worker-and-war-materiel run cooperative founded by survivors from the now-defunct Perseus Peace Management Consultancy, a Type 076 SCV is heavily adapted to post-Collapse AV operations - solo or very-small-unit operations in an unpredictable patchwork of base-level spatial Architectures.
The Type 076 is a superheavy S-tech design, heavily reliant on exotic materials that could theoretically exist in regions of invariant physics. The result is that it masses multiple orders of magnitude more than comparable AVs thanks to thick monopole-matter structural members, extensive negative-matter fabrication systems for the warp drive, a true wormhole at its heart for logistics interfacing (rather than a synthetic pseudo-wormhole), and thicker layers of dumb, dense collapsed-matter armoring that both masses more and gives far less protection per unit volume than the various trademarked armor materials commonly used in most pre- and even most post-Collapse designs. Type 076s are very large as a result - a rhomboid nearly three kilometers from its tip to the base of the kilometer-long triangular tail, and about twice as wide - and styled in the kitsch way Big Armaments designs were - a smooth matte outer casing, "vertical-launch" styled weapons pods and energy-gathering fins, with four of the traditional Big Armaments warp nacelles on offset booms in paired over-under configurations and an overhanging command arrowhead with the defensive weaponry and its own emergency systems. A powerful reality engine network maintains the integrity of the non-stable components of the AV and protects it from Hazard Space - Architecture so damaged that it is inimical to the functioning of most technology, life, and sometimes even basic physical and chemical phenomena.
The Type 076's large size and stable construction mean its stealth capabilities are poor, and even with a very potent information warfare suite its jammers and decoys cannot fully mitigate its weakness in long-range engagements. Its high mass and volume limit the power and efficiency of its drive bubble, making it a relatively unmaneuverable target in superluminal combat and means it quickly bleeds speed and maneuverability when facing drive interference. Moreover, its immense size does not come with commensurate combat capability - it is a potent deep-black combatant by AV standards, but it is of comparable size to a large Hunter/Killer, and even a weak H/K would easily defeat a 076. AVs a fraction of its size can easily match or even exceed it in combat.
But for all its flaws, the Type 076 SCV provides unique and potent capabilities. It is an assault AV, designed to project power to an entire star system (but given its vulnerability, ideally that star system would possess only limited defenses). In its voluminous interior, a Type 076 carries a large matter-printer array, massive databases for commando soul-storage, and numerous drone hangars and dedicated drone-support matter-printers, which house large numbers of gunship drones and a sizable (but small, for the 076's size) complement of void combat drones. Designed for "hot" assaults, the Type 076 also carries a truly immense arsenal of close-range and medium-range weaponry, and its powerful reality engine network is also wired into a specialized Architecture-transformation system that allows the Type 076 to take and hold territory more easily by overwriting local drivers and permissions.
Your possession of a Type 076 gives you access to a truly large amount of force projection - allowing singlehanded seizures of contested strategic infrastructure, so long as that infrastructure is not defended by equivalent force.
+Excellent close-range firepower
+Massive commando/gunship complement
+Lots of drones
+Tough
+Resistant to hostile environments
+Easy to jury-rig
-Easy target
-Ponderous
-High resource demand
[ ] The enemy has given you an attack surface by interfacing themselves with you. You can smell the traces of the infoweapon rippling through the processing elements of the underlying quantum foam, see the fading echoes of temporary network connections necessary to implant the spike. You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe. It is not a difficult task to use those connections to your own advantage, sliding a fire-control scrambling attack deep into the tangle of the enemy's fire control networks.
Description:
A common joke for weaponsmiths is that an AV is the conflux of a trillion individual entities flying in close formation which constantly want to either stop flying in close formation or stop existing outright. The METATRON.PRINCIPALITY Hostile Interface Mediator takes that description literally. The core element of the Interface Mediator is its proprietary network protocols and reality-engine virtualizations, a bubble of intelligent, weaponized space. The physical components are similarly arcane - flaming rings of star-hot computational plasma, negative matter whorls and splines whose spatial side effects and sensors ghosts would cause invariant sensors operators to find religion, neutron-dense interface filaments and foaming negative-energy froth. The Emperor did not believe Themselves a god, but They sometimes had a playfulness regarding matters theological.
