[RFC] What does Brains do next?
08-29-2012, 10:19 PM
OK. Brains is scared. And upset.
He thought he'd be safe at SerenityCon, and he'd got his family with him, and he saw they could all have died.
The mauler was an idea he'd played with as a "totally safe means of transport", but, "completely impractical". If the mauler was the only really major thing he built in his life, maybe the last thing he built, story logic might justify it. But, I don't think Brains is "finished" yet, so it doesn't really make sense.
What sort of thing might Brains reasonably do about his fear? I'm pretty sure he will try and build or create something. I don't think he'll try and hide away in his 'safe' Lunar home. But, unlike some, he's a strong believer in non-violence.
What makes sense in terms of Fenspace?
And, what can he do that fits in with his idea of being "obscure"?
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Leave the solar system.
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The drastic option is to leave Fenspace and keep going out until you find somewhere to claim for yourself... An alternative is to run dirstside and hide behind the governments who are only to happy to point out that the Boskone threat is why governments exist.
The less drastic option if to move in where some miners are moving out and fortify the bejaysus out of any openings they left in the rock. Or even make it look like just another stone of little interest. Until it moves.
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OK, I've written the first bit. The story "Here's Jack". I don't think leaving the Solar System, Fenspace, is quite right.
Brains isn't a coward, if anything the reverse. He spends quite a bit of effort fighting against his violent tendencies, and he knows other people have similar. He needs to do something, and the repair work after SerenityCon wasn't enough.
Hiding, on the Moon, in an asteroid, in interstellar space or another solar system... Doesn't feel right. He's certainly not going back to Earth.
So, what?
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There's a reason an adrenaline rush is called a "fight or flight reaction," and you've ruled out "flight"...
I'm not suggesting Brains pick up a rifle and enlist; that isn't his style. There are ways to fight back that don't involve violence.
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Why not make him the logistical genius behind the scenes that makes the rest of the attack timelines possible?
Brains makes a visit to the Courners for ... Hmm. Dr V wants to do a follow op on one or more fenkinder who were caught in the attack to make sure that the kids wern't exposed to anything that caused slow long term issues rather than being immediatly apparent.
While there he has a chance encounter with Haruhi, who's quirks allow her to a)Notice Brains desipite the 'somebody elses problem' field his chair creates, B)Realise that she needs Brains organizing supplies and, C) Talk Brains into it?
Hidden under the codename Q (for quartermaster) everyone assumes that Q is some sort of weapons technologist, not the guy who cements the victory by making sure what's needed is where its needed, almost before anyone else realizes it will be needed there/
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You actually seem to be coming toward a similar place I went to when I came up with the Gnarlycurl, except that I didn't go for stealth because "in a million years or so this will be the south pole of Cybertron" was always in the back of my mind, and by concept it was tough enough that it might be boarded and taken over but indestructible short of dropping it in the sun, antimatter, or really big nukes. I don't think it would be out of line the have another megavessel, or even to build it with your
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robo-bunshin in a relatively short time... the hull and basic systems at least. Fit and finish work on something that size will take much longer and use much more, more expensive materials, though. Also, this isn't Lensman, our tech tree is wonky and wild but supressing atomic fission and fusion is over the top even for fenspace. I'm blsnking on how to put what I'm pondering, so I'll cut this short.
Besides, where would we get a dozen live chickens and a pool full of green hair dye at this time of night?
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Well, going towards generalities... if you want to go with a big vessel, start from an existing rock and start adding stuff. Big structural constructions are hard in that they take a lot of infrastructure to get everything in place and assembled, but starting from an asteroid or the like bypasses a lot of that. If you want to go towards the "incredibly tough constructed ship" side of things, go smaller, or start with a heavy base hull, or both. One thought that just occured to me is starting with a tanker car and adding reinforcement, armor plating, and or layers of whatever else. It's not as large and stylish, but it's easier to do by a lot, and from what you're saying this sounds like something of a reflexive impulse - a reaction to a bad experience done quickly to feel safe, and not even necessarily breaking any new technological ground or the like.
Star Ranger4's idea is interesting too, in a fighting back without fighting sense. But it's not to me to judge if that's directly appropriate for your character.
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A Rock is ideal -copy the idea of the ninjas, so the asteroid looks exactly like any other sterois from the outside. Brains wants invisibility, not attractive outer design.
And rememerb that there is a HUGE range of asteroid sizes -a rock a couple of kilometers long asterois is raterh useless for an habitat or a mining operation, but as a hollowed home it is a freakign big ship.
