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Libluini posted:Or am I misdirecting? Who knows? Anyway, by my count, this ought to be enough to push the thread onto a new page. Now to find out if I'm gonna look like an idiot on the internet again...
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Jul 16, 2023 14:11
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Friend Commuter posted:Who knows? Nah, that was perfect. And I just finished the fiction bits and some last-minute picture editing. As soon as I've finished up linking everything properly, the update goes up!
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Jul 16, 2023 14:54
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 Reptile Rising 16: Ultima Ratio Reptile Instead of brute forcing my MO3-LP to finally end, I decided to take it easy and spend the weekend doing a 7+ hours session of Operation Eastside. Here is the tale of what happened during that session. PART 1  Mission Log 014: 15th October 2326 The last month turned out to be a rather busy one. We send our researchers on a wild chase across our domain here in New Homellete, to try to find samples of the material the natives use to armor their spaceships. This mysterious “Molkex”, as it turns out, is the secretion of a strange arthropoid species native to the Galactic Eastside. The Blues seem to transport the eggs around to infest worlds they consider barren, to let the eggs hatch into what the Terrans have dubbed the “Terror Locusts”, who then swarm out to feast on the native lifeforms. After that feast is over, the native people use unknown means to safely extract Molkex from them. How, we do not know but our own researchers managed to simply extract samples from the still silent eggs, which seem to be filled with this strange substance. Or at least our researchers seem to think so, for me, Molkex has more resemblance with the nasal discharge of a mammal then the inside of any egg I’ve ever seen. [Edit] Wait, this can not be true. We just received a report from sources inside the United Empire, reports of swarms of Terror Locusts running rampant on hundreds of worlds already, destroying anything in their path. Buildings, people, animals or plants, it does not matter. According to our researchers, the main source of Molkex is not the eggs, as we had thought, but the lifecycle of the Terror Locusts themselves: They reproduce by simply splitting into two new, slightly smaller Locusts. A small amount of Molkex is released whenever this happens. Likewise, a dying Locust will simply dissolve into a mass of inert Molkex. According to the report we have received, at least 200 worlds, maybe a lot more, have been rendered barren, with their surface now coated in a thin layer of Molkex. It seems this is a terrifyingly effective method at generating huge amounts of Molkex, as long as no-one accidentally settles on an infested planet, which we have done, repeatedly, across the last centuries. I am concerned. [Edit END] On the political front, things remain calm. We have observed multiple fleets of our neighbors on the move, sometimes clashing, sometimes fighting fleets of Blues-ships. The strategical picture has remained stable, however. We also had an immense amount of trade requests this last month. It seems in their eagerness to satisfy their war-like nature, many of our humanoid friends did not consider logistics first. Our efforts to break the secret of Blues armor has become well-known at this point, and confusingly, many of our neighbors seem to believe our recent breakthroughs have already resulted in a finished weapon. Or that we may have managed to get aid from the Aras, who have already finished their own version of an Anti-Blues Weapon System. Whatever it may be, we had to turn down multiple offers for a weapon we would hesitate to trade away, even if we actually had it already! Our planetary transport networks have been plagued by a series of glitches, our technicians believe due to our unusual amount of trading overtaxing our transmitter networks. I’ve ordered a complete test and if necessary, rework of our network. We depend utterly on our ability to transport large amounts of supplies from planet to planet, and we expanded our local transmitter network at an insane speed. Who knows what kind of problems are hidden in the hasty work we had to do? Better to resolve this now, we don’t want a repeat of the Shaulires II-3 glitch that crashed the entire planetary network for a day. The rest of my time I spent setting up a new wave of colonization. We do not want to be seen as threatening to our eagerly violent mammalian neighbors, but considering there are Terror Locust eggs on several of our colonies, we need to do some contingency planning, in case some of the established colonies have to be evacuated. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Thinks start small, with me setting up a trade this time, just to remind myself how the gently caress this works. To see more then the long list of your own colonies, you need to first select a trading partner for your offer. Next, you select what you want to give (either resources or your current research in a given category), then you select what you want to get. Easy! Now, if you selected a research level, you’re finished. For resources, you need to move the slider around a bit. The text window is read-only, sorry. For this trade, I’ve offered the Mehandor 17816 units of heavy industry, in exchange to level A (maximum) research in heavy industry. 17,8k units are a lot, but our surplus in heavy industry is also a lot. We can take it.  After setting all trade parameters needed, you can then click on “+” to create a trade. The left window shows all of your trade offers, the right window active offers from other space nations. I direct your eyes to our offer, which now proudly displays 7,8k units. The leftmost digit is missing. Yeah, the devs really did their best programming this mess, didn’t they?  Important to note: If you hosed up your offer, you can click on “-” to delete it again. If you accepted a foreign trade offer by clicking on “ANNEHMEN”, ha ha you’re hosed for real! No takes-backsies! We leave our new offer on the table, for the AI to scoff at. If you are playing multiplayer, the other player can see your offer next turn, and decide on it. If they accept it, you of course have to wait until it’s your turn again to see the result. Offers to the AI are resolved immediately the following turn. Mostly by them rejecting the offer. And a player accepting another player’s offer also sees an immediate result, even though the other player can’t really see anything until it’s their turn again. Offers are valid for exactly one turn after creating them, all offers immediately vanish if not accepted the following turn.  Case in point: The game decides to be an rear end in a top hat when I don’t look too closely on the offers available next turn, and accept them all. Despite me not having enough light industry, the game suddenly accepts my click. Now we have negative light industry on storage. I’m not sure that is supposed to happen...  That trading disaster will make us suffer. Meanwhile, I’m correcting an oversight: Turns out the game slipped a real weapon-level inbetween our Anti-Native Research and now we have super-heavy disintegrators. Good for us! For some reason we never actually got a report telling us this, but both the tiny weapon module graphic and the spoken voice suddenly changed without me noticing. And now we have jumped beyond battlecruisers into battleship-range.  A couple turns later: More trading, and we’re closing in on B-level living space.  Two of the four colonies I’m controlling directly, like Sculima IV here, still have some free space for buildings. Since our new 1600m rockets are quite chunky, this means massive upgrades to production levels.  Two turns later, and B-level residency research is achieved. We get two new buildings. This is the obligatory 1-tile version, the “Type Zalit Residency Building”, Zalit being a somewhat important planet in Perry Rhodan. It has nearly twice the capacity of our old C-level buildings, which quietly removes our manpower problems for a while. Or is that lizardpower? Anyway, as always the Topsiders are perfectly willing to copy a good thing when they see one. Zalit is an important Arkonid colony, with the colonials being allies of the Arkonid Empire. In their case, tradition (Zalit is a rather old colony) trumped Arkonid bigotry. Lucky them, otherwise the empire would have been in an even worse state in this era.  And here is the 4-tile building! Since this game runs under the weird rule that a population unit is 10 people, the Mega Center is a building housing up to 16000 people. That’s honestly kind of impressing. No lore relevance here. It’s just a huge Planetary Mega Center that’s again, nearly twice as good as the C-level version. We’re gonna have to tear down a lot of buildings in the future, at this kind of performance difference our old buildings are a huge liability now.  Time to get back on track! We’ll see about your invincible space armor yet, Yülziish! The Research Blues is playing again. Hopefully we can finish this quest now, before more research bugs show up. Yülziish is what the Blues call themselves, by the way. It’s partly in ultrasonic, so your basic rear end lizard/human ears will only hear a very high screeching noise, if they listen to Blues without technological assistance.  Next turn, a surprise waits for us: The Mehandor suddenly want a non-aggression treaty. Well, they’re getting it of course, but this is kind of random. This game’s version of diplomacy: If the player asks, all they get are kicks to their nuts or in case of Topsiders, nut-equivalents. The AI however, always expects their weird requests to be accepted, or they’ll get huffy.  A couple turns too late I remember I never made a new version of our colonizer-design, and rectify this. The new design is min-maxed to just about stay below the “suddenly transforms into a bigger ship”-point. This makes the design not only buildable by a smaller spaceport-size, it also makes the ship need less material to build, compared to our new battleships. Win-win!  In turn 276 we narrowly avoid another huge boost to our research: One of the offered trades for this turn involves us exchanging a huge amount of consumer goods for level A in heavy industry. Alas, all those trades are blocked. They’re probably all hiding a too-large digit on the truncated left.  It’s now turn 277, and Sculima IV has transformed quite a bit. The yard and the supporting industry have grown immensely, and production of our new colony ships has started.  We aren’t paying any upkeep, but some of our ships are now dangerously obsolete. To unclutter my fleet window, I do a first and scrap some of the oldest ones.  Turn 279: We’re about halfway done with researching the mysteries of the Blues. That sounded vaguely musical. Mysteries of the Blues. Blues’ Mysteries. Sounds like something you’d find on a music album.  And then we’re facing the trading Blues. All those trades, even the one were the Aras desperately want to give us maximum research in heavy industry, are blocked. gently caress! Either the AI demands insane numbers from us, or there may be a bug. I’ve noticed that sometimes going to a different planet, or going to a different planet and back will unfuck the trade display and allow you to accept trades you couldn’t before. This, however, also includes trades you actually can’t accept, which causes even your storage of a given resource to drop negative, regardless of how silly this seems. I’m guessing this is not supposed to happen.   After that unpleasant surprise, we’re upgrading our residence buildings. All those colonial centers can have 9000 people in it, and even though we can rebuild our new 16000-apartment complexes in a single turn, the game has no place for hobos. Everyone shoved out the door yesterday will be gone tomorrow. This makes this upgrade process slow and painful, as we have to lose a hefty chunk of population each time, at least on our full worlds. Imagine every time a new apartment building is being built, the tenants of an older building are all executed on the spot. That’s how this works, in game mechanic terms.  Our first mega towers are finished. Build in a single day. The power of the people (and robots)!  Our trade adventures continue: This time it’s the Terrans who are desperate to unload all of the heavy industry on us. All of it And again, we’re blocked from potentially dooming ourselves. Very funny, game. “0500” units of light industry, my rear end  One turn later, the Terrans try again. This time the barrage of trades is ludicrous: We get the same “big stack of CPUs for free tech”-deal again, but slightly lowered. We can accept it this time, though looking at the numbers, it almost looks like it only works because the AI calculated in the trade deal where we’re exchanging consumer goods for the missing chunk of light industry we need for the main deal. Man, Terrans are complicated. So the Terrans noticed yesterday we couldn’t accept because our light industry production is a huge bottleneck and we don’t have enough reserves on hand, so today the first deal exchanges part of our consumer good surplus for the light industry units we were missing last time. This is either a giant coincidence, or the AI can “look” at our stockpiles to bruteforce the trades they want. Even if it’s a trade the AI really should not be doing. We greedily grab all those trades, since we can this turn.  Except for this one! The Terrans also wanted our new super-heavy disintegrator cannons, but despite having a giant mountain of heavy industry units, we’re now blocked. Why? Again, either the truncated number hides a number too high for our stockpiles, or it’s because we still haven’t dealt with our Blues-questline yet so can’t actually “trade” our bugged weapon tech. You decide!  But then it turns out it’s one of these times where going to a different planet with higher stockpiles works. We give the Terrans our level B weapon tech. Just to be nice. OK, so this time it worked. It doesn’t always, confusingly. I came up with a lot of theories across this playsession, but ultimately I do not understand why this sometimes works and then not. We can even sometimes accept trades that dump us in the extreme negatives, so there must be a bug somewhere in the system. Considering how many AIs are throwing their A-levels at us, I’d have expected the Terrans of all space weirdos to already being leaders in weapon tech, but apparently they weren’t, huh. Good that we don’t actually have to fight anyone to win this game, so I can be generous.  More trading weirdness: Since the colony I used for all those insane trades is now completely void of light industry, I tried sending some over from our capital. But… I can now only send negative units? The hell? Luckily this was a one-time thing and next turn the capital could send normal amounts of stuff again to its moon colony. But wow, I did not expect this. Testing revealed I could have send up to negative maximum in transmission capacity and wouldn’t that have been a fun way to destroy that colony’s economy?  By the way, the next level in Blues-research is almost finished. Also by the way, apparently we didn’t even have level B weapon tech yet to give away. We just got a bunch of heavy industry for nothing. I’m fairly sure this is not a thing that should happen   While all this trading madness was going on, our stacks of combat and colony ships have been steadily growing. The Secret Plan is working!  MORE TRADING!!! Mehandor, Akons and Terrans all try to give us stuff, in exchange for stuff. Yes, this is a German game. Also yes, the game is weirdly insistent on wanting our B-level weapon tech, despite us not having it yet “officially”. All these trades are blocked this turn, because I give up  At least getting the new heavy industry buildings worked. We’ve now maxed out on a second research category, thank you, Terrans and your lust for lizard CPUs This one here is the highest ranked 1-tile building for heavy industry production. The Isolinear Structure Transformer eats light industry like candy and barfs out a whopping 500 heavy industry. Every building of this type also increases transmitter capacity of a colony by 1000 units. For a 1-tile building, this is a lot. Though building too many of them will make your colony drown in heavy industry while your light industry production suddenly craters for some reason, so be sparing in your industrialization efforts.[/i]  The Super-Heavy Integrator is a 4-tile building that I can wholeheartedly endorse: It uses up less light industry than four 1-tile buildings, has the exact same heavy industry output, but also has 4,8x the increase in transmitter capacity. All in all a clear improvement, as now you actually have a reason to build the things. Just take the still hefty operation costs per turn into account.  The final building we unlocked is the massive, 9-tile Solar Power Station Planet Developer and don’t worry, the name does not make much more sense in German. This moloch of heavy industry is less silly as the extremely underpowered 9-tile agriculture building, but it’s still less efficient than using two 4-tile buildings plus 1x single-tile building. It has the output of six single tile buildings and transmission capacity increase is barely above that. It eats up less light industry than six single-tile buildings however, so at least it has one good thing going for it. And an output of 3000 of heavy industry beats the lame joke from the agricultural sector, which gives you only 1500 consumer goods for the same space. Lore-wise, I think this building is supposed to be a prototype of a technology that is barely understood in this era, and will only really matter after all this Blues-nonsense is over in the Perryverse. It works by draining the sun of energy directly. Like, there would normally be this gigantic green beam of doom while this thing is active, that sucks out the sun’s lifeforce, essentially. Doing this shortens the lifespan of a star considerably, but we’re talking about a couple thousand years here, for every year those stations run, so it’s a future problem. Luckily this technology was eventually seen as mostly obsolete and only for emergencies, so only a very few suns had to suffer from this. Except for sun transmitters, since if you already have to move entire suns around to make them, powering the resulting transmitter by sucking the necessary energy directly form their component suns can’t really do any more damage.  And then I find out Shaulires II really didn’t like me draining all the light industry away for potential future gain. The game panicked and switched off all buildings using light industry, because I guess the game calculates losses first and income later? Because that makes loving sense. Welp, there are three types of buildings that do NOT use light industry for upkeep: Residency buildings (zero upkeep), military buildings (only need staff, and only during an attack) and shipyards (only need anything if you’re building ships, zero upkeep otherwise). Anything that produces anything, however? Yeah, that’s all off now and no, the game doesn’t have a convenient “send the staff back to work”-button. All those buildings have to be set back to full power one by one. Fun. We already saw this kind of economic crash happening, and like last time, it was the player’s fault for thinking the AI understands that the colony, despite having zero stockpiles now, will have a huge surplus next turn. Last crash was caused by giving out too much Topsider-built playstations, which made everyone starve. This time, we gave out too much Topsider-built CPUs, with the same result. Jeff Bezos would be so proud of our lizard people.  See this tiny red lock symbol in the upper left? This is on on most of the buildings on this colony, to prevent exactly what happened. But apparently this is the time I find out the colony AI can override this setting at will. After sighing deeply, I simply sat down and send people back to work, one building at a time. At least this time I remembered the game has a handy list of production buildings in its colony menu, so I didn’t have to hunt around the colony map to find every red bar on my own.  That was a lot of work. I really should remember on of these days to concentrate needed resources first, because the trade window breaking was not a nice surprise. Considering my experiences with Master of Orion III and now with Operation: Easily duped into thinking it has negative income, what is it with space 4x games and bad math? Also, why has my research suddenly slowed down so much?  