Here's my idea for my entry into Fenspace. Part tramp steamer, part news van, part data haven. All disfunctional family. Comments? Complaints? Nitpicks? Flames?
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Ship Name: The Inelegant Truth
Created by Jonathon Helscher (Herr Bad Moon)
Registry Number: SPS-253
Base Hull: 175ft Alaskan Commercial Crab Fisher
Drive Type: Speed (Cruising: .07c Flank: .09c)
Owner of Record: Jonathon Helscher
Flag of Record: Nominally United States of America, but only if you squint
Purpose: Medium cargo hauler and news cataloger
Launched: April 27th, 2009
Crew:
Jonathon Helscher, Captain/Owner/Action! Historian
Cynthia Gunderson, First Officer/Pilot/Ship Surgeon
Deidrict Dieter Gunderson, Engineer
Percival Perry Doper, Communications Officer/System Administrator/AI Psychologist
Jeremiah Breckenridge, Security/Bodyguard/Cook
Toni, Ship Gopher/Official Ship Kid Sister
Supplementary Crew:
Callisto (Ship AI)
Gay Deceiver (L.R.D.'s AI)
Brother-Captain Galvius (Mainframe AI)
Supplementary Vehicles:
L.R.D. (Little Red Deathtrap): Handwaved 1990 GEO Metro. Serves as all purpose ship shuttle. Gay Deceiver vehicle AI.
Little Nicky: Handwaved jet ski which serves as a sort of space ATV for when the crew goes EVA.
Known Vehicle Quirks:
* She dives like a crippled whale: - Despite being equipped with a speed drive, given a straight line to go in, the Truth can make faster headway than her outward appearance and even engine capabilities would indicate, but can't turn worth a damn and can be out maneuvered by ships of similar speed. No amount of tinkering with the engines has yet to improve this state.
* Rough Seas Ahead: - Whenever ship speeds exceed .06c, the Truth will begin to exhibit gravitational anomalies that resemble a ship rolling in rough seas. Increasing to flank exacerbates this.
* Gravity's a fickle bitch: - Whenever the ship enters its night, artificial gravity ceases to work until dawn. Nobody knows why this happens, so everyone sleeps in sleeping bags that are anchored to the floor.
* Bitch, get your hands OFF my men! - The ship AI Callisto is jealously protective of the male members of the crew, treating any women that speak to them with deep suspicion, let alone those who board her. This barely hidden hostility becomes an order of a magnitude worse for girl AIs that the Truth comes in contact with. This makes the crew something of social pariahs in some fendoms, and like B.A. on A-Team, the crew have to come up with lurid and increasingly ridiculous ways to work around this. This jealously does extend somewhat to First Officer Cynthia, but not to ragamuffin Toni, who's too much of a cutie pie.
* While the enemies of the Emperor still draw breath, there can be no peace: - Something went wonky with the application of handwavium to Jon's personal computer during its uplifting to its current status as super!computer. The AI was supposed to be a nondescript male of the faceless office worker type. But somebody didn't do a good job of purging the hard drive so instead, what was created was one with the heroic, if scary and kinda evil religious zealots of the Imperial Space Marines of the Gamers Workshop variety. Brother Captain Galvius thinks of himself as a fallen soldier serving as a machine spirit entombed in a virtual coffin. He considers Jon to be his Chapter Master and the other members of his crew to fill various roles in line with those in the Empire of Man. Given the state of relations with most of the governments on Holy Terra, and the Truth, Galvius believes they have come under the influence of foul Chaos sorcery and encourages anybody who will listen their next job should be to burn the heretics. Still, he does his job of data retrieval and broadcast of Jon's writing with competence. His security functions are actually kind of scary after you really look at them, and Perry gets queasy just thinking about it.
* The enemy of my enemy is my enemies' enemy: - The three principle AIs that live on the Truth all hate each other. If allowed, they will bicker to an extent that ship efficiency will drop 30% until they are hard lock separated from each other's networks.
