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Torrannor posted:The Cappin arc was fairly lame imo, the Swarm was a much better follow up. There's two factions among PR fans. Faction A says MDI, Faction B says M87. Ironically, even though the Silberband volume 44 "Alarm für die Galaxis" was my first ever PR-book and high on my list of favorite books (it's the final of the M87-arc), there are even better moments from later arcs. -The moment when Es can finally absorb billions of human souls through the power of love had me in tears. -The little side story of a doomed human on an Endless Armada freighter gave me the shills. -The moment the Sun falls through the Kobold Sun Transmitter. But instead of listing tons of single moments, I think my favorite Top 3 would be something like -Ayindi -The Great Void -Tarkan* A fourth place would be the Endless Armada, which I still haven't finished yet. *I just love this! Alternate universe Humans who are also cats create a huge alternate universe Federation to save their people, and the entire story had hints placed literally hundreds of issues back. Also, apart from the Druuf I think this is the first time we actually get to see an alien universe when Perry and Co. need to go help them. Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:49 on May 23, 2022 |
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Feb 21, 2021 13:26
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How do the writers coordinate this whole mess? Is it survival of the most profitable or some kind of steering committee? Considering the whole series seems like fan fiction on steroids that must be some epic cat herding.
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Feb 22, 2021 05:28
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Decoy Badger posted:How do the writers coordinate this whole mess? Is it survival of the most profitable or some kind of steering committee? Considering the whole series seems like fan fiction on steroids that must be some epic cat herding. At first, it was kind of ad-hoc with the chief-editor and the founding authors doing the major planning. Over time this grew into a dedicated "Author Conference", where the authors and editors met, discussed and planned the future story arcs, and doled out specific novellas to specific writers as assignments. Nowadays in the times of the internet this works smoothly, even though the numbers of authors involved is higher than ever. During the 60s-70s things often tended to be rough, but after that quality and quality control steadily rose to meet the demands of growing success. From the current issue of the day, the future story is often planned up to 2 years in advance. The freedom and flexibility of the authors involved changes depending on how important specific story parts are. Sometimes something absolutely must happen, exactly the way it was planned, other times a certain plot point only has to happen, but how exactly is left to the authors writing. And sometimes there's a bit of leisure time for filler issues, which are then used for worldbuilding or to establish atmosphere. And of course at the edges oddities tend to drift in. Like when in the very early days, one author always complained about the series being to "mechanical" and "lacking soul", so another author (the most technical-minded one) invented a funny pet character for him: The mouse-beaver Gucky. That was meant as a joke, but Gucky then became immensely popular with the readership. Some of the authors despised him, others didn't. So there was this "will they or won't they?" about his character's survival spanning the full time of his invention in the early 1960s up to today. He is now confirmed as 100% immortal, same as Perry Rhodan and a couple of others which are necessary to not die, as their deaths would render the series basically pointless. But in the past? Man, there were issues where you could feel the author was trying to kill the poor guy, and then the very next issue Gucks somehow survived again. Because the conference had decided to spare him. And every time, there was a loud outcry both from readers who loved Gucky, and readers who hated Gucky. For opposing reasons. Even just reading about this decades after the fact is amazing.  As you can probably tell, there's tons of drama involved with so many different authors and their different preferences colliding. But overall, it's a good system: An author good at writing spy drama gets espionage plots assigned, and someone who's really good at writing space battles gets important space battles assigned, and so on.
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Feb 22, 2021 18:48
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Do people get to look behind the curtain a little? Do you have to tease out clues to work out who might have written certain bits or are they fairly open about it so that people end up following more the stuff by particular writers rather than the work as a whole? Is there an official list of contributors? Has anyone ever tried to pass themselves off as a PR writer?
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Feb 22, 2021 20:10
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Munin posted:Do people get to look behind the curtain a little? Do you have to tease out clues to work out who might have written certain bits or are they fairly open about it so that people end up following more the stuff by particular writers rather than the work as a whole? They release entire books describing what happens "behind the curtain", so yes. No, every issue has the author involved front and center. Yes, they're incredibly open, though back in the early days pen names where used sometimes, like "Clark Darlton" was Walter Ernsting's pen name. Nowadays even famous (in Germany) SF-writers like Andreas Eschbach sometimes write PR-issues. Fast edit: Sometimes it also went the other way: A lot of the PR-authors where or are established authors. Sometimes they get their first exposure through PR, sometimes they did their own thing long before they ended up in the team. Susan Schwartz for example released a fantasy novel years before her first PR-novel. Yes, here's the full list. The ones with a little cross behind them are dead now. And as funny as it is to imagine someone trying poo poo like pretending to be Marianne Sydow, no. Not as far as I know. Certainly it would have been easier in the world before internet, but German SF fans go to conventions too, and impersonating someone is still a crime, so... Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Feb 22, 2021 |
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Feb 22, 2021 21:06
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As a short aside, what do you people think about soap operas? I hope a soap opera never crushed a relative of yours.
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Feb 24, 2021 22:40
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They are fairly funny when someone's evil twin pops up.
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Feb 25, 2021 00:33
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I used to watch them as a kid when I didn't get to decide what channel was on, but now I can't recall any of them at all.
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Feb 25, 2021 01:29
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 Lores of Rhodan: Who is Perry Rhodan? Part II OK, last time we learned how things were assembled behind the curtains. This time, we dive right into Perry’s life! Trans-universal super-drive, activate! Birth and Early Childhood  Perry Rhodan was born as the child of Mary Tibo Rhodan and her husband, Jakob Edgar Rhodan on the 8th June 1936 at exactly 6:31 am in Hartford Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut. Wikipedia has a nice article about Hartford Hospital, birthplace of Perry Rhodan. The birth was completely unusual, and history notes only Perry’s basic stats (he was 3050 g and 49 cm) and that the doctor on duty was a Dr. Frederick Stone, and the attending midwife a nurse Grace Pearson. The clerk tasked with recording Perry’s name then drags the father into a dumb discussion because the parents didn’t want to give Perry a middle name, and how Un-American this all is, but Jakob finally gets through and our hero’s official name is recorded: Perry Rhodan. To the young parents’ relief, Perry turned out to be a quite low-maintenance baby, with some typical curiosity but only the absolute minimum of baby-screaming. Of course his parents didn’t exist in a vacuum: Jakob’s father was Alois Roden, born on the 17th May of 1889 in the tiny village Scheernsting in Upper Bavaria, Germany. Alois Roden was the third child of Farmer Edgar Roden and grew up as an astonishingly open-minded and curious human being. As third child, Alois Roden had about zero chance of taking over the fatherly farm and so instead went to Munic and learned to be an electrician, an around this time brand-new and still controversial job. 1907 Alois married Gerda Meyr, a woman from the terribly named and sadly real city of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, another Bavarian. Jakob Edgar Roden was born as the second child, in October 1910. In Summer 1914, most of the family still lived in Scheernsting, and everything seemed well: They had their own house, and were saving up for a new, better house in the suburbs of Munic. Alois Roden, not exactly a fan of the military and a pacifist, had only begrudgingly done his compulsory military service in the Imperial German Army and was dismayed when he was conscripted and, thanks to his technical knowledge and abilities, send to join the new U-Boat fleet. As an aside, as a Bavarian he probably served here, in the 4th Army-District. (As a German word, “Inspektion” can also confusingly refer to a place sometimes, which means e.g. a “Polizei-Inspektion” can both mean a police building and police visiting your building.) Alois Roden spend nearly the entire war imprisoned inside the tiny tin-can known as “U-17”, one of the few U-Boats of WWI which actually saw the end of the war without meeting a horrible end. Said horrible end instead hit his wife, as during the Kohlrüben-Winter of 1917, when the British Blockade finally choked Germany down, Gerda Roden died of Tuberculosis. Under the impression of news from Versailles, Alois Roden decided that the next war would inevitably come, and didn’t want part of it. Using his friendly nature and folksy charm, he pulled some strings and got himself and his two children on a boat to America. During Autumn 1919 he reached the US, where an immigration officer forcibly changed his name to “Al Rhodan”, to make it sound more American. Al Rhodan, thanks to his experience as one of the world’s first official electricians, soon found work, new contacts and a new life. On 18th October 1924, he officially became an US-citizen. The Rhodans soon ended up living in New York, and climbed that social ladder upwards, until they had enough money for a nice American apartment and a nice American maid/teacher named Rosemary White. As a capable black woman, Rosemary White soon beat all the stupid and racism out of the Rhodans' sons and made them into proper young American kids. Jakob’s brother Karl became a carpenter after leaving school, while Jakob himself decided to become another electrician, like his father. Around this time Al Rodhan leaves our story, as he was a determined smoker, and his dreams of founding his own, All-American company, ended in his 40s, when lung cancer chocked the life out of him in just under two years. He died January 1932. Jakob at this time was still only 21 years old, and his brother barely older. Grief-stricken, they decided to leave New York and the home of her adoptive mother to do their own thing in the world. (Al had left almost everything to his black live-in maid. You do the math.) To cut things a bit short, Jakob then got a job in Chicago, and met his future wife Mary Tibo during a work stint renewing the electrical installations of the Childrens’ Memorial Hospital. Then there was a lot of stupid drama, because it turns out the Tibo-family had French roots, until Louis-Fréderic Thibeau, a rich trader during the time of Napoleon and shady as poo poo, decided after his patron’s fall that it as better to get as far from France as possible, before people would start asking awkward questions about this old “friend” of Napoleon and the nature of his “trade”. He ended up in the very young USA and also founded a family. The soon great Chicagoan trading dynasty of the Tibos. [Insert here an entire soap opera playing out during the courtship between rich industrialist daughter Mary Tibo and poor young electrician Jakob Edgar Rhodan, filled with all the clichés you probably expect] Eventually, Mary and Jakob got their dream marriage after Jakob (now “Jake”) got a job in a soap company in Connecticut, well-paying enough to secure a family. They married in the civil registry officer of Manchester, Connecticut on 10th August 1934. Both their families didn’t attend. Jake’s, because most of his living relatives were still in Germany, and it was 19 loving 34. Mary’s, because their family was rich assholes. They then got a cheap, but nice house for themselves north-west of Case Mountain and eventually even a slightly used Ford Model B.  