Shaulires II-3 is back to normal. With one exception, which you can even see if you look closely at the screenshot. I, master player that I am, of course haven’t noticed it yet.  Trading madness resumes. The Akons want our B-level weapon tech. Well, our official answer is: gently caress you. The Terran trades do work out without massive economic damage this time, which is good. We don’t want to tick them off. I’m not sure how much a failed trade affects the AI’s Angry O’Meter, but I’m sure I don’t want to find out.  Turn 289 finally sees a breakthrough on the Molkex-front: Our researchers manage to get some hard info out of our friendly Terran trading partners and combined with some samples we managed to take from our own colonies, we’re on track for a solution. We now learn of the life cycle of the nasty little Terror Locusts and the less nasty Terror Worms they eventually turn into. Isn’t nature a wonder? Apparently, Terror Locusts produce Molkex, and the same energy-absorbing effect that allows Terror Locusts to effortlessly overrun humanoid colonies, also still works in hardened form when applied to a ship’s hull. So what the Blues have been doing is apparently planting Terror Locust eggs on empty planets, and when needed, they’re waking them up with hyperspace-signals, then they’ll just have to wait until the things calm down and harvest their slime. Then they’ll smear their ships with that slime, harden it out, and presto: All energy, even kinetic energy, gets absorbed and if the hull overloads, blasted straight back into the attacker’s faces. Simple, yet disgusting. Part of the information was really upsetting recordings of some of the older, more established colonies near the Eastside getting overrun by hordes of Terror Locusts, resulting in billions of deaths. As the fiction intro for this update shows, our dear lizard lady leader is a bit concerned about the eggs we found on our colonies, because of course she doesn’t now this game isn’t programmed for a Great Locust Uprising. We’re dealing with devs who can apparently only barely operate a calculator, after all.  Oh, the Akons want our B-level weapons again? Well, this time we can actually trade it to them!  Or not. The Terrans gladly accepted our consumer goods, but then the screen locked up, presumably because we don’t have enough light industry to give out. The Akons are shafted again. I’m imagining some lizard technicians desperately trying to find the glitch in the trade system preventing them from accepting a fairly simple trade exchange. Like, lizard people anxiously ripping out cables from a console while an angry Akon looks at them scornfully from a screen.  My own guess is that the research is still bugged out since weapon and quest tech are occupying the same UI-space. To make sure this nonsense stops, we’re continuing our Molkex-research. A quick reminder: There’s also no empire-wide research settings, so I have to do this for every colony housing research buildings. Luckily AI-controlled planets won’t ever do research on their own, or this would get unfunny fast.  Around turn 290, I take a quick tour of our AI-controlled colonies, as there have been questions in the thread about how well they’ve been doing. Some of our colonies are like this: Not much space to build things, but sitting in a tidy equilibrium, giving us +1 victory points without doing anything upsetting.  Not too bad, turns out! And some of our colonies found an equilibrium of not dying, at the cost of not being able to expand, either. This AI for example found a perfect way to balance out everything to keep at 100% agricultural coverage. A perfect triple-zero like this would be nearly impossible for every player that isn’t a math-obsessed nerd. Or maybe not even then, I can’t prove the AI isn’t cheating, after all.  Now let’s go for the most extreme cases.  Planets like this one are so bad, not even the AI can keep them indefinitely stable. But I expect the AI starting to wildly shuffle production staff around when one of those stockpiles drops too low. Those death worlds will of course never expand, as that combined with production penalty would make the situation worse, instead of better. A tiny building here and there is all even the AI can churn out without everything collapsing. But the AI of course has the ability to mindlessly switch around active buildings over and over again without going mad, so I fully expect this and similar colonies to never actually die, despite the catastrophic conditions. Turns out that to my own surprise, while the AI can’t make good colonies, it at least is fairly able at not killing colonies completely! So while the game does not consider an empty, lifeless colony abandoned, we also don’t have to find out what happens when most of a player’s planets have turned into lifeless husks.  The next two turns: First, I realize all of my little moon colony’s research had been switched off, and send the scientific staff back to work, one building at a time...  ...then I make the Akons a little bit madder by failing to trade away our weapon technology again. This time there isn’t even any other trades blocking something, the game just refuses this trade on general principle. I’m now surer and surer it’s because of the Molkex Quest gunking up the programming works somehow.  Well, now that the everything is cruising along for the moment without any big crisis to deal with, I take stock of our pile of ships: We do have a lot of colony ships hanging around on our major ship-producing planets. Time to do something with them! I’ve already started early with a first wave of explorer-colonizers of an older by-date, but now I’m unloading the small pile of colony ships waiting in orbit of Sculima IV.  Phase I of the Secret Plan is a go! Yes, all those white lines are our colony ships. A big new wave, all going out at once. Topsid Command High Order Level 1 Warning: USO Message Intercepted in Region TS-ES458 Code Rank for Acknowledgement: Ulan-Obtor USO reports Posbi-unit BOX-394 encountered a force of Blues-ships over Nytet. Blues as hostile as reported from our colonies in New Homellete: The Posbi-box was immediately attacked and destroyed. Terran forces managed a landing on Nytet afterwards, reporting local population of Terror Locusts as completely dissolved. An entity dubbed “Terror Worm” was discovered. Capture attempt was unsuccessful, the Terror Worm committed suicide. Reports about Blues, Molkex and Terror Locust populations from New Homellete are now to be ranked X-B2 instead of V-B1. More research necessary.  Picture source from the intercepted hyperspace communication, allegedly a depiction of the “Terror Worm” sighted on Nytet. To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Jul 16, 2023 |
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Jul 16, 2023 15:54
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Do the Terror Worms show up in the rest of the Perryverse or only in Operation Eastside?
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Jul 16, 2023 20:57
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PurpleXVI posted:Do the Terror Worms show up in the rest of the Perryverse or only in Operation Eastside? The opposite! That picture up there at the end of the update? That's taken from the cover of a novella from that story arc. We're actually carefully cordoned off from any of the truly interesting stuff that's happening elsewhere, that's where all those "intercepted messages" are coming from!  In the Perryverse, Molkex and the Terror Worms show up at least two more times in story arcs I didn't even know existed until I started trawling the Wiki to add some spice to my update. Operation Eastside gives you some research that's clunkily sharing space with your weapon-research, and some text messages. That's it. Oh wait, if you look closely, some planets of numbers on them, which is possibly meant to indicate that those are planets with Terror Locust eggs on them. But that's now really it. One of the reasons I decided to go with 1 turn = 1 day real time was the realization that the Blues arc of Perry Rhodan is fairly fast and covers about 1-2 years at most. (It gets complicated because of course it does.) And I honestly thought we could do this in under 700 turns. (It turns out yes, it's possible and for a while I got scared we may accidentally win before the Terror Locusts and their big daddies even show up, but it's now safely into October 2326 and billions of people have died. Far away from New Homellete.) When all of this is over, I'll explain the entire time line of this hosed-up little crisis in a final lore post. Edit: If we make it through two more months without winning, Perry Rhodan himself will give general mobilization orders for the entire United Empire, because poo poo will hit the fan. Just in time for the game to be over. Someone who doesn't know the series and only this game would never even know all of this is happening. The lore-integration of Operation Eastside wasn't well planned. Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Jul 16, 2023 |
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Jul 16, 2023 21:44
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So I guess Terror Worms have the fictional shark problem that they die if the stop moving?
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Jul 16, 2023 23:52
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habituallyred posted:So I guess Terror Worms have the fictional shark problem that they die if the stop moving? Nah, as stated the Nytet-worm just commited suicide. Right now all we know is: They exist, and they show up after Terror Locusts have slimed a world. That's it. That's also why the Terrans wanted to catch him. They just hosed it up by scaring him too much
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Jul 17, 2023 08:00
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OK, tomorrow gets you a new lore post. I hope you like reading, because I tried my hand at a very limited, simple topic. In other words, I very nearly collided with the allowed word-maximum per post. Now on to proofreading and picture preparing! Edit: As a light teaser, the post will cover the basic and most common weapons you may encounter in the Perryverse.
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Jul 29, 2023 20:11
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Oh, I'm looking forward to this. Perry Rhodan has some really cool weapons, and at this point in the story, the future standard heavy weapon of Milky Way civilizations has already been introduced, although for now it's a state secret of the Posbis and Terrans iirc.
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Jul 30, 2023 06:27
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Torrannor posted:Oh, I'm looking forward to this. Perry Rhodan has some really cool weapons, and at this point in the story, the future standard heavy weapon of Milky Way civilizations has already been introduced, although for now it's a state secret of the Posbis and Terrans iirc. Nah buddy, Perry thought it would be a great idea to give everyone in the United Empire this weapon. So until the authors decided to reign him in a bit, everyone except the Blues had them. 
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Jul 30, 2023 16:08
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Lores of Rhodan: Weapons We’re now up to “super-heavy disintegrators”, but what, exactly, are we shooting enemies with? What is that thing and what does it “disintegrate”? Let’s have a look at the most common weapons of the Perryverse! A lot of weird poo poo has graced the galaxy (and wider universe) since the moon landing that started everything. Luckily for you, my dear readers, we only really need to cover weaponry common up to 2326/2327. Maybe some time later it becomes necessary to know what a de-evolution weapon is, or a psy-imploder, a weapon that can only kill one person at a time, but it kills you (and your soul) so hard, your body and everything near it dissolves into sludge. Which is not even the first nor the last time in setting that a weapon shows up capable of dissolving people into sludge. Let’s…. just start with some more grounded weapons first, shall we? Impulse Weapons: Just turn your ship around and aim your thrusters One of the most basic weapons that were here from the start, in 1961, and are also still here in modern PR, 2023, thousands of years later in-story. Have you always wondered why SF often has insanely huge super-drives that can accelerate huge chunks of metal to almost light-speed in short order but for some reason no-one just turns their ships around to roast enemies in the gigantic output of their engines? Well, PR shortcuts this by having the most basic weapon of the setting be exactly this: A weaponized drive. To expand on this: The most basic sub-light drive of the Perryverse is the impulse drive, which here is an excessively explained thing that vomits forth a highly dense particle beam, fed by a fusion reaction. There are basically only two differences between an Impulse Cannon and an Impulse Drive: 1.) to multiply its efficiency as a drive, the impulse drives use huge injectors to put additional atoms of higher weight than the original hydrogen atoms dumped out as pure protons into the stream. This adds more mass to the output, therefore you get more impulse for the same amount of fuel. Do this with an impulse cannon and suddenly, they’ll have recoil bad enough to rip them halfway backwards through the ship. And 2.) Impulse Drives have to be massive things to do their work, and since they’re your drives you obviously can’t just fire them around like beam cannons willy-nilly. Not if you actually want to go somewhere, instead of careening out of control.  A ship-based impulse cannon. Really looks like some sort of engine, doesn’t it? So your average Impulse-type weapon is just that: A differently-sized version of a space ship drive, with its design build to minimize recoil, while your average Impulse Drive is a big fusion-powered particle cannon build to maximize recoil. In the Perryverse, impulse weapons are really great at destroying stuff really fast, but they have certain in-built limits so you can still write interesting stories. An impulse rifle for example dumps so much waste heat into your environment that fighting with impulse weapons in small, enclosed areas like spaceship corridors or space stations tends to kill everyone not in combat spacesuits pretty drat fast. Likewise, if you want to stop another ship without destroying it, you generally don’t want to shoot an impulse beam through it. Sometimes, lancing a ship like this works, but most of the time you just vaporize so much mass at once the ship violently explodes. Impulse beams are also really, really compressed, and therefore can easily penetrate and overload energy shields. Well, more easily. For example, the class of energy shields used in OE’s era, would still need constant fire by a ship class at least one size bigger than the one under fire to pierce the shields before everyone involved dies of old age. And the energies involved would most likely vaporize large parts of the ship when the shields finally start to break. So what to do when you don’t want to vaporize everyone like you’re the loving Daleks? Thermal Weapons: The violet purple heat death Ha ha psyche, you don’t use thermal weapons! Thermal weapons are at a weird spot in the Perryverse. They’re often described as those weird, heater-looking things you wave around to spit out weird, blobby balls or chunky beams of purple heat energy. (Though of course a lot of them look like normal weapons, too. Especially Terran-made portable thermal weapons tend to look like futuristic rifles or pistols sometimes.) They’re sometimes used if someone needs to melt their way through something, but doesn’t want to hilariously kill themselves by perforating half a mile of spaceship with their portable impulse cannon. The energies involved are roughly on the same level: Impulse cannons have great penetration, but sometimes they’re too good at said penetration, and a lot of energy is uselessly dumped into outer space (or the air of the corridor you’re standing in). Thermal weapons in contrast offload their heat energy on the first surface they hit. The chance of accidentally ventilating that space station you're fighting on is far lower. As long as everyone is using portable energy shields, thermal weapons are better for fighting in confined areas or in built-up areas like cities. Since they just drop a bunch of heat and that’s it, they tend to suck absolute rear end against many defensive measures you can deploy, especially energy shields. Thermal beams on ships tend to be rare, and are generally only used by primitive non-protagonist races, as they lack the incredibly compressed stability of an impulse-beam, which results in far too short ranges to do much in ship-to-ship combat. Thermal weapons are also a great way to demonstrate why armor still exists: Instead of just reducing the impact tunnel from 500m down to 250m, a thermal beam of corresponding energy level will instead ablate a large area of armor away, with only minor damage to the area directly under the armor. Looks more gruesome from the outside, but is actually far less damaging to the ship. In case you absolutely need more technical details, Perrypedia describes the physics behind thermal weapons as collecting and emitting EM-waves, or in other words, after 8000 years and more of development, that’s what lasers have turned into. Thank you, Arkonids. And this also neatly explains why thermal weapons are seen as somewhat classical, even old, and why primitive species are more likely to use them: They’re just really advanced lasers. And IRL, we already have working lasers. Particle beam cannons powered by fusion reactors, not so much. Clearly, advanced lasers or “thermal weapons” will probably be the first serious weapon on a future space battleship. And then aliens with impulse cannons can laugh at how primitive we are. In other news, most portable thermal beams have a fatal flaw that allows someone with the technical knowledge to do so to disable the emitter at the front. Which then results in a shot not being shot, instead the energy is trapped inside the weapon and a couple trigger-pulls turn your fancy space revolver into a big time bomb. This flaw was never corrected, since it gives space agents a good method to suddenly surprise the bad guys with an unexpected bomb they didn’t see coming.  Bomb and hand weapon in one! Disintegrators: Molecularly Dissolving If you look past a thermal beam’s description basically being “a bunch of heat gets shot at you, dunno how that works”, this is the first of the more unusual weapons. The main reason being: In 1961, our knowledge of both chemistry and physics was far below what it is today, and while the first authors really wanted a matter-dissolving weapon, they couldn’t think of any possible real-world explanation for something that can just magically neutralize the bounds holding molecules together. (This is me joking, I don’t really believe the first authors sat around being sad they couldn’t think of any real-world process for matter-disintegration.) But our new lizard-battleships are equipped with “super-heavy”-versions of disintegrators, so how do they work if it isn’t some kind of quantum-bullshit? The answer is, like a lot of the time in Perry Rhodan, hyperspace. As we (hopefully) all remember, the basis of all FTL-technology in the Perryverse is the oscillating crystal. Those things are sometimes called “Schwingquarze”/”Oscillation Quartz”, though from the description, there are a lot of minerals that could potentially be an oscillating crystal. A red hyper-crystal can be based on hyper-infected Amethyst, for example. There’s a lot of quartz in a planetary crust. Just not much of the special poo poo. (Did you know Granite counts as a quartz, too? Thank you for this fact, Wikipedia.) To recap, you get oscillating crystals when a piece of matter from hyperspace is trapped by a crystalline structure in normal space. This is possible only in so far that both matter and energy have equivalents in hyperspace, equivalents that people in normal space refer to as “hyperbarie” (hyper matter) and hyperenergy. They aren’t actually, because hyperspace is “outside”, it is the medium universes are embedded in, but mathematically, you can describe stuff you find in hyperspace as some sort of shadow to stuff you can expect inside a universe. After that it gets both esoteric and mathematical, and I’ll spare you this for a later lore post. What you need to know is that hyperbarie can sometimes get trapped by certain crystalline structures and since normal space rejects hypermatter, that tiny glitch in the universe gets immediately banished back to its creepy phantom zone. And then, because the crystal structure prevents it, the hyperbarie is dragged back down. Then the cycle repeats. Based on the frequency of the cycle, you can get different types of oscillating crystal, and generally speaking, the frequency of the cycle depends on the type and form of the crystalline structure. As an example, for a lot of Perryverse-history, Amethyst-based “red” hyper-crystal was one of the weaker ones, with a slow and not very energetic oscillation pulse. If your civilization has no means of detecting this process, not only is it almost impossible to invent all the technologies related to FTL-travel, everything based on this will just give out tiny rest energies of detectable frequencies. Or gravitic distortions. A simple anti-gravity drive coupled with a small energy transmitter and a power plant will seem like the transmitter and the drive is just purposelessly sucking down tons of energy, and then the anti-grav will output nothing but extremely weak gravitic distortions far too small to explain why that car is floating now. Without the knowledge of hyperspace existing, any technology exploiting it will look like magic, as the important part doing the work is missing from view. And now here are the disintegrators: By making a piece of oscillating crystal resonate with hyperenergy, you can cause waves of hyper-radiation to emit outwards. There are a lot of potentially harmful ways that radiation can cause damage, or insanity, but one of the ways that was discovered pretty drat fast was a molecule-dissolving effect that reduced any material to a densely packed, dust-like mass of single atoms. After that, the application was obvious: Mining!  