|
Yes We've seen you suffer, now we want to see you relax.
|
#
?
Feb 20, 2024 21:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 2, 2024 19:22 |
|
|
Thread update! The game is finished, material for 2-3 updates are collected, and the only task left is recording the final cutscene. Of course, the game was painfully uncooperative on all fronts. Most annoyingly, my favorite recording software (OBS) suddenly decided to only show a blackscreen, regardless of what I tried. After several tries with different software, I finally managed to record the final video using Bandicam. Which resulted in a recording so heavily distorted by flickering it was unwatchable!  Anyway, since I have multiple updates to type up, I'll keep trying. Just in case, there are also screenshots, but man what is it with old games trying to resist someone making footage? It's like wrangling video game SCPs sometimes.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2024 23:27
|
|
|
Libluini posted:Most annoyingly, my favorite recording software (OBS) suddenly decided to only show a blackscreen, regardless of what I tried. OBS changed some things around in one of the recent-ish updates, you may need to fiddle with whether you're using Screen, Window or Game capture, and which capture mode you're using, to get it to capture at all.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2024 00:32
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:OBS changed some things around in one of the recent-ish updates, you may need to fiddle with whether you're using Screen, Window or Game capture, and which capture mode you're using, to get it to capture at all. Thanks, but I already tried all of this. Multiple times. I encountered this before: Most of the time, OBS works fine, but then it suddenly declares one specific game its mortal enemy, and just nothing works. Also, after wasting 2+ hours on trying to get a tiny, 10-second clip recorded yesterday and another hour today, I have enough for now. I'll try again on the weekend, less stressful this way. OBS and Bandicam have, with their antics combined, already eaten two days I've slated for writing instead. If I arrive at the final update and I still haven't found a solution, well screenshots it is.  Makes me wish I had kept an installer for Hypercam 2. Because that at least was a program that always worked
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2024 19:49
|
|
|
Just tell us the incredibly distorted video is transmission interference.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2024 20:07
|
|
|
SIGSEGV posted:Just tell us the incredibly distorted video is transmission interference. I'd like to! Sadly, the "flickering" is like one full second of darkness, followed by 1/10th of a second where you can see something, then another full second of darkness. It's completely ludicrous how Bandicam can fail this hard at recording, but I guess the LP Curse noticed I was finishing up yet another game and wanted to stop me? Edit: Even worse, I did at some point managed to record parts of Operation Eastside. I guess I better re-learn whatever I did back then, and fast
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2024 20:27
|
|
|
OK, next update is written and almost finished. After polishing and screenshots are sorted out, I'll post. Probably early on Sunday morning.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2024 19:04
|
|
|
 Reptile Rising 19: The Final Dance I One final push was all that was needed. Well, technically the Akons helped us along, but let’s begin at the start  Mission Log 018: 18th December 2326 It is tail-twistingly annoying. After the hard fighting we’re now being raided by Aras and Mehandor. Galactic doctors and traders. More like galactic drug dealers and pirates. And the more colonies we set up, the more targets we are painting on our backs. Still, my orders are to gain control of this star cluster by colonizing most of its systems, and so it shall be done, even if it breaks all my teeth. Just in case things spiral out of control, I’ve prepared a diplomatic mission to the Terrans, since technically, Topsid is still an enclave and protectorate of the Solar Empire. It is time we use this political fiction to our advantage. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  It all started back in turn 339 (in my “canon”, the 20th November 2326). We just continued churning out our lovely ships and concentrated on keeping our research high.  As a reminder: I got struck fairly hard with the bad luck fairy in this run: Thanks to playing on the highest difficulty, we barely managed to get a small handful of usable planets (lots of free space, a low amount of water and mountains, nice weather) before our competitors had already snatched all the good real estate. And because Topsiders are cursed with mechanically worse ships and worse research than any other faction, we couldn’t exactly come back from this, and we instead opted to just survive.  This is the third of our four major production planets. And while the AI is bad at building up planets, it also has dozens of planets making new ships all the time. All other planets I’ve come across were already taken, bad, or too marginal to make the long work of building them up a good use of our time. Everyone, with two exceptions, has used their huge AI-bonuses to max out their tech tree by now. In conclusion: 1. Each AI produces ships faster than us. 2. Each AI has, by default, better ships than us. 3. Only two of the AI haven’t maxed their tech tree. We’re hosed. Now let’s win the game!  Our people have taken their kids’ gloves of to pull this off. (They were blocking their claws anyway.) Still, with only four of our colonies even capable of building ships (and only three of them have economies strong enough to handle our battlecruisers), any AI easily outpaces us. With how shoddy this game’s diplomacy system works, multiple AIs teaming up on us means Game Over ...unless  Turn 340: One ship from our last wave of colonizers finds themselves orbiting their extremely marginal target.  They frantically ask back if command is really sure about this. Command only answers: “Yes.”  Honestly, they should feel lucky. This is the kind of hellworld many of the others have to land on.  Three turns later, our victory score has gone up to 51/64. Not bad! Of course, playing on the highest difficulty means hordes of angry super-ships will soon decent on anyone getting close to victory. I’m doing this for the LP, but the smart way to play Operation Eastside would be to actually only take a small handful of good planets near to each other, and building them up into obscene super-fortresses. Followed by stowing away colonizers until you have to instantly win. Then you just pally until the game stops being fun for you, and end it by unleashing the colonizers. This, by the way, was my “secret plan”. Until now, I’ve always managed to just about stave of catastrophe so we could slowly climb the normal way. Now let’s see how long we can continue like this!  Turn 345! We hit the final research class in light industry! With the heavy industry and agriculture techs we traded for, that’s three categories of the tech tree maxed out. And to my own surprise, research categories maxed out by yourself are marked differently from traded categories: The two A-classes we got from trading are shown as empty fields. Fields that can never fill up, since there’s no hidden S-class to research. But light industry, which we researched up by ourselves, gives us this green glowy bar thingy that now will never go away. No idea if that’s by accident or on purpose, but I think it’s kind of neat!  And with both heavy and light industry maxed out, we’re now being drowned in a barrage of the final military, construction and research buildings, on top of just the final light industry buildings. It’s quite a lot, so let’s get on with it. This first tech is the final form of the 1-tile light industry building: The new Type Terrania Production Plant needs more resources to build and run (as always), but is also a huge upgrade: The TTPP produces now almost as much consumer goods than the first tier of dedicated agricultural buildings, and top of that, 360 light industry units (the B-class building only manages 200). We’re going to do a lot of replacing in the future.  The 4-tile version of the A-class building is the Superheavy Sun Generator. And while I will build a lot of these things because I’m bad at math, they’re really just another novelty item to make your colonies look fancier: They produce 1200 light industry and 240 consumer goods per turn. Four of the single-tile version would produce 1440 light industry and 300 consumer goods. In other words, this thing is a giant trap. I’m kind of impressed the devs managed to keep this poo poo up all through the game. Did they only have access to broken calculators at work? At this point, I’ll have to assume this is on purpose. A min-maxing player will never, ever built those bigger buildings, which is a shame.  The Production Complex 100 Suns is a Posbi-reference. So not only are our reptiloid friends stealing tech from the Terrans and Arkonids, they now moved on to steal tech developed by a civilization of sapient machines. Topsiders don’t do things by halves, it seems. The math on this thing is weird, and far closer to being reasonable. It produces a titanic 3200 light industry, which when divided through 9 tells us that’s 355 and a probably discarded fraction per tile. Very close to the 360 per tile a group of 9 TTPPs would give us. Consumer good production is a respectable 480 PS5s per turn, which is approx. 53 per tile. The 1-tile version beats that value by a wide margin. I ended up never building a single one of these clunkers.  And now on to the massive wave of other final buildings we just unlocked. Next up: The humble Research Center. We get 12 research points per tile, this being a single-tile building.  The next one of course is the same as always, 4-tiles and a fancier sprite. And as per Operation Eastside tradition, the 4-tile research buildings have better math behind them as the production buildings, and we get a whopping 50 at once here. As four single-tile Research Centers would only get us 48, it actually makes mathematical sense to occasionally build a Central System Research! As a reminder, the game is nice enough to pre-calculate every value shown with our race bonuses -or penalties, in this case. A Terran player would get something like 75 RP at this point, for example.  And the final research building is the gigantic Research Complex. Also continuing a tradition. The tradition of every 9-tile building being a colossal waste of your time. It gives us 100 RP all at once. (That’s 100 tiles worth of our very first research buildings, the humble E-class.) Sounds really impressive, until you remember the 4-tile version already gives us 50. So a smart player puts down two 4-tile Central System Researchs and a single Research Center, and gains 112 RP instead, a 12% difference. And that’s for us -with Terrans, this would end up with a difference of 165 to 150 RP. Less in percentage, but an even greater discrepancy in absolute numbers. Consequently, this is another building I would never build out of my own free will.  Oh god it’s still going Next on the list of unlocked poo poo, ship yards and spaceports. The Universe-class spaceport is the only 9-tile building you actually need, as it is the only way to construct our final class of ships, the 3000m-long superbattleships. (Or 2400m for Jumpers, or 1500m for anyone else, thanks to their different hull shapes.) Kind of funny, the game even reinforces the need for this big monster, because teched-up ships automatically gain weight and are then not only bigger, but stronger. So a smaller ship launching from a smaller port is mechanically much weaker, even if you have the same tech-level on both. That’s simply how the design sliders work!  The first A-class yard building is simply another 1-tiler, the Sol-class Yard Complex. It’s bigger and allows you to build ships faster. You also need a bigger economy to keep this bigger funnel running, and that’s it. No surprises there.  And then, the 4-tile version: The Type Andromeda Yard Facility is, again, worse for building ships than just four Sol-class Yards, but with a twist: It’s capacity to transport heavy industry from your economy into your ship building is actually a lot higher in comparison! It’s another bad math party, and this time you can get tricked into being sub-optimal the other way around: Four Sol-class buildings will get you more population into ship crews, and more light industry into ships, but actually far less heavy industry. But while crew and light industry are certainly important, each ship needs a far larger chunk of heavy industry. If you miss this, you actually end up building your ships slightly slower! A little prank by the game. And to make matters even more convoluted, ship yards build ships by first assembling them, and only after they are “built” by eating up light and heavy industry, will the completed ship be slowly filled with new crew. So this means you can get edge cases where your big yards build ships faster, but then slow down because they are channeling less population than four smaller yards combined could. To find out what combination of small and big yards is actually faster, well I hope you have that calculator handy.   As you already expect at this point, the very impressive looking Galaxy-class shipyard covers the full nine tiles and is a bad joke. I could argue for the 4-tile yard to be sometimes better, but this fucker is just straight-up worse on all points. There is literally nothing good about this building. I can’t even say “at least you don’t have to look at it, since it’s so deep down the building menu”, as the entire category of military buildings comes next, so you’ll be forced to scroll past this motherfucker over and over again.  