I’ve searched through the internet, but apparently the Ford Model B was build in a lot of variants, so I eventually decided on taking the Wikipedia-picture, as that thing at least looks like it’s a good fit for transporting your family around. The Rhodan-family isn’t rural enough for a pick-up Ford B, I think. Now let’s press fast-forward on our old VCR, because there is still more family drama you really don’t need to hear about. The only important thing we learn is that due to family circumstances, Perry Rhodan never learned German or French, as all available family members from both branches ended up too naturalized before that could happen, but his great aunt still crammed some little bits of German and French into his baby brain. To summarize the important parts: We learn that Rhodan comes from a branch of wily tricksters and traders (French side), and from a branch of technology-minded folksy farmers and electricians (German side). Also there was at least two soap operas worth of family drama before he was even born. On 1st December 1937, Perry’s doomed sister Deborah was born. Ancient prophecy screamed that her sole purpose in life was to get fridged to traumatize young Perry, because that was literally the only thing we knew about Deborah before this biography was written and so we German SF-fans already know what is going to happen. Perry really cared for his young sister, who developed fast into a smart, but always a bit sickly child. In just three years, a very close relationship developed between the two kids. On 18th May 1940, what you’re all expecting at this point happened: Mary came back from grocery shopping with her kids, and while the kids immediately jumped out of the car to start playing, as the very active 3- and 4-year-olds they where, Mary instead went back to search for a receipt which had slipped her hands and landed somewhere inside the car. While she was searching, the handbrake released itself and the car started rolling. Perry, a really precocious little brat, immediately started screaming and running towards his sister, which sat in shock behind the car. Mary misinterpreted her little hero’s attempt at sister-saving and dived forward to grab him before he could get crushed by the car’s wheels. Instead the car’s wheels crushed the life out of Deborah Rhodan. Her broken body was brought to the nearest hospital, where she died. Perry Rhodan was heavily traumatized. And slightly amnesic, as the experience left him with a concussion, to add some real pain to the pansy-rear end traumatic guilt the death of his sister settled him with. After this, Perry’s childhood took a turn for the dark, as while his father was Catholic and therefore eventually able to forgive himself, his mother was Protestant and therefore thrown into a deep religious conflict with herself (I poo poo you not that’s what’s written here) and unable to resolve the deep-seated psychological issues caused by her daughter’s death, accidentally made young Perry feel like Deborah’s death was his fault, deepening his trauma. And as Jake and Mary, caught deep in the net of early 20th century morals, never really talked about their feelings about guilt and their religious issues, Perry’s trauma grew and grew. And then the second world war happened. A force of evil seeped out of Germany, attacking the entire world, threatening to kill freedom itself: History, as explained by Jake Rhodan to his son. When Jake Rhodan was conscripted into the US Army, he patiently explained to his son Perry that losing your freedom was worse than death, and therefore it was his solemn duty as a German to go and fight Evil Germany, to show the world that not every German was an evil freedom-killer. Perry, as every kid at that age, was seriously impressed by his father’s stern conviction to go die for his fatherland, the Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. (Language joke!) At this point the official Rhodan biography takes a short aside for the history of 1940-1941, like Germany conquering a shitton of nations, and the introduction of the Selective Training and Service Act, under which Rhodan’s father was drafted into the army. The history lesson ends with the comment that Rhodan’s father eventually made it to Master Sergeant in the Army Air Force (later Air Force), and that it took him a full six years until he could finally leave and go home for good. And here then comes a little side-story from the fictitious author of the book, one of the first points where an ignorant reader could get suspicious, apart from an earlier, easily missed reference about aliens taking over the old soap company Rhodan’s grandfather worked at for a while. It jumps to the experience the author had on the 22nd July 1971, a very important date in the Perryverse, and reveals the author spend this time in prison in London, discussing some vaguely threatening event with some Muslim inmates he apparently knew well enough he recorded the discussion and some added observations of inmates and guards panicking in this “biography” Rather well-made, and it continues the illusion that we’re still talking about real events which definitely happened here, in the real world. After that short interlude, we finally make it to Perry’s 5th birthday. His dad gifts him a globe and they spend some time marking countries all over the world. The happy fun time then immediately ends when Pearl Harbor is attacked, and his dad doesn’t get to be home at Christmas. We learn (and considering what I’ve seen from the current generation’s history books here in Germany, really learn when you read this as a German) some more facts about the surprise attack and the Japanese invasions of Thailand, Singapore, Guam, Hongkong, Wake and British-Malaysia. Japan, Germany and the US all declare war at each other and WWII gets rolling for real. In 1942, Perry lives through some more soap opera poo poo, like his mother deciding being alone with her son (and the ghost of her dead daughter) sucks and she joins the US Army too, as a nurse of course because it’s still 1942. Perry gets send to his uncle, Karl Rhodan who by now lives in Wisconsin, as some sort of hillbilly/farmer who likes reading books about the civil war. More convoluted family history follows and Perry learns how to live as a down-to-earth farmer for a while, learns to swim, watches the stars, and Uncle Karl gives him some lessons in everything, even explaining constellations to young Perry. Perry eats up everything, including Karl’s awkward, hillbilly-version of how he thinks galaxies work. It’s adorable.  Then Perry goes to school, still living with his relatives in Wisconsin. He learns about comics, and starts spending his allowance on crap like Superman, which he likes even more than candy. Perry’s future body slider moves a few inches towards slim and fit. He starts to make friends, and by trading comic books around learns about Batman, the Flash and all those other weird fake characters in readable media. But Superman remains his favorite, because he’s an alien from another planet, get it?! Then the author mentions off-handedly that thousands of years later, Perry remembers almost nothing else about his friends during this time, and the author speculates and tries to connect the few names he has to some later important figures, like the leader of the Rhodanist Party of America, or one of the first hyper physicists. Another small, easily skipped part where the random, very stupid reader I made up in my head could notice something off in this “official biography”. But we aren’t left to think about this, because another history lessons follows, this time less about the war and more about the first rockets, especially the A-4. You know the A-4. It’s a very important part of rocket history. You have heard about it. Outside Germany, it’s more often known under its infamous name V-2. We learn about how they were build using slave labor, and how the author was 25 years old at the time the V-2 was used and survived this horrifying new weapon in London. Eventually, Perry reaches his 8th birthday while living in Wisconsin, and Uncle Karl trains him in using a rifle. As you do, with an eight-year old boy. Karl makes sure to include very heavy-handed ethics lessons until Perry is sure “gunslinger” is a horrible job with no future. To Be Continued, I mean, if you want. I can stop this weird future soap opera any time if it gets too much. Next time: Kids need more trauma
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Mar 1, 2021 19:29
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I actually don't remember most of this. Was the backstory expanded later, I don't think most of this was in the first few hundred issues?
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Mar 2, 2021 09:35
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Torrannor posted:I actually don't remember most of this. Was the backstory expanded later, I don't think most of this was in the first few hundred issues? Deborah's death shows up during the Endless Armada arc, when a spooky alien force tried to turn people evil by making them relive their worst deeds and Perry has to work through his trauma to stop becoming an evil thief. The rest came mostly from background notes never openly published. The Bavarian village "Scheernsting" is clearly named after author and co-founder K. H. Scheer, for example. Edit: But yeah, Andreas Eschbach still had to do a lot of work here to connect crumbs spanning thousands of years and from dozens of authors into a coherent narrative. You'd have to ask him personally if you want to know how many additions and retcons were needed to glue all of this together. Libluini fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Mar 2, 2021 |
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Mar 2, 2021 11:08
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A short update related to videos: OBS still shuns this game, so I finally broke down and installed Unregistered Hypercam 2 again. After some trickery with audio not working, I successfully recorded a test video. And while I ran out of time for today (stupid workweek), you can expect a couple short videos in a couple days showing off the weird audio-only parts of the interface.
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Mar 2, 2021 22:10
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Libluini posted:OBS still shuns this game, so I finally broke down and installed Unregistered Hypercam 2 again. After some trickery with audio not working, I successfully recorded a test video. And while I ran out of time for today (stupid workweek), you can expect a couple short videos in a couple days showing off the weird audio-only parts of the interface. Part of the joy of LP'ing is always learning new and exciting ways in which old design can refuse to cooperate with new technology. 
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Mar 3, 2021 19:16
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A friend of mine was trying to stream some Thief 2 and the sound was resolutely refusing to be piped through.