I decided on this picture because it neatly shows the oscillating crystal inside. Soon, Arkonids used this re-discovery* to create huge machinery capable of amplifying and emitting the useful resonances. Making tunnels and mining shafts was suddenly piss-easy, as the resonance shoots out as seemingly green beams of energy in atmosphere, that then reduces every type of matter first to vapor, and then to dust (after the vapor has settled down again). The only drawback is that rudely disrupting the molecular bonds that way causes highly intense short-lived radiation. And this time I’m talking about completely boring standard radiation, mostly of the Gamma-variety. The radiation is short-lived enough you can just shoot a hole into a wall, wait a couple seconds, and then step through unharmed, as long as the vapor has settled down as dust already. Luckily everyone in that situation normally wears a big drat spacesuit. Also coincidentally, Arkonids gifted us Terrans another advanced technology: Really advanced decontamination procedures and radiation-purging medicine. Eventually, people also realized this would make a really good weapon. And so, like impulse cannons were born from sublight drives, disintegrators were born from mining equipment. Disintegrators only cause interactions with the normal world via its alien hyperenergy, that the things are emitting after the core crystal inside got excited in exactly the right way. Therefore, a disintegration beam is both eerily silent and cold. It does not transfer heat, and the only noise comes from buildings suddenly collapsing after you disintegrated their foundations. The green color of the beam comes from the way the disintegration effect still needs a mostly normal EM-carrier wave to drag the hyperenergy along for the ride, plus the van-der-Waals-force of the air molecules being disrupted along the way. There are of course, later variations of this weapon based on a better, deeper understanding of hyperspace that don’t have that drawback anymore: The so-called interval cannons have an invisible beam that “moves” (technically speaking, it doesn’t move through normal space at all) at FTL-speeds. Disintegrators at least can still be defeated by various means: Certain composite materials can be excited and soaked by hypernergy, leading to an effect that neutralizes all weapons based on hyperenergy, including disintegrators. Energy shields, even the non-hyperenergy based ones, can still stop the carrier wave dead cold. But: Hyperenergy dragged along towards the shield’s surface will still slowly seep through, causing a lot of stress on the shield bubble, since it will either not work as well, causing a bleed-through that still slowly damages the ship below, or the shield bubble will have to work an order of a magnitude harder to keep stable under the pressure. Since super-special armor like I described above is really rare and hard to make (in 2326, the Blues’ Molkex is the only one even known), and since the current shield tech of the setting has to fight very hard to keep stuff from dissolving, the game is actually on point here: Disintegrators and “super-heavy” disintegrators being higher on the tech tree than impulse-weapons and thermal beams makes totally sense! (I was shocked myself.) Paralyzers and Shockers: Oh, so you DON’T want to kill?  I couldn’t find any picture showing a paralyzer, so instead just imagine the guy on the left sweeping one across. This would paralyze everyone else in that collection of weirdoes. Shockers are simple to explain: Imagine a weak particle beam that mostly puts out charged particles that can interact with a lifeform’s nervous system. The EM-radiation emitted by a shocker looks a shocking shade of blue, and if that blue touches you, you get shocked. That’s it! Shockers can easily be blocked by shields or even a really sturdy wall, so they tend to be of limited use to everything more advanced than a space animal. Still, on an average day, their range is almost line-of-sight instead of the tiny range a taser would give you, so they were still around in 2326. They were also seen as obsolete by then, because this ancient Arkonid technology comes with a hefty drawback: Did you know getting shocked by a taser can stop your heart if you’re really unlucky? Really, any big electrical shock can be bad news, and the shocker isn’t any different, just far stronger. And it’s a beam weapon that can hit you multiple times in short order. A fierce battle with large amounts of shockers can very easily move past the threshold of lethal force and produce a lot of surprised-looking corpses. Arkonids didn’t really care much about this, since shockers are very reliable and cheap -it’s also conveniently another technology even primitive civilizations can sometimes develop that’s still a potential threat to our intrepid protagonists. Eventually, all shockers were replaced by the more advanced Paralyzers. A Paralyzer is a nasty little weapon: An ancient technology that’s very near the basis of hyperspace-based technology, just after hyperenergy detectors, is a converter that can change normal EM-based energy forms into their hyper-equivalents. That’s the thing you need to put inbetween your power plant and your anti-grav to make it working, for example. In this case, something that could work similar to a basic EM-shocker has a hyper-converter attached to it, and then an (often magazine-based) energy source. If you pull the trigger, the electromagnetic shock beam gets converted by the converter (also named Quintadim Transducer) and instead of a beam visible because it ionizes atoms along its path, you get a totally invisible beam or beam cone that interacts mostly only with the hyper-shadow of a lifeform’s nervous system. This disruption effect causes paralysis, hence the name. As the transformed energy has nearly no interaction with normal matter, it passes through everything and is therefore one of the main reasons the setting just developed better and better energy shields, as part of the energy is still technically EM-based, and therefore a good shield can stop the paralysis-effect from reach you by blocking the carrier wave. A big, sturdy wall however lets most of the carrier wave through. Imagine the EM-wave as a small, not very energetic wave of Gamma-radiation. That stuff gets through nearly everywhere, and yes, dense matter can weaken a paralyzer-beam this way, but since the main effect comes from invisible hyperspace-radiation, even a tiny amount of the EM-wave reaching you will gently caress you up, since the hyper-energy is not affected by the density of normal matter at all. Only blocking everything completely can save you, and in this era that’s easiest with an energy shield. How long and how strongly you are affected depends on how much of this hyper-radiation your body was soaked in. And while the, sometimes painful (you get cramps) way of getting your free movement back sucks, it’s not painful to the point of being incapacitating. Most of the time. Too much paralyzing can still cause a heart failure, though. So it’s still just a really fancy taser. One that travels at 98% of light speed and passes through nearly all forms of matter. Fighters and Missiles: Did you know disintegrators can shoot omnidirectional?  An old Terran space fighter, the Lightning Jet. Missiles do exist in the Perryverse! They’re just very rare, since it’s astonishingly hard work to make a weapon that’s still capable of doing anything in an environment where capital ships tend to have targeting computers advanced enough to delete all incoming strange objects in a matter of nanoseconds. Also, disintegrator “beams” can be configured to instead put out a slightly weaker cone. A big, sphere-shaped Terran ship shooting its disintegrator-turrets can very easily cover the ship in all six directions, making any missiles go away regardless of how good they are at evasion. Hard to evade something that physically fills up the entire space around you, after all! The types of missiles that sometimes show up are therefore purely strategic weapons: Since only a missile that’s basically a fully automated spaceship with advanced AI has a chance to actually reach its target. And at that level, making a big expensive spaceship to blow up another spaceship is incredibly wasteful, so they only make sense if you want to blow up something big, like a planet. Either efficiency reasons (“we already have spaceships, we can just go there and shoot”) or ethical reasons (“we (evil space monsters) want to conquer that planet, not destroy it”), block missiles from being a reasonable weapon system. Also, sometimes there’s a cultural barrier in place, too: A lot of the systems to deploy certain weapon systems certainly look like someone is launching missiles, if you squint hard enough. But Arkonids would call this “bombing”, see next chapter. Now, space fighters. Space fighters kind of surprised me, since I never got the impression they’re that important. But looking stuff up on Perrypedia revealed that I actually had it backwards: Terrans weren’t the ones obsessed with tiny space vessels annoying the poo poo out of the capital ships. Instead, the many thousands of years of near total stasis on the technological front lead to even basic Arkonid capital ships having a large amount of tiny 1-crew space fighters on board. Though technically, a lot of those smaller vessels weren’t really used doctrinically like we expect a fighter strike to function, a lot of times the smaller boats were used more in support roles, for example in rescue operations. Terrans though, immediately noticed why this is and soon made their own types of space fighters: During an age were energy shield technology didn’t progress much, a big swarm of tiny ships could still be a threat to any capital vessel. The typical Arkonid space fighter was 15m long, 7m wide and 2m high. It was just a basic frame with an impulse drive, an anti-grav unit, an energy shield, some capacity for carrying strategic weapons and a single, big impulse cannon. The last one as a big spinal mount, and it depended on the pilot’s ability to use the impulse drive to line up shots correctly. (No silly 60° firing cones here, looking at you, Master of Orion III) Terrans of course didn’t have thousands of years of slowly mellowing out, so instead of the more languid “we have them because we always had them” of the Arkonids, they immediately developed a thousand different types of space fighters, some of which, like the space jet, a 30m-diameter discus-shaped ship with FTL-capability, are not even space fighters anymore. At least not in a way we would recognize. A typical space jet is more a tool for exploration, though of course it’s still armed and can be carried in large numbers by a typical carrier ship. Since the Terran fleets heavily draw on German military ideas, this is where you find destroyers: A “destroyer” in PR refers to a bigger fighter with 3 instead of 1 crew members. This is, to give you context, because there was a German fighter-class of heavily armed fighters back in WWII that was called “Zerstörer” (Destroyer) and those are space-based versions of this concept. No relation to wet navy ships at all.  A Terran space destroyer, crewed by up to three people. In the end, space fighters, especially on the Terran end, and including the destroyer-class, can range from the tiny 1-man fighters copied from the Arkonids, all the way up to 50m long monsters that are almost as big as the more rounded corvettes. The main difference of space fighters is of course the purpose, not the size. A 60m corvette is a support and exploration vessel, similar to the later developed 30m space UFOs, I mean space jets. Some space fighters may have similar sizes, but space fighters and destroyers commonly only have a cockpit instead of a real command center, and no crew redundancy or other support structures. In a space destroyer, your three space pilots are lucky if their boat at least has a toilet, in a space jet you can just go down from the small command center and go have a lie down in one of the cabins. There’ll also be an entire cargo area full with supplies, an extensive automatic machine workshop to aid with repairs, etc. To summarize, space fighters can fight and that’s it, space jets and corvettes are basically miniaturized capital ships that can move around independent from their carrier ships, if necessary.  A Terran space fighter, this time the Topsid-class, named after our favorite lizard people homeworld. Was developed thousands of years after the current era, it carries space torpedoes and anti-matter bombs in addition to weapons too advanced for this post. To bring this back to the thread, in the current era of Operation Eastside, the biggest ships any of the galactic super-powers have built are super-battleships: Of course spheres, spheres with a whopping 1500m diameter. And one mile probably doesn’t sound like much when compared to say, some of the bigger ships in Warhammer 40K, but those ships aren’t big globes. Taking out a calculator and comparing the internal space of those drastically different ships to each other makes you appreciate how nuts the Perryverse is. I’m fairly sure the Imperium’s engines would have a hard time getting a Perry-style space bubble to even move, especially considering how much more dense and therefore heavier all the materials in the Perryverse are. It’s probably a good idea all the technical data for Perryverse-ships doesn’t include mass, because no-one who isn’t an engineer would look at those numbers and believe them. Anyway, I only bring those giants up here to give you an idea what amount of space boats a single one could carry. Please remember with the following numbers, that this is long before technological advancements made it possible to make dedicated carriers with literally thousands of subordinate vessels. This is basically what you can expect from a Terran super-battleship in the year 2326: 40 60m corvettes (FTL-capable) 70 30m space-jets (FTL-capable) 300 3-crew destroyers (some types, not all) 200 1-crew space fighters (no) 40 5-crew aero gliders (nope) 80 Shifts* (nada)  Just so this update doesn’t get too technical, here an eponymous space jet in action, from a novella-cover. *gently caress, completely forgot about these. Uhhh… they’re tanks. Space tanks. They heavily abuse that anti-grav exists now and can fly, swim and dive. They still have tank threads for emergencies and look kind of clunky, since in an age of super-sensors and energy shields, looking flat isn’t as important as getting the gently caress out of dodge. Like a lot of Terran equipment, they’re convenient all-rounders that can carry explorers and sensitive scientific equipment as easily as space weapons. I think that about covers it all.  Also so this update looks less ancient: A fairly modern cover, showing a fairly modern shift. Arkon and Gravity Bombs: The Strategic Weapons  Another cover, this time from the 1960s: It shows Terran mutant Ras Tschubai, after he has just teleported away from that ominously dying planet in the background. Nukes aren’t scary for Arkonids. When you manipulate energy fields well enough, it’s astonishingly easy to just block the neutron flow in an atomic bomb and turn it into an expensive dud. (There are ways around that, but then again, a basic nuke in space against an energy shield isn’t much more effective than a broken dud in the first place.) Instead they use Arkon Bombs and Gravity Bombs as their strategic weapons of choice. Since they’re not relevant for this game at all, I’ll try to keep things short. Arkon Bombs employ an effect called “Atombrand”. This was hard to translate. Internet translators want to translate this word as “nuclear fire”, which isn’t technically correct. Let me try again. One of the main inspirations for the Perry Rhodan series was the German SF-author Hans Dominik, a huge weirdo like all SF-authors. In 1921, he published story called “Zukunftsmusik” / “Future Music”. The title being a German idiom that translates into something like “Utopian dream”. If something is Future Music, you don’t expect it to become reality next Monday, to put it simply. In it, Hans Dominik speculated about the dangers of (then still fairly new) nuclear power and their possible applications as an energy source. The “Atombrand” refers to an accidental chain reaction that nearly kills the Earth, and can only be stopped by surgically removing the places of infection, putting them into big rockets, and shooting them to the moon. At the end of the story, the moon transforms into a short-lived atomic sun. Luckily the story ends then, since Hans Dominik isn’t Russian and therefore didn’t want all his readers to drink themselves to death in depression. PR later picked this idea up for this Arkonid super-weapon: By the 1960s it was clear that the sort of atomic chain-reaction as envisioned by Dominik wasn’t actually possible, since you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn’t set the planet on fire. But the authors thought about hyperspace, and its applications in planet-destruction, and the Arkonids being space imperialists, of course they had a space strategic weapon! Arkon Bombs are a terrifyingly expensive and hard-to-make technology to explode planets, slowly: They manipulate matter itself to cause the same kind of chain-reaction physicists of the early 20th century had been concerned about, on purpose. (Though later this was retconned and the new canon as per Perrypedia is that the Arkon Bomb induced a fusion-process, instead of matter-decay. It’s a lot scarier, and shows there was a discussion at some point about the impossibility of the kind of slow radioactive chain-reaction that was still based on Dominik’s ideas.) Depending on what kind of threat needs extermination, Arkon Bombs are generally very configurable: They can be set to turn an entire planet into nuclear hellfire in mere days, but can also set to take weeks or months. A civilized enemy may be allowed to evacuate a planet if the longer settings are used, if the Arkonids had ever meat the Tyranids, they probably would have used one of the very short settings. This type of process is non-reversible. If that bomb goes up, the planet is toast. Especially because the chain-reaction moves in all three dimensions at once. Good luck stopping the nuclear hellfire after it eats itself 500 miles deep into the ground! The speed of the planetary destruction can be set, as the exact hypernergy-modulation necessary to gently caress with a planet’s matter is finicky. In default mode, a typical Arkonid Arkon Bomb will force fusion in all elements with at least 10 protons in the atomic nucleus. The first weapons of this type Terrans encountered were found in an old Arkonid depot on Venus, and were set to explode all atoms above 80 protons (so roughly nuclei with an atomic weight of at least 160). This kind of weapon is both terrifying, and even back in 2326 it was nearly universally shunned, even the Arkonid Empire had set all manners of self-imposed rules like “don’t Arkon Bomb a life-bearing planet” to