Your worst nightmare will not be the AI taking a colony, but the AI then building this hulking monster before you can retake it, crippling your shipbuilding capacity.  The how-the-gently caress-do-I-translate-this Generator. Also known as the Impact Shield Generator. A very compact way to dunk tons of resources into a single tile, but this will also add a big 1200 armor points and a titanic 3400 shield points to a planet. Each one those. Scrounge up the resources for a couple of them, and a colony can suddenly withstand the firepower of an entire fleet. From a lore-perspective, I think it’s kind of amusing how our ships are currently equipped with a shield-tech that’s several generations beyond the humble Impact Shield, one of the oldest and weakest energy shields of the setting. But OK, I realize shields big enough to protect our entire colony may be in an entirely different class. By the way, Impact Shields were originally invented to prevent deadly accidents, as they absorb kinetic energy. Portable versions are the reasons why projectile weapons mostly ceased to exist on Earth day 1 after Arkonid technology was proliferated, as a single soldier with one of these in his backpack could effortlessly walk through an entire army’s worth of gun fire and just defeat them by slowly moving their portable disintegrator in a 360°-arc. Or, if it is a Terran soldier, by moving their non-lethal paralyser in a 360°-arc and then ordering a bunch of unarmed robots to take the now helpless enemy prisoner. This is an even better example, as armors do nothing against paralyers, their modulated hyper-energy just seeps through hard matter. From the viewpoint of a 21st century IRL-soldier, paralysers are probably even spookier than simple death rays.  Speaking of, the 4-tile A-class military building is the mighty Planetary Disintegrator Building. The ICBM-Silo to the little tactical version we already have. Not only gives it your planet a great punch, it also adds more shield energy and armor strength. It’s not very lore-accurate, since technically speaking, a grav bomb catapult (the B-class super-weapon) should have a bigger range and do more damage, but oh well. I realize the devs were pretty much running on empty here. Most of the interesting weapons of the setting were either invented after this game is set, too complicated to include in a basic 4x-game like this one, or all just too similar in the context of the game. Like, due to things like energy density, disintegrators should be really good at penetrating shields and armor, but do less damage in total, since it does “cold” damage -there’s no energy transfer to blow additional stuff up. Impulse weapons would just do big balls of damage, but less good at outright penetrating shields and armor. Thermal weapons should be lovely at getting through energy shields, but really great at melting armor and causing accidental explosions. The options are fairly great! If you have the time and budget, which Operation Eastside sadly, did not get.  A loving Transform Cannon. They actually dared. It’s even lore-accurate, since the end of the United Empire and Perry pressing the big, red BLOW UP ALL NON-TERRAN GUNS button is still far in the future. As members of the United Empire, everyone is allowed to have this final and ultimate Terran weapon! Yes, even us. This is one tech we didn’t have to steal, we just straight-up had to “research” how to ask the Terran Solar Empire to give them to us off-screen. Luckily I already posted a huge lore-update about weapons from the Perryverse, and this age in specific. The devs gave this weapon a range of 8 hex fields, which on our tiny battle maps is a lot, and the damage output of 4+ 4-tile defense buildings combined. If you have the tiles available, put this down, it can kill even the biggest ship in the game very easily. The one drawback is a total lack of defenses. So if you want to use Transform Cannons, you also need to use some shield buildings to prevent the enemy from just immediately moving in and ending your plucky defense after your first and only shot. If you have a big defensive fleet, you can even add Disintegrators instead of shields, since those buildings also have strong defenses, not just pure damage. As long as your fleet can keep the enemy away, your insane super-colony will just delete the entire enemy fleet by itself. With the maximum number of attacking ships limited to 50, that’s not even that hard. Like the Universe-class spaceport, a 9-tile building that you eventually actually need.  Woah, that was a lot. We’re still missing the A-class residence and agriculture buildings, of course. However, what we really need right now is a buff to our lovely, still mostly C-class, ship technology. Our priority now is B-class drive technology, after which I’ll move on to B-class shields, then armor, then A-class weapons. Basically, our priorities are a) as much mobility as possible without sacrificing anything else, so better drives, then b) better shields because how awful ours are by default, then c) better hulls because while our armor is naturally better, B-class hull-research may allow us to unlock bigger ships way faster than advancing a B-class research to the maximum. Then, after the most dire holes are filled, it’s time to max out weapons research, as our weird melon rockets have even worse firepower than shields. After that, my plan basically ends because I suspect the game won’t allow me to procrastinate long enough to get past that point.  Speaking of ominous portents, in turn 352 a small squadron of galactic doctors shows up in one of our many hellworld backwaters, and demand to help us. The Aras noticed that this colony is in one of their own systems, and they are mad as heck when finding our little observation post. Uh-oh, the jig is up! On a mechanical note, those random ships are better than ours by orders of magnitude, but it’s funny to see their hull armor barely over-matching our own, despite us hanging at C-class, while this is clearly a maxed-out monster. But overall, it does not matter. Our shields are so crappy, a ship like this would make our shields fold in a single turn, while our own fleets would need to combine the fire of dozens of ships to do the same. This amount of firepower can chew through our weirdly sturdy ships pretty drat fast, however. This means in 1 vs. 1, this big ball of death would eat our melon rockets for breakfast. We’d do zero damage, since energy shields this strong can regenerate more damage per turn than our biggest current ships can dish out.  Our local commander politely declines, but the doctors have ships that move far faster than our plucky little defender, and the gets run down. Sadly, the doctors administer their medicine at far too high speeds, and our ship explodes. The Aras gain nothing from this, since they already had a planet in this system, not even the simple +1 to victory score. It’s kind of hilarious, but for us it’s more cost-effective to just build more colonizers than trying to re-take worthless planets.  Let’s visualize where we stand: All systems with brackets have one of our colonies in it. The unbracketed ones and the Blues-systems are all still free of Topsiders. They’re a mix of systems too densely populated or too lovely for us. Still, putting a colony in all the unclaimed planets will push us over the victory score. And yes, this means until you pull the victory percentage extremely high, you can always win the game without ever touching a native system. You can just leave them alone!   Here are some of our new buildings. Mechanically, I’m hurting myself here, as only the weird 50s-sciency looking research buildings are actually more efficient than their smaller siblings.  Trading has mostly stopped. Sometimes I still trade, when I decide things don’t matter anyway -it’s not like we have a shortage on anything. But I’ve seen the AI behave so erratic sometimes I gave up on trying to appease them. Also :l o l: at the Mehandor trying to get our level-B weapons. Everyone else we know has already used their giant AI-bonuses to max out their tech trees, but our friends, the galactic traders, are still struggling down here on our level.  One turn later, the Mehandor apparently don’t appreciate our laughter at their attempt at getting better weapons from us. They make another bad trade-related pun. It’s their war declaration. The Mehandor, or “Jumpers”, are the only other faction that has suboptimal ships by default: Their cylindrical hulls are about inbetween our melon rockets and everyone else’s spheres. So, they have less OP ships and are mechanically less oppressive? We could actually win against these guys conventionally! Clearly, they only antagonize us because we’re too close to victory. Remember, like many 4x-games of its time, it has a hidden function that makes the AI angrier in proportion of our victory score. Though to be fair, programming in this game is not really that complex, so even if we were losing, they still could randomly decide to attack us. Luckily, the limited diplomacy in this game means the Mehandor are also fighting everyone else at the same time. There’s not much to fear here.  After a bit of searching and finding a fleet of Jumper-ships crossing our sensor range, I sleuth down this planet, where a whole bunch of Arkonid and Mehandor-ships are converging. Presumably to do battle. Yeah no, we’re not actually going to see any meaningful attack after their war declaration. With bad tech and bad ships, the Arkonids will give them a trashing here, and they’re probably losing on other fronts, too.  The update ends on turn 357: Nothing happens in our sensor range, and none of our ships arrive somewhere. Only our research ticks up a little, and I keep our four good colonies busy. Not gonna lie, if Operation Eastside had more involved victory conditions, I’d probably have done a restart when we struggled so hard to get good colonies in the early phase. Our only problem right now is that we have to carefully keep our I-win buttons away from invading fleets. As you’ve seen, winning, even winning on the highest difficulty, is fairly easy. Topsiders, who have the worst ships and the worst research, and even with the fairly bad start we had, are now in a position to win anytime we want to. Since we’re getting to the end, I went and watched a German YouTube Let’s Play for a bit. And the guy had the amazingly smart idea to just not do any of the poo poo I’ve done. Because see, it’s actually mechanically better to just rush into space as fast as possible, claim the good planets in your own system and maybe a couple more close by, and then just quietly developing them, stacking ships until it becomes mechanically impossible for invading forces to take them. This is loving brilliant, because with only a handful of planets, you won’t get overwhelmed, and the “the-player-sucks”-dial stays on a low level, causing most AI-nations to just ignore you in their quest to dominate. And if you’re done playing around, you just poo poo out a big wave of colonizers from your save zone and insta-win! We of course, did everything wrong, because I am very smart. Anyway, the Akons have read my gloating about how our victory is inevitable, and so the next update is the last one, as the Akons rush in to wrest victory from us at the last minute. Expect more battles! Next Update: The Final Dance II
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2024 21:09
|
|
|
One of these days you'll LP a game that can actually be finished in under a year.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2024 22:06
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:One of these days you'll LP a game that can actually be finished in under a year. I have good hope that my Dominions 6 LP will be finished in under a year. But yeah, none of my coming projects look like they'll be doable in less than a year. Maybe if I lose my job.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2024 22:26
|
|
|
