Gregory Goddard sits up as I watch; he apparently went to sleep in full uniform (in army green, for whatever reason), complete with his medals. They appear to be made of gold… and given that they're three feet tall and five wide, that's a lot of gold… assuming it's not a thin coat, which it could be. Not that material wealth matters with Controller around. Or me, for that matter.
The general looks around, furrows his brow in confusion for a moment, and then looks down, nods lightly when he sees me, and speaks in a voice that booms like thunder and makes my teeth rattle, “Fleet Admiral Abrams?”
Fortunately, I can fly. I head up to his eye level, setting myself a good thirty feet away from him, then make an illusory avatar of myself, scaled to sixty feet, via Spheres of Power talents. I'm not trying to fool him - just communicate in a convenient manner, “That's me,” I have my illusory avatar salute.
The last kraken blinks at me, “You're NOT using the array for that?”
He can see magic, huh? Good to know, “I'm not, no. It's cool, but too easy to disrupt the flow of power.”
He considers, “If there's more like you…” he shakes his head, “But that's not relevant. CONTROLLER!”
“Yes general?” My worshiper replies through the ship's comms.
“Do you still answer to me?” I have kind of already told him the answer to that, but if he needs to hear it from Controller, I'll let him.
And the general gets the answer I was expecting, “I have found the goddess, and answer to her now, Gregory. She raised me from the dead, and broke the curse of eternal hunger. I am hers for as long as she'll have me.”
General Goddard looks my avatar up and down, and asks, “So where is this goddess?”
“You've been talking to him,” she pipes back through the speakers.
The last Kraken looks at me far more carefully, “What are you, exactly?”
I roll my illusory avatar's eyes, “Complicated.” I'm most assuredly not giving you a breakdown until I trust you better, if ever, “but she's not exactly wrong.”
The old general pauses, “I see. Well… would you mind making me a nice unarmed Mark Six as a retirement package, then?”
I crinkle my forehead as my illusion remains still… but Controller has my back, “If you're ordering up a Mark Six, armed or not, you're not planning to retire. I am willing to build you a nice yacht, but nothing with military spec production capacity.”
The bomb is already diffused, so… “What’s a Mark Six?”
The general chuckles, “A scaled down version of The Manufactury. We deployed them to field outposts for resupply; they're not as fast as my lady here, and they don't have the onboard processing for new designs, but park one in the outskirts of a gas giant and you can spit out standard designs quickly enough… including more Mark Six's, and I’m sure you can guess where that leads. I was mostly asking to see if it was a matter of working under duress. Had she said yes, I would have come back to free her later.”
That next to last sentence was a lie, and the last was a half-truth, but I'm not going to call you on it, general, “But you'll settle for a nice unarmed civilian craft, right?” I inject.
“Oh yes,” he admits, “I will ply the currents I swim.”
Great; because I no longer want you anywhere nearby, even if I can't justify executing you to myself, “Great! Controller, do you have any suitable unarmed luxury yacht designs without that kind of fabrication tech?”
“They are what we gave the senators, yes,” my friendly reformed planet eater answers, “Bay thirty six Whisky, general; it'll be waiting by the time you get there.”
He raises his eyebrows, “So soon? The capacitors don't hold that much juice… even with a full belly I'd expect that to take a few days.”
“The goddess has blessed me mightily,” my new favorite ship replies, “The capacitors simply don't run out anymore.”
The general whistles, “If we could have done that…” he looks at me again, focusing through the illusion, “...a quiet retirement sounds nice, I think.”
And he means it this time, “I'm glad to hear it,” I smile, “Let’s get you to your new ship, hmm?” And honestly, I’m kind of curious what the senators were regularly given….
We walk out of the captain’s cabin, down the massive… okay, for him, it’s a standard sized… hallway to the nearest transport unit (the same one I used to get here). We hop in, and go… largely in silence. Mind you, while these things go VERY fast, the ship is bigger than most inhabited planets; it still takes a while to get anywhere. And we do chat a little along the way… nothing particularly meaningful, though, and he doesn’t try anything.
The hangar is, of course, enormous. There's air now - breathable air, even - but the ship in question isn't landed. The hangar looks more like an airport, with terminal gates and those tubes running “outside” to where the actual ship is docked… and it is not going to be able to land. It's Huge, on the starship scale… but I suppose that's necessary when the intended occupant is sixty feet tall. I walk him (and my illusory avatar) to the gate, where the general pauses.
“Do take care of her, Alex,” he seems… wistful? “...she's a fine lady, treat her right.”
He heads through the airlock before I figure out exactly what he means. No matter… I head back to the transport unit, and ask Controller, “so what's the interior like?”