prevent excesses. As the Arkonid Empire also tended to end rebellions by going full Space Darth Vader on them if they were unlucky enough to sit on an originally airless moon, excesses still happened. Thousands of years after the game is set, the big space Obamas pulled some levers and changed the laws of physics, ending billions of civilizations and killing quadrillions of people universe-wide. This also coincidentally transformed Arkon Bombs into weird bomb-shaped useless piles of junk. Space Gods are a land of contrast. Gravity Bombs however still work. They can destroy entire solar systems. They’re also not technically bombs. OK, I guess they need more explanation. Gravity Bombs Gravity “Bombs” are hyperspace-based energy fields that are projected in a neat looking spiral. Less neat: Since our normal universe really hates weird poo poo like “hyper”energy floating around, the resulting rejection-process causes massive distortions in space-time on the contact coordinates. Those distortions then create a really nasty rift, through which things go from bad to worse: Sure, hyperenergy gets rejected back into hyperspace, but since hyperspace is energetically an order of magnitude “above” normal space, there’s a lot of chaotic backlash with energy being pressed into normal space through this little, highly unstable portal. That’s why those things aren’t really “bombs”. You can for example, project this spiral onto a planet, and after a while, the continuous disruptions caused by the spiral field will rip the planet to shreds and feed those shreds into hyperspace, piece by piece. Likewise, if someone is dumb enough to let their spaceship remain in position for long enough, the same effect will rip up most energy shields like paper, and then the same thing happens to the ship. In most cases though, since things in space are rarely holding still, ships and boats get to experience the name-giving side-effects: The interaction of hyperspace and normal space often results in massive gravitic shockwaves churning over local space and yes, a Gravity Bomb’s spiral field will cause this automatically, since their rift-ripping mechanics distort spacetime. As a reminder: Yes, that’s gravity. Those distortions are grav waves, like the ones we’re currently slowly beginning to detect in real life. Logically, even a ship that managed to escape the original rift, will need really good engines and shields to not get crunched up like an empty soda can in your fists. Gravity Bombs can also be deployed as warheads on space torpedoes, the rare case where we see missiles in action, but also can be fired as some sort of suicide generator from a ship-based launcher and finally, a specialized energy projector. All of these methods are limited to light speed however, and even the tiniest gravity bomb will cause great damage throughout a solar system, so you better plan very well when and where you want to deploy them. As an aside: Shooting at planets is as prohibited like throwing Arkon Bombs on them. In other words, it happens, but is seen as the act of complete lunatics. Gravity bombs are mainly relevant for this game because it’s set about a year before there’s actually a galaxy-level threat that needs to be defeated with them. Thousands of them. An entire solar system will be destroyed and deposited (in the form of fuzzy energy fields and atom-sized fragments) inside hyperspace. Sadly, this awesome big fight will coincidentally start happening after the game is “officially” over. (I mean, this game was so budget-constrained it couldn’t even give the important and only quest in the game their own UI. A galaxy-destroying threat was a bit over the developer’s pay grade. Quite literally.) My head-canon is that no-one was insane enough to give our tiny little colonization-expeditions strategic weapons. That would be as crazy as gifting Elon Musk some nukes for his Grand Mars Adventure, if it eventually happens.  This dumbass is carrying a gravity bomb around. Yes, that weird shell-looking thing contains an energy projector for the projection of the actual spiral field. It’s not really a “bomb”, more like a portable one-shot death cannon. Transform Cannons: A fusion bomb being “dense” doesn’t mean it’s stupid  At this point I was slowly running out of steam, and after searching for a while, I gave up trying to find a depiction of the older-style transform cannons in use at the time of OE. Instead, have this drawing from a fairly modern version, from thousands of years after the game is set. You can’t put Arkon Bombs or Gravity Bombs into them. Arkon Bombs are too complicated to survive the transmission process intact enough to actually work, and Gravity Bombs aren’t really bombs, so they can’t be transmitted without being destroyed, either. You can all calm down now. (After finally reaching this point, I suddenly realized I should have posted my lore post about transmitters first. Oh well, too late now.) Transform Cannons are scary. What they can do was already demonstrated when Perry Rhodan himself got a tool called a “Fiction Transmitter” (behold my bad attempt at another translation of a weird German word) that could instantly send objects and people through hyperspace to a group of pre-selected coordinates. Perry did some cheeky bits with this thing, including sending hostile spaceships a nice, fusion-bomb sized gift straight into their command centers. At the time, all attempts at copying this space god gift failed, as the things had the habit to destroy themselves if tampered with. Normal transmitters can only transmit stuff if there’s another transmitter as the target. The reason being, hyperspace is really weird and strange and has interactions with normal space, but no relation at all from a purely physics-based standpoint. So if you use a machine to send yourself into hyperspace, you cease to exist. If you’re lucky. FTL-drives tend to cheat on this matter by having intelligent beings and a lot of complicated machinery inside the transmission field, and by carefully calculating your target region and reserving enough energy that you will automatically rejected back home if you reach that point. You also need to travel at extremely high relativistic speeds to prevent your FTL-drive from just exploding, and you need to stay away from large masses, as gravitic distortions and hyper-shadows of massive normal space objects all make your FTL-drive sad. And the crews of your ship very dead. The old Arkonid Empire experimented with trying to re-discover transmitters for ages, but ultimately failed because the mix of stagnating society and a really finicky technology resulted in a lot of catastrophic failures. Most of which resulted from the fact that FTL-technology gets really sad if you set it up on really massive objects (planets, moons) that can have massive hyper-shadows, plus most of which hopefully won’t be moving at a speed close to light. Only when Terrans started getting help from a literal space god did this technology show up again. (I’ll explain transmitters in more detail in a later post.) The same space god, known under the to name “ES”(“IT”), then helped out the protagonists from Terra some more, eventually not only gifting them immortality, but also a highly advanced transmitter that could send things directly to target coordinates in normal space, without needing a receiving station waiting at the end. This was the Fiction Transmitter. It could do this because in a society that can’t even build the less complicated two-way version without space god help, it was impossible at the time to understand even how the thing worked, so copying and reverse-engineering it was impossible. (Them being made tamper-proof by a space god didn’t exactly help, either.) In the early 22nd century, Terrans made contact with a race of positronic-biological robots, aptly but not creatively named “Posbis” by Terrans. First contact involved Posbis using some sort of Fiction Transmitter to hurl fusion bombs at them, which came as somewhat of a surprise, after all that failure to understand and copy that technology. Eventually, peace was made and technology exchanged. Terran scientists were surprised to find out that while both transform cannons and fiction transmitters worked on the same basic principles of physics, they couldn’t be more different in detail. Everything about a transform cannons is like a big, broken version of a fiction transmitter: Instead of near silence, dematerialization of a warhead in the ammunition chamber creates both a loud imploding noise from the displaced air, and a rude shock that can make life on a capital ship firing all weapons a living hell. Nevermind impulse cannons, if a transform cannon fires, you feel the hyper-dimensional doors being kicked in. Even with advanced shock-absorbing technology, especially early transform cannons were not a nice place to stand around. A lot of energy is used up to create a short-lived hyperfield that catapults an object made of normal matter through hyperspace to a pre-selected set of coordinates. The drawback here being, that the object going through the process suffers so many distortions no living being can survive this process. And any form of complex machinery is uselessly mangled when it arrives. Sure, a simply lump of rock would work, but that’s not how Terra rolls. Instead, the main ammunition of transform cannons is high-density fusion bombs. With a process similar to the one that creates extreme high-density steels with completely insane characteristics like a melting point of over 100k (yes, 100000) °C, you get similarly insane fusion bomb warheads. The lowly fusion bomb, coincidentally, can still be made simple enough the warhead isn’t distorted to pure uselessness. As long as you don’t send a fuse, as any kind of fuse is already too complex to survive this form of “transport”. Yes, that’s right. The explosion process is triggered at the same time as the transmission process. Pedantically speaking, a transform cannon doesn’t send a fusion bomb onto your bridge, it sends an exploding fusion bomb onto your bridge. And that’s why this weapon became feared throughout the galaxy: Nevermind the gigantic shockwaves of a fusion bomb detonating in an atmosphere, nothing survives having a gigantic fusion warhead detonating inside their ship. And any near misses? Either they nearly make you piss yourselves as a small new sun is suddenly right next to you, or you’re dead. Because ships in the Perryverse tend to fight at relativistic speeds, and a bad enough angle means that fusion warhead, that is already exploding, hits your shields at something silly like 69% of light speed. The combined energy is enough to bring even strong shields down and then still enough to vaporize the ship. To give you an example on accuracy, in one exercise, 100 space fighters with small transform cannons managed to transmit their bombs into a tiny, 1km³ volume of space. At that kind of margin, I like to point out that that’s still less than the expected volume a 1-man fighter’s own shield bubble will extend to. A big capital ship would extend its shield into a volume multiple km³ big, and would have therefore suffered 100 direct hits. At the age the exercise was set (vaguely a century after the game is set in), not many ships would have survived this. In the current age, none. To put this into perspective: A lot of capital ships in the current age inhabit a volume that is fairly larger than 1 km³. But shield technology is still not really up to the task of stopping incoming hyperspace-objects. In other words, all those hits would have had their bombs materialize back inside the target ship. Did I mention a transform cannon can have up to 20 million km of range? That’s a lot. It’s more than twice the distance between Earth and Sun. A ship sitting in Mercury-orbit could target and engage ships hanging around Mars. Neither impulse cannons nor disintegrators can reach even a fraction of that range. So even if a ship had shields good enough to survive a hit, they’d also need uncommon weapons not available in 2326, or a transform cannon. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even be able to shoot back. Consequently, a fleet of Terran warships was capable of just deleting an equal-sized enemy fleet. When the United Empire goes defunct in the age following the one this game is set in, the Solar Empire will suddenly be the sole remaining galactic super-power, because with the only working transform cannons, no-one actually needs to show up for a battle. It’s pointless. Every spacer and soldier in Non-Terran fleets could just take a leave of absence indefinitely, because what does it matter? If your ship shows up all fighty-like, it just gets deleted without even being able to shoot back. (People of course still fought. And died, because see this entire loving chapter.) In fact, in the current age Molkex-armored Blues-ships are the only known vessels that can prevent a fusion bomb from suddenly magicking itself into their command centers. This weapon is ludicrous, and most of the following PR story arcs deal with their insane, overwhelming strength to some degree. To give some meta-context, the Blues showed up in PR just after the authors noticed the inherent problems of writing interesting stories in a peacefully united galaxy. The Blues and their Counter-Empire were a first attempt at providing a threat that couldn’t just be bombed out of the way by transform cannons. But after the Molkex-armor became a solved problem, so did the aggressiveness of the Blues. It probably won’t be a shock to you to hear that the United Empire of the years 2326/2327 broke up shortly after. The authors at the time didn’t want to go full on 40k-bleakness however, and had Perry reveal that all those transform cannons every member of the United Empire had been given, were actually tamper-proof black boxes. Then he pushed a big, red button and all those new nation states suddenly found their big main weapons melting down. A moment later, the authors realized that the Solar Empire was now the sole and undefeatbable super power in the galaxy, and went “poo poo!”. By what is surely complete coincidence, the big story arcs following after the Blues’ troubles were all metaphorically aimed at breaking the Solar Empire. Will it work? Well, we’ll see at another time, maybe. Nowadays in modern PR, transform cannons are still a good weapon, but with a lot of counters that can kill a ship using transform cannons as blindingly fast as transform cannons killed their victims in earlier ages. Karmic justice in action.  And because I forgot to show this off earlier, here are some classical space torpedoes. Edit: I’ve used, when appropriate, Perrypedia as a source, plus my memories from reading far too many Perry Rhodan stories. Plus what knowledge I could grasp from reading far too many science books and articles over the years, because not always are all the details I’m writing about actually clearly put down to paper by the authors. I also had to do a lot of cultural translation, since a lot of the concepts in PR map really weirdly, or not at all to SF I’ve read by Non-German authors. Did you know for example, that as far as I can tell, only one author in thousands of novellas has managed to explicitly mention the principles behind impulse weapons? And that was in the 2010s? As a kid, I never really thought about this, but in hindsight, looking at all those intricate technical drawings of nearly every ship or technology in PR, it’s clear that the authors expect readers to be just smart enough to realize that an “impulse” weapon is clearly a form of kinetic particle beam, fed by a fusion reaction. Likewise, there are entire novellas that are either: Protagonist meets scientists, scientists explain something in excruciating details. Or: The protagonists visit a lab to follow complicated, often dangerous experiments. Half the content will be complicated technical details to explain why that poor bastard just got torn in half by an energy-shear. Apparently, Germans eat that poo poo up. (Also Japanese people for some reason, but that’s another story.) There’s more, but that wouldn’t be relevant to a post about technology. Let’s just say that this lore post is actually very restraint to some of the poo poo the actual series would present to you. It’s basically the opposite of the Star Trek approach of just making poo poo up. That said, this lore post is still an attempt to average out information that, according to Perrypedia, runs into the problem that among the hundreds of PR-authors, there’s often an astonishing amount of variation. Especially Paralyzers run often into the problem that half the authors can’t be arsed to remember that they don't make you lose consciousness, just as an example. And how bad impulse guns are also depends on many variables, like the mood of the author that day, their star sign, the local weather, etc. Sometimes, a character hit by a small impulse beam will fall down with a fatal gun shot wound and then continue for at least five minutes with a last monologue before dying, sometimes a character is a charred, mangled mess if the beam so much as lightly touches them while passing to the real target. What I’ve collected here, like in all lore posts, is mostly what Perry Rhodan wants you to believe is the real science behind that stuff, and to remember for poo poo like a character monologueing after taking a hit that would have vaporized every unimportant person the following mantra: Artistic freedom exists. Edit2: A lot of the pictures in this post are of fairly low quality and shouldn't cause problems, but if they've come out too big for your taste, tell me and I'll change the format to timg. Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jul 30, 2023 |
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Jul 30, 2023 16:13
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You know, one thing I do appreciate about Perry Rhodan is that they've never really seemed to settle for technobabble as an explanation for most things. Like, obviously, at some level things are STILL technobabble, i.e. crystal resonances are at the heart of a lot of hypertech, but it seems like they put in a core bit of technobabble and then tried to extrapolate as many things as possible from that in a scientific way. EDIT: Also you have a busted image link in the gravity bomb heading, the ending tag is an i tag rather than an img tag.
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Jul 30, 2023 20:21
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PurpleXVI posted:You know, one thing I do appreciate about Perry Rhodan is that they've never really seemed to settle for technobabble as an explanation for most things. Like, obviously, at some level things are STILL technobabble, i.e. crystal resonances are at the heart of a lot of hypertech, but it seems like they put in a core bit of technobabble and then tried to extrapolate as many things as possible from that in a scientific way. gently caress! Thank you for that one. I already spend the entire Sunday editing this dumb post, but of course something always slips through.
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Jul 30, 2023 20:26
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Ahh, Hans Dominik. He wrote stuff that was even weird for 20s pulp Sci-Fi. But luckily we managed to contain the Atombrand after we destroyed the fleet of flying soviet battleships because the Venusians faxed us a solution.
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Jul 30, 2023 22:25
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Really cool post, transform cannons and weaponry in this series sound wild 1AU is 150 million km, the average distance the earth is from the sun, though, not 10 million km. This is super pedantic but I'm saying it to show I read the post
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Jul 31, 2023 19:50
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ilmucche posted:Really cool post, transform cannons and weaponry in this series sound wild Thank you! I'll correct this, as soon as my main internet is back and i'm not stuck phone posting. Fun fact: According to one of my sources, another author confused 20 million km with 20 light-minutes, so I'm just following a tradition by making bad errors.
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Aug 1, 2023 07:45
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How much real-world time did those series of weapons take to develop? One of the crazier things about PR to me is how much endless development and escalation has gone into it over generations of writers. The transports especially seem like an rear end-pull (or a literal deus ex machinae) by one author that everyone else ran with far beyond the intended bounds.