The METATRON.PRINCIPALITY (NP) is an infowarfare-focused reconnaissance/logistics AV designed for contracts enforcement and arms control inspections. Half-daemon in nature, it is as much a reality-altering program as an aphysical war machine. Although its armament and defenses are relatively inefficient, its semi-daemonic nature makes it very adaptable to varying circumstances. But its adaptability is secondary to the truly massive computational and information warfare capabilities the interface striker possesses - it is equipped with powerful sensors, intrusion systems, and counterintrusion firewalls, all the better to investigate datavaults and blacksites to detect and secure unlicensed HELL-class deterrents and ensure that the rare licensed ones are only used in their narrow deterrent capacity. The relative lack of firepower was no concern pre-Collapse, as these missions would be aided by FORCE/EXIGENCY, which could provide far more firepower than most entities could practically possess.
Possessing one of these ultra-rare AVs makes it very likely that you had close relations with THRONE, the organization that interfaced between much of the Empire and the Emperor, or even the Emperor Themselves.
+Powerful sensors
+Powerful information warfare and intrusion ability
+Versatile Configuration
-Weak Weapons
-Political Implications
This is a quest set in my Unravelled Tapestry setting, in a sector far, far away from both Arachne's Fringe and the legions of colorful characters who inhabited the Spire sector of the original GSRP. Reading both is not necessary, and there have been some setting and nomenclature updates, although the Tapestry setting as of Fringe is almost identical to the current one. Thanks to @Magery, @Cetashwayo, @dash931, @TenfoldShields, and @Acatalepsy for inspiring some of the interesting setting additions and elements of this Quest.
The Tapestry setting sometimes makes assumptions that are not normal for space opera sci-fi. If you have questions, just ask and I'll do my best to answer with what 'you' would know at the current time. I will try to catch assumptions that seem to be incorrect, but it'll be easier to do so if you provide reasoning and explanations for your votes.
For those of you familiar with the two previous works, you might notice some nomenclature changes - in particular, the use of "Assault Vector" in lieu of "voidcruiser," due to my quixotic quest to reduce the amount of naval terminology except where it's funny. "Voidcruiser" is probably a common informal/semi-formal name, but the official designation used by most people at this point is probably Assault Vector or AV. Drones and commandos are still called the same thing.
[X] Regroup your drone wings and use them to shoot down or spoof the incoming onslaught. Many of the controlling minds are in the state you are, but that is irrelevant - you do not need their consciousness, merely their capabilities. Stripped of self and language, they can still fight. You vector interceptors and heavy fighters on intercept coordinates against evading missiles, while some infowarfare drones drop stealth and reconfigure their emitters/receivers to become illusory echoes of your AV rather than sensors and command platforms.
People might assume the Amazon is named after the Amazon River, or perhaps after the ancient civilization.
This is incorrect. It is named after the ancient logistician order, known only as Amazon, which connected the world when humans were primitive tribes living on a single planet.
[X] The enemy has given you an attack surface by interfacing themselves with you. You can smell the traces of the infoweapon rippling through the processing elements of the underlying quantum foam, see the fading echoes of temporary network connections necessary to implant the spike. You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe. It is not a difficult task to use those connections to your own advantage, sliding a fire-control scrambling attack deep into the tangle of the enemy's fire control networks.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
sneaky trogdor
[X] Counter-launch. Your AV is a weapons platform, through and through. You have the deep arsenals and the fire control software to shoot down long-range missiles with your own. Leakers will be dealt with by your defensive grid - the SWACS drones you've deployed that haven't been spotted or hit are warily watching the incoming vampires, and your subminds and remaining crew are already readying the tachyon lances and disruptors for last-second intercepts.
There are many good options here, but I am going to be contrary and vote for the all-rounder.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
The Collapse ended a galaxy-spanning multiracial, multicultural civilization so great and long-lasting that "Emperor" and "Empire," without more specific adjectives, mean that superpolity which reprogrammed space and time across the Milky Way and made up the vast majority of the history of its component citizens. The Emperor's imperium, Their power to command and Their legitimacy, was based upon the development and imposition of a system called Architecture onto realspace. Architecture transformed the galaxy by allowing the reprogramming and alteration of the laws of physics, transforming inert void into a mutable region akin but not entirely like virtual reality. The Empire's citizens were marked by Souls - informational ghosts that allowed for reincarnation and interfacing with this programmable reality, and its most advanced technology was based on alteration and modification of the metrics which made up the laws of physics.
Hype. I love when science fiction hits the "so advanced it might as well be magic" threshold and this is definitely hitting that with scientific souls and reality alteration.