Lore of Rhodan: Transmitters This lore update has been waiting for a long while. Since this thread is running towards the end, I’ve decided to post it now, before it’s too late. There are only two more updates after this one.  Warning! Big Pictures Incoming! Warning General Overview: Transport Technology Attentive readers of science fiction know about energy based transport technologies: From authors to TV-show writers, sometimes writing a thousand variations on „and then they walked into a spacecraft and then flew away“, apart from simple things like timing problems, imagine scenarios like two space ships hanging around in a dangerous cloud of Evil Space Phenomena, and for the story to work, some characters have to move between ships. Now you can solve this with just plain old shuttles or whatever, but then readers either expect an interesting flight through Evil Space, or at least some words as to how it went beyond „it worked well“. If lots of characters or just plain old stuff has to move, things get implausible fast, or even worse, boring. To remove headaches, a lot of the time authors instead eagerly grab the standard staple of space gates: Now there's this magic space door that you can walk your characters through, and readers will be less inclined to ask awkward questions about how all those shuttle flights going on off-screen are working so remarkably well, considering the current danger. For TV-shows and movies there's also the added bonus of some lighting effects being cheaper than squeezing transport flight sequences into the story every time. Or causing issues like sarcastic viewers making a tally of how many shuttles your incredibly isolated spaceship on the other side of the galaxy has lost by now. Though of course the latter happened in a show that was using one of those fancy magic space door systems, so they really had no excuse for that poo poo. Anyway! There are roughly three different approaches for transporting people with an energy-based system: Information, transformation and warping. „Warping“ refers to systems like wormholes or the Farcasters from Hyperion. They allow travel by warping or folding space to make far away points close together in some way. What a wormhole is you hopefully know, and a Farcaster e.g. folds space between two „gates“, allowing you to „step“ over the intervening space without actually traveling through it. While this allows people to just go about anywhere, it's not always used because warping space in this way uses an absolutely insane amount of energy. Tragically, it's the most realistic energy-transport approach, as folding space is something we know is possible: Earth itself does this to us all the time. (It's gravity) „Information“ refers to systems like Star Trek's Transporter: Systems that can actually only send vaguely defined „information“, which the receiving end uses to re-build whatever was send. Star Trek does this a bit weirdly, as the transport beam also transforms you into energy and it's therefore a bit philosophically unclear if the person getting de-materialized is the same as the one getting re-materialized in the target location. But eventually, I decided to put Star Trek transporters into this category because I think it's not implied that the beam of the transporter de-materializes, transports and re-materializes someone in one go, there's at least some sort of information buffer involved, which e.g. can make duplicates appear or if the information buffer isn't purged, your original body can die in a ditch somewhere and another you can still walk out of the transporter one day. Another form of information transporters are machines using quantum-manipulations. SF-authors sometimes abuse quantum entanglement very hard to create something that basically incinerates its victims and then uses some kind of nanomachines at the target point to completely recreate it. Or the system used to „scan“ you can only take in everything needed for the transport by being highly destructive in some way, or the setting doesn't care at all about there being multiple versions of a person running around. The latter case then would mean a transport system which just straight-up creates new people using the information it got by scanning. SF-authors sometimes like dealing with the philosophical problems information transporters cause by existing, and so, like space warpers, they will exist in some form eternally, as both approaches deal with different questions.  If this was a PR-style transmitter, everyone would be panicking now. To summarize, space warping transporters come from the wish to deal more with questions of physics, while information transporters come from the wish to deal with the more philosophical aspects of this kind of instant travel. Coincidentally, both approaches avoid whatever the author doesn't want to talk about neatly: If you just want your characters to go somewhere without pesky questions like „but what if a computer error means there are now 300 of you“, take a Farcaster. If just going somewhere is trite and boring and you really want to write about a space fax machine accidentally making 300 copies of your protagonist, you take a Quantum Incinerator (or Star Trek Transporter, if you're a Star Trek writer). But I have another approach for you, one that's an odd hybrid of space warper and mind warper: The way Perry Rhodan does it. I call it „Transformation“. If you have an energy transport system transporting people by transformation, you have a system that's neither a simple gate like a wormhole, but also not a complete philosophical nightmare like e.g. Battle Angel Alita: Last Order's theoretical nanomachine quantum entanglement transporter. A system like this, on its surface, works like a Star Trek Transporter: It transforms stuff into energy, sends the energy to the target, then transforms it back again. The difference here is that the authors make crystal clear that the information in question involves everything, even your soul, and that it's nearly impossible to stop or break the process of transporting without destroying you. Walking into a Perryverse transmitter turns you into energy, energy that then is, without interruption, send at superluminal speed to the receiving station (or target coordinates in rare cases). At some point this process is reversed, but the process is also understood be almost natural, as in your body taking on its normal form, as long as nothing goes wrong. One example: It's perfectly possible to just walk through a rift in space/time into hyperspace and survive. Normally, what happens is that your body gets transformed into energy, then currents in hyperspace will tear your energy cloud apart and smear it across a volume roughly equivalent to half a galaxy. But people have survived in rare cases: Either they only dipped into hyperspace for a very short time, or for complicated space reasons the local hyperspace was really calm that day. The reason for that is that hyperspace is not an actual place, but the outside: It's the medium all universes are encased within. The matter our body is made of can only exist inside a universe similar enough to ours, matter doesn't exist outside the universe. But hyperspace is still really loving important, considering it surrounds every universe like a shell. Curving space/time for example, distorts space/time (duh) and therefore causes corresponding dents and „shadows“ on the other side. Likewise, big energetic objects like our sun leave a big, very visible shadow. Hyperspace works a bit like a reverse ocean, with us being just on the other side of the bottom: Think of a sun as like a lamp buried in the mud of the abyssal plains of the Atlantic ocean. If you're just hovering close over the spot the lamp is buried, some of the light may still shine through the mud, but the more you raise through the water, the more the light of the lamp vanishes. Eventually, you're so reverse-deep in the water, the light has completely vanished in the surrounding darkness. Hypershadows of real objects inside a universe work a lot like that. Why am I talking about all of this? Because one of the things „real“ in hyperspace are those shadows. Do you know what else has a shadow in hyperspace? Your mind. For complicated cosmological reasons, lifeforms in the Perryverse are connected with hyperspace, and the more complex a lifeform is, the stronger this connection becomes. The end result of this is the following observation: Highly complex lifeforms like Humans, when coming into direct contact with hyperspace, are somehow more „real“ than the non-living crap they are wearing or are surrounded with. And from here on out, it gets insanely complicated, so I spare you this and go back to the Perryverse transformation transporter: The Transmitter. Just remember: In the Perryverse, the soul is real and gets transported by the settings transporters, so there is no philosophical conundrum. The you walking into a transmitter is the exact same person walking out on the other end. You may be getting destroyed, trapped for 1000 years or facing an even worse fate, but it will always be you, not some duplicate. Basic Transmitting OK, now that's done. Probably the world's longest introduction. Let's have a look at Transmitters, then. On the most basic level, transmitter technology is an outgrowth of FTL-communication technology. Even more basic, FTL-communication and all technologies related to hyperspace in some way are based on oscillating crystals. OK poo poo, I should probably explain that one, too. So, we now know that hyperspace and normal space are connected, our stuff can throw shadows into hyperspace, and denting and twisting space/time has effects in hyperspace. Correspondingly, poo poo happening in hyperspace can gently caress up normal space. One of the ways hyperspace interacts with normal space is through crystals: Under certain rare conditions, a bit of “hyperbarie”, the 5-dimensional phase form of matter, gets caught in the crystal structure of a crystal formation, and dragged out of hyperspace. But because hyperbarie does not automatically (and catastrophically) change into corresponding normal matter and/or energy, nothing bad happens. Instead, the hyperbarie-particles are rejected and phase back out into hyperspace. But the crystal structure trapping them is still there of course, so the little bit of really weird not-matter gets dragged back down again. And then it immediately starts phasing out again. This happens over and over, with different types of crystal having different amounts of hyperenergy trapped inside of them, based on the frequency with which this phase shift occurs. The phase shifting however, can only cause changes detectable without any hyperspace tech or psychic powers, if there are a real loving lot of oscillating crystals, or extremely strong types of OC or „hypercrystal“. This is because with rising frequency of phase shifts, the amount of energy dripping in from the outside grows, and eventually a hypercrystal can influence the minds of people around it, and eventually even their physical bodies. The environment eventually changes, too. The most extreme cases are often found near the galactic core, as all those big suns hanging out close together, create big, strong hyperpressure on normal space around them, causing their planets to have far higher amounts of oscillating crystal to form than in other parts of a galaxy. Consequently, living in the galactic core sometimes gets you infected with Core Plague, a „disease“ that is just the hyperenergy seeping into normal space slowly transforming living matter into more hypercrystal. It's creepy and very deadly. You get some nice crystal statues from this process, however. All this poo poo has consequences: Species on average tend to develop more psionic strength faster the closer they evolve to the galactic core or other „hotspots“ of hyperspace intruding into normal space, but on the other hand those environments are also highly detrimental to life developing in general, so super-psionic species are still not that common. It also means that without outside intervention, the most likely life-bearing planets to eventually get intelligent life are those who are hyper-duds, essentially. Which then results in an intelligent species having an extremely hard time ever understanding how the universe actually works. One nice example of this is a species that only shows up in one shortstory to get an antagonist showing up in the middle of nowhere to impede the protagonists for 70 pages and is then gone forever from the Perryverse: This species evolved near a blackhole in a system deep in the intergalactic void, and never found any „hypercrystals“ or other New-Age bullshit. Instead they developed a deep, and sadly very wrong, understanding of normal space, basically real life physics. Based on this, they eventually managed to launch a sublight-colonyship to escape the cataclysm threatening their civilization, and then this last throw of the dice got grabbed by hyperspace seeping out of that blackhole and their space-folding drive based on real-world physics, instead of slowly moving them through the void like Star Trek’s Enterprise, hyper-catapulted them millions of light years in an instant. Then the protagonists nearly got killed by them showing up out of nowhere, and then the visitors all died, making their species extinct. Very sad, very tragic, very German. Another example is Human history, as it's a convoluted mess of our ancestors starting out psychically active, meaning they eventually found out that e.g. those nice rubies were actually creepy space lava lamps and invented FTL, but then later the Terran descendants of those early Humans lost the special brain gland boosting their psionic powers due to evolution being mean, but at that point descendants of the original Humans had spread so far, it was basically impossible to not eventually get an already built FTL-drive from somewhere to jumpstart themselves back into space. Which is what happened! Humans stole advanced tech from other Humans (which were thought to be humanoid aliens due to convergent evolution at the time), and suddenly could go out and find hypercrystals to feed their new alien-boosted hypercrystal-based industry. In cosmic history, a variation of this has played out over and over again: First, a species somehow (psionics, technology, dumb luck) finds phase-shifting hyperbarie inside some diamond or something, and then by observing their behavior and expanding their understanding of physics based on this, eventually exploit the fact that hyperspace, thanks to being the „outside“ of the universe, is kind of a weird energetic reverse of normal space: For one thing, light speed is the lowest possible speed in hyperspace: And like it takes infinite energy to reach light speed in normal reality, so it takes infinite energy to slow down to light speed in hyperspace! Also, while coordinates inside and outside are roughly congruent, distances are not, as hyperspace, despite the name, does not actually have „space“. Think about the universe as a soap bubble for now. We're on the surface of the bubble. Hyperspace is the empty air the bubble is slowly floating through. Just that in this very simplified analogy, you're bound by the laws of physics as you know them by traipsing around the soapy surface like normal, but jumping up into empty air suddenly removes all your