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Mar 4, 2021 01:57
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Intermezzo B: Video Killed the Radio Star It took me blood, sweat and tears (also lots of swearing), but I finally made the promised videos. They’re in full Unregistered Hyper Cam 2 glory, but sadly without the water mark you were probably hoping to see. (HyperCam2 was released for free at some point) At least it’s still the gloriously lovely quality you can expect from a video recording software almost as old as Operation Eastside itself! And without further ado: Operation Eastside User Interface: Deaf People, gently caress You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KElLbhiHepE The first video is a wildly edited mix of interface-snippets. There’s a lot of oddly charming details hidden all over the place, which is sadly almost invisible in a pure screenshot LP. The promised translations are (also duplicated below the video, for the poor dumb bastards who stumble across my videos from the wrong direction): Ship designer “Energieschirm” - Energy Shield “Leichter Desintegrator” - Light Disintegrator “Arkonit” - Arkonite “Überschwerer Impulsantrieb” - Super-Heavy Impulse Drive Other messages “Kampfhandlungen geortet” - Combat operations detected This message plays at turn start whenever one of your colonies/ships detects fleet movement across your space. It doesn’t actually refer to only battles. Though that’s of course not testable, as this is literally the only information you get besides looking at the map and searching for alien ships in transit. “Warnung: Kampf beginnt” - Warning: Battle begins A short message which plays when turn processing throws you into a battle. “Keine weiteren Kampfhandlungen geortet” - No further combat operations detected This audio clip plays immediately after the last one if there is only one battle in a turn. Somewhat confusing if you then realize that yes, you still have to fight at least this one battle. I think this audio message is only supposed to play when the huge “No further battles detected” screen starts showing, but that’s just speculation on my part.  Topsider ASMR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfflLs1Q_mo This is just a relaxing bonus video. Sit back, watch those low-resolution Lizardfolk work, and enjoy the music. Edit: Like the art, the music is actually just stuff directly from the series. The music was at one point sold as "Ad Astra, Perry Rhodan" or something. You can buy it from the publisher directly or from Amazon, though there may be some differences (the Amazon-link I found sold the rear end-old original CD and the new one from the publisher has at least the cover art updated, but anyway, the music is good so who cares?) Publisher Ad Astra at Amazon Hopefully those links will work for Non-Germans! To Be Continued, with an actual update Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Mar 5, 2021 |
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Mar 5, 2021 21:08
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The music actually sounds really good.
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Mar 5, 2021 21:17
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Like the art, the music is actually just stuff directly from the series. The music was at one point sold as "Ad Astra, Perry Rhodan" or something. You can buy it from the publisher directly or from Amazon, though there may be some differences (the Amazon-link I found sold the rear end-old original CD and the new one from the publisher has at least the cover art updated, but anyway, the music is good so who cares?) Publisher Ad Astra at Amazon Hopefully those links will work for Non-Germans!
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Mar 5, 2021 21:31
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I'm kinda amazed that my German is still good enough to let me understand the voice, text is one thing but audio is another.
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Mar 6, 2021 07:40
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OK, I'm interrupting my soap opera covering Perry's life for a bit, as I nearly killed myself by writing 17 pages today. I'm uh, defeated right now, but the new update will go up on Sunday. After that, I'm trying to advance the lore posts a bit over the week, because I just know I won't be able to resist hammering out another insane mega-post next weekend. 
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Apr 10, 2021 18:41
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Reptile Rising 11: War of the Worlds  Mission Log 009: 24th July 2326 Deepest sigh. It seems peace was just a dream, and the time for teeth and claw has come. Attacks are now almost happening daily, and we can only take small hope in the fact that our enemies are fighting even worse among themselves. The unity of the United Empire is a great joke, as far as I am concerned. At least with the Arkonids mostly on our side, we have a chance. I’ve ordered production of warships to increase, we need to be ready! Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Welp, things are heating up in the New Homellete Cluster. We need more shipyards! And a lot more ships. Luckily I’ve been starting to build up just that on our older colonies. All of our non-capital planets of sufficient economy gain a set of small medium yards and a big spaceport so ships can actually launch and land.  Dedunth II is one of our newest colonies, and under AI-control. The AI does lots of things which are a mystery to me, like building the lowest tier buildings available. It’s a mess, but as fun as planet building is, if I have to manually control dozens of SimCity-style maps each turn this LP may run longer then my Master of Orion 3 LP.  Our trap planet in turn 202: Lesbicor II-2 is fully built up and can now basically run indefinitely. The population will steadily rise until there’s too much unemployment and not enough food, then crash back down again. Rinse, and repeat. While this kind of minimalist colony makes our lives easier, it is a dire warning not to go down on planets covered by 90+% ocean, if you want an actually productive planet.  Just in case the Akons take their planet back, I’m continuing to plunder the vast stockpiles of light and heavy industry piled up on Scusatan VII-5. The AI seems to get the chaotic mess produced by another AI slowly under control, and I deleted some unneeded buildings. Total economic collapse could still happen though. That and invasion.  After that, I go and do the hard work of redistributing resources from our cap to our needy colonies. Also, our consumer good surplus is high enough I accept another trade from the Arkonids. Everyone in this cluster seems to produce an enormous surplus of heavy industry, it’s almost always want someone wants from us and we have tons already. But, space ship construction needs a lot of heavy industry, so amassing large stockpiles could help us in the long run.  Our scouts have been busy and found some potential new colonies for us: Albitan I is near the bottom and maybe in an emergency if we need +1 colony to win, but nope for now. The combination of low habitability and 87% ice ocean coverage kills this one. We couldn’t deal with this without killing all colonists repeatedly, and the AI sure as hell wouldn’t be able to handle this one, either.  Al Nilitra has a lot of burned husks, and everything beyond the 10th planet is too cold. gently caress. Humans took over the tiny moon of Al Nilitra X, so there’s basically nothing for us here.  And they didn’t take the main planet because it has 0% usable surface area, and is therefore blocked from colonizing. A lot of the death worlds are totally landable, though! Chalk this down to another system we will only ever colonize if we need some emergency colonies to trigger the win condition.  Turn 203 sees our capital finishing all ship construction. Something you can immediately see without looking, as your resource production tends to soar up as soon as your yards stop working.  Anyway, I don’t want us to fall too far back in the colony run, so I’m immediately ordering three more scouts. They’ll be doing double-duty for finding new planets and as “shields” to cover them if we want to set up new colonies on them.  Something important to mention: Since the RNG hosed us over so badly with our cap, it’s full of almost, but not quite level tiles like this one. All this green poo poo you see in the screenshot is and will forever be not usable for building. Our cap is therefore basically finished, as I’ve run out of buildable tiles long ago. From now on the only thing I can do is to slowly demolish old buildings and replacing them with new ones. If we want more research, production or better shipyards, it’s now hanging on our colonies.  Like Shaulires II-3, one of our moons! Shipyards are already finished, but we can’t start building until the spaceport is completed. I can’t stop thinking about how weird it is that this small moon has a lot more space to use then the main planet below, just because the planet forming engine decided the planet needed to be a huge mess of oceans, hills and valleys, while this tiny moon ended up nearly completely flat. (There’s a mountain range in the middle, but that’s mostly it besides some small hills.) This results in the awkward position of our moon slowly eclipsing our main capital in everything as time moves on.  Turn 204 sees the Arkonids pestering us some more for our consumer goods. As I want to build lots of ships and our consumer good surplus is insane right now, I see nothing wrong with agreeing. So, if you look at that tech screen up there, you will notice we’re still slowly working through engine research to get a C-level engine. It’s kind of funny that even so technically I couldn’t yet start on the voted on plan to research more industry, we’re already halfway there thanks to the Arkonids trading us B-level light industry last time. But don’t worry, C-level engines were mostly easy to research when compared to the enormous cost of B-level industry research, so there’s still lots of research to be done! (I’m secretly hoping the Arkonids give us the heavy industry tech, of course.)  “Your brave fight against fate, which has gifted you with insufficient working brains, touches us. Compassionate as we are, we are offering you trade relations.” And after the trade is accepted, he says: “Crystal Regent Zoltral V grants you the grace to allow you to trade with us. Laud and praise him for his magnanimity, barbarians!” And they’re still nominally the good guys, yikes.  Right after that little affair, I’m moving some of our scouts around. Dedunth II needs coverage from our SDS (scout defense system) and of course, it be neat to find some good planets for a change.  Our orders result in lots of lines showing up on our star map. Everyone else is switched off. By now, there’s enough ships moving around the map turns into an unreadable mess if every race is switched to active view.  Around turn 206 we have now four planets capable of building and launching ships. But another problem approaches: Big ships eat big resources, so now we have to expand the industry on each of those three young colonies. What we can do already is using our 2nd tier to construct new scouts, and maybe to repair/build colony ships. Our main shipyards are now free to construct warships exclusively.  Around this time, I get curious to see what the AI is doing on Borekaris IV-1, the tiny moon so coveted by our enemies they keep launching fleets at it. Turns out it’s the typical lovely mess of E-level buildings all over, and they’ll need another shot of resources soon or the colonists will run out of everything yet again. If our defense wasn’t so cheap, I’m not sure I would even bother defending this colony. It’s only good point is that we have worse places colonized.  Strangely enough, the Humans disagree. Turn 207 sees another fleet arrive to contest Borekaris IV-1.  The long green line is our speed. The only thing our scout has in its favor in this battle.  Welp, let’s do the dance.  