Edit: Got rid of the frame-busting section lines. Next time, Fenian, just use the horizontal rule tag. --Mal Shinkaze - at first I'd just intended them to be smaller versions of Yggdrasil. But thinking on it further, I think I'd do my best to grow the other ships to be more like the Juraian ships, to distinguish between the two classes.
Mal? If you were wondering what I had intended to do with the Star Trek holotech, here it is. Quite frankly they wasted its potential in the show - the closest they came to what it could be used for was really in The Nth Degree, and then they ignored the ramifications of that. Why have it in just one room? This is also why Yggdrasil will eventually have the Power Plant from Hell. Everybody - opinions of the stuff below, please? Too much? Too over the top or stuff that should be tweaked?
I tapped a couple of keys on the keyboard in front of me, studied the results on the room's main screen, and nodded. "All right. I think that's got everything. Are we ready to do the first real system tests?" Fate's chorus answered, "It looks that way, Kevin. All of the initial tests were positive, and the few minor glitches that we found have been fixed. What do you want to try first?"
Leaning back in the nice high-backed chair that I'd set up as the command chair for the bridge, I glanced around the room. Right now, it was fairly plain – a rather bare room carved into the heart of my treeship. There were several chairs grouped around my main seat, a desk in front of me with a keyboard, and a large plasma screen TV hung on the front wall as a combination viewscreen and computer monitor. Though with luck, in a few minutes that would only be the backup system. "Control room setup." I bit my lip, and drew a deep breath. "Open configuration." The walls seemed to shimmer... and suddenly I was hanging in deep space. I swallowed nervously, then let out a long sigh. Not the easiest setup for someone who was still a bit acrophobic, even after dealing with freefall for the past few years. Fortunately, this wasn't freefall, and the configuration included a platform under my chair and the others, with a nice sturdy-looking railing around it. "All right... ." I settled back, trying to relax and convince myself I was NOT about to breathe vacuum regardless of what I was seeing. As my nerves eased, I started to look around in earnest, and began to smile. The view, once you got used to it, was AMAZING. "OK... this will take a while... .but I can't wait to see what it's like when we're headed somewhere." I entered a couple more commands on my keyboard, the results of which were now being displayed on a screen hanging in the air over the desk. "This is definitely a keeper. Shall we try one of the others now?"
Fate chuckled. "Ask and ye shall receive. Do you have a preference?" I hmmed, and then nodded. "The Victorian cockpit setup." Space shimmered around me... and my bridge became a nice, cozy Victorian den. The walls were dark polished wood, as was the floor, and the front half of the room was now huge sheets of glass set in gleaming brass vines and buttresses. My keyboard and monitor had shifted as well, to a glowing panel set in a wood case, and a brass and wood contraption that looked like an old typewriter keyboard. Various readouts were displayed in brass and crystals that pulsated with light, and several back-lit stained-glass windows showed famous fictional starships, including the original Jupiter Two, the Tardis, and three different versions of the Enterprise. Off to one side, a fireplace had a cheerful fire crackling in it. Mounted over the mantel were the stuffed hindquarters of some sort of feline – maybe a mountain lion, from the size and color. A small plaque under it read ‘Please do not touch.' I laughed. "Let's stick with this for now. Though I still want to see the open configuration when we're under way."
"All right, Kevin. We're clear for the other test, then? There are no ships within sensor range, so we are good to go."
I nodded. "Might as well. We've got a few drones out so we can get an exterior view, right?" I leaned back in my seat, and hmmed at her affirmative. "Display current status, two-foot scale." About eye-level above the desk, a solid-seeming image of a two-foot-long Yggdrasil appeared. Solid indeed, as I reached out and turned it from side to side, regarding it closely. "Display works like we'd hoped." Fate's voice seemed smug, "Did you have doubts?" I laughed. "With you and the other girls working on it? Not really. So... .let's see what we can do to blend in with the Belt a bit more, shall we?" I grinned broadly. "Activate the chameleon circuit." Yggdrasil's image wavered for a second, and then in place of a silver-trunked tree there was now a rough-looking asteroid, one that would not have gathered a second glance in the Belt. "Cool! It does work, then... " I reached out and turned the rock around, viewing it from all angles. I didn't see any immediate discrepancies. Fate spoke softly, "Yes, it does appear to be functioning the way we wanted, though the power drain is fairly strong. We'll need to keep expanding the power rooms if we want to be able to do this for long periods as well as all of the other functions." I nodded. "We'd already planned on that... I want us to be able to hide if we ever need to, and this will be perfect."