Known Crew Quirks:
* Are we there yet? - The social dynamics on board eerily resemble those of a family on an extend road trip, constantly getting on each others nerves and only getting along when they can jump ship for a day or two. And though Cynthia has reluctantly taken up the role of Ship Mom, nobody wants to be the Dad. Jon owns, and theoretically is in charge, of the boat, but he acts more like a passenger and only gives orders akin to go here how fast can we get to Luna? and Hey, I just got off the comm with some of those weirdo's in charge of terraforming Venus. Yeah.... we can't go back there for awhile. And guess where we gotta be by Friday. Dieter gives ever indication of settling into the surly uncle model. Perry is too busy trying to avoid having a nervous breakdown keeping the peace between the AIs. And Jeremiah says that he doesn't get paid enough for that. Toni just rolls her eyes at not being asked her opinion.
* Fighting the media is like wrestling with pigs. You might win but you will get dirty: - Don't call them journalists. Just don't. It won't end well.
* This will keep me from curing cancer, making it so my birthday isn't a national holiday. And you know how much I hate to work on my birthday! - Cynthia has very little patients for all things Fen. While in med school, she was tolerantly amused by a roommate that was really into Buffy and Angel, but living in Fendom has left her stressed out and jaded. Geeking out over something in her prescene causes a angry explosion in a one to one ratio.
* They kick high.... really high: - Perry's has a poorly hidden facination with magical girl shows and the members of Crystal Millenium and would have eventually joined the faction if he hadn't taken a job as sysadmin for a apparent cargo hauler. His mood improves when in contact with fellow enthusiasts, but this doesn't happen often given the rest of the crews scorn for the genre.
* F*ck you! F*ck you! F*ck you! You're cool. F*ck you! I'm out. - Dieter Gunderson hates everyone on board except his daughter Cynthia, and only stays on because he can't bear to see his beloved ship captained into an asteroid by some punk suburbanite kid who never had to really work for a living. So he sits in the engine room or the cargo hold, tinkering with various hardtech fixes. But even there, when he can almost forget he's not hurtling through the vacuum of space, he still hates everyone. So very much.
* And Iiiiiiii will alwaaaaays luv youuuuuu! - Jeremiah is a former Secret Service agent, who left under undisclosed reasons. Physically imposing at 6'3 and having played tight end for Maryland, he knows how to use it for intimidation factors when necessary. He makes a mean curry though.
* If this were cave man times I'd be married and have kids! - The runaway orphan answering only as Toni has a tendency to be moody, short tempered, sarcastic, flighty, lazy, smug, and frankly a gigantic bitch at times. So she's a normal teenager. On a crab fisher. In space.
Faction: Technically none, though Jonathon is a member of the Blue Blazer Irregulars.
Home Port: Port of Tacoma, Washington State, United States of America, Earth
Current Location: Northern polar orbit around Mars
Status: ACTIVE
Trivia:
* The Inelegant Truth used to be the rusting hulk of the commercial crab fisher Autumnal Equinox, owned by Dieter. Dieter lost it in a drunken card game to Jon in the spring of 2008. Nobody knows this, but Jon was cheating in the last hand when he managed to mark the aces. To this day, Jon's ashamed of this act but will never admit it.
* The Truth serves as the base and transport for Jon's quasi-journalistic enterprise that's part blog, part gonzo reporting, part living library. She runs cargo on the side to keep the ship running and the crew fed and paid. Accusations of actual journalism annoy the crew to no end.
* The Truth mounts an aft mounted deck cannon taken from a WWII era submarine, waved to fire in space and modified do so without a crew. Towards the bow is the turret system that was scavenged from a Sherman tank. Welded and sealed to the hull and jury rigged with a firing system that can rotate the turret far faster than the original could. These, along with the ships speed, serve as the primary deterrence from Black Hats.
* Even though the car AI Gay Deceiver was named after the car from several Robert Heinlein books, Jon doesn't actually like any of them overly much. The only other car AI name he could think of was K.I.T.T and Gay's gender ended up being female so nix went that plan. He does finish all conversations with her by saying you're a smart girl, Gay, mostly because she likes it and doesn't start as many fights with Callisto.---------------
-Jon
Being the Mariner hitting coach is like being the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts.
-Poster on USSMariner.com
---
Jon
"And that must have caused my dad's brain to break in half, replaced by a purely mechanical engine of revenge!"

That's the end of the Mayan calandar, if you missed that line in the Grand Unified Timeline.