Again, it works  While the Human commander is left wondering what just happened, our engine research finishes and Doc Bot shows us what we get: The Transition Drive. Transition Drive The Transition Drive is the most basic FTL-drive in Perry Rhodan, and the one most species sooner or later stumble across if they get the chance. It also means that if your species isn’t special enough, they get nothing. Sorry, Fuckedoverians from Ohshit IV, no FTL for you! Better hope an alien spaceship crashes on your moon someday! Remember how transmitters work? The Transition Drive works on the same basic principle, just using huge machines inside your ship instead. And huge, bulky computers to calculate how to do hyperspace so you don’t need a welcoming beacon or structure to catch you. A Transition Drive uses a gigantic energy converter to create an energy field made of pure hyperspace particles, but without a Paratron Converter weeding out random particles, you don’t get a protective shell out of this entire affair, as the random assortment of hyper particles tends to move the entire mass inside of them with them back to hyperspace if that shield is allowed to close. Normally, contact with something from hyperspace wouldn’t be that disastrous, but when re-discovering FTL, ancient Arkonids noticed by completely surrounding a normal 4D mass with a 5D hyperfield, it was possible to completely shield the surrounded mass from influences from itself and the rest of the universe, e.g. to the hyper particles surrounding it the mass seemed to become normal, and to the surrounding normal universe the mass became utterly alien. This resulted in the contained mass being violently removed from the standard universe, and jumping into hyperspace. Under normal conditions, a 4D mass can’t be stable in hyperspace, and turns into energy, which is then dispersed by currents in hyperspace, utterly destroying whatever entered hyperspace this way. When using a structure field in the way a Transition Drive core generates, this process is halted temporarily, as the structure field is composed from hyper particles in the first place, which results in the suddenly transformed mass keeping together. The impulse and vector a mass has when entering hyperspace directly translates into hyperspace-equivalents, which allows to control your exit points by carefully calculating how fast your ship needs to go, in which vector, and how strong the 5D-structure field needs to be to go there. The very complex calculations involved can also be randomized for an immediate emergency jump, which is something no sane being wants to do considering it means trusting your life to a RNG where an unbelievable high amount of possible results give back “hilariously over-the-top death”. In all sane cases, even good computers can take a while, sometimes up to hours or even days to calculate the complex 5D-math to get your ship what you need for a safe jump. (We, yes even we Topsiders, can do this in about 30 minutes. The current Topsider-empire started by rebels storming the Arkonid battleship left to cover their occupied homeworld, after all. Who says theft is always bad? ) And after that comes another amount of time depending on how good your ship is built, where your ship’s capacitors need to charge up to get the structure field immediately up to the desired strength when the jump button is pressed. This can take seconds, or up to hours and days, depending mostly on if your Transition Drive is something your species just invented yesterday, or if it is a highly advanced device you got “gifted” by a species 10k years more advanced then yours. Anyway, while entering hyperspace without a structure field immediately kills you by blasting your matter apart into a volume measurable in entire galaxies, going with a structure field keeps your new, energy-based existence together while vector and impulse moves you to your exit coordinates. Now something weird happens: When you reach the exit coordinates, your structure field rest has finally evaporated down into nothing, and you should now die. But instead, the energy cloud of you and your ship transforms back into its “natural” state, which is anathema to hyperspace. And like normal space violently ejected you at the start of your journey, now hyperspace violently ejects you and you have arrived! Mostly intact, even! The reason for this is kind of ironic, in a way: Just walking into hyperspace through a random rift in space/time or something is deadly because the transition itself transforms the mass in your body into energy, which is then dispersed, but a Transition Drive forces this transformation to occur by isolating 4D-objects from any 4D-influences, imitating forms of hyperspace-based matter and then the structure field works less as space glue or a protective field and more like a delusion-field keeping the sham going. When the structure field runs out of juice, this weird quantum Schrödinger-bullshit immediately fails and everything inside that moving energy cloud reconstitutes itself back to normal. The shock of this happening, together with the shock of the last remnant of the structure field collapsing, kicks you out into normal space. To reiterate, in case this sounds confusing: If there’s a hole to hyperspace right in front of you, the very act of walking through (the “transition”) will cause your body to violently transform into energy and then currents in hyperspace will disperse that energy. You are now dead. If you use the structure field of a Transition Drive to enter hyperspace, the remnant of the structure field keeps you together and at the end of your journey, when you transform back you are still inside hyperspace, so now you are an utterly alien object here, but since you already transitioned, you aren’t immediately destroyed. Instead, physics declare that you don’t belong there and a completely natural rift through to normal space opens around and through you and you get kicked out before hyperspace can do anything to you. In this way, hyperspace works utterly different and alien to similar fictitious constructs like Warhammer 40k’s Warp. In the warp, protection by a “Gellar Field” means you can move using your normal drives like you are an actual object existing in this place, and bad poo poo only happens if you can’t leave or your protective shield collapses. In Hyperspace! this does not work: While it’s possible to generate very special bubbles of artificial normal space to carry around with you, you then can’t move them with normal engines. And every sublight-drive not using hyperspace bullshit can’t do anything in hyperspace. In fact, as long as we’re still staying in the “at least it’s not incomprehensible” level of space travel tech, your engines don’t exist in hyperspace, so even if your normal space particles could interact with the background medium of hyperspace in any way, nothing will happen because your engines are an expanding cloud of energy in hyperspace.  To break things up a bit, this is how a common Transition Drive looks up close.  A schema to go with the drawing. 1 is a cooling system, 4 is the reactor core which produces the energy necessary to generate the structure field. All those round things are either generators for the field, converters (since you can’t just pump normal electricity into a 5D-generator and expect it to do anything) and capacitors. Everything else is only relevant if you want to build one in your backyard, so I left it out. Why transmitters are hard Transmitters, which I covered last time, work mostly exactly like that, just replacing the need for super-complex calculations by having a receiver-station to catch your cloud of energy coming in. Now, when the series starts, not even the mighty Arkonids still remember how transmitters can be built, because there’s a small obstacle to “just” replacing the math part with a receiver-station: Energy consumption. There’s another law of physics coming into place, which is called Hyper Impedance. This is a mathematical way to describe the way our normal space and the surrounding hyperspace interact, and it’s not always uniform. The higher the impedance, the higher the energy consumption needed to break through into the energetically “higher” part outside the standard universe. In the standard cosmos the series starts in, living beings can consider themselves “lucky”, that the Hyper Impedance is far lower than theoretically possible. Still, investing nothing only gets you nothing, and so FTL-drives start with eating colossal amounts of energy to work. What the Arkonids noticed when re-discovering FTL and what they wrote down so later Terran physicists could use their knowledge as the basis for further advances, is that hyper impedance is also related to how far away you are from relativistic boundaries. In theory, if you were moving at light speed, you would remove yourself from the standard universe and accidentally glide into hyperspace, since hyper impedance would reach zero. In practice that’s of course impossible since you need infinite energy to reach light speed. But this also means the optimal moment to engage your FTL-drive is at the highest possible relativistic speed your ship can reach, and as you get slower, the energy consumption you need to make the transition grows exponentially. At light speed, the amount of energy to transition into hyperspace is zero, but to get there you need infinite energy. At zero speed, the amount of energy to transition into hyperspace is infinite, but to get there you need zero energy. Both are thing which are obviously not possible, which is why transmitters, which are stationary installations, where a lost secret to the Arkonids before Terrans stumbled over them by accident. Until it was discovered how to make stationary structure fields doing more than just waste energy and cause earthquakes (when stray energy translates down the wrong way and causes interactions with normal matter, bad poo poo happens), building transmitters was not possible. How fast, how far? Back on topic, with a standard Transition Drive it is accepted that you need an absolute minimum speed of 20% light speed, if you don’t like catastrophic failure and want to avoid vanishing forever. As optimal is seen 50-60%, but only if you’re in a hurry. Civilian ships will spend a lot of extra time going up as far as 80-90% light speed to make the transition as smooth as possible. This is by the way, why even the most primitive ships in the Perryverse tend to have at least some form of energy shield, as your transition drive will fast become a suicide drive on account of all that space crap crashing into your ship at relativistic speeds. (You don't want to see what single molecule can do at 99% light speed, it's not pretty.) In the worst case, where you disable your hardware-locks and attempt a jump at far too low speed, your capacitors will blast themselves apart in an attempt to charge up your structure field up to the strength you need. Your capacitors, and with them your ship, will detonate like a bomb. Alternatively, your capacitors can take it, but your generators won’t. Your drive core will explode, either completely, taking your ship with it, or a failsafe will prevent your entire ship from going up. Congratulations, you are now stranded decades or even centuries from reaching a friendly harbor. Hope you brought enough supplies! Baring sabotage and a really badly designed ship, a lot of hardware-locks and failsafes are in the way of those outcomes, but a failed jump will still cause your ship to get a fierce kick and your drive can easily get too damaged to work. In which case you better hope you can enact some local repairs, or congratulations! You are now stranded decades or even centuries from reaching a friendly harbor. Hope you brought enough supplies!  