She forms her avatar just to shrug, “It's a luxury yacht: It has a bathtub, a bed, a swimming pool, a holographic amusement center, and so on; a sky crane for getting on and off planets; a decoy husk and an emergency accelerator for getting out of fights; an AI… sorry, VI… with a skill expander to be able to fix itself up and take care of the occupants, a small conversion unit with a limited dataset for food, basic tools, and fancy clothing; and of course a small scanner… you know, a normal luxury yacht.”
Hmm… “Once you're up on current developments, I might want to have you design a few ships for me… or rather three, with copies. Can you do biomechanical ships?”
“No… living cells are too complicated and interdependent to encode on that scale. They don't pattern well, so anything bigger than…” she pauses, “let's go with ‘a mouse’... simply won't fit in the data buffers, and for obvious reasons a staged build just doesn't work with anything biological.”
I consider, “Because half of a living organism won't live long, and even if it did, the splice point would start healing over and stop meeting the assumptions necessary for a continued build,” and the result is a pretty gruesome thought. Probably good for cloning replacement organs, though… as long as they're smaller than a mouse, or are scanned while in a frozen state.
“Right,” the ship agrees, “Computing units, on the other hand, are carefully organized sets of small identical structures, so they compress well when the scanner understands what data is safe to lose, and structural components are much simpler still. But of course, the best compression comes from what I design myself.”
“Because then you're making use of pattern fills directly within the instructions,” I complete. “I definitely need to get you proper network access…."
And I spend the next several hours setting up a relay via The Retcon's network connection, making sure data will be properly sanitized with virus scans and firewalls (I don't want Controller catching anything), and sorting out how to adapt the data connection.
After that, I let Controller catch up on ship tech. I even give her a nice little budget for paid access when needed… and then I give her three ship specs I'd like her to build.
The first is for a fighter, with all the trimmings (power, shields, engines, weapons, computer, security, sensors, et cetera: as good as a fighter can get on an unlimited budget). The next uses an Explorer base, with one cargo hold (to carry things as a shuttle if needed), an extra power core housing (to have enough power), a launch tube (for the fighter, to act as a shuttle when needed) and all the best of everything else. The third design is, of course, a Supercolossal Base Ship with the colony ship framework for the base, all the expansion bays (most notably including a hangar, which can carry Medium ships on a Supercolossal frame), and the best of everything (I do keep half of the ship's weapons down to just Heavy weapons, though: Capital weapons cannot target Small or Tiny ships, you see). And I skip Spinal weapons entirely. Yeah, they do a lot of damage, but the tech just isn't there yet: They take two rounds to charge before they can fire, have a cool down period (variable, two to eight rounds of combat), and only do about three or four times the damage of equivalent capital weapons. So an Ultra X-Laser Cannon deals 6d8x10 damage, while the Super X-Laser Cannon deals 3d4x10 damage. The Super cannon fires three times (for 9d4x10) by the time the Ultra Cannon fires once for 6d8x10… and then the Super Cannon gets at least five more shots in (and as many as eight more) before the Ultra Cannon gets a second shot in. Add to that the higher power requirements and the aiming restrictions… and Spinal Mount weapons just aren't worth it, even before the cost difference.
It takes Controller a day to gather all the specific component designs, a week to render the Fighter plans, a month to render the Explorer plans, and three more months to render the Base Ship design.
Oh yes: And I have her include the replication tech in each. Given time and source materials, the Fighters can make basic supplies, the Explorers can make those and the Fighters, the Base Ships can make all of the above plus the Explorers, and can self-replicate… eventually.
That last might not be a great idea, but if the tech is possible, it’ll become known eventually again anyway: I may as well use it.
Alex seems to significantly prefer sustained damage, but he doesn't seem to be considering the fact that there's such a thing as burst damage, and that he's making a trade-off. It might be that the burst damage still isn't enough to make spinals worth it, but when the technology finally does mature, it'll be a legitimate sidegrade. Sometimes it's worth it to blast through a ship's shields and armor in a single hit, some targets are worth directing that kind of attention to. The Super Cannons will be the default damage option, but when a target shows up that needs EXPLODING RIGHT FCKING NOW, you'll want to be able to do the burst damage that Spinals might someday be able to do.
Also, I suggest engineering spinals so that charging and firing can be done in a single turn, even if it means making the cooldown time significantly longer to compensate. Mother of Learning has a suitable analogy here for emphasis, in the pre-story era, spellcasters used to spend a dozen seconds or more chanting for big spells, and then guns were invented and normals started shooting the people standing out in the open loudly chanting instead of cowering in fear at the scary words.