"True enough." Fate chuckled softly. "Do you want to try the other appearance that we discussed?" I grinned. "The one that will scare the Warsies white? Not to mention a lot of other folks? Sure, go ahead." The rock shimmered again, but instead of revealing the tree, there was now a two-foot-long Imperial Star Destroyer hanging in the air above my desk, shining a pure white. One glaring difference between the ones from the movies and this one however was the voluptuous, bat-winged woman painted on the prow of the ship, a woman wielding a whip apparently made of fire. Emblazoned under her was the ship's name: TISIPHONE. My grin grew a bit wider. "If I didn't want to keep the chameleon circuit as a trump card, I'd be SO tempted to show up at Phobos like this." A snicker sounded from the speakers – Clotho apparently thought it would be fun as well. Then I heard a clicking tongue. "Da, that would be mean." Then Lachesis chuckled as well. "Probably fun, I'll admit. But mean." I smiled. "True, true... all right. Turn the circuit off for now. No sense keeping it going full-time until we get more generators for the power rooms. But if you spot anybody coming, go ahead and turn the rock on. We might as well keep the ship a secret until we're ready to show her about." The SD shimmered and turned back into the Yggdrasil's true form.
Leaning back again, I smiled. "Good work, everyone." There was a cough – Atropos, I thought, confirmed in a moment when she spoke. "There's... one other thing, Kevin. We've got the other thing we discussed worked out as well." At that, I drew a quick breath. "You did?" In answer, the air in the front of the room wavered... and four women were standing there.
Clotho was dressed in the jeans and t-shirt that she usually wore in the lab's display, minus the lab coat she wore there. Pretty, college-aged and blond, with shoulder-length hair pulled back into a tail, she looked a little like Sarah Michelle Gellar. A long-shafted spindle was hanging from a loop at her belt, almost like a fencing foil, and two pouches also on her belt would probably be holding her Tarot cards and rune stones.
Lachesis was wiping her hands nervously on a towel. It was clear that in her virtual youth, she must have been drop-dead gorgeous. Even now in her apparent forties she was stunning, despite the effects of age starting to show. She had bright green eyes and long, wavy copper-red hair starting to go grey, especially at the temples. A cloth tape measure was wrapped around the waist of her green dress, serving as a belt, and a large ring of keys hung from that.
Atropos...was not pretty, at least not in the traditional sense. Lean and wiry, with a weathered and wrinkled face, she was probably in her sixties or so. But if not pretty, she was definitely striking. In her youth, she might have been called handsome. Iron-grey hair was cut short, and her expression tended to make one think she brooked no nonsense, though there were definite laugh lines among the wrinkles. She wore a grey jumpsuit, and had a tool belt with a hammer and wrench showing...as well as a pair of scissors prominently displayed.
Fate looked between Clotho and Lachesis in age, maybe late twenties or so...but her blue eyes seemed far older. She was beautiful...maybe even as gorgeous as Lachesis had been in her youth. Wearing an old-fashioned blue dress with white lace, her hair had to be her most prominent feature: it was long and black, hanging almost to her knees, with a brilliant white lock rising back from her forehead. She was leaning on a long, wooden staff, a staff that had a glowing blue crystal orb set in the top.
As I looked back and forth between them, I swallowed hard around a lump in my throat. "Are....is it working as well as we hoped, when we talked about it?" They nodded, then Clotho smiled nervously and moved forward, bending down to give me a hug. "Hello, dad. Good to be able to do this finally." She always was the most impulsive of the four. That broke the dam, though, as the others came forward to hug me as well. "Hello, girls. Good on my end, too." I returned their hugs, swallowing around that lump again.
Clotho does indeed look a fair bit like Gellar. Lachesis - in my mind, she's a cross between Niobe Kaftan as Lachesis in Anthony's With A Tangled Skein and the older Gwen Gallowglass from Stasheff's Warlock books. Atropos is definitely based on the old mage-smith that became the sword Need in Lackey's books - appropriate, since Juanita Coulson was the voice for the sword in several filksongs about Need. And Fate....Fate is a cross between Polgara the Sorceress and Sailor Pluto. This is just how they assembled themselves in my head over the past year or so. *grin* As for Tisiphone - that seemed appropriate since the Furies were another one of those threefold goddesses...not to mention as an homage to Path of the Fury by David Weber, which gave me the idea of using holograms to do a shapeshifting ship. So....thoughts? Like anything in particular, hate anything? Let me know. Mal? Does this look OK with the holotech? I plan to make full use of it on the ship - to make the chambers appear to be open air and planetside, to assemble a bridge/command center wherever I might be on the ship if needed (why race to the bridge, when you can have one set up right where you are just by asking for it?). You wouldn't even need to assemble everybody in the same place if you use the holotech right - just have solid hologram images of crew members and their movements relayed back and forth between different ship locations. All the usefulness of having people in the same spot, none of the fuss of having to assemble them in the exact same spot.
