Here's a small sample of what I've been working on... It would have been from my Robotech step... but the fates have been unkind enough to snatch that away from me. If anyone knows how to extract individual files from a windows backup, please let me know.
"Welcome to the Reg!" chorused a group of girls. They all stood behind counters with terminals to either side of a doorway in the back and wore colorful service costumes that would not have been out of place in Akihabara. Then the door in the back opened and Gosconge swaggered out.
"Well, if it isn't our show-stealer from yesterday. You said your name was Corporal Grimm, right? Got a first name?"
"Friends call me Garrick, miss?"
"Just call me Goscogne."
"A pleasure to make your acquaintence, Miss Goscogne."
"Bah, no need for the 'miss' part, just Goscogne will do."
"Excuse me, Miss Gosco?" asked Meia.
"Argh, not you too! What do you want?"
"If Corporal Grimm will be fine with you by himself, then I need to attend to my other duties."
"Yeah, whatever. I'll have the Corporal here eating out of my hands in no time." Meia neatly about-faced and marched back out of the Reg, leaving me with Goscogne. "Alright then, now that she's gone, let's go see about that bird of yours. I took the liberty of calling up our chief engineer to start looking at it. Hope you don't mind."
"As long as she doesn't poke at it too much without me around, I don't mind."
"Eh, don't worry there, Garrick. Parfait is one of the best you could ask for. There isn't much she doesn't know about, and what she doesn't know she picks up pretty quick."
"Total gear-head, huh? Sounds like a girl after my own heart."
"You're an engineer, too?"
"Only by inclination. I've been trained as a maintenance tech before, but circumstances stuck me into the pilot's seat pretty suddenly."
"Is that so? Say, rumor's going around that you come from some place where men and women live together. How does that work?"
"Some teasing, some joking, and a whole lot of misunderstandings."
Gosconge laughed. "Now that I can actually see, especially after today."
"Yeah, tell me about it. I knew of one man, real sweet natured guy. Bigger than a puffed marshmallow with a simple sort of outlook. At an evening class we were attending, some girl from the morning class started leaving notes for him. After a few exchanges, he came to the conclusion that she was playing with him."
"What? You mean she was really..."
"Flirting? Yup. Poor guy just didn't understand it, even after I and several others explained that this is how it's been done for ages, and that when a girl teases him, the best thing is to smile and tease her back. Without that give and take, there's just no fuel for the spark to catch fire."
Goscogne scoffed. "Wow. You really have been around women, haven't you?"
"That's putting it mildly. Ah, there's my lovely bird!"
"It's a little drab colored to be lovely."
"Eh, that's life in the military. You want that nice flight leader paint job then you gotta earn it."
"Hey you guys!" called out Parfait as we approached. "I gotta say, your people have done some amazing things with the technology you had available. What do you call this stuff anyhow?"
"We call it Robotechnology - a high-octane brew of high-energy physics, quantum computing, and materials sciences."
"So how much can you tell me about it?"
"I can give you the gross details, and I even got the tech-pubs on a ruggedized E-reader. But if you want the finer details about reflex reactions and the particle physics involved, then you're out of luck."
"That's okay. I'm pretty sure I can figure out the rest myself. So, let's get started. I noticed that this is basically a variable geometry airframe that's been equipped with vernier thrusters. How does this thing fly in space?"
"Well, once it's out of atmosphere, the intakes close up and fuel is injected into the fusion turbines instead of air. That, combined with a thrust vectoring system and gravitational vector controls, this thing will fly in vacuum just like it would in the soup."
"So it's method of flight is not unlike our Dreads, then. That should at least give me some points of commonality to work with. What about weaponry?"
I shrugged. "Lasers for the most part. There's four five-megawatt lasers, two in the nose and one over each engine cowl. The sensor-head down at the bottom has a turreted one-megawatt laser and is generally used for picking off inbound missiles. There's also the gunpod. That is a 20mm gattling gun with a 15,000 round magazine. As for missiles, I can carry about three on each of the four pylons. It really depends on the size and weight of the munitions, of course."
"Not bad," said Parfet. "I think we can upgrade you in a few areas, but before that tell me about the transformation system."
"Nothing fancy there except for a whole lot of moving parts. There are three forms, the fighter mode, the guardian mode, and the battloid mode. Right now, it's in battloid. The legs you see are really the engine nacelles with the thrust vectoring nozzles flared open to distribute the weight. As you can see, they're attached to the front-end of the nose. The trickiest part of the transformation is switching the nacelles around between the guardian and battloid modes. If you look carefully up into the torso area from behind the Veritech, you can see the hard points where the nacelles attach. One set of those hard points are on armatures that swing down and put the nacelles in the right spot to reconnect at the nose, and vice versa when it's switching back.
"If you don't mind, I can at least demonstrate the transformation from battloid to guardian for you."
"You can do that later. Tell me about maintenance now."
"Well, as I said to someone else, these Valkyries are pretty light on maintenance. Regular lubrication and cleaning keeps them in top form, and the engines themselves rarely need service. In fact, the only time I've ever seen a fusion-turbine serviced was when one got blown out by a lucky shot."
"I see... Would you say that this fighter of yours is modular?"
"It was one of the design requirements. In fact, a pilot can jettison the nose and cockpit section of his ship, and another can come and carry them in place of the gun pod - it's usually mounted ventrally on the fighter's centerline."
"That's perfect then! With some modifications we can probably launch your ship the same way we launch the rest of our dreads!"
"Well, it's good to know that I won't cause too much of an imposition for you folks."