I agree to KJ, there is no need to scrap the "Mauler" idea if you can modify it to be less "over the top". Maybe call it a "Mini Mauler"... 
Start with a more sane size, maybe 20m diameter and 30m long (or something like this). This is still a HUGE volume, much larger than houses for half a dozen families. If you want to go to the "I am giving Gnarlycurl a run for its money" do so, you can even scrap or reduce the "need multiple shields" thing... why shields if your armor laughs about normal Fenspace military weapons? I am still thinking this "perfect cloak, can see out but nobody can see in, noone will ever find me" is a bit over the top, but I think you see the direction I am going with this suggestion.
The other option is to start with a large rock and work with it... advantage is you get "tons" of armor for free (its called rock). Disadvantage might be that they tend to be slow and its a really long way to wave the hull.
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Quote:If you want to give the Gnarlycurl a run for its money
In the wake of SerenityCon and the followup Gnarlycurl bombing, WC will supply known fen enough seibertron 'wave to start a similar NiFe former asteroid hull cooking for the cost of the growth media (liquid fuel and metal shavings) but it does take about twelve days per inch of thickness to process that into stainless steel and thence cybertronium, so it would be over a year from the point of waving to finish even a 10ft. hull. This is
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not the lightweight, foam based cybertronium used for mecha construction though, it weighs 594lbs per cubic foot. Large and powerful engines will be required for a ship - the 'curl's is 20ft wide x 30ft tall x 300ft long.
(the foam kind is 1.5lb./cu. ft. and standard 3/4in. sheets are what WC and similar "Cybertron style" mecha are built from - it takes a few hours to 'wave and is plenty tough for most purposes)
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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
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The idea of being a Quartermaster and doing logistics for OGJ sounds good.
If Wave Convoy is willing to consider Brains as a candidate (Brains is quite willing to talk to WC about what he's done in Fenspace, and he did rescue people and do clean-up at SerenityCon) then he'd be very interested in starting a hull cooking to cybertronium, even if it is going to take years. Brains will have to obtain the (unrefined) uranium to build the Bergenholms, though. [grin]
Would people be happy for Brains to acquire the remains of a ship called the "Boise"?
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32706/32 ... CHAPTER_14
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32706/32 ... CHAPTER_16
Triplanetary: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32706/32 ... 2706-h.htm
I'm planning on claiming that has an (unwaved) alloy hull, is a sphere a bit less than a 100 foot (about 30m) diameter, and was built by EE 'Doc Smith Lensman Fen, who wanted a 'Bergenholm' drive that would fly at FTL speeds inside and outside the Limit, at least at one light year a minute (about 500k lights; Fenspace FTL is 500 lights).
They used allotropic iron generators, and one exploded, injuring no one but wrecking the insides of the ship (rather like the original fiction). Unfortunately, the Fen were sufficiently upset by this that they gutted the remains of the ship, and sold the nearly bare hull, aiming to build smaller, maybe just as experimental, but safer, stuff.
Brains plans to outfit the upper hull with bits he salvaged from the mauler project, and hack the lower hull so it will open in segments, like a flower, to use it as a mobile repair dock for OGJ. It won't be invisible (except briefly, using a temporary 'skin' (not kept on board), as he takes it in and out of his Lunar home, and while it will have very good shields, and tractor-pressers, will be unarmed (except for the strange ability to suppress cosmic ray screens as a power source - which I don't think anyone uses), and tractor shears.
((
Brains had no idea that "Pinky" was one of WC nick-names. [grin]
))
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Pending general meta approval, I have no objection to Brains setting up a rockship hull. Support types gotta stick together after all. Getting a suitable nickel iron 'roid cut to shape first, including any plumbing/life support/wiring/etc channels is the hard part, because once that sucker is waved you're not going to be cutting or drilling it no way no how. It may in fact be adviseable to only 'wave the outside even though it will double the final time required, just to make it easier to mount internals.
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As for nicknames... If he can sometimes be Autobot Kamen complete with cape, opera mask, and giant dart/javelin roses, then he can certainly be Pinkie sometimes too.
Narf! C'mon Brain, everyone loikes a party. You can even wear one o' these pointy little 'ats!
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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
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Note that if he's willing to trust a little, Rockhounds a) does this to order as a main part of their business, and b) is clearly and openly on the OGJ side of the war. Which means that arguments about "one fan can't build something that big" are moot, because one fan won't. He'll be hiring it done. (It will, OTOH, be massively expensive...)
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Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
Interested in trying the 'blow an egg' trick?