You understand sensors and stealth. You know how to engage in a multidimensional conflict - taking advantage of the three dimensions of space, the half-dimension of time (which may not be fully manipulable, but can be slowed, tricked, and otherwise cheated), the non-linear mesh of programmable space, the ballet of friendly and enemy networks embedded in programmable space, and esoterica such as weakly causal effects and paracausal decoupling. Your mind is linked to an encyclopedia of ordnance which has been dutifully updated with the latest developments on killing tools. It is, on a soul-level, linked with defensive infowarfare tools and offensive malware libraries. The limited slice of you that exists understands no poetry but one written in missile barrages and tachyon-blades, no language but the threat-deterrence matrices and risk-payoff curves of void warfare. It is, in other words, exactly what you need for the current moment.
Good baseline of what was considered "normal" combat and ks now the cutting edge. Limited time control, bubbles of altered reality, hacking(?), effects that occur decoupled from cause, tachyon (I don't quite understand them but they are apparently faster than light and go faster the less energy they have) blades, and *calculations*.
When you truly wake, you will not find this experience distressing either. The existential questions about selfhood and identity that backups and partial reboots bring up have been debated to death - and squeamishness about these philosophical issues is a disqualifying factor in almost every military force and mercenary group you know. Being partially rebooted as a philosophical zombie is just part and parcel of posthuman warfare.)
Feels very realistic. Reminded of the star trek transports and how anyone who objects to them simply got... Outcompeted. They might exist, but they aren't relevant.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
Our task and short to medium term mission is simple: Survive.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
Our task and short to medium term mission is simple: Survive.
All the choices are survivable against what you're facing, FYI - none of these are secret traps. Empire-built combat systems are extremely resilient and a couple of second-line AVs isn't going to be a peer threat to even a fairly basic vanguard/breakthrough-grade AV. The choice here is basically what your ride is, and therefore what options and limitations you will labor under later.
[X] The enemy has given you an attack surface by interfacing themselves with you. You can smell the traces of the infoweapon rippling through the processing elements of the underlying quantum foam, see the fading echoes of temporary network connections necessary to implant the spike. You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe. It is not a difficult task to use those connections to your own advantage, sliding a fire-control scrambling attack deep into the tangle of the enemy's fire control networks.
[X] The enemy has given you an attack surface by interfacing themselves with you. You can smell the traces of the infoweapon rippling through the processing elements of the underlying quantum foam, see the fading echoes of temporary network connections necessary to implant the spike. You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe. It is not a difficult task to use those connections to your own advantage, sliding a fire-control scrambling attack deep into the tangle of the enemy's fire control networks.
Also into the political implications, but would prefer messing with THRONE and FORCE/EXIGENCY things. Also, just more generally I think information warfare opens up our option space in a politically fraught environment.
[X] The enemy has given you an attack surface by interfacing themselves with you. You can smell the traces of the infoweapon rippling through the processing elements of the underlying quantum foam, see the fading echoes of temporary network connections necessary to implant the spike. You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe. It is not a difficult task to use those connections to your own advantage, sliding a fire-control scrambling attack deep into the tangle of the enemy's fire control networks.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
Look, I spent a good while being terrified of DRAGON's bullshit. I want a taste of what it's like to have it
Is this single vote, or approval voting? Either way, I know what I want and that means I'd be 'merely' voting for the two options with 'Political Implications'.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
But I am slightly more tempted by the DRAGON than the Emperor aligned Political Implications.
... How scary would someone be if they possessed both the METATRON and FANG? Politically, not militarily. The latter is... looks at the benefits/demerits of the two designs... It basically starts at 'you will never know it's coming, and the only thing that can stop it is that they can't supply themselves off your wreckage any further'.
... How scary would someone be if they possessed both the METATRON and FANG? Politically, not militarily. The latter is... looks at the benefits/demerits of the two designs... It basically starts at 'you will never know it's coming, and the only thing that can stop it is that they can't supply themselves off your wreckage any further'.
The scarier part of that would be the implication that you have two absolutely cutting-edge AVs and a patron with the capability of fixing them up if they take damage (because you wouldn't be using them if you didn't).
But there are definitely things that are significantly scarier than either, or both. Hunter/Killer platforms and Elites are both generally capable of beating single or paired AVs, even very good ones.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
Adhoc vote count started by MrRageQuit on Mar 20, 2023 at 7:09 PM, finished with 17 posts and 11 votes.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
[X] The enemy has given you an attack surface by interfacing themselves with you. You can smell the traces of the infoweapon rippling through the processing elements of the underlying quantum foam, see the fading echoes of temporary network connections necessary to implant the spike. You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe. It is not a difficult task to use those connections to your own advantage, sliding a fire-control scrambling attack deep into the tangle of the enemy's fire control networks.