First, the concept, then the supporting details:
In brief, that's when someone finds proof of alien intelligence. It's not first contact, it's not even planetary ruins or a wrecked ship - and no one in the character space is going to know about it for a while, because it's a two-year trip back on a straight line for Sol.
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December 12, 2012
Unnamed system, approx 1000ly from Sol
(find a registry number that's suitable)
It was three years since the USS Miranda launched - she'd been the result of probably the only wide-spread privately funded space program that would ever exist, a collaboration between several major colleges, the SETI group, and (in a burst of mad brilliance that had pulled in most of the individual donations) the Trekkies. The actual structure of the ship had sort of accreted on the back side of the Large Array radio telescope framework that was her major hardtech "eye" for Serious Astronomy, and most of the internal volume was tankage for the two strains of handwavium that fed the ship's engines and power system, but in that breif period between when Handwavium became relatively public knowledge and when the mundane governments cracked down on it, they'd gotten enough funding in place, and with the enthusiastic design and programming assistance of hundreds of people too attached to their regular lives or unwilling to jump into the black on a wing and a prayer they'd gotten environmental and suplly systems that could actually support a five-year mission.
They'd followed a somewhat irregular course to this point, with regular stops to point the Main Sensor Dish back at Sol to get a look "into the past" in the sky beyond, but this was the furthest out they'd get, it was time to turn back for the long trip home, with only two stars on the way to break up the trip. For now, though, it was time to put the Big Eye to its other use...
The ship flipped gracefully in space, the sensitve radio ears designed to listen to the whispers of the stars now seeking out the sounds of civilization... and for the very first time, there was something to hear. Not the multitudinous cacophony of an inhabited, technological world's communications, just a single signal, a candle in the endless night playing out an endless loop of squawks and chirps, several voices in an approximation of harmony before breaking up into recogniseable cheers, then breif passages of single voices, before repeating. The whole thing took about twenty minutes to cycle.
It was remarkably similar to to recording made for the drone they'd been getting ready to drop off in this system themselves, to mark the furthest extent of human exploration. Sometime in the tenth hour of the ship-wide party following the announcement of the find, the captain wondered if there would be video screens when they physically examined the beacon, as they'd planned to leave running on their own.

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The nature of the aliens, how long ago the beacon was left, how long it would take to find them even if the Miranda gambled on their being freindly, willing and able to provide resupply if they blew off returning (because they are at RTB with only a very narrow safety margin) and how anyone else will take it is up to developement, and this is strictly an Idea Box submission - there's lots of story before winter 2014/2015, which is the absolute earliest the Miranda could be back.
And yes, though far from show-accurate, the ship is named that because it's basically a big round platter with a thicker addition on the back and two engines hanging off the bottom. No rollbar, and the upper surface has a small forest of antennas. THere's also a carefully maintained dived between the 'waved systems (drive, enviro, navigation) and the pure hardtech (astronomy, mainly) espescially in the computers - the Science Network has absolutely no wireless access, the wired network is maintained in different access spaces than the 'wavetech data lines, and even the power supply is fed through three stages of hardtech converters and regulators to avoid the possibility of handwave info contamination. Transfer to the 'wavetech system is very rare, because it means burning one of the limited supply of CDRs on the hardtech side - there is no transfer back from 'wavetech to hardtech, ever. Serious Science has no room for waving hands.
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

Could some one put up a link to the FFML? I lost the link when my computer crashed last week, and i have not been able to find it since then.Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.

What's with all the deleted posts in the Other Fanfic area?--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

As I recently finished the Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-ohki OAV series (and GXP) this question has been bugging me and I figure I'd get other peoples opinions.
Given their TM Cannon depictions (power and personality), is it at all possible to consider the Chousin as avatars of the Three?
(I have an Idea for a Stagger based around the answer to this and I want to know if it's viable.)
(P.S. Chapter 3's in pre-read! Wahoo!)