That is where you find a nearly pure NiFe asteroid of the right mass which is solid rather than a load of loosely held together lumps. Then you thoroughly map its internal and external structure. Do some very careful simulations. Bore a hole into the calculated area, then pack that with water ice.
Then you spin the asteroid so as to produce the right dynamics, and melt it with an immense array of mylar solar mirrors. For fun, you wave-up the mirrors so they convert visible light to stored electrical energy in accumulators, which live on the back of the mirror with the radiators, and just use the infra red to do the melting.
As the asteroid starts to melt the spin will control the shape it takes. When the ice evaporates into steam this will blow a large void in the centre. If you get it all right you now have a reasonably smooth asteroid, in the shape you want (probably elipsoid) with a large internal void. The stored electrical energy can be used to run the heat pumps (refridgeration) so you don't have to wait for it to cool down naturally.
Once you get the trick right, this might be quite an effective way of making habitats.
If you can't get a big enough, or solid enough, asteroid, melt, freeze, then map, drill and plant your ice, etc.
Brains is prepared to lease the rights to you. [grin]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_habitat#Bubbleworld
Fun list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_in_fiction
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One of the several story ideas that I have had bouncing around my head for a couple years is for the assault on Boskone Prime.
In the (current) plan, the Starhawk is carrying a load of assault Marines (along with all 3 of Babylon.5's APE units) on the way to the Boskone station's surface.
After you started posting your Brains stories, I mentally added:
Quote:The assault fleet had met up in the middle of nowhere above the eliptic before getting the coordinates for the target.
At the same time, some sort of waved sheild had been deployed. Scuttlebutt said it had been made by some unknown Mad with a talent for stealth tech.
Whoever made it, it had obscured the fleet's approach until we started getting close. The target saw us coming, but only with minutes of warning instead of hours.
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Timote Wrote:One of the several story ideas that I have had bouncing around my head for a couple years is for the assault on Boskone Prime.
In the (current) plan, the Starhawk is carrying a load of assault Marines (along with all 3 of Babylon.5's APE units) on the way to the Boskone station's surface.
After you started posting your Brains stories, I mentally added:
Quote:The assault fleet had met up in the middle of nowhere above the elliptic before getting the coordinates for the target.
At the same time, some sort of waved shield had been deployed. Scuttlebutt said it had been made by some unknown Mad with a talent for stealth tech.
Whoever made it, it had obscured the fleet's approach until we started getting close. The target saw us coming, but only with minutes of warning instead of hours. Sounds workable. The easy way to do such a shield would be to know where the Boskone active and passive sensor arrays were, and deploy physical shields that masked the fleet and sent the enemy sensor arrays something close to the signals they had been receiving which the fleet would have affected.
Once you get close, it would be very difficult to do this for optical sensors, particularly if there are things like laser trip wires with complex signals running along them (say reflecting back off a net of slowly moving drones). Or, if the enemy had magnetic or gravimetric passive sensors that would pick-up metal ships or distortions caused by almost all ships' boat and bigger speed drives (not to mention the electro-magnetic radiation put out by all non-stealthed craft). For real paranoia they have short-range handwavium detectors, too. [grin]
Don't forget that there are likely Boskone ships coming and going reasonably often, and probably patrol ships. Even if you can hide from the base then hiding from these is going to be really difficult.
A more difficult way to do a stealth approach would be to have a short life-span specialised ship which deployed an immense sensor warp field around the entire fleet. This would likely make everything darker for the fleet ships inside it, both optically and on sensors; the "Dark Cloak". Fleet ships would have to shut-down active sensors, like radar and lidar, and rely on accurate navigation (maybe with tight-beamed instructions from a flag ship). Probably the flag ship would get a sensor feed from the cloak ship of what was going on outside the cloak. The big advantage of the cloak is it would work against Boskone passive sensors that you didn't know about, including any Boskone ships that didn't fly too close or even through the cloak.
Just a few ideas...
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ClassicDrogn Wrote:As for nicknames... If he can sometimes be Autobot Kamen complete with cape, opera mask, and giant dart/javelin roses, then he can certainly be Pinkie sometimes too.
Narf! C'mon Brain, everyone loikes a party. You can even wear one o' these pointy little 'ats! Brains makes costumes. Brains is quite good at cos-play. The only trouble is, he doesn't like it, and it makes him uncomfortable. Uran would agree with you that Brains needs to loosen-up a bit, and have more fun. [grin]
So, you got any spare Autobots so Uran can practice her large-scale juggling? [grin]
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