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Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)

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Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete) Demons and Angels Seven Days to Skitter
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mp3.1415player said:
They should build a wall around Federation space!

:evil:
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They have one. Neutral Zone. Nobody enters without warning and an invitation or they start a War. Federation isn't really a Utopia, just trying really hard for the core member worlds.

Edit: thinking only a little further on this, we really only see the Federation through the window of their combination Military and Diplomatic corps. Both of those are based off of highly regimented workplace cultures. Diplomats must be polite and follow all the letter of the law without insulting those they negotiate with. Without the the formalities of rank and file, military groups scatter and fall to infighting.
 
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Checking as I read:
"The Caped Crusader would likey have" =>
"The Caped Crusader would likely have"

"I had to defeat Don Rickles's evil" =>
"I had to defeat Don Rickles' evil"

"point defense gravy guns" =>
"point defense grav guns"

"they won't done for months yet" =>
"they won't be done for months yet"

Thanks for the new chapter. I'm really interested in seeing how this turns out.
 
Shadowcub said:
The Feddies are slowly turning space nazis. Section 13, time travel bureau. No my hopes and dreams would not be in the Federation. Their actions during the Bajoran war where they just stood and watched; and only when the wormhole opened in their space did they all of a sudden decide to help/use them.
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The time travel restrictions and bureau are a requirement to even have a civilization. Time travel is the WMD to end all WMDs and you either use the principle of MAD or/and constant patrolling from a position outside of Time to make sure nobody uses it against you and fix things if they do.

The same could be said of Section 13, to combat shadow organisations you kind of need a shadow organisation. Either that or you have to monitor everybody at all times to make sure they aren't part of some foreign shadow org. That level of monitoring of people's lives would be even more dystopian.

As for their cowardice in the face of open war... well I'm sort of guessing it's a cultural thing and that it'll sort itself out eventually. Either that or the federation collapses. If you've had peace in large parts of your empire for more than a few decades then the REMFs sort of take over, this usually gets fixed when the shit hits the fan and people begin to understand how useless they are in wartime.
 
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The Family would probably make Nick Fury become the embodiment of his name and transcend physical form through sheer incandescent mass of paranoid indignation.

E M Berner said:
As for their cowardice in the face of open war... well I'm sort of guessing it's a cultural thing and that it'll sort itself out eventually. Either that or the federation collapses. If you've had peace in large parts of your empire for more than a few decades then the REMFs sort of take over, this usually gets fixed when the shit hits the fan and people begin to understand how useless they are in wartime.
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It's very much a cultural thing, Prime Timeline Federation has a massive hard-on for noninterference and an 'enlightened' ideology based around post-scarcity economy and the overly hopeful attitude that war is an unnecessary outdated anachronism.

In the Prime Timeline, the Federation basically didn't encounter any serious problems until the Borg, even the 'war' with the Klingons was more like a series of small raiding actions and skirmishes rather than true war. This led to an overly peaceful and optimistic attitude that by all rights should have bit them in the arse, but didn't thanks to people like Kirk and Picard holding the line until the rest of the Federation got its shit together.
 
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E M Berner said:
Well considering what the site name is... could you build a gun that kills ships with gravy?

Maybe freeze it and launch it in a thin metal sabot from a railgun? High pressure gravy cutter?

Any more ideas?
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With the capability to teleport INTO someone else's shield bubble, you could pack a few thousand tons of gravy into a dimensionally folded storage ball set to go off in 3 2 SPLORTCH. This would fill most standard sized ships with an unbreathable liquid, and probably buckle the hull plates in the exact opposite way a submarine experiences explosive decompression. Just doing it with the EDM monowire missile would be more than sufficent, but you asked for gravy. Even without dimensional shenanigans, you can just keep a teleport going inside of your replicator until the power fails to slowly consign a ship to the.... gravyyard.

Depending on how the target ship vents waste heat out into space, using basic fire hose analogs to coat the opposing ship in more and more gravy would eventually cause it to overheat by jamming up the heatsinks, weapon ports, bussard scoops, etc. But that would require the shields to be off, or beaming the gravy past the shields.

For freezing it, you could use a small sabot, or you could just upsize your gravy ball to the size of a small moon, then accelerate it. Granted, the inside of the ball would probably heat up because of friction, and you'd have gravy volcanoes on your moon, but that just adds to the ambience.
 
E M Berner said:
The time travel restrictions and bureau are a requirement to even have a civilization. Time travel is the WMD to end all WMDs and you either use the principle of MAD or/and constant patrolling from a position outside of Time to make sure nobody uses it against you and fix things if they do.

The same could be said of Section 13, to combat shadow organisations you kind of need a shadow organisation. Either that or you have to monitor everybody at all times to make sure they aren't part of some foreign shadow org. That level of monitoring of people's lives would be even more dystopian.