restrictions and enables cheat mode. Suddenly, you can choose to come down from your jump at any spot on the bubble you want! Or even on the other side of the bubble, or you decide to just go land on another bubble entirely! Only energy and the limitation of your own, sadly not hyperspace-based body, prevent people from doing this all the time in the Perryverse. (Of course, this still happens.) The exact timeline of how things go from here is of course different for every civilization, but it roughly goes crystal detector → theoretical knowledge about FTL → FTL-communication → FTL-travel → FTL matter transport (Transmitter). Basic FTL-communication is just using hypercrystals to send modulated waves through hyperspace like some kind of weird warp radio, basic FTL works by kicking a hole into space and jumping through, which hurts like hell, and basic transmitting is like FTL-travel, except you can just, like, walk. You can skip the need for a transport vehicle. But both forms of FTL-travel are based on the same physical principles, and therefore roughly work the same way: Both the basic Translation Drive and a basic transmitter project a bubble of hyperenergy, wrap something into it, and then let it phase-shift out of the normal universe. In both cases, the machines involved need 5D-coordinates for their quasi-ballistic launch, otherwise this kind of FTL-travel just permanently kills you. Also in both cases, tremendous amounts of energy and hypercrystals are necessary for the projectors to create enough hyperenergy for the process to work. The limitations roughly correspond to each other as well: Both basic methods of FTL-travel will use more energy the farther you want to go, as higher distance in normal space corresponds to hanging around in hyperspace for slightly longer, which causes small rifts and distortions. Both your body and any equipment traveling with you will get slightly twisted, and this „twisting“ gets worse and worse the longer you're in hyperspace. Any FTL-jump going too far will not only risk important equipment becoming so distorted upon arrival that a catastrophic failure is the result, even the more malleable organic beings using said equipment eventually won't survive: First it's pain, then the pain becomes stronger, then debilitating, followed by unconsciousness, and finally, death. Coincidentally, the first Terran improvement on FTL-travel was reverse-engineering alien medical technology to create a type of „jump shock“-medication that will make you unconscious during a jump, which keeps your brainwaves from being as strongly disrupted by hyperspace. This lead to a short, but funny era of Terran spacers juicing themselves up so their ships could jump further and further without killing all their crew. Transmitters face the same problems, but often have far shorter ranges, so even primitive transmitters, while painful to use, at least in general won't just kill you for using them. On the other hand, transmitter installations with insanely huge ranges do exist, and they of course can be hilariously dangerous to use! Where transmitters and FTL-spaceships differ, and instead interject with communication technology, is the way they kind of can't move themselves to the target coordinates, so instead hypercom-tech is used to ensure both sending and receiving station are linked, and that there are no sources of interference, like active anti-transmitter weapons. Any good transmitter will have automatic failsafes that immediately interrupt transport if the signal connection is severed or even just slightly disrupted. Also, whatever is transported, is send as one big communication signal made of modulated hyperenergy, following the signal line established. In a way, this means you could, in theory, „catch“ something in transit and duplicate whatever it is by duplicating the hyper-signal. In practice though, actually doing this is hideously complicated, and a civilization at that level could, metaphorically speaking, take the Enterprise and smoke it. We're talking about Q-Continuum levels of space magic at this point. For most eras of the Perryverse, even attempting this stupid thing is a good way to just destroy everything you attempt to multiplicate. Or to create hideous monsters if you tried to multiplicate living beings and got something slightly wrong. Using transmitter technology this way is a little bit like a priest IRL suddenly deciding to go capture souls for their god by caving peoples' heads in with a baseball bat. Good loving luck buddy, it ain't gonna work out. On the other hand, re-routing transmission signals to steal stuff and/or people, that's been done! It's complicated, but at least feasible. Another important thing that limits transmitters is part of the math underlying FTL-technology: Energetically, going faster gets you closer to the lowest possible energy state of hyperspace, which makes breaking through easier. A transmitter however, is always going as fast as whatever it is bolted on. Having a machine that uses less energy on a ship going fast is nice, having a machine violently explode while the ship is in orbit, less so. It is therefore understood that a transmitter is not merely a machine to violently open a portal to the great beyond, as you can have that easier with a pack of high-explosives and suicidal thoughts. Getting something like a transmitter to work at all, is a herculean effort even if your civilization already knows how FTL-travel works. The main reason of course being the tendency of all FTL-tech to violently explode when all that super-energy squeezes itself into the normal continuum. This makes research rather expensive. A lot of the time, a civilization just decides that since they already have ships that can go faster than light, and FTL-radios on top of that, they don't really need to replace their shuttles with energy beams that hard. So, now that I've exhaustively laid down the groundwork, let's finally look at some common types of transmitters, god drat it! Cage Transmitters  This is a fairly modern one, the old ones actually did look like cages. The classic. The first transmitter type encountered by Terrans. When Perry Rhodan personally exploited Arkonid technology to boost Terran technology by roughly 8000 years forward, transmitters weren't part of the package. To summarize a complicated history, the Arkonid Empire had, at some point in the distant past, known how to build them. But after a series of devastating galactic wars and a long phase of losing the fight against entropy, at some unknown point the knowledge of building transmitters was lost. The Arkonids still had theories about how interstellar space doors could be done, but the few scientists still actively working on this, managed to not make any progress. Apparently they did manage to blow up a lot of poo poo trying to get this right. In a decaying empire institutionally discouraging this kind of thing more and more, the Arkonid Empire actually got to the point of negative progress: The more complicated and math-intensive understanding a space technology was, the higher the chance that one day, not enough people gave a poo poo to keep it around. (The Arkonid Empire at its lowest point was in such a bad state, important stuff like transmitter technology was probably even still hanging around in some forgotten data base, but actually getting to that stuff would have been the equivalent of a lengthy campaign of dungeon crawls, just with disintegrators instead of swords. In a state where nobody cared enough to even want to try.) So of course the first time some Terrans walk into space, they stumble face-first into some ancient transmitters, as to the astonishment of the Arkonids joining them, the Ferrons, a species living in the Wega-system, just about 11 light years from Earth, had a functioning transmitter network. The Ferrons (think blue-skinned space halfling/dwarf hybrids) had not much else, though: It turned out their transmitter-network had been there already when they made their way into space, a leftover from insanely advanced people who left their ruins all over the place.  A fairly modern Ferron Coincidentally for this thread, the Ferrons had send an emergency FTL-broadcast because of the Topsiders invading their planets, in the faint hope someone would send help before they all ended up as lizard snacks. As a short recap, just before the series started, the Topsiders had managed to successfully rebel against Arkonid oppression and overwhelmed the military garrison on Topsid itself, storming a giant 800m-battleship in the process. Perry & Friends managed to stop the Topsiders, find out why they were there in the first place (unreliable jump technology had caused them to miss Earth, they were in the wrong system ), destroy the Topdsider-fleet by an act of psionic sabotage/terrorism, and then stole their thunder by finding the ancient space secrets they were after and becoming functionally immortal.For this lore post however, it's only important to know that they got a bunch of transmitter-blueprints, and here we are. A cage transmitter is as basic as it gets: You have two linked stations, both capable of being a sender/receiver, and the hyperenergy-field necessary to initiate transmission is created by causing the generated energy to flow along a mesh-like structure surrounding the transport area: The aforementioned „cage“. See, the ludicrously difficult thing about transmitters is your attempt at essentially causing the Warp to flood into normal space and then somehow wrangle with it. A Translation Drive cheats like a motherfucker by using comparatively gigantic power plants and capacitors to get a hyperenergy field of insane strength, and then using the ship's own hull to create a field bubble that's stable enough to not just cause a titanic explosion. After that, you get problems with signal strength and connectivity issues. (As you may have guessed, a couple of centuries of highly expensive experiments should have given the Arkonids their dumb transmitters back, but as the story points out, their main problem was a lack of people who still gave a poo poo.) To get transported, you get into the cage, then someone flips a switch, and in a matter of nanoseconds the machine confirms that 1) there's a connection to a receiver-station, 2) the signal is stable and 3) that there's enough energy to do the thing. Then you get a really painful headache and suddenly, you are in what looks like the exact same cage, but in a different place. And since even this basic type of transmitter can send you, in theory, hundreds of light years, that's really useful. Eventually, cage transmitters became mostly obsolete, but for industrial transports, they kept being in use for over a thousand years after the more advanced Archway-Transmitter was developed/rediscovered. Archway-Transmitters The first big step into the world of FTL-walking! Archway-Transmitters are actually literally space „doors“. Instead of needing an entire cage-like structure to make the transmission work, you only need two poles to create an energy archway. You can walk through it and the transmitter will then do all the things a cage transmitter can do, just faster.  Ironically, this picture is from a model thousands of years older than the modern cage transmitter depicted above. Talk about luck with Google. Archway-Transmitters were a nice step-up from the older models, and this time around, they weren't so hideously complicated to make an archaeological expedition to recover ancient lost technology was necessary. No, just a couple centuries of research was needed! Those nifty things can work continuously, which meant they saw immediate application in industry and trade. The Terran colony world of Olymp rose to power this way, as the planet was at an important crosspoint of supplies going to and trade goods coming from the many, widely dispersed colonies of the Solar Empire. First cage transmitter, then archway transmitter technology was used to create a network of instant transport, with Olymp becoming the massive trading hub where everything ends and begins. While this sounds grand, it was a process taking centuries: At first, Mars right next to Terra became the central trading hub for the Solar Empire. It just got eventually replaced by Olymp, as Olymp was in a really good position for trade, especially with most of the Empire’s trading partners, while Mars… wasn’t. Space geography can be weird. As time went on and things became more peaceful, Olymp continued to grow, attracting trade from outside the empire, in the end reaching position as galactic-level trading hub. Archway-transmitters also lead to an immense proliferation of personal transmitters: Cage-transmitters were so big, clunky and loving energy hogs to boot, they never really managed to become something your average middle-class Terran would ever get to use. In comparison to the Elon-Musk-level of capital you'd need to put a cage-transmitter into your home, archway-transmitters eventually made their way into individual (normal) peoples' houses. Of course, they still have all the other limitations and drawbacks of transmitters, like giving you a short, headache-like burst of pain when walking through, or needing safeguards to switch themselves off if not everything is working exactly 100% perfectly. Still, being able to visit your friend on the moon by just flipping a switch near your door and walking through sounds very, very convenient. A bit too convenient, even: Accidents with archway-transmitters are far more likely, as with cage-transmitters, if something goes wrong while the transmitter spools up, the transmission is interrupted before it happens and you're fine. But in terms of scale, the very act of walking through an active transmitter-field means you're giving the universe a million times more chances to gently caress with you.  