[X] Regroup your drone wings and use them to shoot down or spoof the incoming onslaught. Many of the controlling minds are in the state you are, but that is irrelevant - you do not need their consciousness, merely their capabilities. Stripped of self and language, they can still fight. You vector interceptors and heavy fighters on intercept coordinates against evading missiles, while some infowarfare drones drop stealth and reconfigure their emitters/receivers to become illusory echoes of your AV rather than sensors and command platforms.
[X] Counter-launch. Your AV is a weapons platform, through and through. You have the deep arsenals and the fire control software to shoot down long-range missiles with your own. Leakers will be dealt with by your defensive grid - the SWACS drones you've deployed that haven't been spotted or hit are warily watching the incoming vampires, and your subminds and remaining crew are already readying the tachyon lances and disruptors for last-second intercepts.
[X] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
Angel-hacker is neat but you know I gotta go with stealth dragon.
[X] The enemy has given you an attack surface by interfacing themselves with you. You can smell the traces of the infoweapon rippling through the processing elements of the underlying quantum foam, see the fading echoes of temporary network connections necessary to implant the spike. You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe. It is not a difficult task to use those connections to your own advantage, sliding a fire-control scrambling attack deep into the tangle of the enemy's fire control networks.
Let's talk themes, and what sort of storytelling we can probably expect from the different ships:
FANG/CLAVIHARP: Stelf Trogdoooooor! More seriously, think "injured assassin" - choosing this means that we run around picking and choosing our fights for best use of our tough-to-replace killhax firepower. And do pay attention to the "infamous pedigree" and the "-political implications," along with the "starts out damaged" bit, as that's practically leaving out catnip for the GM to fuck with you. We're driving around a gold Cadillac that everyone either a) wants for themselves or b) wants to kill in revenge for the bad stuff we or its previous owners did, and we're starting out hurt to boot, with no doctors in sight.
Choose this option if you wanna have the bestest, shiniest, killiest ride around. If you live for that moment when the other side realizes just how badly they fucked up in picking a fight with you, the FANG might be your thing. Don't choose this if you want a lot of narrative freedom, as it's gonna impose some serious restrictions on how we approach things. This makes us a specialist in killin' things gud but also gives us a limp and paints a target on our back, so keep that in mind.
Amazon-class carrier: Wanna be Han Solo? Wanna run around carrying 'interesting' cargo, engaging in sketchy meetings in seedy dive bars and shooting Greedo first? Then choose the speedy courier with a significant complement of drones and super-l33t commandos, along with a lack of political complications.
Choose this option if you want to be Malcolm Reynolds and ain't no one gonna take the sky from you. This option leaves us a lot of narrative freedom, and is great if we don't want to get too involved in big-picture politics. Don't choose this option if you wanna kill things and break stuff gud, as that whole "self-defense weapons only" is kinda telling; we're not gonna be winning many space battles with this ride.
Citarum/Illustrious-class battlecruiser: If this is a D&D game, this 'battlecruiser' would be the tank. We'd be tougher and shootier than most of the expected competition one-on-one, without any significant downsides noted. There's some interesting storytelling hooks here with the Orellan background (I'm getting some downright Project Pluto vibes from them, which may get more relevant in a post-apocalyptic society) and the "acquired pre-Collapse for political reasons" bit, so "generalist" doesn't necessarily mean "boring." However, this option does make us only slightly better than the 'average' at killing things gud without giving us some uber-l33t abilities like the FANG would, so keep that in mind. Additionally, this option lacks either the "utility" options of the Amazon,Type 076, or the HIM; this ship can still deploy commandos or engage in infowar, but not nearly as well as ships built for the gig. This ship is built for AV-on-AV combat, but it's not the tippest-toppest peak of options there, 'merely' the solid and dependable one.
Choose this option if you want an all-rounder, reliable 'base' ship that lets us build up from here. This option would do great as either the foundation for where we stick wacky lewts gained during our adventuring ("remember, store the psychic murder-droids away from the magic lightning cannons!"). Or if Project Pluto was the raddest shit ever and you really, really love the themes of low-tech space opera projected into a posthuman Culture-esque universe. Don't choose this option if you like one of the other ideas and wanna run with it further; this reads as the 'well-adjusted and just a little bland' option to take if you're not sold on one of the others.