*grin* And yes, a little sappy at the end, I know. I can't help it. I'm a sentimental bastard.
Mal? If you were wondering what I had intended to do with the Star Trek holotech, here it is. Quite frankly they wasted its potential in the show - the closest they came to what it could be used for was really in The Nth Degree, and then they ignored the ramifications of that. Why have it in just one room? This is also why Yggdrasil will eventually have the Power Plant from Hell. Everybody - opinions of the stuff below, please? Too much? Too over the top or stuff that should be tweaked?
I tapped a couple of keys on the keyboard in front of me, studied the results on the room's main screen, and nodded. "All right. I think that's got everything. Are we ready to do the first real system tests?" Fate's chorus answered, "It looks that way, Kevin. All of the initial tests were positive, and the few minor glitches that we found have been fixed. What do you want to try first?"
Leaning back in the nice high-backed chair that I'd set up as the command chair for the bridge, I glanced around the room. Right now, it was fairly plain – a rather bare room carved into the heart of my treeship. There were several chairs grouped around my main seat, a desk in front of me with a keyboard, and a large plasma screen TV hung on the front wall as a combination viewscreen and computer monitor. Though with luck, in a few minutes that would only be the backup system. "Control room setup." I bit my lip, and drew a deep breath. "Open configuration." The walls seemed to shimmer... and suddenly I was hanging in deep space. I swallowed nervously, then let out a long sigh. Not the easiest setup for someone who was still a bit acrophobic, even after dealing with freefall for the past few years. Fortunately, this wasn't freefall, and the configuration included a platform under my chair and the others, with a nice sturdy-looking railing around it. "All right... ." I settled back, trying to relax and convince myself I was NOT about to breathe vacuum regardless of what I was seeing. As my nerves eased, I started to look around in earnest, and began to smile. The view, once you got used to it, was AMAZING. "OK... this will take a while... .but I can't wait to see what it's like when we're headed somewhere." I entered a couple more commands on my keyboard, the results of which were now being displayed on a screen hanging in the air over the desk. "This is definitely a keeper. Shall we try one of the others now?"
Fate chuckled. "Ask and ye shall receive. Do you have a preference?" I hmmed, and then nodded. "The Victorian cockpit setup." Space shimmered around me... and my bridge became a nice, cozy Victorian den. The walls were dark polished wood, as was the floor, and the front half of the room was now huge sheets of glass set in gleaming brass vines and buttresses. My keyboard and monitor had shifted as well, to a glowing panel set in a wood case, and a brass and wood contraption that looked like an old typewriter keyboard. Various readouts were displayed in brass and crystals that pulsated with light, and several back-lit stained-glass windows showed famous fictional starships, including the original Jupiter Two, the Tardis, and three different versions of the Enterprise. Off to one side, a fireplace had a cheerful fire crackling in it. Mounted over the mantel were the stuffed hindquarters of some sort of feline – maybe a mountain lion, from the size and color. A small plaque under it read ‘Please do not touch.' I laughed. "Let's stick with this for now. Though I still want to see the open configuration when we're under way."
"All right, Kevin. We're clear for the other test, then? There are no ships within sensor range, so we are good to go."
I nodded. "Might as well. We've got a few drones out so we can get an exterior view, right?" I leaned back in my seat, and hmmed at her affirmative. "Display current status, two-foot scale." About eye-level above the desk, a solid-seeming image of a two-foot-long Yggdrasil appeared. Solid indeed, as I reached out and turned it from side to side, regarding it closely. "Display works like we'd hoped." Fate's voice seemed smug, "Did you have doubts?" I laughed. "With you and the other girls working on it? Not really. So... .let's see what we can do to blend in with the Belt a bit more, shall we?" I grinned broadly. "Activate the chameleon circuit." Yggdrasil's image wavered for a second, and then in place of a silver-trunked tree there was now a rough-looking asteroid, one that would not have gathered a second glance in the Belt. "Cool! It does work, then... " I reached out and turned the rock around, viewing it from all angles. I didn't see any immediate discrepancies. Fate spoke softly, "Yes, it does appear to be functioning the way we wanted, though the power drain is fairly strong. We'll need to keep expanding the power rooms if we want to be able to do this for long periods as well as all of the other functions." I nodded. "We'd already planned on that... I want us to be able to hide if we ever need to, and this will be perfect."