This guy. Alaska Saedaelaere, walking transmitter-accident, learned this the hard way when he joined the rank of protagonist in the early 34th, century CE. That poor fucker was force-merged with a humanoid alien being transmitted on the same frequency in a one-in-a-trillion chance collision, and only barely won. The other guy or girl is now a permanent symbiont emitting insanity-causing radiation and is glued to his face. To show that it has a sense of humor, the universe finagled things so that the man in the mask got to become immortal, just so he can savior his fate for longer.  Alaska, from one of the rare times in his life he got to spend alone, without his insanity-causing symbiont. The same mid-series change that crippled all civilizations across the entire cosmos also changed transmitter-technology: As it became harder to cross into hyperspace, all old-style transmitters simply stopped working. In principle, nothing was wrong, but they all now need a magnitude more energy to do the exact same thing. The age of everyone having their own personal space door was ephemeral, after all. Sun-Transmitter I could have just titled this section „What if transmitters, but BIG?“, and barely resisted the temptation. Sun-transmitters are deeply involved in human history, though until Terrans ran into an example directly, it was just assumed building a transmitter at this scale would simply be too insane to contemplate. Turns out our ancestors had plenty of insanity to spare. On paper, sun-transmitters are a simple, logical progression upwards from standard transmitters: The more energy you pump into a transmitter, the further it can safely transmit a signal. And to keep in step with the growing energy consumption, transmitters with longer range need to be built bigger. A simple house-door sized transmitter may barely be able to reach Earth's moon from your house in Pennsylvania, but the industrial nightmares used on Olymp can easily bridge up to 20k light years (for industrial goods, people trying to use Olymp's gates like this would be as dead on arrival as a trolloc walking through one of Rand's death gates). Getting a transmitter to reach even beyond that, and more importantly, safe enough for people to use, just means you have to scale everything even larger. However, after a certain amount of scaling, you will reach the point where even the immensely advanced fusion reactors based on Arkonid technology can't feasibly supply the necessary energy anymore. So even if you'd be willing to sacrifice an entire mountain range to create a super-transmitter, you'd then be hosed because you'd end up with half the planet covered in power plants to supply the damned thing. And the end result would be something silly like two times the range of the already fairly big industrial transmitters used on Olymp. It's possible, but it makes no economic sense. But you know what is even bigger than a planet? Space! Here the problem becomes how to make a transmitter big enough that it's not just cheaper to use a fleet's completely mundane internal FTL-drives to move where it needs to go. Especially relevant since common FTL-drives don't need an equally big receiving station at the target. Stuff like the necessary energy density of capacitors and material science requirements then put down further obstacles: It's simply not economical to create a pair of space gates that are actually more useful then just using your more flexible ships. In the time Operation Eastside plays, half the galaxy is basically terra incognita, to boot. This means starting a gigantic construction project in an area with unknown (or as we're slowly learning, intensely hostile) alien civilizations. And putting down space gates closer to home makes no sense, as I repeat: Normal ships do just fine, there's a reason the Arkonid Empire controlled most of our half of the galaxy, after all. Currently, for this reason, transmitters may already exist and are in wide-spread use, but the main trade hub of the Solar Empire is still Mars, and the Arkon-System for the rest of the galaxy. In the following centuries, as transmitter technology becomes better understood, the Free Traders of Olymp will slowly create the crown jewel of their galaxy-spanning transmitter network, and the weights of history will finally tilt into the other direction. It also helped that at one point, Mars was bombed to poo poo.  This is how the Free Traders were depicted at first. And that's were things start to get interesting, as the human empires of the galaxy, the recovering „Crystal Empire“ of the Arkonids and the Terran „Solar Empire“ both begin to approach the standard of galactic civilization that was lost long ago. In the early 24th century, Perry & Friends stumble over something insane: They find an oddly structured formation of six stars, arranged in a perfect hexagon. When exploring it, they find a strange ancient station that, when activated, can link up with the sun it orbits, and start draining it. The fairly incomprehensible amounts of energy the station draws from this poor star then creates a strange hyperenergy-field of titanic proportions, hovering in the exact geographic midpoint between the six suns. Poking the field reveals that this is a still working transmitter of truly baffling dimensions: Someone arranged six stars carefully, so that in the exact midpoint of this formation, their overlapping gravity fields and hypershadows create a weakpoint you can then apply energy to, and open a transmitter field. As this post is already fairly long I spare you the antics and adventures that followed, but yes, this was the first sun-transmitter Terrans discovered, and the story arc reveals that they were originally build by the ancient Lemurians, the human civilization ruling the galaxy from Terra over seventy thousand years before Perry landed on the moon. The first sun-transmitter discovered was linked to a counter-station in Andromeda, but in principle, you can link any compatible station of sufficient size, like any transmitter. And due to how big this type of transmitter is, it becomes easily possible to transmit not just entire fleets, but more importantly, entire fleets with still living crews over galactic or even inter-galactic distances. For a while of course, no-one in the setting could actually build new ones, and the old ones linked to Andromeda became fairly unusable, first they were under the control of a hostile force of space fascists ominously called the Masters of the Isle and after their invasion was defeated, the true descendants of Lemuria took over control of the Andromeda-station. These Tefrods then had to fight off an invasion fleet of Akons. Akons. You know? The guys that keep attacking us in this LP? Turns out them being belligerent assholes is just canon in the Perryverse. This really stupid attempt of the Akons to abuse the political instability in Andromeda after the fall of the Masters ended in a total one-sided massacre, with the Akons only becoming 2nd place: But the damage was done and instead of becoming a massive trade hub linking two galaxies, it became effectively closed after that particular stunt. The Tefrods made clear that they didn't care about the homeworld of their ancestors and blocked entry on their part, and with no other known sun-transmitters in range, the big one in our galaxy was suddenly pointless. From that point on, there's just some minor stuff about occasional careful diplomatic exchanges, but overall the sun-transmitters only managed to have some relevance during the Dolan-Wars, when the Uleb and their Second Conditioned nearly made Terrans go extinct. The era right after this devastating war raging across the 25th century was heavily dedicated to rebuilding efforts, and internal political problems, as several of the larger groups of colonies split off from the Solar Empire. Suddenly, no-one had any time left to deal with gigantic mega-gates. Edit: Looking up details on Perrypedia revealed two important point: 1.) I’m being wrong here, the original Kahalo Sun-Transmitter I’m talking about was permanently closed in 2405, by way of gigantic explosion, but there were hundreds of other Lemurian Sun-Transmitters, and some of them survived. I’m guessing the diplomatic stuff I’m remembering went through some of those others. This setting.  Edit 2: gently caress it, here’s a link to the list of active/potentially active, and still active Sun Transmitters in the Milkyway: Beware of German It’s a lot.  From the Dolan-Wars: A time cop buries his executor-creature, while his Dolan looks on, solemnly. War is hell. A Terran ship hangs ominously in the distance. Over a thousand years later, galactic technology had progressed to the point where Terrans were capable of replicating sun-transmitter technology: The Kobold-transmitter, a temporary structure, was formed of our Sun, and the small dwarf star Kobold, who was put into position at an extremely precise point to make Earth fall into the midpoint between Kobold and Sol. And yeah, you guessed it: A sun-drain station activated at a pre-programmed point to safely transmit the Earth and about ten billion people into another, precisely calculated point in another solar system, in another galaxy. The Kobold-transmitter worked (thankfully), but ES, our local space-god, intervened to hurl Earth into another galaxy and system instead. Not even a real galaxy: Just a gigantic maelstrom of stars slowly falling into a galaxy. Including a gigantic hypershadow-mess of colliding suns, creating the actual Maelstrom: A rare phenomenon of a natural occuring sun-transmitter.  To my surprise, I couldn’t find a picture of Kobold or the short-lived Dual Sun/Kobold Sun Transmitter, so here is what it looked like for a second, just after Earth and Moon arrived at the hidden Archimedes TriTrans Sun Transmitter, and before a loving space god stole our planet and send them into the Maelstrom, millions of light years away. Earth fell into the Maelstrom, and was yet again yeeted across the universe.  A short diagram from Perrypedia. “Schlund” is the natural Sun-Transmitter at the center of the Maelstrom. “Medaillon” is the name of the star that suddenly got gifted an Earth and a Luna. Please note the elliptical orbit of Medaillon, and where it is going. I can at this point step aside and assure you: Eventually, the Earth got back home. However, the ten billion people? All totally lost! First they lost their emotions, then their lives. Yeah, living in the Perryverse sucks sometimes.  At least without emotions, it sucked a bit less. And then they died, so it stopped sucking eventually. But after all this bullshit, attempts at building new sun-transmitters became non-existent. The connection to Andromeda eventually re-opened, though! So not all is gloom and death. Of course, technically it got re-opened, closed and re-opened multiple times, since we’re talking about a time span of thousands of years, but details, details. Anyway, to summarize the basic principle: To make a transmitter big enough to connect distant galaxies, you at first need to carefully position at least two or up to six suns of the exact right mass and composition in a shape of orbits that allows their gravitational fields and hypershadows to overlap in the exact right way, then you „just“ need to construct the energy drain and control station or stations to control the drat thing. Then you do the same thing again in another galaxy, and link both up after you're finished and then presto, you have a star gate! You still can't run it indefinitely though, that would be ridiculous. Like a Star Gate star gate, the thing has to be powered up for use, no-one actually runs the transmitter field 24/7.  It probably doesn’t surprise you to hear that the one definitely still functioning Sun Transmitter in modern-day PR is this: The Kharag Sun-Dodecahedron, as seen from the surface of Kharag. Now that’s a lot of suns. Even Stupider poo poo, Up To Infinity The Perryverse is insane and stupid, I love it. Beyond what I’m already describing here, there are also bridges connecting galaxies (yes, bridges, just simple bridges), deathball gates, the Zero Zone and of course, the hidden rift in space/time orbiting Mars that are based on another technology entirely. But in the era of Operation Eastside, all that poo poo either doesn’t exist yet, or the people living their lives aren’t aware of them, like the Mars Gate.  One of these is the Hero of Mars, the other one is the Bane of Mars (official titles, do not steal). Can you tell which is which? Their stealth systems are good enough it will take thousands of years until whatever is scratching on the universe from the other side makes this our problem. When I’m starting my next Perryverse-related thread, expect a second lore update to include all this insane stuff, since then it will be a lot more relevant! Edit: Also, a disclaimer: I’m not an author of Perry Rhodan, nor am I in any way responsible for any of the pictures posted here. It’s all either official art of supplied by fans. I’ve used the Perrypedia and my memories as a source, and so there may be minor errors. Edit2: The pictures. Ah, well. When looking at them I realized two facts: 1.) They're not that big, just mostly low-quality. 2.) People earlier in my LP-threads complained about timg loving up the view on mobile devises. I thought about this long and hard, and when trying to re-size some of the pictures reduced the image detail too much, I finally settled on this compromise: Since the quality of the pictures I've found is mostly really dire, no resizing, so you can see all the weird glory in as much detail as possible. Also, no timg for our mobile phoning friends. I hope this works out!