This rough looking thing is an old Arkonid cruiser from the old Arkonid Empire. It was designed to reinforce the fleets fighting the Maahks (we talked about them a couple lore updates ago). They’re simple 150 m light cruisers, cheap, reliable and could carry a company of 60 combat robots and 160 soldiers (the drawing specifies they were “all men”). This cruiser was built at the very end of the 9th millenium BCE but still has almost all the technology available during the age this game is set in: The energy shields may be a bit less advanced and it doesn’t have gravity bombs, but everything else is the same, including the Transition Drive. Basically, the old Arkonid Empire stagnated worse than the Imperium of Man, is what I’m getting at here. Apart from issues of energy supply and hyper impedance, Transition Drives are only limited by their crew and the material their ships are made out off: The rough transformations from matter into energy and back again, as natural as they are, will slowly degrade both mind and matter. Dumb matter like a block of alien super-steel can take more of this rough handling then your mind, but on the other hand, biological matter can bounce back unless the immediate deformation is too much, while dead matter just continues to degrade. Jump too far and you kill your crew, jump too often and your ship will disintegrate below your feet. Eventually, this leads to jump drives just slowly burning out and needing to be replaced, as the core components of a Transition Drive are among the least robust parts of a ship. If you can somehow dampen the effects of a hyperspace jump, or develop a really advanced version, you eventually can stretch jump ranges into the utterly insane realm of 300-500k light years per jump. This would allow you to reach Andromeda in a couple of days. The standard drives of our age are a lot less awesome, though. Our maximum jump range lies somewhere between 1000 and 5000 light years per jump. If we want to go safe. Unsafe jump ranges can go up to about 35k light years, but would come with some high risks: Effectively, our largest ships could try to go back to Topsid in one singular jump, but those poor bastards would have a more than even chance of not arriving at all. In at least one instance where this kind of thing was attempted in the early PR-series, the entire crew of a battleship was unconscious for hours, the damaged ship just quietly drifting through space. And that’s one of the best outcomes you could hope for, the most likely success of a mad jump like this is the same as in the last paragraph, with “unconscious for hours” replaced by “dead forever”. Fun effects Still not everything I have to say about the Transition Drive! The jump itself can’t be felt consciously, as your dumb rear end moves through hyperspace too fast and not in a form capable of feeling. This becomes important because there have been cases of people or ships getting “stuck” in hyperspace, which for those poor bastards meant they didn’t experience anything for minutes, hours, days or up to centuries. Like a twisted time jump, essentially. The only thing an energy cloud in hyperspace remembers is what it was before the jump, after all. No aging for you! Also no living, because one of the things influencing how your brain feels on exit is how long you were in hyperspace. The smoothest transition into and out of hyperspace doesn’t help you if you got stuck for centuries before being spit out. If this kind of thing happens to a spaceship, the most likely outcome is often a large explosion, or some sort of dead ghost ship arriving. If it’s people walking through transmitters getting stuck, the result is often either death by being put together wrong, death by pain, death by brain bleeding after being put together slightly too wrong, death by insanity if your brain doesn’t work anymore or you can be perfectly fine! Being put together by random natural forces is like that. As long as nothing weird or catastrophic happens, jumps through hyperspace are… still insanely painful. Welp, still better than moving at sublight-speeds, I guess. The distortions caused by hyperspace jumps are interpreted by your re-appearing brain as immense phantom pains. Fun! The energies and spacial distortions involved in a jump are a sight to behold from the outside, too: Waves of radiation and gravity, including visible light, are spreading from your entry- and exit points. Ships tend to disappear with a huge burst of white light, while violent gravity waves distort nearby space. The exit side is a special case, because of the acausal nature of FTL: If you’re there at exactly the right time, you can see the same strange lights appearing as the ship jumps in, and the waves of radiation and gravity rolling from the exit wound is also not exactly unsubtle, but this is not actually how ships with Transition Drive are commonly detected. What happens is something weirder: Since part of the distortions happen in hyperspace, 5D-detectors can see you jumping the moment you jump and also see you arriving before you actually arrive. If you’re on the ball, you can easily use the effects of jump shock to overwhelm an invader with a surprise strike. And even in a fight between robots the defender has an insurmountable advantage, as your defense already starts reacting before your fleet exits hyperspace. For this reason alone, most space battles start at the outskirts of a solar system, either high above or below the ecliptic near the sun or the planetary orbits furthest out. In both cases, the defenders have time to rally, and the invaders have to slowly dig their way through all those long-range fortresses covering their approaches. At least highly advanced sublight drives means the front moves still pretty drat fast, if the defenders fold, a fleet can be at your capital in hours and demand surrender, even if they started beyond Pluto. If the defenders put up a fight however, all the necessary maneuvering can drag things out to weeks or however long the moral of your crew holds out. Another thing at the very end: The violent shocks of hyperspace transitions can cause untold damage on planets too close. A single crappy corvette can cause earthquakes if it isn’t moving at least a couple hundred million kilometers from its starting planet before the jump, and a large fleet can cause a planet to just burst apart into a new asteroid belt from all those gravity shockwaves arriving. Before even more insane weapons were developed, this phenomenon became the basis for the gravity bomb: Despite its name, a “gravity bomb” is a specialized hyper energy generator, a Transition Drive core which doesn’t generate a structure field and instead just blasts out huge amounts of random hyper energy in a spiral around it. The blast is strong enough to create artificial lumps of hyperbarie, the 5D-form of matter. Which then immediately gets ejected back into hyperspace like a crude reverse hyperspace jump with no target and the resulting rift eats and consequently destroys, everything too close. This results in the same shocks of a hyperspace jump occurring, including huge, destructive gravity waves. Hence, “gravity bomb”. So, remember when people ask awkward questions about hyper drives in Star Wars and why no-one really thinks of weaponizing them? Perry Rhodan answers this question with “We already did and this weapon is standard equipment on all our ships!” Jumping in or out of a planetary system is strictly forbidden. Only lunatics would even try this, as the interaction of a FTL-drive and huge masses can easily tear your ship apart on both entry and exit points. If you’re a suicidal maniac bent on genocide, you better target some far-off planet no-one cares about, or automatic defenses will throw a small gravity bomb into your face on exit, which kicks you swiftly back to hyperspace. This time forever. I didn’t even mention the 5D-shockwaves arriving even before the gravity and normal radiation. Ships and even fleets arriving or leaving too close to a planet can cause mass-devastation by destroying all forms of 5D-technology, as the first and most often observed effect of 5D-shockwaves is destruction of the very rare oscillating 5D-crystalls powering all 5D-technology. On a modern planet, a lot of tech, including factories producing goods for the population, and major transportation networks, will simply stop working. And then the gravity waves arrive to cause earthquakes and tsunamis. Hyperstorms and other major phenomena can cause hyper shockwaves so strong, it causes madness in thinking minds. So the difference between a single lunatic with a ship and a huge hyperstorm can be staggering. Imagine everything from the last paragraph happening, but now everyone is insane, too. Twice the fun! For this LP, all this information mostly boils down to an explanation why the devs always deposit incoming ships in a new system at the sun, as this is the only safe point in an unknown, not surveyed system easily accessible. Randomly jumping into a system with unknown orbits is a good way to kill yourself and a shitton of very surprised aliens in truly apocalyptic fashion, so no-one wants to do it. It also tells us, since level E and D engines were sublight-tech, what level of abstraction the game operates on, as we obviously had at least some form of Transition Drive before “officially” getting it. You can handwave this as better sublight drives making us reaching jump speed faster and allowing us to slow down faster after exiting, just don’t try to think too hard about the influence of FTL-tech on space battles fought with sublight drives. (As far as I can tell, more movement points means you can move faster both strategically and in battle, which is of course nonsense, but that’s what you get in a game where the difference between FTL and STL-travel is “zilch”.) In Perry Rhodan, sometimes we meet people who actually were unlucky enough they had to invent their own FTL-drives and it often isn’t pretty. As long as they’re just your average relatable standard lifeforms, they’re bound to just build a form of Transition Drive, since nothing is simpler then “kick the universe, let’s go!”, but of course those early FTL-drives are often really, really lovely. Without any help from other space people, those first gen Transition Drives are often limited to something ludicrously tiny like 0,5 – 3 light years per jump and all the bad effects of jumps are often amplified due to lovely understanding of what the hell they’re doing. Even without going that far, there are a lot of “advanded” civilizations who get really depressed when they and their “high-range” 300 ly/jump engines encounter a Terran ship and have to learn “oh yeah, normally we can only go 5k, but if one us accidentally spills coffee on the computer, we can reach 30+k without killing ourselves”. On the other hand, most of the limitations of those early drives came from the godawful energy generation and storage techs their users where limited to. Hell, even bad sublight engines limit you, since you can’t just go faster to lower the energy barrier you have to get over! This means both our lovely expedition and your average newcomer on the galactic stage can easily get a really cheap and reliable short-range version for their needs. We by building the cheap versions, the newcomers by trading for them. Paying most of your planet's GP for the galactic equivalent of a donkey cart sucks, but what are you supposed to do? Wait until your scientists invent your own version 3000 years later? Yeah sure, that will help. And now, our tech base has advanced to the point where we can use FTL-drives with standard range again! Also this means: Soon, couriers and com relays will arrive with news and commands from Topsid High Command, seeing as we now could go back and visit Topsid itself in maybe a week of traveling. Or less then a day in an emergency.  OK wow, that was a lot of ranting. At least thanks to the Perrypedia I’m using as a source, it was somewhat coherent ranting, I hope? Anyway, while I was talking, another scout reached the Elbigas-system. It only has this one lovely planet, and the Arkonids already got it. gently caress.  Welp, finally time to start/continue with the agreed upon research plan: We switch to heavy industry research.  