Eh, I never worry about "themes" when I'm writing. I just write.Durabys wrote:The issue is that TransHuman Space (the other RPG setting from the same era like Early Traveler) themes would clash with the Traveler themes of Outsider. Traveler is about the journey into the society and politics of civilizations..human or alien. TransHuman Space is about the stories of interactions of technology and science with the society and politics.
Of course! I would have personally also loved if the final epilogue chapter was Alexander holding hands with Fireblade..both smiling at the sunset..ten millennia from now.
I still think that genetic upgrades like what the Culture can do for its organic citizens..aka: Biological Immortality..are more doable in Outsider then uploading into a new and better meat puppet.
Everyone hop onto the Trans-Sapient/Post-Sapient Train! CHOO CHOO! Motherfuckers.
And frankly, if the enemy has a huge technological head-start, the only really reasonable option is to disengage all the brakes on the technological progress train and put the hammer down, consequences be damned.
So the Umiak have an insane industrial base. Okay, that's a big problem.
Possible solutions include full-bore, no-limits augmentation and transhuman technologies to augment ship crew, marines and industrial workers, and full-bore deployment of artificial general intelligence. You don't need any embodied crew at all when you can crew a ship with the uploaded minds of your finest crews and AGIs raised wholecloth as infolife, using robotic drones to perform maintenance tasks.
Also, I'm not sure there is a proper term for "Transhumanism" when applied to sapient species which were not originally human. "Transorigin" is the umbrella term I like, but I dunno if anybody else uses it.
They almost certainly did, yes. One of the advantages of fullerened antimatter is that, if you absolutely have to, you can carry it around in a paper sack.Sweforce wrote:I did an came to think about missile ordinance. Since those missile use antimatter both as fuel and warhead, did they consider plundering them for fuel to the ships? They did leave ships behind after all.
To be clear, the missiles they have now are ordnance spares provided by the fleet support tender that arrived with Fragile Storm's fleet, not the ones they had remaining when they got the fuck out of Dodge.
Blocked in my country on copyright grounds.Durabys wrote:I just got a brilliant idea:
Rapid Fire Kinetic Railgun/Coilgun Fragmentarty Flak?
The purely Human cock-blocking answer to Umiak Missile/Torpedo Spam. Remember: Kinetics don't trigger the shields on the torpedoes.
That having been said, kinetic PD is certainly a viable option, and would probably be the one humans will be employing. It doesn't have nearly as much range as the Loroi laser PDs and won't be as capable of savaging Umiak ships since their inertial dampening systems are effective against kinetic impacts, and any point-defense cannon is going to necessarily fire a lot of little projectiles instead of a big, fuckoff "I don't give a damn about your inertial dampeners" ship-to-ship cannon's projectile, which would be exponentially more destructive against a Umiak ship by the simple expedient of concentrating exponentially more force on a smaller area.
But I'd expect they'd actually be more effective as point-defense than lasers. The Loroi might consider arming at least some dedicated point-defense corvettes with mass driver PD cannons.