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Aug 6, 2023 13:28
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Decoy Badger posted:How much real-world time did those series of weapons take to develop? One of the crazier things about PR to me is how much endless development and escalation has gone into it over generations of writers. The transports especially seem like an rear end-pull (or a literal deus ex machinae) by one author that everyone else ran with far beyond the intended bounds. A lot of those weapons are basically ancient, not even the transform cannons were a purely Terran development, after all: The in-world answer is who the gently caress knows because everyone was already using impulse cannons and disintegrators for countless thousands of years, for space faring species they're about as basic as realizing that you can use a sling instead of throwing stones by hand. That's why thermal weapons exist, so you can sometimes have less-developed space people without them being utterly helpless -they're more "primitive" than the other weapons, but still strong enough to be a threat. And they're mostly keep being used because they're cheap to make and well, won't accidentally kill some civilian on the wrong side of a wall. (Just the wall. )With "transports" I think you refer to the transmitters, this setting's version of instant teleportation? Those were in-baked from the start, as the arc slowly introducing them as an ancient alien secret started back in 1961, the first year of PR. They're also a necessity, as seen from a German SF-author's viewpoint: It's really hard to have interstellar commerce just based on ships. The Arkonids tried really hard, but their empire is also openly dying when the series starts, so that's not actually an argument in favor of not using them, if you can. Later on, when the rest of the galaxy finally manages to enter the tech-fray, Terrans have already turned entire planets into huge trading hubs, capable of sending untold tons of goods around without the need for any ships*. If you read closely between the lines, it seems that the Arkonid Empire wouldn't even have lost transmitter technology in the first place if it weren't for the Maahk Wars loving up the galaxy so bad, and the modern Empire could have easily re-invented it, if it hadn't degraded so strongly. In fact, later the Arkonid Empire recovers a bit and they have no problems gaining basic transmitter-technology back. Only transform cannons elude most of the galaxy for a couple more centuries, and then it turns out Terrans were just lucky to advance into space by cheating, and during a time when decay and chaos reigned over the space surrounding our solar system. But I'll talk about the Solar Empire and its colorful history some other time. (It'll probably take multiple lore posts, PR-history is kind of dense.) *Ships are of course still needed, as not all planets have transmitters, or transmitters with the capacity to transport large-scale goods. Some stuff is also too delicate to be transported this way, transmitters are kind of rough on you. Edit: To give you a more straight-up answer to your first question, sometimes when aliens with primitive tech are met, the authors often like to mention that it took those poor fuckers many centuries to get stuff like barely functioning FTL-drives and basic thermal weapons. Presumably, to get impulse cannons and disintegrators like the setting starts with, you'd need even longer. What we see in PR starts as the end-point of a long line of similar weapons. Naturally, we'd probably have gotten there. Without Arkonid help, we'd at least made it into our solar system, but even in the hypothetical year 3023 of Alt-Rhodan, we'd have at best very weak versions of impulse cannons (we'd call them "particle cannons", of course) and some advanced laser-weapons any visitor would recognize as some form of thermal weapons. Everyone else we'd have at that point would be like soab bubbles going up against battleships, though. But that's of course not possible, because without Perry stumbling over that Arkonid battlecruiser on the moon, one of the many problems lurking around in near space would have wiped us out. Consider that while Perry was loving around founding his "Third Power" to stop a nuclear war, there was already a secret alien invasion going on. The fuckers would have turned Perry-World into the real world, just even shittier. Oh yeah, and we'd have been extinct before the real year 2023 rolled around. Despite everything, humans in the Perryverse have been ludicrously lucky. Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Aug 6, 2023 |
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Aug 6, 2023 13:47
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A little thread-update: I still have some material left-over and started to work on putting a new update together. It'll probably be ready by Sunday. Also, I took a look at the German RPG Midgard for the next PR-related thread, since that RPG was the one the Perry Rhodan RPG recycled the rules from. It's certainly a thing. No relation to D&D whatsoever. Have fun trudging your bleeding body for three days through the northern wastes because your body became resistant to magic radiation. After looking up some timelines, it seems the reason for the no-relation thing is that there was no German version of Dungeons and Dragons until 1983, two years after the first edition of Midgard was released. I'm also recognizing some basic concepts from the Dark Eye, the other big German RPG. Seems that the Dark Eye took some inspiration from Midgard. Which I guess, makes sense since most people back then would have thought "Midgard" when thinking "which big RPG can we take inspiration from for our rules?" Anyway! I also secured the demo-disc with the prototype of the Perry Rhodan CRPG on it, and all three PR adventure games. This means, the approaching end of this thread won't be the end of Perry Rhodan on Something Awful. The madness continues. Edit: My favorite little fact about Midgard so far: It's perfectly viable to play a spellcaster in full plate armor. The only limitation is that you can only use spells that work by touch or on yourself. Because the metal in your armor is blocking your magic radiation from going any further. And yes, this means if you can find a heavy armor not based on metal (bones, some kind of animal scales, etc.), you can play a fireball-throwing magic knight. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Aug 11, 2023 |
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Aug 11, 2023 11:42
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By the way, how compatible are various species in terms of desired environments and also how deadly are alien viruses that inexplicably work both on space lizards and hairy monkeys?
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Aug 11, 2023 11:56
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SIGSEGV posted:By the way, how compatible are various species in terms of desired environments and also how deadly are alien viruses that inexplicably work both on space lizards and hairy monkeys? So, there are different things going on. There are several important humanoid species, like Terrans, Arkonids, Akonids, Aras, Mehandor, Tefrods, etc. They can even sometimes get children with each other. And that's obviously because they are all descendants of the First Mankind, which arose from Terra (Lemuria) 50,000 years in the past, and then fell. So these mostly can easily coexist in various environments, the outliers being people adapted to high gravity worlds. I think it's 3.2 Earth gravities on the important planet of Ertrus, which is difficult to live in without technological assistance, while Earth for people from Ertrus is a bit like living on the ISS for us. It's possible, but long-term bad for your body. Luckily, personal gravity generators exist, which project a field of the desired gravity around your body, and are small enough to not impair the wearer. There are quite a lot of species which can thrive in Earth-like environments, and quite some who can't. Problems can mostly be overcome with the right tech, which the Milky Way civilizations mostly possess. The gravity issue I've talked about, the big thing is not being able to breathe the atmosphere. Which can either necessitate wearing a breathing apparatus plus a doodad that projects a small force field around your head to act as an airtight helmet, or wearing a full body suit because your body melts in oxygen or whater. Alien viruses don't usually work across species barriers unless they're the weapon of some highly technologically advanced enemy.
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Aug 11, 2023 12:08
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SIGSEGV posted:By the way, how compatible are various species in terms of desired environments and also how deadly are alien viruses that inexplicably work both on space lizards and hairy monkeys? Since I'm still typing away at my PC, I decided to answer this real fast: -Not even among humans are the environments very compatible. A colonist from Ertrus for example was genetically adapted to a gravity no normal human could survive. They tend to be extremely dangerous purely on accident, thanks to their incredibly dense bones and musclemass. They're also hard to supply for, since their metabolism needs a lot of energy to function properly. Martians are even stranger: There are first-generation Martians that were essentially victims of the over-eager approach of the early Solar Empire to just gene-engineer people to fit if the planet didn't fit, because centuries later it eventually dawned on Terrans that their super-tech could also just terraform Mars to be a bit greener. The first-gen Martians eventually died out. There's also an incredibly tiny sub-species of humans that got hosed when it turned out their new sun was a dangerous source of hyper-radiation, slowly making them shrink in proportion, until they were just those tiny, handspan-length miniature people. They have incredibly fast reaction speeds and can make incredible little wonders of technology, but they're also incredibly squishy and need technological help so normal humans can even hear them. On the Non-Terran, but still human front: -Arkonids prefer an average temperature of 40 °C and a rather dry climate. Possibly because the first colonists on Arkon where also adapted, or also possibly because they already had lived on that planet for approx. 50k years when the setting starts. Normal Terran humans need technological assistance or at least a lot of water to survive conditions Arkonids consider perfectly temperate. Non-humans can get wild, it ranges from Topsiders and Blues (close enough that there are Topsiders and Blues peacefully living on Terra in the modern age of the Perryverse, set thousands of years after this game), up to beings like the Maahks, who breath hydrogen instead of oxygen and live on gigantic monster rock planets that make Venus seem hospitable. Then there are the really weird species, like the Druuf (can breathe oxygen, but come from a dying universe where time runs on a different speed setting, making contact nearly impossible) or the Accalauries (little potatoes made from antimatter, they literally can't share the environment of anyone else in the Perryverse) My favorite is still the Abruse: A giant crystalline hivemind that is constantly surrounded by a life-eating energy aura. Funnily enough, the protagonists do get to make contact, because they're immortal. Another interesting juxtaposition from way later in the time line: The Kartanin, bipedal humanoid cats, can perfectly share environments with humans and the Hauri. The Hauri look like if the dried-out husk of a human suddenly decided to get up and walk again. They evolved in an extremely dry environment, and their metabolism reacts badly when they come into contact with too much water. On diseases: Since contact between species is so common, occasionally you get a little jumper across the lines. Terrans luckily got to get a set of really advanced medicines when they stole the entire Arkonid technology base. Those "Cosmobiotics" help deal with most of the little medical accidents a space traveller can come across. Cosmobiotics are based on the basic principles of how to disable/destroy potentially dangerous microorganisms, and so can often even help against new diseases. Though diseases also can get weird sometimes, and a new disease that trounces common cosmobiotics are a disaster. Back before Terrans and their cat-like curiosity showed up, this fact was (besides drug trafficking) the main reason the Aras (galactic doctors) were so successful in monopolizing the galactic medicine and drug trade. Some "diseases", like the "Zentrumspest" / Center Plague that occurs on planets too close to the galactic center, are not caused by microorganisms at all, and are instead a natural phenomenon people just have to live with. Or not, if the CP turns you into a crystal statue. And viruses alone are worth an entire update alone, as viruses in PR, thanks to a lot of real-life medical knowledge not being a thing when this came up in-universe, are not actually a natural thing. Edit: I removed a wrong part after looking at the source. Viruses were once a part of something called the Viral Empire, and I'll leave it at that, because it'll be funnier that way. Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Aug 11, 2023 |
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Aug 11, 2023 12:26
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Torrannor posted:Alien viruses don't usually work across species barriers unless they're the weapon of some highly technologically advanced enemy. Oh, it's canon that they can. Even disturbingly easy at times. They can also form large spaceships, if you know how to properly talk to them.
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Aug 11, 2023 12:33
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Now for something else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5YZUNK8sg This short video (just 3 minutes long) suddenly showed up in my YouTube-subscription feed and I had to take notice, because Ras Tschubai was posted from me just before, it's the black guy on the cover in my weapon lore post. He's a Sudanese chemist who ended up awakening as mutant teleporter, and become one of Terra's greatest heroes, living for thousands of years as an immortal before buying it together with Fellmer Loyd, the blondest man alive. (Fellmer was a telepath, and the two of them often worked together.) In fact, Ras Tschubai was so important to the humanity of the future, they eventually named a mountain-sized super-carrier after him. The video is actually about this RAS TSCHUBAI, a ship controlled by the advanced AI Ananzi. Apparently, in the current days of the series, the Ras Tschubai was already nearly destroyed one time and has now been transported back home, to Luna, and restored in the sublunarian shipyards. Or will be, as the short animation is a teaser for plot happening in 25 weeks Sadly, the voice of Ananzi isn't translated into English or anything, but the main reason for watching is that approx. after minute 1, we see an animation of a modern carrier ship, the Ras Tschubai. We also see a modern fleet fleet tender of the League of Free Galactics (the current main human government) and then the short animation also shows us a look at the big yards that fill up most of Luna below the surface. Those yards have been nearly fully robotic and AI-controlled for thousands of years at this point. The Lunarian yards created both gigantic death fleets of destruction and titanic long-range exploration ships and everything inbetween. So if you want to see an officially approved fan animation set in the Perryverse, go watch it! For reference: The Ras Tschubai has a diameter of 3 km. 3,75 km at the main toroid surrounding the ship's equator. Terrans have built bigger ships, but the Ras Tschubai isn't exactly a dwarf, either. And while I remember reading the first novellas in which the Ras Tschubai was first put into service, by now enough time has past in-setting, this ship is already 500+ years old. (Ships in the Perryverse can be awfully sturdy, probably thanks to all those insane mega-tech space materials used to build them. )Edit: The official name of this ship's class is "Omniträgerfernschiff für Multiplen Einsatz" / "Lon-Range Omni-Carrier for Multiple Use". It has a whopping 85000 crew. Most of which are needed as crew for the veritable fleet the Ras Tschubai carries around with her. The main crew is just 3000 plus a lot of robots. In addition to this, the carrier also carries another 50000 non-sapient robots. Oh, and I was amused to learn that the authors of today aren't scared anymore to show the mass of their ships. The Ras Tschubai has a mass of approximately 2,4 billion tons Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Aug 11, 2023 |
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Aug 11, 2023 16:39
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Have you done a lore post on the Centrumpest yet? It sounds vaguely familiar but I feel like I'd remember more about a plague caused by proximity to the galactic center.