I’m capable of learning! This time I’m not forgetting that you can’t update old designs and make a new one, to create another cruiser implementing the new, better FTL-drive. The effects are unusually staggering: Our new ship allows me to move the armor-slider down to the right without making our ship slower, so now we can have maximum hull strength without losing speed. Our hull strength now is up to 504, up from 350 and nearly double the size from a comparable Terran ship. That’s a lot of structure to blast through! But something strange also happens: All other stats go up, too! The Tail Cruiser has stronger shields (92 instead of 75) and weapon strength (19 instead of 15) even though I didn’t do anything at all except enlarging the hull! Since I’m fairly sure ship size calculations take slider positions and tech levels into account somehow, I’m guessing our C-level engines mean the game now simulates a slightly bigger, or slightly more efficiently designed ship, below the hood. Alas, this also means the ship needs more crew (230 Topsiders are needed for a Tail Cruiser, up from 160 crewmember for a Claw Cruiser) and 50% more of all resources to build. Especially the heavy industry units needed going up from 940 to 1400 means I’m suddenly glad for all those trades giving me more HIUs than I thought I needed!  To include our awesome new tech, I’m also adding an improved scout and an improved colonizer. More we don’t really need, it’s not like OE simulates different types of weapons, after all. The Nestmaker X is a more streamlined, cheaper ship then the original colonizer. I may have overgunned that one quite a bit. Sadly, the landing module slows the ship down enough it still is useless as a scout defender, so we still need a nice surplus of scouts in addition to colony ships. The Tail Cruisers go into construction on our capital, while the other three colonies are building the colonizers, all in parallel. After that, the new Eggsplorer C will be build exclusively on our secondary yards, while our main yard just spits out more Tail Cruisers for the foreseeable future. The one Eggsplorer B still in construction prevents us from deleting the old design, but that’s fine. I don’t even need to abort construction, as the Transition Drive doesn’t make our scouts fast enough to gain another movement point. Because of this, while the C-type has slightly better stats overall, both B- and C-type have exactly the same speed and therefore effectiveness. Another reason why the SDS is so effective: It’s actually really hard to make ships go faster than 7 mps. Even with B- and A-level engine techs, as soon as you start cramming some actual weapons into your hull the speed nosedives below 7, causing our dumb scouts to be able to run away again. Hell, when we eventually reach B-level engines, it will become functionally impossible to make ships who are both fast enough and strong enough to defeat the SDS in a straight-up fight.  But the old design isn’t really preventing us from building the new version, so I’m ordering three of the C-type scouts, too. Parallel builds for our colonies, to keep the main shipyard free for combat vessels. Even our secondary yards can build a scout in a couple of turns, while only our capital shipyard is good enough to do the same with warships, so this is working out nice so far.  Our current fleet. The Yolk II-frigates are really only self-moving ablative armor plates at this point. The difference between Claw and Tail cruisers is less staggering, but man is our weapon strength depressingly low. Topsiders, I guess.  While making sure an emergency scout is deployed to cover Scusatan VII-5, I see this. Apparently, the Akons are trying to get this colony back. And I’m not sure this bunch of dumb early game frigates can do more besides dying.  While looking at the map, I notice some large fleets moving around, like this Mehandor-fleet of 21 ships moving to one of their colonies. It seems our main shipyards will be forced to build warships for now and forever, as the SDS has one weakness: The larger the fleet, the larger the chance for me to gently caress up and let the scout get trapped. Yes, indeed: As awesomely stupid as our Scout Defense System is, it’s not a cure-all. Eventually, a full fleet of 50 ships will get really hard to escape from. And if 1-2 allies with similarly huge fleets show up, forget it. 150 ships cover so much space between them the SDS will not work.  After some thinking, I realize our own planetary defense is enough to defeat a sizable fleet, and an emergency scout just in case is all I need, really. If a fleet arrives our gravity catapult can’t smash, all is lost, anyway. And so all 12 of our older ships accelerate out of orbit and prepare for the jump towards Scusatan VII-5. With the ships already there, we will have 20 ships. If we can’t even win with 2:1 odds, I’m giving up. The weakness of our ships really concerns me. Hopefully our ludicrously strong hulls will negate some of the enemy’s advantage, so we have a chance. Also ha ha, I just remembered there are tons of shipyards the AI sprinkled all over this moon, so at least if ships survive the battle I can immediately start repairing them locally!  Two turns later, another attempt is made at Borekaris IV-1. Akons this time. They can’t break the SDS and fail. Why does everyone want this lovely moon so bad? Not even I want it! Akons, Terrans, I think even Aras at one time made a go. That’s half the entire roster of races!  Meanwhile, the new scout arrived in orbit around Scusatan VII-5, bringing the total number of defenders up to 8. In two more turns, 12 of our ships will arrive together with another Akon force, and then we’ll have a battle at our hands.  And on the fateful turn 210, a full fleet of 50 Terran ships arrives near Borekaris IV-1. With a full fourth of the entire battlefield controlled by the Terran fleet, is resistance futile? The way the engine works, up to 5 factions can appear in a battle. Worst case, all four edges have hostile fleets with us wedged in at the center. If said center than only has one dumb scout inside, we can forget about running from that disaster.  Our scout doesn’t like its chances in a straight run, and so the crew tries a dangerous feint into the southeastern quadrant. The plan was to then run west, then north, then east again to run out the timer. But the crew misjudged and half a dozen Terran ships get into range and blast the ship into a ruined wreck. Barely holding together, the small scout finally completes its dangerous turn and moves out of range. After that, they manage to keep the Terrans at bay. Just seconds before the relentless hairless apes manage to trap the scout, an encrypted message is detected, coming from an unknown com relay of the Solar Empire. Suddenly, the Terrans stop shooting and their entire fleet changes course. Borekaris IV-1 survives another day.  And that’s it! Really, this was closer than I hoped and if this happens again, this dumb colony will finally be hosed. Sadly all those pages about FTL I wrote made me run out of space in this update, so the major space battle will have to wait for next week! Still, I allocated lots of space to that battle, since it will be first major battle fought in earnest. Even after weeding out unneeded shots several times, it still covers almost half of next update! I’ll try to write fast. To Be Continued
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Apr 11, 2021 14:58
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Libluini posted:*Lots of words about FTL travel and you* Oh, yeah, sure, that sounds SO much safer than opening a rift into literally hell, where time and space are less "universal constants" and more "polite suggestions up to the capricious whims of gods both chaotic and orderly" and where, in the event of a system failure, your best hope is that your ship picks up an extra traveller that's willing to die when shot, and worst case your own ship becomes possessed by an angry daemon that's hellbent on killing you, your crew and everything that sets foot aboard after you've been turned into a decorative wall hanging or twenty. Yes I like the 40k setting for sci-fi, it hits an odd place between "hard sci-fi" and "not only does psionics exist and acts like space magic, but there's also literal space magic".
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Apr 12, 2021 01:57
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Do the hyperspace explosions go the other way? Say if two adjacent ships jump at the same time, but one explodes immediately, would it damage the other one mid-jump? Is a jump even instantaneous or is there some kind of perception of time passing? It seems like soon the ability to maneuver ships will be overwhelmed by sheer volume of enemies in the battlefield. I'm guessing the rush to colonize is mostly over so the AIs are trying to fill out even the terrible planets now.
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Apr 15, 2021 12:56
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Decoy Badger posted:Do the hyperspace explosions go the other way? Say if two adjacent ships jump at the same time, but one explodes immediately, would it damage the other one mid-jump? Is a jump even instantaneous or is there some kind of perception of time passing? To answer your questions: It depends, if one ship blows up attempting to jump and another ship is for some reason far too close (which at relativistic speeds should be functionally impossible, but never underestimate stupidity), yeah that would cause damage to the other ship, too. Though that's not hyperspace's fault. If the ship blows up on exit, this will only affect ships who by sheer dumb luck also exit too close to you. Normally, this can't happen because the Transition Drive works kind of fuzzy: Even with fictional super computers, the 5D-math governing your jump is complex enough that it's impossible to make a pin-point jump from A to B. This means even a short hop will displace you a bit. And since space is loving gigantic, even something really short like jumping from Sol to Proxima Centauri would displace you hundreds of thousands of kilometers. But yeah, sometimes, when 50k ships or more jump towards the same target, and another 50k enemy ships jump in towards the same region, sometimes a couple of ships have really, and I mean, really bad luck and then poo poo is getting hosed. Time perception is non-existent, since you are transformed into energy during the duration of the jump, so you can't feel anything until you arrive. From our point of view, a jump lasts only fractions of microseconds though, we wouldn't notice time passing even when not transformed. One important point is that since you're still touching hyperspace, just for a very tiny amount of time, the distortion caused by de- and re-materialization gets worse the further you jump. This is why a 5k light year jump only gives you heavy headaches and some wear-and-tear and your machinery, but a 50k light year jump can kill you and blow up sensitive equipment: The longer your energy cloud stays in hyperspace, the more chance have currents, hyperstorms or other freak incidents to tear you apart. Something I forgot to mention: Since suns exist in hyperspace (like living beings, they tend to throw a "shadow" into hyperspace, and suns are loving enormous, so their hyper-shadows are equally hefty) and even generate and radiate out hyper-energy, zones with lots of suns close together get progressively harder to maneuver through. The entire center of the galaxy is like a death zone because of this. All those suns close together can also make space weather far worse: The conditions close to the center generate far more hyperstorms, and if you try to jump while a hyperstorm is blasting the other side, your ship will probably just vanish. Re: The game: Yeah, poo poo is hosed. Welp, the thread wanted to play at the highest difficulty, so here we are! If the AI (our AI) eventually manages to make some of our auto-colonies capable of building ships, we're probably have to go and allow them to build ships. Though if our planetary governors start spitting out swarms of tiny scouts and colonizers, I'll probably have to delete those designs to force the AI to only build combat ships. To preemptive this bullshit, I'm trying to keep our AI from building ships as long as possible. Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Apr 15, 2021 |
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Apr 15, 2021 14:51
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I still can't get over the SDS, it's the funniest thing about the jank this game has.