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2024 16:18
|
|
|
The Perryverse is big. Like ridiculously big. You had the main pulp magazines which are now running in the 3000+ issues. These are 'condensed' into the 'Silberbände', a series of 165 (and counting) book. I still fondly recall the library in my hometown which had a whole shelf dedicated to the (back then 120-ish) books. Then you have several spin-offs, including 'Atlan' (you know, the Arkonid Atlantis was named after) which has it's own series of books (called 'Blaubände'). Luckily, you can buy the whole series digitally now, if you have about 4000€ burning a hole in your pocket and want to actually outstrip the capacity of your e-reader of choice. Perry Rhodan is not for the faint of heart.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2024 18:44
|
|
|
Consider this: Each week, since the early 1960s, the main series alone creates approx. 70 new pages for you to read. This means, every week you can't at least read 70+ pages. Perry Rhodan will grow faster than your ability to read it. You are doomed.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2024 19:17
|
|
|
Do you need some kind of official franchise to write for the Perryverse or is it just a chaotic scramble? Because that infodump with a bit more work and editing could have been a published essay in Clarkesworld.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2024 16:51
|
|
|
Decoy Badger posted:Do you need some kind of official franchise to write for the Perryverse or is it just a chaotic scramble? Because that infodump with a bit more work and editing could have been a published essay in Clarkesworld. Pabel-Moewig, the publisher of Perry Rhodan, is a little bit like Disney. By which I mean they scare me to death. Everything technical I wrote is taken directly from the Perrypedia, which is a wiki that painstakingly lists all the novels they take their sources from. In other words, taking anything from my PR-posts and trying to pass it off as your own writing is highly illegal, I'm afraid.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2024 19:00
|
|
|
Libluini posted:Pabel-Moewig, the publisher of Perry Rhodan, is a little bit like Disney. By which I mean they scare me to death. Everything technical I wrote is taken directly from the Perrypedia, which is a wiki that painstakingly lists all the novels they take their sources from. In addition to this, to get to write for Perry Rhodan, you already need to be an accomplished writer first, so not only would I rip off the rights of a big corporation, I would (try) to rip off poo poo written by people who all have multiple published novels under their belt. Imagine someone trying to put their own name under one of Isaac Asimov's stories. That's the level this suggestion operates on, essentially. Edit: In less funny news (but still funny), I've been playing through the game a second time, to record the stuff I couldn't show off due to winning too early. Despite starting on Easy, with a larger map (remember, the game hard codes all factions to show up, so a bigger map reduces the chance to get AI-dogpiled early, when you're most vulnerable), the game put the Akons in a system directly next to us. And they're as batshit evil as they were in the main run. I've managed to found 9-10 good colonies thanks to getting into space ASAP and the AI not having the huge boosts necessary to outpace me, but the Akons are so hilariously aggro my plan to just abuse my many good planets to research up to the finish line has been put on hold for war. It's a really stupid war, as the Akons in this reality can barely put out enough of their (still mechanically superior) ships to threaten me, and they've put most of their ships in on their stupid attempts to gain a foothold in my capital system. In the meantime, I've been sending around a squad of small early game ships to gently caress up their backyard, taking planets and then leaving them empty while I move on. The AI is as bad at defending as it is at attacking. The way things are going it's probably 1-2 sessions until I can snipe the Akon-capital, and with everyone else safely outside our tiny bubble, everything after that should be smooth sailing. I'm contemplating some sort of bonus update to show what's happening in the alternate timeline, or just folding it in with the "what did we miss"-update. Anyway, the final update of the main timeline is already mostly written, I'm probably posting it tomorrow!
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2024 13:56
|
|
|
Libluini posted:I'm contemplating some sort of bonus update to show what's happening in the alternate timeline, or just folding it in with the "what did we miss"-update. What did we miss? This game feels like it doesn't have a lot of content you really CAN miss except interacting with the Blues if you just beeline for a win.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2024 19:42
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:What did we miss? This game feels like it doesn't have a lot of content you really CAN miss except interacting with the Blues if you just beeline for a win. A bunch of techs we couldn't research when I hit the I-win button. Honestly, part of the double-ultra final update after the final one will probably include a growing number of screenshots from the alternative universe, because wow, I totally forgot how swingy the planet generation RNG can be. I got so many green planets I had to stuff anything I took from the Akons in a big locker labeled "AI", just so I didn't need to look at them. Otherwise, everything is oddly like it was in this run: Terrans are friends, Akons are bastards.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2024 22:18
|
|
|
Reptile Rising 20: The Final Dance II And now here we are. Let’s dance, one final time. Mission Log 019: 31st December 2326 The Akons continue to blatantly disregard the laws and customs of the United Empire, but it matters not. I have received a signal from a “Colonel Mitoshi”, who has arrived with a small fleet in the Terran parts of Homellete. Apparently, the Solar Empire has agreed with our plan. Akons, Aras, Mehandor, it matters not. We will strike them down. Diplomatically. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  The last and final dance starts calm. Terrans and Arkonids are still our friends, Blues still hate everyone, the rest hate us. Though the space vikings are perfectly fine with the occasional trade.  Next turn, a giant (but outdated) Aras-fleet reaches another one of our dud worlds. Despite the aging ships in the invasion fleet, our lone defender is an older colonizer, this means twice as lame than any other old ship. The fight doesn’t last long. Right around this point, loading, saving and ending a turn have started to lag significantly. Did you know there’s even a small loading bar that only shows up when those delays happen? I didn’t! This game is normally simple enough not even on my old PC was it causing any MO3-like lags. Of course, when I’m playing alone, I prefer to play on Easy or Normal, so I can just peacefully SimCitify my colonies. Even at normal, the AI has only a fraction of the poo poo it can throw at us at Very Difficult.  Right now, our combined main fleet is 160 ships, defending our 4 main colonies. And approx. 30 of those are colonizers, meant to stay in reserve in case winning the normal way becomes too much of a slog.  Of course I keep hammering down the buttons to build more battlecruisers, but I fear our ships are simply too lovely to compete, even inside the limits the combat system imposes. One of my hopes was to leave the rest of the Homellette-cluster to just fight among themselves while we slowly creep up the tech tree to replace our bad ships with slightly less bad ships and then simply win battles by constantly throwing huge numbers at small numbers. But apparently, I extended our borders too fast, and now we’re drawing aggro faster than a World of Warcraft tank. Oops.  Turn 363: Our luck has run dry completely. The Akons mount another massive assault on our capital. Our mighty battlecruisers form up for defense.  But the Akons this time bring only their most modern ships. Presumably because the last few battles saw us blasting apart too many of their older ones. Oops. The dark blue orbs are the firepower, remember? Please compare this Akon ship to our best ship one screenshot up. Yeah, Topsiders aren’t the best at designing ships, and too stubborn to change in time to save us.  Predictably,  ...we get our tails whipped. To add insult to injury, the slow combat system forces us to watch our miserable defeat in super slow-motion.  So, let’s pretend that didn’t happen and go one turn back to throw everything we have at the Akons. In case you’re wondering about the dates, no I did not, in fact, play this final session last year. After some point, the date saved on the save slots just got stuck. Apparently, 6th January 2023 is the final date the game accepts. Ah, the wonders of old game programming.  Now at least there will be a max fleet of 50 ships defending, the rest is a simple bit of AI-manipulation, since I know the AI is prone to just moving their fleets immediately off after a victory, leaving their new conquest open to a fast counter-strike. That fleet arriving in 4 turns will either reinforce our battered defenders, or re-take the planet. Again.  The battle starts again, and immediately things go awry, as I encounter a new glitch. See those four ships behind the main line? The game took control away from me and launched the new turn before I could get around giving them orders. Looks like you can only give out 47 orders per turn, so if you have 50 ships and your planet, four ships will be left out each turn. Welp. A problem, I did not observe the AI to have. I guess we’re really playing on highest difficulty now!   A grueling slog later, we successfully detonated 3 of the 30 Akon super-ships. At the same time, our own numbers are melting faster and faster the more ships are destroyed. At least I got control back of all of our ships as soon as our number dropped enough. But since this now unwinnable, I hit the seldom used “retreat”-button in the middle of the interface (the running man). Retreat works a bit weird, as it includes a bit of oddly placed “realism”: Only ships that can still move can fleet, and concentrating on powering up their FTL-drives takes energy away from weapons, so they can’t fire, either. As I learned to my dismay, “retreat” is best hit at the beginning of a turn, to make sure as many ships as possible FTL-out immediately. If you do this in the middle of a turn, like I just did, all the ships that already executed their movement orders for this turn won’t do anything. The enemy of course, will rush in to decimate them. Oh, and ships that are too damaged won’t be able to flee, either. Combined, this meant roughly 14 of our ships made it out alive, the rest were just massacred in one, long, drawn-out execution.  Good lord, what a mess. 25% of our production and research capacity, just gone like that. Even if we take the planet back, with the Akons so determined to get their hands on Shaulires II, we probably can’t hold it.  Consequently, the next thing I do is to pull open the star map. Everything in brackets has either our ships or our colonies, or both. Star systems without any of both will look the same, no matter what. Though at this stage all systems are known to us. Even big maps aren’t that big in this game.  And then I start parceling out colonizers to targets in any systems still unclaimed by us. It’s time. The Secret Plan is engaged.  Since some of our neighbors are currently friends, I pull out all the stops and even include planets right in the middle of a bunch of Terran and Arkonid colonies. To my surprise, this final wave uncovers some marginal planets hidden inside the ocean of bad: This one would have been a nice research colony to have, if I had known earlier. 