"True enough." Fate chuckled softly. "Do you want to try the other appearance that we discussed?" I grinned. "The one that will scare the Warsies white? Not to mention a lot of other folks? Sure, go ahead." The rock shimmered again, but instead of revealing the tree, there was now a two-foot-long Imperial Star Destroyer hanging in the air above my desk, shining a pure white. One glaring difference between the ones from the movies and this one however was the voluptuous, bat-winged woman painted on the prow of the ship, a woman wielding a whip apparently made of fire. Emblazoned under her was the ship's name: TISIPHONE. My grin grew a bit wider. "If I didn't want to keep the chameleon circuit as a trump card, I'd be SO tempted to show up at Phobos like this." A snicker sounded from the speakers – Clotho apparently thought it would be fun as well. Then I heard a clicking tongue. "Da, that would be mean." Then Lachesis chuckled as well. "Probably fun, I'll admit. But mean." I smiled. "True, true... all right. Turn the circuit off for now. No sense keeping it going full-time until we get more generators for the power rooms. But if you spot anybody coming, go ahead and turn the rock on. We might as well keep the ship a secret until we're ready to show her about." The SD shimmered and turned back into the Yggdrasil's true form.
Leaning back again, I smiled. "Good work, everyone." There was a cough – Atropos, I thought, confirmed in a moment when she spoke. "There's... one other thing, Kevin. We've got the other thing we discussed worked out as well." At that, I drew a quick breath. "You did?" In answer, the air in the front of the room wavered... and four women were standing there.
Clotho was dressed in the jeans and t-shirt that she usually wore in the lab's display, minus the lab coat she wore there. Pretty, college-aged and blond, with shoulder-length hair pulled back into a tail, she looked a little like Sarah Michelle Gellar. A long-shafted spindle was hanging from a loop at her belt, almost like a fencing foil, and two pouches also on her belt would probably be holding her Tarot cards and rune stones.
Lachesis was wiping her hands nervously on a towel. It was clear that in her virtual youth, she must have been drop-dead gorgeous. Even now in her apparent forties she was stunning, despite the effects of age starting to show. She had bright green eyes and long, wavy copper-red hair starting to go grey, especially at the temples. A cloth tape measure was wrapped around the waist of her green dress, serving as a belt, and a large ring of keys hung from that.
Atropos...was not pretty, at least not in the traditional sense. Lean and wiry, with a weathered and wrinkled face, she was probably in her sixties or so. But if not pretty, she was definitely striking. In her youth, she might have been called handsome. Iron-grey hair was cut short, and her expression tended to make one think she brooked no nonsense, though there were definite laugh lines among the wrinkles. She wore a grey jumpsuit, and had a tool belt with a hammer and wrench showing...as well as a pair of scissors prominently displayed.
Fate looked between Clotho and Lachesis in age, maybe late twenties or so...but her blue eyes seemed far older. She was beautiful...maybe even as gorgeous as Lachesis had been in her youth. Wearing an old-fashioned blue dress with white lace, her hair had to be her most prominent feature: it was long and black, hanging almost to her knees, with a brilliant white lock rising back from her forehead. She was leaning on a long, wooden staff, a staff that had a glowing blue crystal orb set in the top.
As I looked back and forth between them, I swallowed hard around a lump in my throat. "Are....is it working as well as we hoped, when we talked about it?" They nodded, then Clotho smiled nervously and moved forward, bending down to give me a hug. "Hello, dad. Good to be able to do this finally." She always was the most impulsive of the four. That broke the dam, though, as the others came forward to hug me as well. "Hello, girls. Good on my end, too." I returned their hugs, swallowing around that lump again.
Clotho does indeed look a fair bit like Gellar. Lachesis - in my mind, she's a cross between Niobe Kaftan as Lachesis in Anthony's With A Tangled Skein and the older Gwen Gallowglass from Stasheff's Warlock books. Atropos is definitely based on the old mage-smith that became the sword Need in Lackey's books - appropriate, since Juanita Coulson was the voice for the sword in several filksongs about Need. And Fate....Fate is a cross between Polgara the Sorceress and Sailor Pluto. This is just how they assembled themselves in my head over the past year or so. *grin* As for Tisiphone - that seemed appropriate since the Furies were another one of those threefold goddesses...not to mention as an homage to Path of the Fury by David Weber, which gave me the idea of using holograms to do a shapeshifting ship. So....thoughts? Like anything in particular, hate anything? Let me know. Mal? Does this look OK with the holotech? I plan to make full use of it on the ship - to make the chambers appear to be open air and planetside, to assemble a bridge/command center wherever I might be on the ship if needed (why race to the bridge, when you can have one set up right where you are just by asking for it?). You wouldn't even need to assemble everybody in the same place if you use the holotech right - just have solid hologram images of crew members and their movements relayed back and forth between different ship locations. All the usefulness of having people in the same spot, none of the fuss of having to assemble them in the exact same spot.
*grin* And yes, a little sappy at the end, I know. I can't help it. I'm a sentimental bastard.