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Apr 15, 2021 15:08
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I mean, it does sound like balance is kind of out of the window with our pick having crippled ships and the difficulty being an additional bullet to the knee.
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Apr 17, 2021 00:14
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OK, I'm sorry for another lengthy waiting period, so here's what's up: I had some seriously lovely weeks and didn't feel motivated to do a lot of writing. Hopefully over the next few weeks things will look better, but I can't promise anything.
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Apr 24, 2021 20:31
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Some good news: Work on my LPs has started again! The update for this thread is already mostly finished. I'm trying to get it out today, but it could also drop on Monday. My other thread will then follow later that same week.
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May 30, 2021 15:28
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God speed, Libluini. I enjoy these LP's a lot.
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May 30, 2021 19:26
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Reptile Rising 12: A Time for Battles New update! Mission Log 010: 29th July 2326 We are beset by enemies on all sides. Only one thing remains to do: Fight! Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  While we’re waiting on the promised big space battle, let’s look through our diplomatic messages. Oh, this one is just more insults from the Arkonids. Yes, yes we get it, we’re stupid and you want to make fun of us.  We also have some scouting reports. Menkarez is dead.  Anchasala: Another system dead as a door nail. Yikes, the RNG really did not like us in this run. At least I guess I should give props for the level of realism this game gets right.  We also do some trading. New corporations like Lizzy Leshad’s Big Eggsports have formed and tons of light industry and consumer items are exchanged for big, bulky heavy industry. Ironically, thanks to ship production eating up tons of heavy industry, we’re slowly getting to the point where our Arkonid friends’ constant shortage of everything else suddenly becomes useful.  Just in case the Arkonids eventually stop trading with us (real goods I mean, they’re never gonna stop trading insults), we need better heavy industry tech. And since our capital has run out of buildable tiles long ago, I’m forced to get creative. Here I am replacing our oldest residential buildings with their newest designs. Every 4 replacements, the total space available added is large enough the 5th building can be replaced by another science building instead. An interesting observation: Topsiders being bad at research combines very badly with exponentially growing tech costs. All those Big Computer Centers we’re building are only a very low reduction of research time. Either we expand massively on our other colonies, or we’ll have to wait a long time for those sweet, sweet B-level heavy industry buildings.  Our fleet screen meanwhile keeps getting more confusing with each new ship moving around. Currently, there are at least 4 new scouting targets and I’m thinking of adding a new batch of scouts soon.  OK, I’ve wasted enough of your time. Turn 211 sees the Akon-fleet we’ve observed finally arriving at Scusatan VII-5, our little occupied territory. As the defender, I’m now placing all 20 of our ships one by one. At first, you only have one ring closest to the planet free, but after all 6 of those spots are filled, the next one opens up, and so on. There’s not much choice here in the first turn, you just spend some time setting down ships and that’s it. The colony in the center now has some actual weapons after I added some missile launchers and impulse cannons to the large number of unarmed shield generators the AI built, so it is now actually a danger to enemy ships in its own right. Also uh oh, the little field on the lower rights tells me there’s a second battle waiting after the main event. Borekaris IV-1 again. Why is the AI so adamant on taking that underdeveloped shithole?   This is how it looks when a new ring opens for placement. The defender of a colony really has not much tactical flexibility in ship placement. The attacker gets an entire quadrant for placement, the defender… doesn’t. Ten enemy ships wait patiently for our 20 ships to assemble. But since our ships are naturally shittier, I’m still not sure how this battle will go.  After placement is finished, let’s take a look at what exactly we have. This one here is our scout: Green is movement points, orange is weapon range, red is hull strength, light blue shield strength and slightly darker blue weapon strength. As you can see, our scouts are fast and thanks to using Topsider-designs, they have pretty sturdy hulls. Our shields and weapons are poo poo. The lowest line of bulbs is for experience. As this one of our newest scouts, this crew has never, ever fired a shot. Experience gives bonus to hit and damage, and those bonuses can get ridiculous at higher levels.  This is our obsolete “frigate”-type of design. This ship class is actually older, and therefore has less weapon range. Thanks to being bigger, it has a second light blue bulb of shield strength, but while hull and firepower are way stronger then our scouts, the difference isn’t high enough to earn another bulb. The difference is there, but only invisible in the background calculations. The player does not need this info, says the dev team. Oh, and thanks to shooting the unarmed, helpless colony, our old frigates have managed to level up their experience! Both the invisible higher stats and the experience point mean this ship type is superior to our scouts, even if they’re slower and have less range.  Finally, the new batch of Claw Cruisers send as reinforcements. They have the same speed as our old frigates, but have higher range and chunky hulls. This cruiser is only a D-level ship using C-level engines and it’s already filled up half the available interface space with red hull dots. That’s a lot of heft. Three shield dots means our cruisers have arrived at the standard most races in Operation Eastside start with and our weapon strength has grown to the point the game finally has mercy and grants them a second dot for attack strength. They have no experience though, having come straight from the yards. Look at that hull strength!  That’s the one good thing the Topsider-ships have going for them: Absurdly sturdy hulls. Not really canon, but considering our shields and weapons are still laughable, I’ll take it. Better than nothing! At least the AI was nice enough to spread tons of shipyard buildings across Scusatan VII-5, because this means the other huge drawback for Topsider ships -their need for constant repairs every time a shot sails through their weak shields, is mostly negated.All ships taking damage in this battle I can just shove into the shipyards down there and have them back into action 1-2 turns later. Armor and shield generator repairs are mercifully fast.  The Akons see twice their number in Topsider-ships and just laugh. “Those silly lizards, thinking they’re people! Let’s get them.” They should have brought better ships, though. I did not expect the Akons to just roll in with what must have been their basic combat design from game start. Range, shield strength and attack power tell me those Akonid ships are just basically what you can expect with E-level tech. They’re stronger then our frigates and scouts, but our cruisers should chew through them fast. The Akons just immediately rush us like there’s just one scout instead of a full fleet waiting for them. I’d like to crack a joke about the AI being stupid, but there’s not really much you can do here. You can move, shoot and retreat and that’s it. If the Akons want a battle, rushing in asap is really their only choice. But seriously, the Akons really are the most amazingly arrogant space bastards, so this behavior is 100% canon We’re in a better position, as our Topsider-admiral could just decide to also rush forward, leaving the heavy guns of our colony behind. As that would be stupid, she of course instead awaits the Akons with open claws.  Just one turn later, the Akons smash headfirst into our fleet. And then learn that a range of 3 hexes is not really that much when one hex only has space for one ship. The AI obligingly fucks up by spreading their fire pretty badly. Only two of our ships get hit enough for their shields to visibly drop. We have it better, as most of our ships use D-level desintegrators which have range 4, so we manage to pummel one of the Akon ships so badly their shields go down, then some of the ships with less range or too far behind the main formation move into position to at least hit the ship a bit closer. There’s some additional information now visible: A blue bar represents active shields, a red bar hull strength. You only get to see a red bar after the shields have collapsed completely, after which only a shipyard will allow you to regain shields. As long as the shield generators are still working however, shields also regain strength each turn, as a percentage based on tech and maximum strength. This is shown as a slightly faded blue. If you look closely, you’ll see that the Akon ship below the damaged one has a tiny black sliver and a big chunk of faded blue in its bar. The faded blue is the shield strength it will regenerate after the turn ends, while the black sliver is the shield strength that is gone. If I stop shooting at this ship next turn, the black sliver will turn to faded blue and then regenerate, too. Our own corresponding ship on the left flank has instead a tiny faded blue sliver and a bigger part of the bar is completely black. That’s because our shields are so bad, they can’t even regenerate health as fast as our enemies, even though that’s one of our cruisers with “nominally” equally strong shields. In truth, they’re still weaker!  A bit later, we managed to destroy one Akonid ship, and started to reduce shields on two more. They managed to blast through the shields of one of our ships, and are on their way to collapse the shields of a second ship. Only our heavily armored hulls allow us to keep winning. Both fleets slowly rotate around each other, as ships on both sides keep moving to keep in range of their targets. The AI is now slightly better and has managed to keep firing on the same two ships. If it weren’t for our ridiculous hulls, we’d be trading ships nearly 1:1 at this point, which would be atrociously bad for a fleet with 2:1 numerical superiority.  As the battle continues, I realized the Akons try to sneakily move past the fleet towards the colony. And if the colony still did not have any weapons, that would be smart. And you know, if colony control didn’t depend on who owns the orbit after the battle. Or if a colony could be damaged by orbital bombardment. Clearly, the Akons are playing another, better game. After randomly deciding to look at the wreckage of this Akonid ship again I learn that the dot window updates during a battle, as no combination of E-level tech could create a ship this weak. I did not expect this level of accuracy, it’s kind of neat.  Some more looks reveal there was actually a second type of Akonid ships I missed earlier: This type is slightly worse in all stats except range and speed, which makes me believe this may have been a re-purposed colonizer or something.  And then my colony fires and that highlighted ship immediately turns to space dust. Assaulting a planet is not an easy task, even with only a few basic planetary forts defending it!  Thanks to the Akons occasionally moving their ships in range of my colony, the battles turns into a one-sided massacre. Their low range also allows me to keep moving my damaged ship out of range, forcing them to move either towards the planet or switch targets to a still undamaged ship.  