"Let's get started now! I'm gonna need to see those tech pubs of yours."
"Welcome to the Reg!" chorused a group of girls. They all stood behind counters with terminals to either side of a doorway in the back and wore colorful service costumes that would not have been out of place in Akihabara. Then the door in the back opened and Gosconge swaggered out.
"Well, if it isn't our show-stealer from yesterday. You said your name was Corporal Grimm, right? Got a first name?"
"Friends call me Garrick, miss?"
"Just call me Goscogne."
"A pleasure to make your acquaintence, Miss Goscogne."
"Bah, no need for the 'miss' part, just Goscogne will do."
"Excuse me, Miss Gosco?" asked Meia.
"Argh, not you too! What do you want?"
"If Corporal Grimm will be fine with you by himself, then I need to attend to my other duties."
"Yeah, whatever. I'll have the Corporal here eating out of my hands in no time." Meia neatly about-faced and marched back out of the Reg, leaving me with Goscogne. "Alright then, now that she's gone, let's go see about that bird of yours. I took the liberty of calling up our chief engineer to start looking at it. Hope you don't mind."
"As long as she doesn't poke at it too much without me around, I don't mind."
"Eh, don't worry there, Garrick. Parfait is one of the best you could ask for. There isn't much she doesn't know about, and what she doesn't know she picks up pretty quick."
"Total gear-head, huh? Sounds like a girl after my own heart."
"You're an engineer, too?"
"Only by inclination. I've been trained as a maintenance tech before, but circumstances stuck me into the pilot's seat pretty suddenly."
"Is that so? Say, rumor's going around that you come from some place where men and women live together. How does that work?"
"Some teasing, some joking, and a whole lot of misunderstandings."
Gosconge laughed. "Now that I can actually see, especially after today."
"Yeah, tell me about it. I knew of one man, real sweet natured guy. Bigger than a puffed marshmallow with a simple sort of outlook. At an evening class we were attending, some girl from the morning class started leaving notes for him. After a few exchanges, he came to the conclusion that she was playing with him."
"What? You mean she was really..."
"Flirting? Yup. Poor guy just didn't understand it, even after I and several others explained that this is how it's been done for ages, and that when a girl teases him, the best thing is to smile and tease her back. Without that give and take, there's just no fuel for the spark to catch fire."
Goscogne scoffed. "Wow. You really have been around women, haven't you?"
"That's putting it mildly. Ah, there's my lovely bird!"
"It's a little drab colored to be lovely."
"Eh, that's life in the military. You want that nice flight leader paint job then you gotta earn it."
"Hey you guys!" called out Parfait as we approached. "I gotta say, your people have done some amazing things with the technology you had available. What do you call this stuff anyhow?"
"We call it Robotechnology - a high-octane brew of high-energy physics, quantum computing, and materials sciences."
"So how much can you tell me about it?"
"I can give you the gross details, and I even got the tech-pubs on a ruggedized E-reader. But if you want the finer details about reflex reactions and the particle physics involved, then you're out of luck."
"That's okay. I'm pretty sure I can figure out the rest myself. So, let's get started. I noticed that this is basically a variable geometry airframe that's been equipped with vernier thrusters. How does this thing fly in space?"
"Well, once it's out of atmosphere, the intakes close up and fuel is injected into the fusion turbines instead of air. That, combined with a thrust vectoring system and gravitational vector controls, this thing will fly in vacuum just like it would in the soup."
"So it's method of flight is not unlike our Dreads, then. That should at least give me some points of commonality to work with. What about weaponry?"
I shrugged. "Lasers for the most part. There's four five-megawatt lasers, two in the nose and one over each engine cowl. The sensor-head down at the bottom has a turreted one-megawatt laser and is generally used for picking off inbound missiles. There's also the gunpod. That is a 20mm gattling gun with a 15,000 round magazine. As for missiles, I can carry about three on each of the four pylons. It really depends on the size and weight of the munitions, of course."
"Not bad," said Parfet. "I think we can upgrade you in a few areas, but before that tell me about the transformation system."
"Nothing fancy there except for a whole lot of moving parts. There are three forms, the fighter mode, the guardian mode, and the battloid mode. Right now, it's in battloid. The legs you see are really the engine nacelles with the thrust vectoring nozzles flared open to distribute the weight. As you can see, they're attached to the front-end of the nose. The trickiest part of the transformation is switching the nacelles around between the guardian and battloid modes. If you look carefully up into the torso area from behind the Veritech, you can see the hard points where the nacelles attach. One set of those hard points are on armatures that swing down and put the nacelles in the right spot to reconnect at the nose, and vice versa when it's switching back.
"If you don't mind, I can at least demonstrate the transformation from battloid to guardian for you."
"You can do that later. Tell me about maintenance now."
"Well, as I said to someone else, these Valkyries are pretty light on maintenance. Regular lubrication and cleaning keeps them in top form, and the engines themselves rarely need service. In fact, the only time I've ever seen a fusion-turbine serviced was when one got blown out by a lucky shot."
"I see... Would you say that this fighter of yours is modular?"
"It was one of the design requirements. In fact, a pilot can jettison the nose and cockpit section of his ship, and another can come and carry them in place of the gun pod - it's usually mounted ventrally on the fighter's centerline."
"That's perfect then! With some modifications we can probably launch your ship the same way we launch the rest of our dreads!"
"Well, it's good to know that I won't cause too much of an imposition for you folks."
"Let's get started now! I'm gonna need to see those tech pubs of yours."