So, here's a little teaser, I'm still reading the rules and current exploits, so more will come later. So far, I figure Candy's is somewhere between the mining asteroids and the 'central hub' whose name escapes me at this time. But at least you have a place you can go for....entertainment. -HLW-
~~~~~
Im a cook, thats what I do, thats what I know. Where do I work? I dont like to advertise, but I guess I should. I work at Candy Apple Reds. Yeah, thats the place. The brothel. No, I said Im just the cook and there are no freebies at Candys. Get it through your thick skull or Ill have you banned before you even get there.

Neon Genesis 1/2 - Principal Gendou runs a high school in the Nerima ward of Tokyo-3, while Kouchou Kuno is the wacky leader of a desperate battle to save the city against the onslaught of the Angels..
Angel the First - Xian Puiel.
Angel the Second - Ukyou Kuonjiel
etc, etc, etc.. Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

June 3rd, 2012
"On Earth, gentlemen, Golf is the game of business executives, doctors, and other self-important types." I stooped over and pressed a tee into the asteroid.
"Here, however, Golf is nothing more than a handy supply for physics experimentation and vector analysis training equipment." I set a ball on the tee, the small magnet in the tee holding the ferrous golf ball in place in microgravity.
"Constant consistent training in vector analysis, and an in-depth knowledge of Newton makes a damn fine skill set out here." I unsheathed a driver, and addressed the ball.
"Out here, vector analysis can mean the difference between hit or miss, literally. Whether you're blasting cannon at a Reaver ship." I pulled back, swung, and slammed the tiny white spheroid off into it's own orbit.
"Or whether you're trying to park the car at the end of the day." In the distance, one of the Boys surged out from behind another asteroid, catching the golf ball and bounding towards me.
"I'm not telling you to use my equipment or buy from me. I'm just telling you that your AI, your equipment, it can all be cheated or compromised. But the mark one eyeball..."I scratched my head, considering some of the obvious biomods I'd seen recently. "Ok, the _human_ eyeball, and the human brain can't be fooled that easily. Especially if you train. Case in point, gentlemen. Is that going to hit us?"
I pointed behind us to a rather nice nickle-iron lump spinning down on us from the Belt like ten million tons of devestation. Most people jumped nervously when they saw it, some stood their ground, and one or two laughed. I let them hash it out, playing their various passive sensors at it. I pushed a button on my belt, bent over, and retrieved my tee.
"With some good training in vector analysis, you could have made a call on that immediately. You would have known that yes, that big chunk of rock and pain is going to land here, and would have been able to plan accordingly." The Suburban with the ball dropped silently onto the asteroid next to me, and one of his brothers fell down a moment later on the other side, leaving the three of us facing the small crowd of NewFen I'd agreed to give a talking to.
"And it is going to hit us. We've actually got about a minute, that thing's smaller and moving quicker than it looks at first glance, so let's saddle up and get along, folks."
I herded them into the waiting Suburbans, idly fondling the steel-cored golf ball in my right hand. So far, the death toll from 'simple stupidity' was pretty damn low, Up Here, and anything I could do to keep it that way was a Damn Fine Thing, especially with the Reaver threat and the mobilization efforts there.
Which didn't mean that I wasn't gonna call in this favor sometime soon. Maybe I could parlay it into a nice homecooked meal somewhere, by someone who knows how to cook. It's been a while since I've been off the rock, SOS-con notwithstanding.