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Aug 11, 2023 20:23
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PurpleXVI posted:Have you done a lore post on the Centrumpest yet? It sounds vaguely familiar but I feel like I'd remember more about a plague caused by proximity to the galactic center. Not yet, but it keeps coming up in my lore posts, since it's one of the more creepy effects hyperspace can have on normal space. I think by now, there are at least three different posts that mention the Center Plague. It's also very easy to understand, even if you're not an avid reader. Every time I have to explain stuff like the Viral Empire to someone, I sound like a crank. You can really only talk about the great VIRAL EMPIRE by stopping for a good maniacal laugh then and when https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNKEVTtWYNY
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Aug 11, 2023 20:56
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Reptile Rising 17: Blue Bombs Bombing Blues Another big chunk of game is done. The next post will be another lore-post, since at this point I feel like I should explain the context of what is going on. We really need to grab a Yülziish and ask them some pointed questions. Mission Log 015: 18th November 2326 I confess, I do not really understand how this works, but our scientists are sure they found a way to replicate how the Aras can crack the invulnerable ship armor of the Yülziish. Our new weapon will cause a chain-reaction in the hardened slime covering their ships, leading to it crumbling away and leaving only the real hull of the ship. And since the Yülziish seem to not really have progressed in their material sciences after developing this terrifyingly efficient Molkex-armor, their real hull is terrifyingly easy to destroy. Hopefully this means our young colonies are now protected against their predations. I’m certain our competitors will be a larger pain-in-the-tail, however. Especially the Akons seem to be determined to fight us now. I concur with my XO that clearly, the Akons were just stalling for time when pretending to be our valued allies just days ago. Still, our defenses are ready to meet the humanoids. Without the painfully efficient sabotage teams of the Energy Command, we are sure the Akons will learn a very important lesson in the coming battles. And now I will have to end this log-entry, it is time to join our fleet in orbit. The Akons are approaching. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  We’re now at turn 295. Most of our main colonies are now full.  The only reason there’s still work to do are the better buildings. On our less old colonies we can still squeeze some new buildings in, but even here more and more work is about deciding which and how many of the older buildings I can bulldoze done this turn and what more advanced buildings will replace them.  Meanwhile, we’ve been exploring around to find the last unknown spots in the star cluster. This system has a great planet, but it’s also a Blues-colony. There are also Mehandor here, which means lots of fighting in this system’s future.  But our local cluster command has decided we should create an observation post to keep looking at them, so we’re sending our scout/colonizer from the local sun to this frozen hellhole at the outermost orbit to do just that. After having confirmed that our AI can in fact, barely keep on surviving on hellplanets, this a decision that’s now easy. Good planets would still be nicer, but that’s not a win condition.  A lot of our last big wave of exploration has hit their target systems, and in a lot of cases, they’re empty because the planets are utter poo poo. Still, this means we can safely set up a bunch of colonies where no-one expects them.  Other systems hit just reveal more enemy colonies. This one contains a strong Arkonid presence. Obviously, since we’re already here and the chance of free real estate in a cluster this size at the highest difficulty are pretty much zero, we set up another “observation post” here. Sorry, little lizards, you have to suffer for dumb political reasons.  At the same time we’re “expanding” in space, our older colonies continue with the whole tearing-down-to-rebuilt plan. It may not look like it, but the empty spaces between the new building sites are all slightly off, and are therefore deemed to unsafe for new constructions. Yes, I know, but apparently the devs forgot our huge robot-forces could just as easily bulldoze all those squares flat. Like ground combat, it’s a part that was not included in the game. But at least this way the colonists will always have at least some nature left on their planets!  One of our new “observation posts”. This planet uses a desert map with some shrubberies. A bit odd, considering the planet’s average temperature is high enough to melt lead. Ironically, it’s kind of not impossible to find a Perryverse-world with really strange alien lifeforms like this, just not very likely. I’m writing down “more diverse planetary maps” on my wish-list for Operation Eastside II.  Our list of colonies grows and grows. Coincidentally, nearly all of our new colonies are terrible, and so the list of AI-controlled planets grows in step. This map is genuinely terrible. The only thing making it not the worst is that the screen keeps scrolling if you’re clicking on one of the arrows and hold the mouse button down. The worst UI-screen is the trade window. It doesn’t keep moving like the planet list map. It also can’t be filtered or re-ordered, like the planet lists in MO3. Have fun clicking. Hope you like cramps.  Another system already taken. This time, the Terrans hold the best planet here.  But what’s this??? This planet is only a little bit worse than maximum, but still not colonized??? We’ll take it, thank you! It makes sense, as this planet is 97% covered by water. But I’d really like at least one more good planet, now that the other good planets we have are full or nearly full. It’s worth it, just in case we get a good roll. At least the AI is heavily discouraged from taking planets like this one. Should make defending this colony a lot easier.  Terrans got the 2nd best planet here, Aras the best one. Ironically, even the best one is still rather marginal. We’ll take the third price here. Experience tells me that the AI is massively cheating with their weighting here: The 2nd best planet may look like it’s only a little bit less good for colonization, but looking at the data closely reveals our soon-to-be newest jewels has temperatures that are just out of whack compared to the Terran colony. This mechanically results in colonies that seem like they should be doable, but actually are just below the threshold of suitability. I’ll probably try at least, but my suspicion is that this planet will end up AI-controlled soon, anyway.  We’re facing a similar situation in this system, just with Mehandor and Blues instead, and shittier planets. I feel like this hosed-up moon will end up as another one of our AI-controlled “observation posts”.  Remember the planet with 97% water covering the surface? We actually got a pretty good roll! This certainly doesn’t look like it’s just 3% of the surface. Too bad half the real estate is unusable hills and mountains. Still, not bad. The local environment is nice enough our Topsiders can walk around unprotected and enjoy the nice island chain near the main continent. This planet will mostly be a research colony, since there’s just enough free space to do one thing and one thing only: This definitely won’t be a huge population center or industrial powerhouse. But research is, ironically enough, the only thing that still needs some time doing! The rest of the game is basically won at this point.  Turn 301. Let’s take a look at where we stand: Our “weapons”-research is still very slowly closing in on the point where we hopefully finally end Operation Eastside’s quest and can go back to standard research. We have 34 systems colonized, and need to have colonies set up in at least 64 systems to win. Not bad! And this is my Secret Plan (I promise I’ll stop calling it “Secret Plan” from now on): All this time we’ve been stockpiling colonizers, and while we used colonizers “normally”, trying to get some good planets, we’ve also been abusing the game mechanics a lot by setting up totally useless colonies. By now I have a big enough stockpile, we could end this at any time, simply by aiming my currently 30+ colonizers at systems we haven’t settled yet, cruising over the finishing line in an instant. But that’s boring! So I’ll also continue playing normally, trying to solve the quest like a proper player, finish researching the tech tree, and maybe building up a couple more nice planets. And when we inevitably reach the point where the AI gets too stroppy and all dissolves into universal war, I can just let our lizard commander hit the big, red button in her office and a couple turns later, we win. Master of Orion III, this ain’t. I wasn’t joking about the player not needing to ever fight an enemy in this game. In fact, it’s counter-productive, as every bit of hostility, may it be too many rejected trades or too many shots fired, makes an AI-controlled player more hostile towards you. And the resulting fighting can easily result in a down-wards spiral towards unending hellwar.  But even without exploiting game mechanics, we’re reaching a spot where the AI will slowly turn on us. In turn 301 alone, I set up three more “observation posts”. The AI only sees +3 on our win scale though, not how lovely all those planets are.  On the less insane side of our empire, construction on the few new planets that aren’t a complete joke continues.  At the same time, each turn sees multiple trading requests. Sometimes we can take them, sometimes we get stuff like this, where whatever the invisible digits show, means the trade is blocked. Due to the AI getting so much more stuff on the highest difficulty, I have to reject more and more trades simply because the AI can give us so much poo poo, the corresponding poo poo we’d have to give on our end is just skyrocketing beyond all reason. Besides slowly getting concerned about the invisible hostility counter ticking in the background, I’m also thinking that “highest difficulty” would be a lot worse if the AI got different weight factors. With the amount of sheer cheating power AI-players get, they’d should have an easy time keeping marginal planets going, even where we can not. But the AI-weighting often steers AI-players away from those marginal planets. On the other hand, judging from the one time we took an Akon-colony, it seems the AI is also terrible at building up colonies, so maybe it wouldn’t really make a difference, just force more fights if a player is really determined to get more useful planets. A future Operation Eastside II should also have vastly improved building AI, I write down in my imaginary notes.  Even though I didn’t plan this, all those colonizing ships parked around or hunting down new colonies gave us vastly improved sensor coverage. There’s a shitton of ships moving around, only a fraction of which are ours. So far, no-one is targeting one of our colonies. Though of course, blind spots in our sensor coverage and information overload could prevent me from seeing incoming attacks. So far it seems everyone is ganging up on the Blues. The Akons are still trying to get our level B weapon-tech, and I have no idea how this interacts with our Blues-research. Will they get that one, too? Do they even need it? This overlapping research UI-bullshit is getting annoying.  Sweet! Another absolutely terrible place to be. Time to colonize! I like how realistic this game sometimes get: Look at how cold this planet is, despite being so close to its parent star. The star? Is a red dwarf, basically a very tiny, very cold sun. And since the positioning system of the system builder is constrained by fixed positions based on our own solar system, since that’s all that was known when this game came out. That first planet sits on the spot Mercury would have in our own solar system, which in a system with a red dwarf can already be a bit chilly, distance-wise. (That’s why Earth-like planets are in huge trouble in red dwarf systems: To not be frozen ice balls, they have to be dangerously close to their parent sun, and this puts them in range of a lot more radiation than is healthy for Earth-like lifeforms.) Not bad verisimilitude for a simulation now 25+ years obsolete.  Shaulicor VI-1 is a frozen moon that was just marginal enough I had high hopes after colonizing it. Sadly, I was wrong. I have to keep sending consumer goods, or everyone here just starts to starve. The production penalties are just strong enough, we might not get much further than this. Eresh-Thel is already looking up the personal files of her subordinates, to see which one will get the next promotion to governor.  Wesatair II is the complete opposite: Despite looking a bit muddy, the local environment is rather nice, and our Topsiders like it here. Too bad there’s really not much free space around. The basic industry is already established, and soon Wesatair II will see the construction of a fairly intense research base. Also Eresh-Thel’s latest video on ToothTube said the colony got top marks on Tail-Top as a vacation spot, which is “very nice”.  OK, we’re now at 40 out of 64 systems to colonize. Maybe we should slow down a bit before we’re accidentally winning too early?  Huh. We achieved really slightly positive production on this moon. Maybe we can prevent it from falling into AI-hands?  Our main colonies all have upgraded space ports now, and are churning out new ships as fast as possible. Just in case the current peace doesn’t hold.  Turn 313: I’ve finally started with the center piece of our new research colony: A massive central lab. But even our hordes of robots aren’t magic, and this young colony will need at least four more days to complete this project. Let’s jump forward a bit! Now the big, impressive lab is finished. 24 more research points for us! Well, with some caveats: The 24 research points would have gone into a random research project if we hadn’t manually switched this planet to Blues-research like the others, and four 1-tile buildings would have given us 32 research instead. But the building really does look impressive, doesn’t it  Our other new player-controlled colony is… not going well. There are more buildings now, but the growth penalties keep us from actually improving. Each new building causes a gap in some other resource, and so I keep running around chasing resource holes to close. Every time I succeed, the colony is bigger, but still not producing a noteworthy surplus.  Welp, as soon as turn 319 runs around, the Akons have enough of our dumb snouts and declare war.  “Soon you will be star dust, and the galaxy will have forgotten you.” Both last turn and this turn I keep playing around with map filters to get a feeling for what the Akons are doing, but I either get too much or not enough information. This is all the confirmed Akon-colonies, by the way. As you can see, we only know of very few places where there aren’t any Blues. Seems like this is why the Akons were so desperate to gain our Anti-Blues weapon research. They either expanded aggressively into invulnerable natives territory, or got pushed back after making the Blues too angry. Anyway, just marvel of the strategic mastery of the Akons, starting a two-front war in the middle of losing their one-front war.  This is the map with everything switched back on. The white brackets show the positions of our non-traveling ships and our planets. So far, nothing seems to be threatening us. Luckily, the Akons are still mostly sending ships around to fight Blues, or at least not at us. And since every turn gives us more ships to defend ourselves with, I won’t complain.  Now things are heating up: The Mehandor are the second space nation that has noticed we’re on the way to victory, and they don’t like it. Mehandor: Are you dumb space tourists, or do you grasp on, if there's a bargain to be made? Blanch when you see our goods, trade, make sales, convert your dreary liabilities into shrill dancing assets! Wait a minute, their status changed to war, but this isn’t...   “Be ready for the greatest fiasco in your history!” (War Declaration)Ah, there it is! Those dumb bastards just can’t help themselves, asking for trade at the same time they’re declaring war.  Well, time to order some more battleships!  To no-ones surprise, the Jumpers continue trading with us, even while at war. This most be something unique to them, no other species in this game will do this. Mehandor are truly acting like the galactic traders they are.  We accept, because using Mehandor-heavy industry to build the ships we’ll use against them is kind of funny. “We’ll probably pay again, but if it serves them sales...” Next turn, the Akons refuse our peace offer.  And so do the Jumpers! “There’s no such thing as a “half-bankruptcy”.”They also won’t attack us, and keep trading with us. Functionally, you can hardly call this a “war”.  Things are heating up! The Akons finally started to move! The system targeted actually has one of our colonies -it’s the one we had to wrangle with the Akons to get.  Yes, a lot of squadrons are in-bound on this Akon-colony. There’s only one reason for this sudden mobilization.  And that’s clearly this lonely colony of ours, right next to them! I’ve already ordered 18 modern ships to support the aging fleet. Since the Akons haven’t really send maximum-sized fleets, this seems to be plenty. If not, well the Akons messed this colony up bad enough I gave up and changed the control back to AI. I’m honestly considering not going back if they manage to win, but I really don’t want to lose a battle, either. Therefore, if I see more Akonic reinforcements, I’ll be perfectly willing to send more ships, too.  While the Akons actually seem to want revenge for lost battles in the past, the Mehandor are just continuing business as usual, just adding a “war surcharge” to all our trades. Man, I wish cheeky behavior like this was actually supported by the game, but trading normally while at war is as far as the personalization of Mehandor-AI goes.  The last few turns I was too busy organizing a space defense to set up more colonies, but at least our Blues-quest is nearly done.  OK, I give up on Shaulicor IV-1. The more I build, the worse it gets.  Eresh-Thel sends a promotion, and now we have a new governor to deal with that iceball. Please ignore the wrong colony being selected, it’s so you can actually see the green sign for automation, as the same symbol on a selected colony is just a tiny red dot in the upper right corner of the automation button, and that’s really hard to see on screenshots.  Turn 326 sees us finally ending the Blues-quest chain for good. The final breakthrough is there, and all research returns to normal. Vlaht-Om, the XO of our Eresh-Thel, gets the news from our scientists: We managed to get some Terror Worm B-Hormones and H2D2 to create something that can cause a Molkex-armor destroying chain reaction. This weird gunk is now being filled into new Anti-Molkex bombs and when the day is over, every last ship in our fleet can now launch those bombs to crack a Blues-ship’s armor. This will actually make sense with the next lore post, I promise. Suffice to say, from now on we can use the same tactic we’ve observed back when we saw Aras fighting Blues: Every first shot from a ship with Anti-Molkex weapons will crack the armor, and all subsequent shots are just normal shots that hit the Blus-ship just like a normal one. And the Yülziish here have kind of crappy ships after their invulnerability is removed. Apart from their relentless aggressiveness when agitated, they now cease to be a real threat. Mostly because we neither need nor want to attack their colonies, but it’s nice having a defense for emergencies.  Meanwhile, the Akons have launched a second assault: 33 ships are targeting our capital, Shaulires II!  Ironically, we can only see them approach because one of our many scouts posted across the cluster has seen them, as they’re still out of sensor range from our capital itself. Out capital already has 54 ships, a lot of them battleships by now. I’m not really concerned.  There’s nothing saying we shouldn’t be cautious, though: Again all our yards are ordered to spit out more warships. In case you’re remembering this from before, our 1-frigate-defense-exploit has run its course by now: To work, you not only need a small, fast ship, you also need a completely undefended colony, otherwise the enemy fleet will shoot at the colony while rushing after your lone defender, resetting the turn-timer. Leaving your main colonies uncovered like this is chancy. One gently caress-up, and your capital may be lost. So in late-game, it’s far better to have massive fortifications plus a massive fleet to defend your important planets. All those lovely mini-colonies with their now empty colonizer hanging above, though? Those still fall under exploit-protection, as the AI will never manage to run those hellworlds well enough to construct planetary defenses. And as long as an invading fleet can’t shoot in the first turn, and can’t shoot your fleeing ship the following turn, the battle times out and the colony is saved.  Our little research-colony on Wesatair II has more than doubled their science-production, but now we’re slowly running out of space. I already switched to light industry research earlier, since our new big ships are eating up resources like nothing else, and A-class industry is the last big thing besides better ships we absolutely want. But a couple new science buildings finished this turn, and like always, I need to switch the colony “back” to our current research to prevent the new buildings choosing some random research on their own.  So, where do I get a new research-colony? I’d like to speed up our last research a bit more… Wait a minute, that’s a moon orbiting our capital, why did no-one ever colonize it? Oh yeah, I forgot. 96% ocean. So barely more free space than Wesatair II. But for now it’s perfect, thank you AI, for never taking this moon! [No new secret messages this time, turns out November 2326 was a month were all the interesting things are happening either before or after. But a fun fact: According to the sources for this story arc, a hyper com connection between Aralon (capital of the Aras) and Terra running for 7 hours and 18 minutes will cost you approx. 40000 Solar. Back then, "Solar" was just fancy Space Deutsche Marks, so basically Dollar, since the DM had parity with the Dollar most of the time. Now, 60 years later and adjusted for inflation, you could buy a house for the cost of that connection. FTL-communication in the Perryverse costs a lot of energy, and therefore money.] Next Update: Big Battles
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Aug 23, 2023 17:25
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So could you theoretically win the game entirely by ignoring the Blues quest chain and all combat, and just producing colonizers as cost-effectively as possible, as fast as possible? Also is any kind of diplomacy possible with the Blues or are they permanently hostile towards everyone?
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Aug 23, 2023 19:15
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Libluini posted:While the Akons actually seem to want revenge for lost battles in the past, the Mehandor are just continuing business as usual, just adding a “war surcharge” to all our trades. Starting a war with a trade partner to make you import more of their goods to build up your fleet, and hiking the prices to boot. Those cheeky bastards.
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Aug 23, 2023 19:22
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PurpleXVI posted:So could you theoretically win the game entirely by ignoring the Blues quest chain and all combat, and just producing colonizers as cost-effectively as possible, as fast as possible? Yes. And Yes. Blues are always hostile, but you can still do diplomacy with them. They'll just send a bunch of funny messages back to insult you. (It's still technically diplomacy if you can send requests. It's just that the Blues will refuse every single one you make. )The second yes is the reason for the first yes: Normally, a player getting close to winning makes every AI-player mad as heck and the curse of many 4x-games of this era descents: Forced Hellwar. But because the Blues are programmed to be hostile to everyone, they'll keep attacking everyone, causing AIs hostile to the player to divert resources to deal with them. Causing situations like this one, where despite us closing in on the victory goal, only two AIs have collected enough hostility points to declare war on us. And only one has bothered to actually send fleets so far. By the way, I'll probably stop colonizing new planets soon, unless we find a really good one. Since we can now win any time we choose, there's no reason to antagonize the AI until we've cleared up our research goals and maybe showed off the last buildings and ship parts. But if winning is everything you want, well that's easy, as soon as you understand its mechanics. Reminder: We're playing on the highest difficulty.
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Aug 23, 2023 21:37
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Update concerning my preparations for the next thread: -The Perry Rhodan "Adventure" does run on my machine -The second, older adventure: I haven't tried yet -The first, oldest adventure: Thoregon, or "the forbidden city", fights very hard against being played. I finally managed to get a VMWare-installation of Windows 98 running well enough the game at least starts: Graphics and sound are OK. But bad news: The game immediately crashes if you try to move. So, it's a work in progress. Of course this being a German game and old, the internet hasn't been of much help so far*. The CRPG-demo doesn't need an installer, so hopefully at worst I will need to run it under Dosbox. Welp, so far we're 1,75 for 4. And now I'll go back to finishing this game first. *By sheer dumb luck I found someone who put videos of the game on YouTube four years ago. I dropped a comment asking for advice, but in the meantime, I'll keep quietly working on those old game issues. And , in 100 years everything you love will be forgotten and gone forever. People who think our civilization will last haven't tried dealing with old software.
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Aug 26, 2023 20:45
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Digital archiving is a real problem and a lot of people are gonna rediscover family photos once stored on CDs and then discover disc rot. Also real archives and national libraries and such already have a lot of problems with it and for purely digital things anti-piracy measures make the situation incredibly worse.