And so it ends: Our fleet smashes the second-to-last Akonid ship, then the Akons try a suicide run to attack my damaged ship. The guns on my colony then space-delete their last space ship to space nothing. We have won! And only one of our ships needs to go into the yards! It’s like double-victory! This went a lot better than I dared to hope! But we had a lot of unintentional help: The Akons only brought old and obsolete ships, they were deeply outnumbered, and then bravely kept moving ships into range of my colony, allowing me to turn an almost even fight into a turkey shoot. This battle also tells me to avoid a deep space battle with even numbers at all costs.  Was there something else? Oh, yeah. The other battle. Time to run away again!  This time, the Terrans only send two ships, instead of a huge murder block covering half the map. Looking at the stats, I’d guess we’re seeing a heavily armed C-level design, or possibly a D-level design with C-level hulls. Now, if the Akons had brought ships like this one, we’d have been in serious trouble.  My final gently caress-up: The Terran ships are just fast enough I managed to trap myself in a corner. And the Terrans have long enough range to pulverize our scout. Of course I’m still trying, but the inevitable happens as I’m crossing their line of fire. Welp, that was one space battle too many, my little space scout. Rest in space pieces.  Now that was bitter. Sure, we successfully defended the colony we actually cared about, but our other enemies finally ran down our lonely scout. A good reminder that our scout defense system isn’t invulnerable! At least the Arkonids are still our friends. Not like those bastards, the Akons.  Normally I’d reload the earlier turn and try again until I manage to not move myself into a trap position, but that would mean fighting the main battle again, too. At this point I was out of patience and decided to roll with it. So, our colony in Borekaris has been ceded officially to the Terrans. The small population over there has been thrown into big long-range transmitters back towards Topsid and is therefore lost to us. In a couple days, our hypercom will receive a message that the population is heavily traumatized by the experience and needs medical attention, but will eventually come back to the Eastside*. *Because they’ll be mixed in with the constant stream of immigrants to our colonies.  The aftermath of the battle around Scusatan VII-5: A new scout is arriving in two turns, a failsafe in case the main fleet is needed elsewhere.  The only damaged ship in the fleet gets shoved into the local shipyards, as I promised.  Topsid Colonial Fleet Command decides to send a scout towards Borekaris IV-1 to see what is happening over there, now that all contact has been lost with the colony.  Considering recent events, the expansion of our fleet is accelerated. Three more Tail-class cruisers begin construction on Shaulires II.  Some good news: Scusatan VII-5 is now long enough in our hands for the economy to slowly gain speed. Most of the work was done by the AI, but I had to tear down and/or replace a lot of bullshit to let it get this far. If things continue on this trajectory, this colony may end up a major shipyard later.  “OK, fine. You’re allowed to offer us goods. But don’t tell anyone that we’re trading with barbarians! It could damage our image.” Battles, battles, and now back to trading. Every time I look at the tech screen on the upper right I cringe, though: Our progress towards B-level heavy industry is agonizingly slow. Or at least it feels this way, thanks to me having to do so much stuff each turn now.  And then all manner of poo poo hits the fan: Akons, Aras and Blues all decide to move in on Sheran I, one of our better colonies. The Aras and Akons are basically just scouting operations, and if they move close to the colony, our local defenses will obliterate them. The 49 native ships barreling down on us are a problem, however. Right now I’m hoping our SDS can deal with them, as I’m out of options. Even if I concentrate all 27 combat ships we currently have at one point (which we can’t, Sheran I is too far from both our capital and the Scusatan-system), this would just mean we lose them all. So let’s all hope I find a way to outmaneuver that fleet block flying towards our lizard-snouts! 8 turns before the end.  Turn 215 sees some well-needed comedy, as this little Akonid ship arrives one turn too late for the battle.  The Akonid ship doesn’t survive the first turn of battle. Turns out that while 2:1 odds in our favor are still scary, 20:1 odds are just fine!  Let’s end this update with some more scout reports: Fumal VI is a temptation. The planet is big and has lots of free space, but the habitability is so low, actually building a colony seems kind of pointless. We’ll pass for now.  Fusares I is a surprise: While still in painful territory, building something here isn’t outright madness. A colonizer is dispatched to catch this one before someone else can.  The current map of the New Homellete Cluster. The red lines are hostile fleets inbound on Sheran I. Seems like future updates will continue to be interesting.  Some more comic relief: Either the Akons are trying again to get Scusatan VII-5 back, this time with 4 ships, or this is another group that was send too late. I’d like to think the AI assumed it would be winning the battle, and now keeps sending tiny groups of ships as reinforcements for the “victorious” fleet. As long as they aren’t sending a large fleet of modern ships, we’ll be fine. To Be Continued
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May 31, 2021 20:41
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Rest in peace. How many times did that little SDS manage to juke superior enemy offensives?
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May 31, 2021 21:01
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PurpleXVI posted:Rest in peace. How many times did that little SDS manage to juke superior enemy offensives? I think 4 or so times? I'm not sure I should count the time I hosed up and got nearly blasted to pieces. In the future I'm thinking I should probably just beef up planetary defenses, as planetary buildings have some ridiculous firepower, and buildings are only limited by available free space, not numbers, so you can make some seriously insane fortress planets if you want to. Now you could argue that both exploiting an insane loophole in the program code and an insane loophole in game balancing are both equally brazen exploits, but at least with the latter we're still operating in the confines of what the devs wanted to happen Also, thread update (and cross-posted from my other LP): A huge idiot posted:OK, this is painfully embarrassing to admit. Uh, until July then, dear readers.
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Jun 23, 2021 18:39
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Oh, I forgot. This thread will probably suffer a bit less then my MO3-thread, since I want to start this one up again with 1-2 Perry Rhodan lore updates first. And since those don't need me wrangling tons of screenshots, they tend to be a lot less work so the chance of life short-changing you guys again is significantly lower!
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Jun 23, 2021 18:46
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Libluini: "Alright, in the distant space future, people are getting paid to play videogames for other people to watch, a strange and bizarre concept. But one fool has started playing a game that's driving him insane, yet his contract with StreamerCorp won't let him stop playing... let's join this strange space future person in this completely implausible future and see what happens..."
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Jun 23, 2021 19:58
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Which leads to the question: "Is the game just that bad, or is it possessed or actively made to make people insane?" Are we going true horror, Scooby-doo, or dystopia/takeover plot here?
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Jun 26, 2021 06:03
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Given what you've said so far about your ships I don't see how you will win without use of exploits etc...
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Jun 28, 2021 10:51
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Yeah OK, sorry, this thread is still basically on hiatus. I'm trying to work at least on my MO3-LP to move that big clunker forward to completion, but RL really doesn't give me enough time to write two screenshot-LPs concurrently. One of my LPs has to suffer. poo poo sucks right now, and will for a couple more months. After that, hopefully things will be stable enough I can re-allocate my mental strength from dealing with bureaucrats back to dealing with writing about video games
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Aug 4, 2021 19:40
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Oh well, time for another keep-this-still-running-LP-from-falling-into-the-archives post. You love those, right? So, there's still some stuff going on taking up my attention. The last thing was, which I really didn't need on top of everything else, at least very funny: Last week my neighbor decided I had too much freetime and flooded my apartment. Since then I'm forced to put a lot of my time into running damage control. She actually met me as I came back from work to warn me about the impending nightmare waiting on the other side of my apartment's door and confessed that she had left her bathtub to overflow, causing first massive water damage to her own apartment, and then because I live directly under hers, mine. Luckily the weirdo who re-did my apartment ages ago before I moved in put some kind of tiny metalstep into the part keeping floor and bathroom from the rest of my tiny apartment, so the water at least didn't flow out and reached my electronics. (Or my LPs would just be dead instead of delayed.) Right now I'm too stressed out to do much writing, so I hope you're still willing to wait while I'm screaming at my landlord over the phone to make them send repairmen faster. And now repeat after me, "There Is No Such Thing As An LP Curse". 
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Sep 8, 2021 18:39
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To keep my depressing life story out of this thread and more on topic, Perry Rhodan, the German SF-series this game is based on, is now 60 years old! Suck on that, Dr. Who! Germans rule, British drool  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WNXxEqqKpI But seriously, on 8th September 1961, the very first issue was published. 60 years, every week a new novella, like clockwork. Quite impressive, or what do you think?
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Sep 11, 2021 12:53
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Libluini posted:To keep my depressing life story out of this thread and more on topic, Perry Rhodan, the German SF-series this game is based on, is now 60 years old! Suck on that, Dr. Who! Germans rule, British drool It's actually pretty impressive they kept it running for so long. But on the other hand I'm also a big fan of narrative franchises just getting put to sleep after a certain amount of time, all stories and characters eventually need to take a break. Whether that's Dr. Who, Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman, Batman, etc. a clear start and end point are necessary.
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Sep 11, 2021 13:16
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 03:52 |
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The LP curse isn't real, you are cursed to LP. Subtle difference. I'm just amazed that the series hasn't had five or six total collapses/timeskips/resets by this point. Is there a wild West cowboy series spin-off yet? Seems like a staple of German fandoms.
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Sep 11, 2021 13:57
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