94% ice ocean surface does not leave much, but still enough for a couple research buildings and the local environment isn’t too deadly. Too bad winning won’t leave us the time to actually develop any new colonies.  After handing out targets to my first stack of colonizers, I go over to the second stack I had hanging around our new capital, the moon Shaulires II-3, and do it all over again.  Some of our ships will take 10 turns or longer to reach their targets, but I had over 30 colony ships in reserve, and double dipped on some systems, just in case I lose colonies while the new fleet is on the move. This should put us over the victory threshold, and fast.  Turn 366: Like I predicted, the Akons moved all their ships off Shaulires-II, and so our relief force blasts down the few defenses the Akons put into place and our old capital is ours. Again.  Meanwhile, despite our recent set-backs, our military research into better engines is soon set to reach level B. And yeah, no way in hell will we be able to finish the other research in this run. At this point, conquest is the only way to get more actually good planets, and our rustbuckets are as good for combat as hurling actual melons with rockets sticking out of them at the enemy. We’ve come a long way from our early ships, where I made the joke our weapons were just some Topsiders from the crew hanging out the airlock and using their handguns, but we’ll forever be outclassed simple by being reptiles instead of mammals.   And of course, the Akons spent the last turns completely demolishing everything on Shaulires-II. In fact, many of our most modern buildings have been torn down and replaced with construction sites for older versions. With no population to work anything, this planet is as ruined as if it had been hit by one of those orbital bombardments other 4x-games have. The population-thing is simply game mechanics, and besides, the Akons will always dutifully put their own people on the planet when they take it, so each time we take it back, we evaporate a large chunk of their people into the nothingness of the programming void, never to return. But the AI bulldozing down all our modernization-efforts to construct older buildings is pretty much , but also pretty on point for Operation Eastside AI.Edit: During my second run to get the missing screenshots for our missing techs, I learned the hard way that the old strategy of “evade the attacker until the battle timer runs out” has one drawback I didn’t realize in the main run: The game does hand over control of a colony the second it is bombarded to gently caress and the battle ends. The AI actually gets a turn free to gently caress around with your colony, before the next phase of the turn order hands you back control since your ship is still in orbit, and the attacking “winners” were send back after the time-out. So while at least you won’t lose your population if you fake-win a defensive battle, it can still mess with your buildings!  Predictably, the Akons didn’t think our stunt was very funny, and a maxed out fleet is barreling down on us. This fight is a foregone conclusion.  A couple turns later, and we’re seeing the first of our final colonizers arriving, and our victory score ticks upward again. We’ve also unlocked B-level engines!  The Linear Drive, or Libration Drive, is a less brutal FTL-drive then the older Transition Drive. The description here is mightily vague, as the Libration Drive involves the ship dipping into the Libration Zone, a strange border region between hyperspace and normal space. (The text just vaguely mentions traveling at FTL-speeds, and doing so directly to the target. If you don’t know PR, your reaction of this sterilized little blurb would probably be: So what?) Ships using the Linear Drive are technically slower, but the ships are also protected by five-dimensional compensation field that prevents the nasty side-effects of the Translation Drive, like having the ship mechanically distorted, the crew punched unconscious by extreme headaches, or having to carefully calculate specific target coordinates and charge up all capacitors as high as possible before attempting a jump. The only thing both drive types have in common is that it’s still really unwise to jump out into FTL with a too low speed. For the earliest Terran version we’re getting here, the Kalupian Linear Converters (named after Professor Kalup, the Terran scientist who invented them), 20-40% light speed are the absolute minimum to prevent explosive malfunctions. In return for not having any of the drawbacks of the Translation Drive except the reverse speed limit, it’s slower. But it also allows to just travel by sight, as the hyper-shadows of suns and other big stellar object are still very visible in the Libration Zone, and so instead of awkwardly fumbling around with coordinates that may or may not deposit you inside your target star, this time you can just go and aim directly. Even better, as the ship moves “only” at a factor of a dozen million times the speed of light, you have time to adjust your course after you enter FTL. The Transition Drive is a kind of do-or-don’t drive: As soon you push the button, you’re committed. With a Linear Drive, a ship can always decide to just turn around if the crew doesn’t like what they’re seeing. Linear Drives were seen as a huge upgrade, and this technology spread like wildfire as soon as it was re-discovered. They’re also the reason why the Akons in this current era are so mad: They had their home system perfectly protected against Transition Drives, with their defenses just depositing incoming jump ships in random systems nearby with a similar sun, causing a lot of confusion among innocent spacers. These defenses don’t work against Libration Drives, however. You can just move along a linear line (hence the alternative name) towards the star you’re actually pointing to, and as you’re not jumping, there’s no jump to interfere with. So of course the very first Terran ship with a prototype of this thing immediately happened to land straight in the Akon-system, causing them now, 200 years later, to haunt Topsider-nightmares.  Sure, the game is almost over now, but gently caress it: I’m still improving my remaining three good planets and do business as usual, including to now switching to shield-research.  Part of this strategy is to improve our warship-designs: The Topsid III is another battlecruiser, now with better engines faster (well, not mechanically, but it’s at least also not slower ), despite the armor-slider sitting at maximum. This makes this new ship class nearly 25% sturdier, with all this new armor the hull can carry. The weird pseudo-realism hidden behind the design sliders creates a lot of odd interactions like this: By improving our engines, our armor is now better, because our ships can carry more mass at the same maximum acceleration. (Which the game then translates into movement points for the strategical and tactical maps.)  For comparisons, see the stats of our older Topsid II cruisers: They’re worse in everything. This is because according to the way the game handles ship design, “bigger hull” not only means “thicker armor”, but also “bigger ship”. In fact, if we could only hold out long enough to also get B-class shields, we probably tip over into a full new size class, which would then give our newer designs a huge boost in stats. This is one of the reasons the Akons could just paste us the way they did: They had ships that are mechanically better, equipped with better equipment, and said better equipment also made their ships bigger, causing their strength to be geometrically stronger than ours, instead of following a simple linear growth scale. If you think about this, this also means our shields and weapons will always be tremendously bad, as the enemy starts with bigger numbers before all those upgrades are applied.  Just in case I want to decide to continue this run, I immediately start building some of our new Topsid-III battlecruisers.  Oh hey, surprise: Now it’s the Jumpers jumping in to pay us a visit. A big fleet of lumpy Mehandor-cylinders shows up at one of our many crap colonies, and the resulting battle is over so fast I couldn’t even get a second screenshot. Well, at least we got to see the third hull type in action! Another LP-checkbox checked.  But the Mehandor are, as always, too late: By turn 370 enough of our last-hope fleet have founded new colonies to push us up to 67/64 victory points. Any time we end this turn, the game will be won. Around the time I’m typing this up, I suddenly realize I could possibly have lessened enemy aggression by simply deleting all those weird death worlds I had set up, and just keep the final fleet hidden in reserve, in case we need them later. Of course I also didn’t get into space early enough, completely underestimating the speed with which the AI would exploit their huge difficulty-bonuses to claim all good planets around us. On the other hand, Operation Eastside AI is kind of simple, and one of the rules is more aggression for aggression. In other words, since we kept clashing with the Akons over planets we both wanted, even with less general cluster aggro, we’d probably still have to constantly fight against angry Akon fleets. Doesn’t sound like a fun time with OE’s extremely basic combat engine. I’m pushing the big, red button now.  A bunch of weird shuttle/fighter hybrids, that have never been seen in the Perryverse, suddenly rush down to enter the atmosphere of a planet that looks like it’s colonized by Thargoids.  Seriously, this is just a couple shades away from being an Ammoniac-planet.  The weird gliders fly through the clouds for a while.  Then they move down through the clouds in a nice sequence.  And arrive over a Mars-looking dried-out landscape. I swear I saw this same background-rendering when playing Terranigma on SNES.  As the wonky looking things get closer to the ground, suddenly vegetation.  And a base. This looks like nothing we ever build in this game. In fact, this looks more like some kind of RTS-base. Is this suddenly turning into an RTS?  The Star Trek shuttles, after having breached universes, now settle down on this weird glider port in Perryland, a port that would definitely just fly apart under the engines of any real ship landing.  