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Aug 26, 2023 21:20
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SIGSEGV posted:Digital archiving is a real problem and a lot of people are gonna rediscover family photos once stored on CDs and then discover disc rot. Oh, this has already happened to me. I bought an Atari ST of eBay some years ago and it came from the relative of an old musician, dissolving everything they had owned after his death. It came with dozens of floppies filled with weird, incomprehensible data files, nothing I did would make them work. After a lot of research I eventually stumbled over the solution to my problem: The files were in a proprietary picture format only used by an ancient digital camera and all those Disketten had been this guys stash of photos he had made with one of those. Too bad the software to open and view those pictures doesn't exist anymore! I've already bulldozed down a couple of the discs on accident. All those family pictures, dust in the wind now.
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Aug 26, 2023 21:56
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Proprietary data formats can go to hell. gently caress those things.
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Aug 26, 2023 21:58
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SIGSEGV posted:Digital archiving is a real problem and a lot of people are gonna rediscover family photos once stored on CDs and then discover disc rot. AI will simply reconstruct all those photos for you! Grandma always had six fingers; the family just didn't like to talk about it.
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Aug 26, 2023 22:43
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Lore of Rhodan: Yülziish Blues  So, avid readers of this LP have noticed that I’ve been putting in some spiced-up stuff from the rest of the galaxy, unrolling while we’re stuck in our little star cluster, safely out of the way to not interfere with the GM-NPCs having fun. Since we’re now very close to winning, it’s time to look at the greater picture in more detail. We already now the official story on our end: There’s a random star cluster in the Galactic Eastside. Go there and colonize. Everything else, even the game’s special quest, is just added flavor. But newsflash, people: New Homellete is also a backwater for the Blues, which is why we’ve been facing only the local Blues forces, not the entire might of the Counter-Empire of the Gataser. Which are also Blues, because the Yülziish are, like us Humanoids, divided into multiple nations. Like the Solar Empire is currently the leading power of the United Empire, ruling all of the Westside and some parts of the Eastside of the Milkyway, the Gataser are the ruling nation of the Counter-Empire (so called by us, since for the Gataser it’s just the Empire) but not the only house in this great galactic street. And like the United Empire is not long for this world, the Gataser’s rule will soon end. The only difference is, since the Solar Empire doesn’t rule by force, it will easily survive the end of the United Empire. The Gataser Empire however, will end for good when all those Yülziish-Nations suddenly realize the Gataser’s invincible Molkex-armor can be broken. Yes, this means all the Blues we’ve faced so far have been Gataser, since the other Blues-people are not allowed to use this super-secret technology. Surprise reveal! Our Blues here in New Homellete are also just imperialists, the same as us! But to make sense of all this loving bullshit, I’ve assembled a timeline of the story arc we Operation Eastsiders have so rudely planted ourselves in, by using Perrypedia, the online-source for everything Perry Rhodan. (Before you continue, a small warning: By now you have hopefully realized that I'm very bad at this. When I was finished preparing and uploading pictures for this post, I then had to face the fact that despite only one picture having a fairly big file size, all of them look titanic after I added the links in. Since I didn't want to risk ruining the pictures by downsizing them, something I'm coincidentally very good at, I had to put the worst offenders on TIMG-duty. For those of you reading this on mobile, I'm so sorry.) The Bigger Picture Outside in the Real World, Perry Rhodan is done by committee: Several times a year, there’s a great convention with all authors to plan the bigger picture, and then later a team of synopsis-authors writes down the details and assigns sub-story arcs to individual authors. A system that, with not much change, has been running since the early 1960s, since it allows for better coherence, quality control and is still flexible enough for plot changes if the currently running plot turns out to be furiously hated by the readers. Back in the 1960s, Perry Rhodan had unified the galaxy, and now there was a problem. Until this story arc, Perry Rhodan had first unified Earth. People loved it and sales skyrocketed. Perry then created a space empire, solved space mysteries, and defended Earth. All things that people both in-universe and IRL loved. Sales skyrocketed even more. Now we’re slowly closing in on the current state of affairs, the 24 century. It is my pet theory that around this point, the authors realized the United Empire ruling the galaxy had to go. And so, even before readers had a chance to realize that there even was a problem, the authorial system around the series had already started creating future story arcs to deal with this. We’re getting into the in-universe history later, but that’s basically what the Blues originally were meant to be: A first run at the power creep clogging the series. It introduced a lot of necessary changes, but ultimately failed at its main goal. After all is done, the United Empire crumbles, but now the Solar Empire is even more powerful in comparison. Oops. But the authors had already planned ahead, and the authors had a lot of ideas they wanted to explore, and coincidentally a lot of additional problems for Perry to solve. (Time travel! Other galaxies!) A wild time was approaching. Back here in Operation Eastside, we’ve been consistently being plagued with the natives not wanting us here, and the authors of Perry Rhodan made sure were story-quarantined, as the game map represents one random star cluster out of the way from all major plotlines. We have the Blues here, but whatever we do, does not matter in the greater scheme of things. Of course, South-, North-, East- and Westside sound less sensible than “spinwards” “counter-spinwards” “core-wards” and “halo-wards”, the four direction a galaxy can actually have. The series basically had to go the “stupid language convention”-route when the early 60s were over and science progressed. So, after I have confused you enough, where are we, precisely? Well, let’s get astronomical! Here’s a map of the Westside, the core of the old Arkonid Empire Earth was a part of:  This map is dated NGZ 1400 and you don’t really need to know right now what that means. It’s a bit to the future of 2326, the current year in-game. About 2500 years in the future. Most of the important systems, like Sol and Arkon, are still there. Green shows the League of Free Terrans and its allies, Purple and light blue shows the re-born Crystal Empire of the Arkonids and their “allies”. Orange are regions that have recently rebelled against the Arkonids. A current map would show green as the Solar Empire, and far smaller, the rest of the map would be basically a mix of orange and purple, as the Arkonid Empire of this age is still basically broken. Move a couple thousand years into the past, say around the time Caesar crossed the Rubikon, and you have this entire map in purple, even Earth itself (but with a question mark, since no-one has been here after the destruction of Atlantis). At this point you may ask some questions, like “why is this called “Westside” when Earth is in the South-East quadrant of the galaxy?” and yes, it is a bit funny. In astronomical convention, you don’t really have “East” or “West” on a galactic map, and there are two main conventions I know of: One moves the galactic wheel around so Earth is in the south-east, the other shows Earth in the North-West instead. Astronomers can do this because there is no gigantic mega-sun the galaxy is orbiting, so directions are entirely arbitrary. “Westside” and “Eastside” are, in-universe, entirely a convention of language: The “Westside” was defined as the part where all the important space empires have their capitals, like Arkon and Terra. “Eastside” was then defined as the part of the galaxy directly on the opposite side of the Westside. After the immense destruction caused by the Maahk-Wars, the old Crystal Empire of the Arkonids never managed to regain the strength needed to push that far, and until overly curious Terrans got into space again, it was already a pain in the rear end to send expeditions to the old borders. Even for the Arkonids, it was a big deal even crossing the approx. 30k light years to Earth just before Perry lands on the moon. Going further was seen as sheer madness. Correspondingly, as thanks to Earth American Perry Rhodan the new Solar Empire was a bit American-influenced, the Terrans defined themselves as the Space West and the mostly unknown far reaches of the galaxy as the Mysterious Space East. And because galaxy maps don’t care about your puny earth directions, all big galaxy maps show the “Westside” as the galactic south-east, and the “Eastside” as the galactic north-west! It could have been the opposite, of course, since IRL has multiple different galaxy map conventions. But the authors decided on one, and then really had no good reason to change this, since it would have confused the readers, who aren’t all astronomers. In-universe, real maps are holographic 3D-projections or incomprehensible lists of 5D-coordinates only a computer can understand, so it’s not like your average citizen of the year 2326 would even know that this could be a problem: Those maps are just for us, the readers. (I mean, historians and Perry Rhodan himself could know, but since no-one with a long history of interstellar spaceflight would even understand the question, it never came up. It’s also possible I’m underestimating you and you already understood all of this with one look at the map, in which case I apologize.) OK, and this is the Eastside:  As you can see, all this Eastside/Westside-stuff is clearly showing the galaxy from the point of the Westside, as the Eastside includes a lot of barely known territory in 2326. “Here be dragons” in space form. Gatas is the homeworld of the Yülziish, as in, they evolved on there and later spread into the galaxy. In the era the game is set in, it is also the capital of their empire, which spans most of the Eastside, with a big exception for the core region of the galaxy. Some places (the dark cloud Provcon-Faust, Halut) are unknown or unimportant in 2326. You can also see that Akon is the only big important humanoid world that you can find on the Eastside. The reason for that is that the first big empire of mankind covered the entire galaxy, and Akon (and the dark cloud Provcon-Faust, coincidentally!) was among the few places that survived the destruction of the Greater Tamanium. Too bad Akons are isolationist space assholes in 2326, and so no-one in-universe really knows about this: Arkonid history is heavily re-written and therefore it’s not common knowledge that Akon is the place the first Arkonids came from. And Akons appprently very well know where they came from, but they didn’t really tell anyone. Eventually this insane level of hostility leads to the very stupid attempt to re-assert control over Andromeda, which leads to the destruction of all the bad imperialists since the Andromedans aren’t stupid. As you can expect when a polity centered around the resources of a couple systems at most tries to fight an entire galaxy, that attempt ended all dreams of galactic conquest and a new Greater Tamanium immediately and permanently. I just let this sit here as a funny anecdote, since it’s not relevant for this game except to show that yes, the Akons are Space Bastards. To give you a better sense of where New Homellete is, imagine our star cluster to sit somewhere between Kadal-Duo and Koetanor-Delp. Far enough way from everything so the game makes sense. Any closer to Gatas and we’d run the risk of getting a visit on turn 100 to see the unique Game Over: Gatas Genociders Arrive ending screen.  This map is roughly showing the Counter-Empire only. You can use Verth (the system Gatas is in) and Akon to understand where things are in relation to the older map. On this newer map, set after the Blues Empire done and gone, you have circles to show you roughly where the different Yülziish-nations have any sort of political influence. It’s not exactly the same, terrifyingly complete control of the Gataser Empire, but then, space is big and New Homellete shows even back in the 24th century, you could easily have entire star clusters fall through the cracks. Well, I think that’s all about the bigger picture. Let’s now look at the Blues themselves.  By the way, this is the alternate view to show the galaxy: This version of a galactic map shows Terra on the west of the galaxy. Just remember, this is all completely arbitrary, a map showing the “Westside” in the south or north would be equally astronomically valid! The Yülziish  One important bit before I start: In German, the name is transcribed as “Jülziish”, but since English and German have different pronunciations, I decided to transcribe the Blues-name for Blues as “Yülziish”, as that comes closer to the German pronunciation of “Jülziish”. “Blues” is a name Terrans came up with because of the often blue fur the Yülziish are covered with. It is nowadays in-universe seen as a slur. So don’t use it if you meet one in real life! People will think you’re an Arkonid, or worse, an Akonid. (If you want to be a real racist rear end in a top hat, call them “Tellerköpfe”/”Plate Heads”. They will just straight-up murder you. Like IRL, back in the 60s this was seen as “fun ribbing” by the authors, nowadays authors like to point out that only Adolf Hitler would find this funny anymore.) Anyway, the Terror Worms also called them “The Graceful”, but no-one who isn’t a historian specialized in Eastside-history knows this anymore, and we sure as hell don’t in-game, as the Yülziish are only sending us insults. (I’m not even sure we officially know what they call themselves yet.) Gatas  Hey, another map! Gatas is an Earth-like Eastside-planet. It is the 5th planet of the Verth-system and while as water-rich as our own world, it is dominated from large groups of smaller continents and islands, with the ocean surface squeezed into the middle of all that mess. Many of the continents are also covered with mountain ranges, and an enormous amount of rivers and lakes fills up the flatter regions below them. All those small continental plates ramming each other additionally created an additional planetary feature: Extensive cave-systems. Some of the rivers and lakes are purely underground, for example. Due to the planet’s alien tectonic, the mountains are less high, the oceans less deep. Volcanism is everywhere and it’s unusual for the earth under your feet to not shake. But at least the weird shape and structure of Gatas’ crust means also that the volcanism is far weaker. Not very relevant if you happen to live directly below a volcano, though its very nice to know the chance of your city suddenly crumbling like a bad movie set is far lower than on Earth. Gatas is approximately 69k light years away from Maharani, the capital of the League of Free Galactics (formerly League of Free Terrans) in the current era of the Perryverse, far into the future of this game. It is very nice indeed and definitely not chosen because the distance to Sol is a boring 68k light years. (Arkon is nearly as far away, while Akon of course is “only” approx. 24000 light years from Gatas.) So, to put this into perspective, the closest galactic capital to Gatas is Akon, and Akon is already 2/3rds of the distance between Arkon and Earth from the Blues Planet. Considering how much of a struggle it was for Old Arkon to keep the borders towards Earth under control, you can imagine the highly isolationist Akons had no idea of the Gataser slowly creeping into space until fairly recently. (The Akons have just barely ended their long isolationism. In the 24th century, they’re now into imperialism instead, but as late-comers, they only have taken control of a sphere of around 100-200 light years around Akon. Until plot happened, they neither knew nor cared about stuff in the direction of Gatas.) Life on Gatas Gatas is, despite constant earthquakes, a fairly mild-tempered, and temperate, world. With an average global temperature at 28 °C, it’s a lot warmer than Earth and while we can breath the atmosphere easily, the high humidity might make life for Humans harder than Arkon III’s average temperature of 34 °C. (At least Arkon III is a fairly dry world.) Gatas is a bit bigger and heavier than Earth, with a gravity of 1,18 g on the ground. A Gatas “day” is about 32,3 Earth-hours long. The planet has no moons. Tides are either caused by the neighboring planets or are due to water movement caused by the constant tectonic events. Flora and Fauna are extensive, as besides the poles and mountain ranges, resources are plentiful. As the Perryverse tries very hard to be a “real” universe, there’s about as much of it as on Earth IRL, so the authors wisely decided to only mention animals and plants from Gatas when they’re important to the plot, otherwise there’s just “lots”. Worth mentioning here are the Quarraccos, a species of small running birds. They’ve been domesticated by the Yülziish to serve as pets, and they fill the same sociological niche as our cats and dogs. Yes, the Yülziish have their own little Chocobos. Yülziish prefer architectural styles dominated by domes, possibly because a well-built dome is a lot more stable than your average skyscraper. Very important for a world so tectonically active. The 23 small continents and endless islands also created a situation were a multitude of nations could arise, but were geographically separated enough to make conquest and control a magnitude harder than on Terra: While the thin sea straits are not much of a barrier, they’re a lot more substantial than the separations between say, Germany and France on IRL Earth. It also helps that tons of rivers, swamps and lakes add even more natural barriers to the interiors of the small continents of Gatas. And then there are the mountain ranges on top of that. So while the Yülziish were a testy folk, prone to constant fighting, for a long time no nation could become dominant enough to unify the planet. For long after the Yülziish went into space, hundreds of Yülziish-nations were constantly at each other’s throats. During this time, the Yülziish slowly moved most of their important infrastructure and industry below ground, into the vast expanses of Gatas’ cave network, to protect them from the constant fighting. Presumably, only when a lot of the most politically motivated Yülziish had left the planet to create their own space nations did the Gataser eventually unify, now seeing themselves as the “real” and “more pure” Yülziish in opposition to the dirty colonials. Eventually, the Gataser made contact with the Terror Worms and made a secret deal. A short while later, extensive production facilities for Molkex were built on Gatas, leading to Gatasian spaceships becoming invincible and Gatas then became the capital of the galaxy-spanning Gatas Empire. All other independent Yüliziish-nations were forced to accept Gatasian leadership. Blues Biology  This picture shows that Yülziish can have some variations. Some Yülziish-races even evolved different fur colors, though seeing a non-blue Yülziish is a rare occurence. Culturally, they’re not really into coloring their fur. Yülziish barely made the definition of “humanoid”, as in-universe there are many definitions of “humanoid”, thanks to our ancestors spreading so fast and so far. Yülziish have no relations to humans whatsoever and are like Topsiders, genuinely native to their homeworld. But since they’re vaguely mammalian and Topsiders are not, Topsiders were officially classified as non-humanoid and Yülziish were accepted as fellow humanoids. Otherwise, as the old rule goes “one head, one body, two legs, two arms”, Topsiders would easily classify, too. But space