Many noble houses went extinct because none of their mages adapted to the new wartime paradigm, as it completely went counter to their images as powerful nobles and their egos couldn't take the hit. The new aristocracy adopted the stance that spells that can't be cast instantly are completely worthless in an actual combat situation, even if that means spell power and energy efficiency have to take hits to compensate.
So yes, generally speaking, I'm of the opinion that while spells that maximize energy efficiency and effect power are extremely useful, that's only for things that are not combat related. There's plenty of use-cases for such utility spells, but if you are in combat, your spells need to be so fast in casting that they can't be reliably interrupted or countered. How much damage it does doesn't matter if you can never get such a spell off in the first place.
Nah, he understands big hits vs. damage over time just fine, and would normally prefer the big hits; The only reason he's not using his big guns (spells) in character-scale combat is because he doesn't want to level up quicker.
As Alex said in regards to Spinal weapons: "the tech just isn't there yet". "Might someday"? Sure. Most Spinal weapons do about three times the damage of their Capital weapon counterparts... and can't be fired until turn three (because they have two rounds of required charging), then have a variable cooldown before you can start charging them up again (so the firing pattern will look like "nothing, nothing, BOOM!, Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, BOOM!"... you're only going to see that second shot in the most protracted space battles). Capital weapons? Can fire every round. So with most Capital vs. Spinal weapons, it's a choice between "X this round, X next round, and X on round three" for capital vs. "3X on round three" for Spinal. There's a handful that are 4X instead, but it's still "on round three". If they were on round 1? The big shot with a cooldown would be justifiable... but that's not how they work in the game. As is? They're mostly there to frighten players (it requires a ship size that PCs can't normally crew, and is extra expensive). Facing a bunch of smaller ships that can be taken down in two hits by capital weapons? The Spinal weapon is overkill, and a complete waste: A Capital weapon would work better. Facing a single ship that will take several hits to take down? The rare 4X Spinal weapon might, sometimes, be a choice on par with a Capital weapon... if the power and build costs didn't mean you could have a Capital weapon plus a Heavy weapon for the same resources, because that will basically always put you over in damage output before the Spinal weapon can get a shot off. For reference, the most devastating Spinal weapon is the Vortex Devourer at 6d12x10 damage; the matching Capital weapon is the Vortex Cannon at 2d12x10 damage. Three hits of 2d12x10 is even with one hit at 6d12x10. The Spinal weapon catches up to the Capital weapon's damage on round three, falls behind on round four, and then stays behind forever. Spinal weapons, as they are, are basically always the worse choice.
Also: The heavy-duty combat spells are fine, even with guns in play: You just need to make sure the caster has support preventing them from taking the hit for a while, or you need to catch the targets by surprise. A dozen strong peasants carrying solid wooden doors as a mobile shield wall, say: Train them on exactly when to get out of the way, and you're good to go (I haven't read that book series to know if there's a reason that's not viable). Tactics actually beat out tech on the "importance in war" front. I mean, get guns yourself, and trained folks in their use, sure. But if you have the trained casters, use them: If it's a large engagement that will take a while, the energy efficiency actually will be useful.
Also: Rate of Fire isn't what guns changed until very late (relatively) in their development! The English Longbowmen could actually fire *faster* (and at least equally effectively) than firearms until roughly the mid 1900's. The big benefits of guns (and earlier, crossbows) that made them supplant the bow were as follows:
1) Transport costs on ammo were lower.
2) They get through plate armor more effectively.
3) They require less training to use effectively.
The last was also the biggest: You can stockpile weapons and ammunition more easily than you can good people. Bowmen need constant exercise and practice (for years), in order to be good for deploying in war: If you want 100 bowmen for that war that's brewing and will probably ignite? You'll need to feed and house them for a good five or ten years in advance. If you want crossbowmen or musketeers? A few months training will do well enough, they don't need nearly as much in the way of specialized muscle development or breathing control... which means you can keep a few good trainers on hand and conscript some healthy peasants for cheap.
Thank you for reading!
Well, my predictions about how Captain Squidward would be turned out delightfully wrong. It's rather nice to finally have a random meeting with a character that doesn't devolve into strangeness and/or death.
There were a couple of those early on too, although you probably don't really remember Ayako or Olthiss. There was also the detective, the lawyer... I suppose it depends on how many chapters they need to be involved in to count. Admittedly, they are the minority, though.
Thank you for reading!
@Jack_simth Honestly, it seems like this story is running on not just rpg mechanics, but narrative rules too. In most ttrpg's characters are either important, irrelevant, or an enemy. There's not really much overlap there.
@lupenthewolf Yeah. DM's role in this one isn't the norm. Solo campaigns are like that.
Thank you for reading!