And then suddenly, the victory screen leaps into our faces. At the same time, the theme music starts again. It’s over. From the screen, we managed to destroy 109 Akon-ships during the run, while they managed to destroy 69 of ours. Nice. We almost had no conflict with the other factions, not even the Blues. Only the Akons and us were constantly at each others’ throats. Man, that’s really funny if you happen to know that all those factions were living together in a big, united empire at the time the game is set, but the Akons were already plotting their big betrayal. The Akons cruelly attacking a Terran protectorate like us is totally on point for them! So, how exactly did our lady commander Eresh-Thel pull this “victory” off in-universe? Who knows! LP over. What happened, though? The following messages were part of an old high-security data depository system that went off-line due to an unlucky hit during the Dolan-bombardment of Terra. The room containing the missing data tapes was only found and had its connections restored in May 3245, when the historian Hans Itaka stumbled across the disconnected room during a tour of the lower levels of Imperium-Alpha. Allegedly, he had suddenly noticed his guide robot missing a door that according to him, should have been part of the old security depository system. Mr. Itaka then questioned the robot, who in turn proceeded to pretend the ignored room wasn’t there. TRANSMISSION FROM: EASTSIDE COLONIAL CLUSTER NGC-577 SIGNED: TUBTHOR VLAHT-OHM, VICE-COMMANDER RECEIVED AT: IMPERIUM-ALPHA TIMESTAMP: 19.12.2326 / 12:30PM TERRAN STANDARD I am contacting you in the name of my superior, the earnest and chilling Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel. We are sad to report that the United Empire mission to colonize the Eastside may have hit a snout, at least in the case of star cluster NGC-577, named by our own expedition, Project Egg-Layer, as New Homelete. Attached to this message is a data stream of all the transgressions against United Empire law we have recorded up to this date. You will find the information enlightening, we are sure. This may still not be a time of egg-smashing and tail-biting, however, as Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Tel humbly suggests a plan to prevent more useless blood-shed. We deem this especially important, as we have encountered a completely new alien civilization while exploring this star cluster. We are sure you already have received plenty of information from the other expeditions send to found colonies in the Eastside, but our current allies in suppressing anti-imperial transgressions, the local alliance of Arkonid and Terran colonials, have suggested to forward all information about the unknown species, dubbed “Blues” by our local Terrans, in a concerted manner. A second data stream has been added to this message, containing the observations of all three of our groups in New Homelete. (From what we were told by our allies, apparently several hypercom-relay stations between our cluster and the next imperial outpost have been taken over by forces of the Akon security forces, and there are some concerns they may have not allowed all information to pass through. As this message will arrive via USO-courier, I am sure this very explainable information blockade will not be a problem anymore in the future.) The third data stream contains the details of Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Tel’s plan. In summary, we propose a plan with minimal combat and maximum diplomacy. Currently, we are in a process to set up a couple dozen new “observation posts” throughout the NGC-577 star cluster, to fulfill the charter given to us by the United Empire: To colonize a certain percentage of the entire cluster, and then be granted certain political and economical rights to exploit the cluster. As the plan details, we are willing to combine efforts with the Crystal Empire and the Solar Empire both. If the Crystal Empire and the Solar Empire as our hegemon both declare that our sham is in fact, just us fulfilling our charter as intended, the Topsid Autonomous Zone is then in turn willing to share the star cluster with the two aforementioned powers. Since the other galactic powers who have send expeditions to this place have all violently discarded their charter in favor of a power-grab, we feel this course of action would be both a sensible and reasonable punishment for the transgressors, but also a proof that the United Empire stands by even the lower, subservient member states. We gracefully await your answer to our proposal, Tubthor Vlaht-Ohm, “Vice-Commander” of Project Egg-Layer, stationed in NGC 577 [END OF MESSAGE] TRANSMISSION FROM: IMPERIUM-ALPHA SIGNED: JULIAN TIFFLOR RECEIVED AT: TITAN FLEET BASE TIMESTAMP: 19.12.2326 / 14:30PM TERRAN STANDARD Hey guys, the big man is out and about, and there is some dumb diplomatic incident going on on the other side of the galaxy. I’ve been looking into things and it seem we can easily resolve this issue by sending a couple hundred ships. Could one of you wake up whoever is in charge and tell them to take a fleet to NGC-577 and meet up with whoever clown we put in charge over there? For some reason I got a message from a bunch of Topsiders telling me the Akons and their drat Energy Command are active over there. What do we even have the USO for? Anyway, since everyone important is in the Eastside already, I’ll send Lord-Admiral Atlan and Perry a short head’s-up, just in case they stumble over this mess before we can clean it up. I think 69th or 420th Fleet should still be stationed in Titan orbit, so grab some ships from there, if possible. Go and show a bit of strength, maybe explode a couple of Akon-ships if they go crazy again. That’s all for now, our smart guys have combed the Topsider-plan (can you believe it, Topsiders and planning? What a laugh) to end this farce with a minimum of deaths and I agree that it’s a good idea. Mighty cheeky of them, I might add, but if we act fast, no-one has to know this wasn’t our idea. So go forth and make peace, and add maybe a couple dozen new systems to the empire. [END MESSAGE] Note from the Terran History Archives conserved on Gäa in the dark nebula Provcon-Faust: On the 31st December 2326 of the old calendar, elements of the Solarian Fleet indeed reached a small open star cluster in the at the time still mostly unexplored Eastside, and engaged in diplomacy involving the Akon Energy Command, an organization known back then for its terrorist activities. During this diplomatic incident, a “Colonel Mitoshi” took control of several Akon-occupied worlds in the cluster, until negotiations could be concluded. As the “New Homellette”-cluster was later peacefully shared between Arkonid, Terran and Topsid colonists, it is assumed that whatever the Energy Command was planning, it must have failed. The little cluster then had a mostly uneventful history, with the exception of a Topsider-colony called Shaulires-II: During the Tolkander-invasion several thousand years later, this planet was one of the unlucky inhabited worlds that was emptied of life. The colony was never restored, and today the only thing of note about the planet is an often-visited monument to the woman who was involved in claiming most of New Homellette for the Topsidian Republic (back then still a protectorate of the old Solar Empire): Eresh-Tel. Next Update: What We Left Behind [i]Some notes about the fiction parts in this update: -Julian Tifflor does exist in canon, he is the ultimate 2nd tier leader, the one who is often left doing the actual work of government when Perry is playing hero somewhere else in the universe. Julian became Perry’s second best friend, and then became immortal. So he is now Perry Rhodan’s second best friend, forever. Normally, he is a bit on the dour side. Like a slightly more flawed Perry. Which makes him so boring it turns around to being funny. I’ve given him a personality that would utterly infuriate him if he could read this. -Imperium-Alpha is the name of the gigantic set of mostly subterranean rooms that grew below the new capital of Terrania, in the Gobi Desert on Earth. It is a mix of fortress and government center, and even back in the 23rd century, where this game is set, it was already fairly big. 11 underground-levels, and of course the government buildings on the surface. Roughly half of Imperium-Alpha is neither military nor off-limits for civilians: Due to how freedom-loving the Solar Empire was, Imperium-Alpha was also a gigantic center for information, imagine a mix of a big library and a congressional center for politicians and people to mingle. You could literally go down ten levels and walk through this really important super-fortress until eventually a robot would politely turn you back from the deadly incinerator-traps you were about to walk into. -”NGC-577” is only New Homellette according to the New Galactic Catalog, Edition of 2325. And the New Galactic Catalog was made up by me on the spot to make this dumb pun. Please don’t confuse it with the New General Catalog that is actually for real. NGC-577 IRL is an actual big, fat galaxy, while our new home in the Eastside was only a bog-standard open star cluster. One of many in the Milkyway. -Making the “-omellette” in “New Homellette” an alternative spelling of “-omelet” caused me tons of tears in editing. Especially egregious because my text editor keeps trying to “correct” my spelling. There’s probably at least three different spellings of “New Homellette” used in this LP, and it pains me whenever I notice. In truth, it’s all just different transliterations from the Topsider’s writing system of course, they’re all right. -Provcon-Faust is the place where the free Terran government fled to when the adorable Laren occupied the galaxy and Earth was MIA for a while. Hyperspace-stuff made it impossible for the Laren to penetrate the dark nebula directly, so they were forced to lay siege to it instead. -It shouldn't be a surprise, but the wider setting didn't give a gently caress about this game. Consequently, everything not directly related to the big guys, like my tall tale of super-techno insectoids killing everyone on Shaulires-II, is made up. Edit: I managed to find a setting to get footage! Only took me half a million years, lol. For the interested, I can get (soundless) footage by using old Hypercam 2, and then edit it together with audio recorded with audacity. The result will be rough, but after trying 5+ recording programs, I'm kind of done with this. Hopefully OBS likes Ascendancy, ha ha
Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Apr 21, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2024 17:54
|
|
|
It's over! Congratulations on beating the game before it beat you!
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2024 18:42
|
|
|
And also before the universe got to you! Here's to good luck with your roof, water heater, plumbing in general, eyeballs, vehicles, electric installation...
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2024 20:22
|
|
|
Libluini posted:-Provcon-Faust is the place where the free Terran government fled to when the adorable Laren occupied the galaxy and Earth was MIA for a while. Hyperspace-stuff made it impossible for the Laren to penetrate the dark nebula directly, so they were forced to lay siege to it instead. Grats on the win! Also, because there's been so much Perrylore(tm), have we heard about the Laren yet?
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2024 21:51
|
|
|
I don't think so, because the Laren appear several hundred years after the first encounter with the Blues.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2024 21:59
|
|
|
yeah, sadly OE is just the barebones of a barebones 4x game, and while it has a cult following in Germany, not enough people bought the game to entice Pabel-Moewig to try again, so we'll probably never gonna see any of the other, more insane denizens of the Perryrealm Off-hand, I can't remember what weird poo poo we'll be encountering in the Perry Rhodan adventure games, though. I want to go in blind, so only going by memories,, they all play long after the era of the Council of the Seven, and therefore, the Laren-threat is already gone by this point Kind of funny, the Laren were so important to that age of Perry Rhodan, yet all the video games managed to miss that time by just being either too early or too late. In this LP, I mentioned the Kobold Sun-Transmitter in the last lore update. That thing that catapulted Earth into a hyperspace-maw millions of light-years away? The Laren were so powerful that Perry thought transporting Earth away was better than trying to fight it out. Funny enough and tangentially related to this thread, there's a subculture of space vikings, the Superheavies, who traded themselves as mercenaries instead of just being traders, like the normal Jumpers. The Laren bribed the Superheavies with technology and power, after they realized trying to occupy an entire loving galaxy just with their expedition troops alone was not going well. So for a while, Perry was fighting space dwarves and space vikings.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2024 22:34
|
|
|
Grats on getting it done!
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2024 02:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 2, 2024 19:22 |
|
|
i studied german for a few years a thousand years ago and never have i felt the weakness of my command of the language so poignantly as i have when reading this thread
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2024 20:19
|
|