racism! To clear things up a bit, in the Perryverse us Earth-humans would be “Terranoids”, which includes all humans who are related to the latest attempt of humans trying to get into space. The scary, ogre-like Ertrusians would be Terranoids, same as us. Arkonids and Akons, not so much. “Lemurids” however, would include them too: Some random guy from New York City and some random gal from Arkon III would both be Lemurids. “Humanoids” is even wider, and includes some genuine alien species, some of which look exactly like Earth-Humans, and some are so alien they barely made it into the definition, like the Blues. But this is what is accepted in the Milkyway, other places may use their own definitions to put sapient beings into neat little boxes: The Great Powers of Order for example, call us “Yug”, which refers to our body-form, and our ability to breath Oxygen. This classification collides with ours, as e.g. the Maahks would be “mostly humanoid” by a Terran standard, but not at all humanoid by the Yug-standard, as they are not Oxygen-breathers. Both a gigantic Halutian with three eyes and Penny from across the street are both Yug, but the less imposing Maahks (compared to Halutians, they would still scare Penny a lot) wouldn’t count as Yug. Blues are Yug, as are all Lemurids. By the same way of thinking, Topsiders are also Yug. In the Language of the Powerful, that is used by all servants and servant races of the Powers of Order, it is therefore not possible to differentiate further then “bipedal and Oxygen-breathing”, as nothing else is of interest to their culture. We’re all Yug and for bad or good, we’re all treated equally, which is quite often “like loving poo poo”. Now that you’re helplessly confused, back to the Blues: Their skulls are disc-shaped, and what the pictures above don’t really show, they have second of their oddly cat-like eyes on the backside of their skull. The eyes in front can move like you’d expect them to, but the ones on the back of their skull are mostly too inflexible. Evolution clearly had favorites here. (But the back eyes work well enough trying to surprise a Yülziish is a god-like feat not often done.) The sides of their heads are covered by grey-white slats that are used for hearing: They are far more sensitive to vibrations than our own ears, allowing Yülziish to easily hear deep into the ultrasonic range. Like humans, they have a mouth for speaking and eating, situated at the lower end of their long, very strong necks. Their upper bodies are mostly human-looking, at least from a distance. Their arms are longer, and their legs shorter, than your basic human body. Their hands end in three thumbs and then four more fingers. This means if a Yülziish grabs you, they will grab you good. Yülziish are mammalian enough that they give living birth, same as us. On average, Yülziish-women tend to have 6-8 kids per birth and a pregnancy of only about 3 months length. Consequently, their spacefaring civilization eventually faced an enormous over-population problem. For comparison: In the 24th century, the population of Earth is approximately 6 billion people, while Gatas is struggling to feed its 14 billion people. Despite Yülziish having a complex social structure that’s incomprehensible to outsiders and an astonishingly violent temperament, humans (especially Terrans) developed this strange mistaken belief that Yülziish are cold and emotionless creatures. So take in mind, whenever our local friends send us an angry message, at the same time a professor back on Terra holds a long lecture on how clearly, the Blues have no emotions. One theory as to why Terrans developed this strange misconception may be borne from Yülziish-language: As the Yülziish both speak and hear mostly in ultrasonic, all communication with other Yug is dependent on translation-machines alone. (An Akon can learn English, if he wants. Yülziish, not so much.) This may cause the loss of a tremendous amount of emotional tonation that is not translated. Theoretically, a Yülziish can actually learn to speak other humanoid languages, but the effort needed to keep their voices in a range we can still hear is staggering, and even when successful, their voices sound mind-numbingly shrill. Nowadays, this is more seen as the very wrong stereotype that it is, but in 2326, barely anything is known about them, and we know even less than the rest of the galaxy. I’m pretty sure our scientist don’t even know the B-hormone they’re using to crack the Molkex-armor is a substance Blues-children secrete until they’re 10 years old. (The Terrans developed an artificial version of the hormone and are in this era the only source outside of literally dissecting Blues-children and pregannt women, or raiding Molkex-factories, so I’m putting down my feet and declare our Topsiders getting that stuff through our extensive trade-relations.) As a last nice cultural bit of information before I relent and end this chapter: The Yülziish prefer a decimal time system. They still use it in modern-day PR, their equivalent of an hour is for example the One-Tenth Day, and each day has exactly 10 of them. This may force a bit of adjustment if you end up living on a planet dominated by Yülziish for some reason. Blues History Oh wait, I forgot an even more important bit of Blues-culture: Their food. For some reason, prolonged contact with Yülziish made the galaxy aware that their new friends make really good food. Yülziish-food is widely known as a delicacy in the Milkyway. Yülziish-cooking involves a wide variety of humanoid-compatible animals and plants, like disturbingly large worms. Yummy! And now let’s end this post with an overview about their history! (Don’t worry, I won’t include most of the poo poo happening after Operation Eastside, as it’s not relevant for this thread.)  Blues love their disc-shaped ships. Around 7000 BC, the Yülziish invented FTL-travel and founded 78 extraverthanid colonies in quick succession. One of them was Apas in the Pahl-system and eventually developed one of the stronger Non-Gatasian civilisations. A couple thousand years later, Gatas and the first 78 colonies had turned into thousands, and Blues could now be found all over the Eastside. Constant warfare between all those mini-empires kept them from stretching any farther, and since Akon had sealed themselves off and Arkon was getting weaker and weaker, the existence of this new spacefaring civilization went unnoticed. The Gataser, thanks to being in control of the Yülziish-homeworld, slowly emerged as one of the strongest among the Yülziish-nations, but even thousands of years of bloody wars could not make the majority of the Blues accept them as the dominant power. By around 2000 BC, Gataser-ships made contact with the Terror Worms, and Gataser scientists excitedly realized the strength of the worm-secretions. The Terror Worms, who were imprisoned on the planet later known as “Tombstone” by Terrans, were facing extinction around this time. Terror Worms are terribly long-lived and blisteringly intelligent, but they weren’t able to make their giant, worm-like bodies construct space ships. To make more Terror Worms, Terror Locusts needed to be seeded on other worlds, to eat their ecology and turn into Molkex-slime, which then would slowly move together and form new adult worms. This had been the fate of Tombstone, but the new worms then found themselves trapped there, with no way to make new worms, except by collective suicide. The Terror Worms were smart enough to realize how xenophobic the Gataser were, and pretended to be very stupid. The Gataser, tempted by the power of Molkex, fell for it and promised them everything, thinking they were duping a lifeform barely more intelligent than your average dog. After this fateful date, Gataser began seeding life-bearing, but uninhabited planets with Terror Locust eggs. A special hyper-dimensional wavefront generator would, after a certain period of waiting, trigger the hatching. The world would be consumed, and new worms and an ocean of super-slime would be found. The Gataser then dutifully transported the adult worms and half the Molkex back to Tombstone, to help them sustain themselves. Half of the Molkex they kept, as “taxes” to pay for their generous help. Gataser now turned up with Molkex-armored ships, and one Yülziish-nation after another was forced into submission. A reign of terror followed. By the time Orcast XVII ascended to the throne as the 487th Emperor of Arkon (1863 here on Earth), the Gataser had managed to unify all of the Blues-people under the rule of their iron-clawed seven-fingered fists. But not all Yülziish had stopped fighting the Gatas Empire: Blues from Apas managed to kidnap Terror Worms and transported them to planets outside of the empire, to create creches of worm eggs independent from Gatas. Eysal, a small, sleepy Arkonid colony lost to history, was one of those planets. Eysal had been colonized around 1700 BC, but the slow decay of the Crystal Empire had lead to the colonists first losing contact with the rest of the empire, and then slowly sliding back into a pre-industrial culture. By 1500 CE, the Eysalians had completely lost their original history and culture. In 1500 CE, the Apasos arrived and constructed an hidden research base on Eysal. And then in the 19th century CE, Eysal became one of the planets seeded with worm eggs and a hidden hyper-energy beacon to force the eggs to hatch a pre-planned moment. However, this moment never came. For unknown reasons, the Apasos did not try this final gambit. Considering the Apasos were not as genocidal as the Gataser, it is possible they simply got cold feet, instead of murdering billions to further some secret plan. Centuries passed. The Gataser found and exterminated countless intelligent species. The Terror Worms continued to pretend to be dumb. Then the 21st century CE hit. The Antis, another loving humanoid remnant of Lemuria, found Eysal. As the Báalols, as they call themselves, have strong psychic powers they like to use to infiltrate and control other civilizations, they did exactly that. Presumably under the carefully hidden watch of the Apasos, the Antis (so-called by the Terrans because Báalols can use their psychic powers to negate mutant-powers, which Terrans, with their army of psionic mutants, did not like at all) began taking control. Under their influence, the local nation of Salonia became more and more dominant, and with them, the planet slowly became a hidden Anti-colony. 2326 The Gatas Empire had a good run, thanks to galaxies being so loving huge and all, but the inevitable now begins to happen. In July 2326, the Terran mutant and immortal Anne Sloane gets murdered when the Anti Ebrolo, a member of the United Stars Organization (space FBI/CIA), turns traitor and takes her cell activator, one of the rare alien machines capable of making someone immortal. This kind of thing is not something the USO can just accept lying down, and so the Lord Admiral Commander Atlan of the USO shows up in person with a USO-commando to investigate the murder and recover Anne’s lost immortality machine. The resulting fighting is really good if you’re into James Bond but in Space, and the USO-agent Lemy Danger finally ends this farce by accidentally shooting Anne’s cell activator. The thing detonates and causes a hyperdimensinal shockwave, sending weird FTL-gravity waves in all directions. The watching Apasos then choke on their popcorn as this event causes the local shockwave generator to malfunction and the beacon activates before they can stop it. But hyperspace is a bitch, and living beings are a lot slower than an infinitely fast shockwave front. Soon, all Terror Worm eggs, hatch. Everywhere. While the Gatas Empire is thrown into chaos and starts investigating, the rest of the galaxy is thrown into chaos by the Terror Locust menace and a giant, sun-eating monster that is awakened by the same shockwave on planet Herkules. It immediately begins to eat suns. In October 2326 (last month, from our game run’s perspective) the death count for the Terror Locusts alone stands by 277 inhabited worlds destroyed. Purely by accident, USO agent Lemy Danger has become the greatest mass-murderer in the history of ever. BOX-394, a ship send by the human-allied Posbis (sapient robots), is surprised and destroyed by Blues-ships above Nytet. After the death of their favorite robo-friends, Terrans rush back to Nytet in force. An attempt at catching a Terror Worm is made, but the Nytet-worm rather commits suicide. It is now November 2326. The wider galaxy is still reeling from the recent events. Next month, things will pick up again. But because we idiots in New Homellete aren’t talking with our mother worlds, it will take until 2329 until the rest of the galaxy can finally stop the Gatasers for good. Unlike us, who get constant angry communications with video, the rest of the galaxy has never actually encountered a Yülziish directly. And thanks to the Suprahet currently rampaging around, most of the Westside isn’t even aware the Blues are behind the 277 dead worlds. Of course because our game is not exactly canon, the Aras won’t get any credit for cracking Molkex-armor, either. That hasn’t happened yet. The Akons also have a bigger role to play. In-canon they’re probably a bigger danger than the Blues. It’s therefore kind of funny that we ended up being at war with them anyway. How and what the future may bring to the Yülziish has to wait until we finish the game.  This Blues capitalship was designed thousands of years after Operation Eastside is set. The form is still the same, but everything inside is now different. This ship could probably have destroyed the Gatas Empire on its own.  I had no idea where to put this, but since I keep mentioning Perry Rhodan in Japan, I wanted to leave you this before I end this update. It’s one of the more recent covers of the light-novel sized Japanese edition of Perry Rhodan. It shows Dao-Lin, my favorite character, since Japan is currently running a story arc that has her be one of the main protagonists, due to the current Japanese arc dealing with her people’s history. Funnily enough, the German Silver Volume Edition, which covers PR in book format, has almost reached the point in the series where she runs into our famous dumbasses playing intergalactic capitalism, causing her entry into the series. So both the re-edited German and the current Japanese edition are both running cat girl stories at roughly the same time. I just wanted to mention this. Next Update: Back to the Big Battles
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Sep 3, 2023 12:36
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I don't usually look at the map, but Bostich conquered Ertrus before like Epsal? That deep in LFT space? wtf Or the other way around, how could Epsal hold out against the Crystal Empire?
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Sep 3, 2023 13:05
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Torrannor posted:I don't usually look at the map, but Bostich conquered Ertrus before like Epsal? That deep in LFT space? wtf Thousands of years, man. Without Perrypedia, I'd be utterly lost myself. Apparently the Crystal Empire has been destroyed again, for centuries now. The LFT doesn't exist anymore, it's now the LFG, and last time I checked in, Sol wasn't the capital site anymore because Earth got lost again. Edit: Wait a minute, you're wrong. Ertrus is shown in LFT-colors on the map. The Crystal Empire is Purple, Blue and Orange. All those green shades are LFT. Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Sep 3, 2023 |
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Sep 3, 2023 13:27
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Libluini posted:Thousands of years, man. Without Perrypedia, I'd be utterly lost myself. Apparently the Crystal Empire has been destroyed again, for centuries now. The LFT doesn't exist anymore, it's now the LFG, and last time I checked in, Sol wasn't the capital site anymore because Earth got lost again. No, sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant the plot where the Crystal Empire conquered Ertrus in an attempt to kill Perry, when Bostich was secretly controlled by Seelenquell. In the 2000-2099 issues. Before the Jamondi Star Ocean even fell out of hyperspace. All that orange and purple stuff presumably was part of the Gos'Tussan then. And if Bostich's forces could penetrate then LFT space to Ertrus, but allowed Epsal to be independent... that seems strange.
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Sep 3, 2023 14:21
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Torrannor posted:No, sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant the plot where the Crystal Empire conquered Ertrus in an attempt to kill Perry, when Bostich was secretly controlled by Seelenquell. In the 2000-2099 issues. Before the Jamondi Star Ocean even fell out of hyperspace. All that orange and purple stuff presumably was part of the Gos'Tussan then. And if Bostich's forces could penetrate then LFT space to Ertrus, but allowed Epsal to be independent... that seems strange. As a reminder, when the Solar Empire was formed, most of its early colonies were spread all over the galaxy, to prevent hostile forces from easily finding them. Epsal may look "closer" on the map, but that doesn't mean it's easy to reach from Arkon. Thantur-Lok is a separate cluster in itself, after all. Ships have to first get out of there and enter the main disc proper. This also means that if you already know where everyone is, like in Bostich's era, there's not much you can do to stop an enemy fleet going anywhere, except by force. The LFT of the time didn't have the fleet power to stop Bostich in a stand-up fight, and so Ertrus was lost. (At least that's how I remember that arc going.) Another reminder, apart from "because it's the plot system", the reason so many big fleets in the early series go straight for the throat (attacks on Arkon III and Terra directly) is because of this: If someone sees a good chance to prevent a long, drawn-out conflict by going straight to the capital, they will do it. Bostich wasn't too sure about that and didn't actually want to start a full-scale war that he might lose, as the Luna Yards could easily spit out ten thousand ultrabattleships again if a direct assault fails and it's now total war. The LFT basically cared about the immense amount of senseless destruction the war would cause while the galaxy gets constantly visited by big outside forces, while Bostich didn't care for that poo poo at all. I can't remember off-hand if the Chaos-forces in a later arc managed to break through when they sieged Arkon itself, but it's kind of important to remember Arkon could only expect help and cooperation because there are immortals hanging around mediating in the background. Without their influence, everyone would have just gone to war after Ertrus. Possible that the LFT would even lose, and then everyone would just rise up in rebellion when the Chaos-forces later come and start carving up the galaxy. The immortals take the long view, which means the Crystal Empire, despite looking strong at the current moment, may be weak later. I mean, the map above even shows tons of break-away states caused by their own dumb imperialism. Bostich was basically a big dummy, and a retroactive justification for a lot of the bullshit Perry Rhodan pulled in the early series, aka blowing up the robot regent of Arkon, and trying to hide Terran colonies from the rest of the galaxy. Just that early series Rhodan didn't yet know that there are a lot of fuckers hanging around just outside the picture, waiting for the galaxy to weaken itself. In retrospective, it feels really real that the galaxy needed multiple cosmic sucker punches (Masters of the Isle, Second Conditioned, Cappins from Gruelfin, the Council of the Seven) until finally the people of the Milkyway realized that infighting just makes extragalactic assholes happy. Bostich trying to Make Arkon Great Again was basically a tragedy, and consequently, when the Great Data Rot hit the galaxy, the Crystal Empire was among the states that that were hit the worst. And that's considering the LFT lost Earth and ceased to exist. Bostich was good in ordering battleships around, but that's not much use against forces that can just switch off your civilization like a toy. Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Sep 3, 2023 |
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Sep 3, 2023 14:42
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