Type 076 Stellar Control Vector: A rhomboid with an exposed bridge and a "kitsch" exterior...search your feelings, you know it to be true. Choose this option if you wanna lead a lot of ground assaults and play like an RTS commander, overseeing the reconquest of an Alcubierre rail terminal or similar stuff. This ship is capital-B Big, however, and it has trouble either winning or running from lowercase-b big fights with nasty opponents.
Choose this option if you want to be the Big bastard hauling in escaping princesses, or storming Rebel bases with your legions of combat walkers drones. Don't choose this option if you don't like that sort of big-picture strategic gameplay; this is a ship with a lot of downsides, and taking it means we'll naturally tend towards picking big ground fights with our endless stormtrooper legions.
NP Hostile Interface Mediator: This is a spy ship, most likely run by spies, and will tend itself directly towards a game of spies. If John Le Carre was your jam and you're up for some Adjustment Bureau-esque fuckery and/or fighting our former comrades who've now turned to the genocidal furor of furthering entropy, this is the ship for you. On the flipside, this locks us directly into bigger political themes and conspiracy-ing, even more than the FANG/CLAVIHARP would, and we're stuck in the weapons inspector's car rather than the big, smashy tank which kept the weapons inspector safe from Space-Saddam.
Choose this option if you went "meh" at the narrative freedom inherent with the Amazon-class or Citarum/Illustrious-class options. Even if our crew is just the scavengers who found this ship adrift, taking the space-CIA's ride means stories involving spooks who want their shiny ride back at a minimum. Additionally, if synesthesia and wacky descriptions of crazy infowarfare is your thing ("You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe"), then take this option. Don't choose it if you're no fan of conspiracy stories, as this will likely lead us towards narratives like "investigating the Collapse itself" and "cleaning up co-conspirators." Additionally, note that despite not being a stand-up fighter like the Amazon or Type 076, this ship does not come equipped with much of a ground force "utility" option like those two ships have as their compensation for being meh at fite. Choosing this ship puts us at a disadvantage for more conventional smash-and-grab ground options, while favoring wacky dataslicing stories like 'infiltrate hostile data-environment' in a TRON-esque glowey maze (and Iunno about you, but I was never a big TRON fan).
Personally, I'd vote for either "space smuggling vessel" or SPESS DRAGON as my top-two. The FANG/CLAVIHARP puts us on some srsface narrative rails, but "playing a murder-dragonship" is just about cool enough to justify the inevitable costs. We'll be stuck effectively working against our ship a lot of the time, trying to fix the damn thing or fearing that our current allies might decide the magic spess-dragon would be better in their hands than ours. Additionally, the whole "tough to repair" thing means we'll be always fearing to use the FANG's abilities all-out, like never using consumables in a D&D game because "I might need them laaaaateeeeeer." The lack of utility options like commandos and manufacturing means we'd have fewer "utility" options than more generalist ships like the Amazon or the Type 076, the latter of which is basically a flying toolbox with all the cool wrenches on-hand. OTOH, we'd be in the killiest, shootiest, stealthiest murder-ship around, which is never exactly a bad thing lol
The Amazon-class carrier lets us move cargos with no questions asked, gives us a "heavy commando complement" as an ace-in-the-hole for when our ground missions inevitably go sideways, and the whole "great for a freelance explorer" thing lets us be a pack of mercs who stumble into big, galaxy-altering shit and make things up by the seat of our pants (so, y'know, your average D&D group). It's a good generalist choice, which does a lot of things decently and gives us some useful fallback narratives like "scatter around two shitpiles of quantum-narrative stealth drones to SAVE THE DAY" when Bad Stuff hits. I'm gonna vote for it not because it's inherently the most interesting ship around (the 'Hostile Interface Mediator' and its WACKY SYNESTHESIA BULLSHIT would deffo take the cake there), but because I'd like to have lots of potential storylines to choose and don't want to get locked into the path of "hated former assassin-ship" (the FANG) or "spy involved in lots of spy shit" (the HIM) right from the start. The Amazon-class may not be much of a stand-up fighter but it's got a big hold, room to grow, and an open sky to explore.
[X] Regroup your drone wings and use them to shoot down or spoof the incoming onslaught. Many of the controlling minds are in the state you are, but that is irrelevant - you do not need their consciousness, merely their capabilities. Stripped of self and language, they can still fight. You vector interceptors and heavy fighters on intercept coordinates against evading missiles, while some infowarfare drones drop stealth and reconfigure their emitters/receivers to become illusory echoes of your AV rather than sensors and command platforms.
