Page 89

[Trantor]

Tempest is WOW Amazing reminds me of the last page of the prologue

Looks partly rendered and partly drawn (no brickbat!), while the one from the end of the prologue was fully rendered.
So scaling problems were eating up Ariochs time?

[TrashMan]

I don't think Alex is gonna spout out some dribble...He's a smart monkey after all and quick on his feet.
Somethnig short and to the point probably...maybe even something poetic.

"Farewell faithfull vessel."
or
"Rest among the stars"


Or probably something longer..I'm interested to see what.

[Count Casimir]

When he said "I could say anything 'cause they can't understand me" (paraphrased) I got the weirdest chill...

Why do I get the feeling that it's going to come back to bite him in the ass, whatever he says?

"Rest in peace, homies, I got tons of blue space elf bitches now."

[anticarrot]

SUG: My suggestion had the same problem.
"Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battlestation! You may fire when ready."

[Trantor]

When he said "I could say anything 'cause they can't understand me" (paraphrased) I got the weirdest chill...

Why do I get the feeling that it's going to come back to bite him in the ass, whatever he says?

Because of the living storage unit next to him?

(BTW: Somehow IBMs "Blue Gene" comes to my mind right now...)

[Kharanax]

Good to see a nice a new page!

I love Outsider's story.

[Ktrain]

Why do I get the feeling that it's going to come back to bite him in the ass, whatever he says?

"I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion"


http://video.adultswim.com/the-venture- ... -gary.html

[Cy83r]

One must pay homage to the original.

[Razor One]

I had a flashback to Terminator 3 when Beryl said that it was time...

I'll post my thoughts for that Alex could say after I've had some time to ruminate on the matter.

[Rosen_Ritter_1]

Well it sees that Stillstorm gave exactly zero shits about the Umiak offer.

[Mjolnir]

If a ship doesn't have shields, the consequences of even a ball-bearing sized piece of scrap metal in orbit hitting it are huge, assuming either the ship or the scrap is travelling at 10% the speed of light (i.e. 10% of 299792 km/s). Even an item hitting your ship at 1% of the speed of light (2997 km/s) would be... messy.

It doesn't matter, mining a jump point with enough ball bearings to have a reasonable chance of a collision would take impractical amounts of material. Putting a single 10 gram ball bearing in every 10 km cube in a 1 AU^3 volume would take 33 quadrillion metric tons of ball bearings. Even if you have the material, there's much more effective things you can do with it.

And that's assuming they don't have a way of detecting such objects and eliminating them. Like radar/lidar and a handful of point defense lasers/particle beams/plasma weapons. Given the levels of performance we're getting out of radar and lidar today, in a dirty planetary environment, I'd expect Outsider Terran ships to have no trouble tracking a few billion ball bearings and picking off the hazardous ones with point defense weapons.

[Cy83r]

Interdiction will always be more resource-efficient than fortification when expanding volumes of space are involved.

[Luge]

It doesn't matter, mining a jump point with enough ball bearings to have a reasonable chance of a collision would take impractical amounts of material. Putting a single 10 gram ball bearing in every 10 km cube in a 1 AU^3 volume would take 33 quadrillion metric tons of ball bearings. Even if you have the material, there's much more effective things you can do with it.

And that's assuming they don't have a way of detecting such objects and eliminating them. Like radar/lidar and a handful of point defense lasers/particle beams/plasma weapons. Given the levels of performance we're getting out of radar and lidar today, in a dirty planetary environment, I'd expect Outsider Terran ships to have no trouble tracking a few billion ball bearings and picking off the hazardous ones with point defense weapons.

The original proposal was about exiting hyperspace right on top of/actually around a piece of debris or a mine, which point defence systems wouldn't have time to detect and radar/lidar would have time to detect anyway.

But I agree with your point that mining such a large area could be impractical.

On the other hand, hyperspace navigation systems would need to maintain very complex real-time simulations of where the planets are in each system, including accounting for galactic drift and other features, in order to predict (as accurately as possible) where exactly the ship will emerge from hyperspace - No warship wants to spend 10 minutes after each jump working out which side of the local sun it ended up in! To that end, I can imagine that there are some "sweet spots" in each system that are easier to jump to. Silent listening posts could be set up near these locations to monitor hyperspace traffic.

L.

[captainsmirk]

The problem is that those ball bearings have no method of station keeping and thus will orbit the star just like any other object and will move out of position, the jump zones are fixed in relation to other stars and do not move.

You would have to continuously replace your "minefield" as the previous one orbits out of position. Arioch has mentioned this before in relation to similar suggestions.

[Mayhem]

When he said "I could say anything 'cause they can't understand me" (paraphrased) I got the weirdest chill...

Why do I get the feeling that it's going to come back to bite him in the ass, whatever he says?

Because of the living storage unit next to him?

He might be best off using some ancient military-ish quote, preferably not in English.

No sensible suggestions yet but silliness provided:

"venimus, vidimus, et mortuus est horribile, quia tempus non probabo nimis"

which is what google translate gave me for the latin of:

"we came, we saw, you died horribly, I will try not to fuck it up too much"

[Cy83r]

The problem is that those ball bearings have no method of station keeping and thus will orbit the star just like any other object and will move out of position, the jump zones are fixed in relation to other stars and do not move.

You would have to continuously replace your "minefield" as the previous one orbits out of position. Arioch has mentioned this before in relation to similar suggestions.

Yep, you'd basically have to created a metallic Oort Cloud within your entire jump zone to make it permanently defensible from all directions. However, Pluto's orbital period is roughly 248 years, and that orbit is strewn with other Plutonian objects plus many smaller ones, it's basically a second asteroid belt with some really big, really round examples. Assuming that the Sol jump point is just outside this frozen belt, you could hypothetically saturate at least come of the incoming jump corridors with enough material to make jumping in a threat for a very long time. Though I would guess, with the length of time that the Loroi and Umiak have been at each other's throats, such a measure would prove less viable than for humankind (they would probably see it as something of a very expensive smoke screen, especially the Umiak).

Also, I like the doggish(?) latin quote, to paraphrase with far less wit: we came, shit hit the fan, and now a mechanic is left to fill the diplomats' shoes.

[Mjolnir]

The problem is that those ball bearings have no method of station keeping and thus will orbit the star just like any other object and will move out of position, the jump zones are fixed in relation to other stars and do not move.

Just build a quintillion or so flak mines per jump zone consisting of an ion drive and burst charge. When the enemy comes in (through another route or just bulldozing through with point defenses) and sees your economy almost totally devoted to building ball-bearing bombs, they might just decide you're too crazy to conquer.

However, Pluto's orbital period is roughly 248 years, and that orbit is strewn with other Plutonian objects plus many smaller ones, it's basically a second asteroid belt with some really big, really round examples. Assuming that the Sol jump point is just outside this frozen belt, you could hypothetically saturate at least come of the incoming jump corridors with enough material to make jumping in a threat for a very long time.

Pluto's a lot further out than the jump zones in Sol system...they're at about the distance of Jupiter. Defenses without any maneuvering capabilities would drift out of the zone in a year or so. Stationkeeping isn't at all hard, though.

[Cy83r]

Ah, well, shoot. I need to go read some more.

[flarecde]

Mining your jump zone would prevent you from jumping in too. I imagine would wouldn't need to do the whole orbital lane though, just the wedge where possible arrivals are likely to occur, no?

[Cy83r]

Mining your jump zone would prevent you from jumping in too. I imagine would wouldn't need to do the whole orbital lane though, just the wedge where possible arrivals are likely to occur, no?

IIRC, that's a whole system-wide hemisphere of potential inbound vectors.