As for their cowardice in the face of open war... well I'm sort of guessing it's a cultural thing and that it'll sort itself out eventually. Either that or the federation collapses. If you've had peace in large parts of your empire for more than a few decades then the REMFs sort of take over, this usually gets fixed when the shit hits the fan and people begin to understand how useless they are in wartime.
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That's nice and all but their stupidity and hypocritical actions make me wonder why more planets aren't pulling out of the federation. They ARE cowards when it comes to confrontation, the Klingons and Romulans knew that they could do what they wanted as long as they didn't directly attack the center of the federation.

Their utter hypocrisy with their behavior with 7 of 9, treating her like trash, the entire crew and no one said a thing against it. And then they whine all about their Borg taking their loved ones, when if they could get them back they would be treated just like 7.

The Prime Directive only goes so far as they need it to. Trying to steal a planet so they could get those healing rays, letting the Bajorans be attacked, too stupid to actually protect every planet because they are trying to be Vulcan wannabes. The federation will turn on you in a moment. Even with Kirk they broke the Prime Directive so many times the entire command crew should have been on a prison planet.

Giving the federation more tech is a bad idea, sending Saurial to talk to them about their policies would be better.
 
Shadowcub said:
Giving the federation more tech is a bad idea, sending Saurial to talk to them about their policies would be better.
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You honestly think Saurial wont be giving certain people a stern talking to?

That said, yeah, giving the federation that sort of weapons tech is a Bad Idea. It might only be the fact that such tech does kind of rely on Math which the federation wouldn't understand that makes things almost okay.

EDIT:
Uhm, why did the "gravy gun" bit spark a debate on how to make gravy into a weapon?!
 
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Gravy: Gravy

If you haven't checked out Schlock Mercenary, yet you like Taylor Varga and Ship of Fools...have you just not heard of it yet? Howard Taylor has updated that webcomic pretty much every single day since June 12, 2000...that's almost NINETEEN years of webcomic.

One word of warning -- the art style has improved dramatically as it has evolved over time. If you go back to the first day, don't walk away because it looks primitive...cause it does.

Edit: BTW, technology in the Schlock Mercenary universe is insanely advanced in many ways. The mercenaries, for example, have powered armor that have antimatter plants built into them. They can fly, provide enhanced strength, and are generally ridiculous.
 
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Derek M said:
Howard Taylor has updated that webcomic pretty much every single day since June 12, 2000...that's almost NINETEEN years of webcomic.
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not just pretty much has actually has updated that webcomic every single day since he launched it on 06/12/2000
 
Derek M said:
No, Miles said you need a linguist to help program in new languages. That was a key part of the job of Lieutenant Uhura in the original TV show, though the writers made her look like a glorified receptionist back in the 60's." That was one thing the reboot movies improved upon, thought Dragon, even if some of the other changes were problematic.
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Actually, the computer does it automatically in some places.

There was an episode of DS9 that covered it.
There was an encounter with aliens from the other side of the Wormhole, who came to the Bajoran side. Their language was so alien that the translation system wasn't working, and it took several hours before the system started figuring out the language. No linguist, just the programming learning a new language by itself.
 
the DragonBard said:
Actually, the computer does it automatically in some places.

There was an episode of DS9 that covered it.
There was an encounter with aliens from the other side of the Wormhole, who came to the Bajoran side. Their language was so alien that the translation system wasn't working, and it took several hours before the system started figuring out the language. No linguist, just the programming learning a new language by itself.
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I could see the translator fairly quickly coming up with a translation for a language that is related, heavily influenced by, or descended from known languages. Like, I could see a Star Trek grade AI eventually figuring out Japanese if it already knew Chinese and English, because you would have enough touch points through borrowed words to work out syntax and such, e.g., subjects usually go HERE in the sentence, this syntax is only used by adults talking to children, etc. I could also see it working if the aliens provide a first contact package of some kind -- like, number sequences, samples of speaking etc. A very, very basic form of that would be what humans sent out as part of the Voyager probes.

A program would have to have SOME clues, though. The reason the Rosetta stone was so important to deciphering hieroglyphics, if I recall correctly, was that it showed the same text in two other known languages. That was the start of a key that let archaeologists start piecing together the meaning of the rest of it. There are examples of what we think are writing from ancient civilizations that are indecipherable. We have no idea what they say, because they were found isolated without context, and weren't based on any known system of writing.

So, in my writing, the translator is good but not magically capable of understanding everybody...and I'm going to say that our "historical documents" of the Star Trek universe are simplifying things for television.
 
the DragonBard said:
Actually, the computer does it automatically in some places.

There was an episode of DS9 that covered it.
There was an encounter with aliens from the other side of the Wormhole, who came to the Bajoran side. Their language was so alien that the translation system wasn't working, and it took several hours before the system started figuring out the language. No linguist, just the programming learning a new language by itself.
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What ep was that? I thought I remembered DS9 pretty well, but I don't recall that at all.
 
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