We filed and shuffled into the Suburbans, a dozen 'new meat' Fen just up from the big blue marble, one plug ugly dwarf with a hankering for a steak, and his good buddy. Hopefully we'd be back this way again, hopefully none of them would become just a name on a memorial.. Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

If all the stress keeping me off my emotional balance weren't bad enough, I had the unfortunate privilege, late that Thursday morning, of getting caught between Chris' two ... well, I never did get a good idea what to call them. "Girlfriends" wasn't *quite* the right word. "Paramours" implies more intimacy than their body language and verbal denials allowed for. "Steady dates" sounds too high-schoolish. "Harem" would have gotten me killed. Very slowly. "Bookends" might have been the most accurate -- they seemed to automatically gravitate to the opposite sides of everything, both physically and metaphorically. Whatever. All I know is that they were hooked up with him through a combination of honest attraction and divine fuck-up that could have had me laughing for even longer than the story of Chris' apotheosis did, if it weren't so twisted. As a result, Police Girl and Buffy Coed -- Ami and Rachel -- seemed destined to oppose and orbit each other as well as Chris.I didn't learn that right away. Oh, no. I had to make a mistake first. I had to *ask* them about it.It was almost lunchtime the day after the angel-related unpleasantness. I was still keeping myself more or less separate from the rest of the house's inhabitants, if only to spare them (and me) the effects of my still-hair-trigger temper. That meant I'd taken over the temple building proper as my personal domain again.I'd seen Megumi to the gate earlier, and not long after that watched from a distance as Skuld headed off toward the NIT campus by herself. Chris apparently had no morning classes on Thursdays, though, and I had not yet seen him by the time I ensconced myself in my temporary retreat for the morning. I spent several hours performing kata -- empty-handed, at first, to warm up, and then once I was limber and ready, while wielding a bokken. During the latter, I did my best to integrate what Chris had been showing me into a coherent whole. The fact that he had begun by working me in a single style to begin with helped me a great deal. I found, however, that I missed making up my own names for the stances, positions and moves. Somehow terms like "hasso hidari gamae", "chudan-no-kame" and "jodan-no-kame morote uchi kiri otashi kudashi", as descriptive as they were in Japanese, seemed far less interesting to me than coming up with something of my own like "Strike of the Wild Mallard" or "The Scarlet Pumpernickel Parry".Dull or not, though, I worked on those new moves all morning, both singly and in combinations. I concentrated on burning them deep into muscle memory, to make them as automatic as my unarmed combat moves have become. It wouldn't happen all in one morning, not by a long shot, but the key to the process was repetition. And the sooner you start, the sooner it's accomplished. I only stopped when Chris's bookends showed up and I realized that I was hungry.I heard them before I saw them, but then again, most of the neighborhood could probably have said the same. They were engaged in a calm and dignified discussion of important issues of the day. No, wait, that was somebody else. *These* two were all but screaming at each other at the tops of their lungs just outside the gates to the complex, which did nothing to mitigate their volume that I could detect. Even so, I had no idea what they were actually arguing about. Long before they'd gotten within earshot the two of them had already devolved into sniping at each other. The rather shrill exchange jolted me out of the state of intense focus into which I'd slipped, and reminded me that it was close to lunch time. As I started to debate with myself over how comfortable it would be for me to eat with the "family", I slid the bokken I was using into my belt and grabbed the towel I'dbrought in with me. I didn't really need it, but I wiped downmy brow anyway and then draped it around my shoulders.The two girls were just entering the compound when I stepped out of the temple. I was the only person in the yard at that moment other than them, and I watched as they crossed the flagstones so absorbed in their argument that they were completely unaware of my presence. From what I overheard, they were bickering about which of them was the better match for Chris, and it was already rapidly degenerating into the "so there!" and "I know you are but what am *I*?" level of debate. They weren't more than halfway across when I grimaced at the irritating stridency of their voices and decided that I'd had more than I could take. Taking advantage of their inattention, I blended speed and stealth to slip up behind them unnoticed. Staying just out of arm's reach I asked, very loudly and obnoxiously, "Just what the *hell* is it with you two?"
-- Bob
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...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

A few comments in various threads (including a couple of Glossary entries) got me to thinking about tourism in Fenspace. Obviously, some 'Danes are going to want to head out and see the sights. But what's in place to accomodate them?
The obvious first step for a 'Dane's Grand Tour is Luna - it's close to Earth, and has all those historical sites, including Tranquility Base.
The next obvious location is Stellvia, if ony because it's easier for most Fen ships to dock at a station than it is to land on a minor-planet-sized body. ("Half the traffic in Fenspace passes through these hulls...")
Then... what?
Do the Crystal Cities of Venus have the facilities to handle tourism, or are they "just" a series of terraforming stations?
What's available on Mars, or Phobos or Deimos?
Is there sufficient infrastructure past the Belt to make it worthwhile to run a passenger service out there? (The Belt itself is duller than dishwater from a tourism point of view, no matter how interesting it really is. As an analogy, tourists in Pennsylvania visit Pittsburgh, not Allentown.)
Would anyone visit Mercury? It seems to be just a source of raw materials, from what I've seen posted. On the flip side, the view of Sol can't be beat...

-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012