RP forum and collaborative fiction community - Daireem

RP Home - Join - Play - The Universe - Encyclopedia - Species - Vehicles - Items - Staff
Expand Active Plots (Alphabetical) - Updated 8/21/2010
Login | Create User | List UsersYou are not logged in.
Page 11 of 21
Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Next
Daireem - Space
AuthorComment
Jara Green
freelance fighter pilot
3/21/2009 6:56:03 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 60
RE: Space Station F.R.E.Y.A.

Go time for the other two but Jara still had to wait. She sighed, Belladonna was pretty much done booting up.

"Mr piet, do I release now and hyperspace after introductions, or release after introductions and hyperspace then?"

She was quite used to following directions to the letter as long as they made sense, it had saved her life a few times. She initiated the warm up for the hyperdrive.
Kapitein Piet
(Ethical) Space Pirate
3/22/2009 6:20:13 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 60
RE: Space Station F.R.E.Y.A.

Kapitein Piet spoke, "Jara - Freya is the officer in charge and you should ask her for orders, but I'd rather you stayed tight until we know more about how the situation is going to develop. We might need you in here."

The old man rubbed his face and finally lit the pipe he had been toying with during the last hour.

"Freya - I could really use a half-pint of whiskey right about now; I'm going to hail the 'unknown bogey' as the chieftain of the Hounds of Slaughter would, in this situation. Are you ready for voice modulation? Let me know when we're broadcasting."
Kapitein Piet
(Ethical) Space Pirate
3/22/2009 7:18:39 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 60
On board the Krakatau

The low-frequency drone faded into a low hum and dissipated.

"Sir! Successful re-entry to Cartesian space, milord." The meek voice uttered a standard phrase.

The diminutive man bowed in deference before the even smaller, caped Dark Lord of Tenerife.

The Lord ignored his peon and yelled at no-one in particular, "Good! Bring shields down, scramble the scouts as I requested, and set the active sensors on full power. If there's anybody out here, it'll be our ol' captain Piet.

And I won't give a dang if he sees me coming."

Hahahahahahahahaaaa!

A massive pulse of radar, radio, X-ray, and microwave radiation expanded from the ship in an ever-expanding shell, within which everything was considered "known". It continued to grow at the speed of light in all directions, but way out of the plane of the ecliptic, in interstellar space, not a single measurable cluster of photons would bounce back to tell the instruments about its travels, until 32 minutes after it first left the powerful emitters.

Before the active sensors received an answer, however, the passive receivers collected a very very faint image - something as large as a typical asteroid, but from two A.U.'s away.

"Sir! Anomaly detected! It could be the Calamitous, milord... although initial estimates appear to over-estimate its size and mass, so we can't..." the meek voice was abruptly interrupted by the Dark Lord cackling voice. "Silence, worm! Do NOT tell the Lord what can and cannot be done. He is interested only in facts!"

The shadowy figure turned to a woman in chains, who was bleeding and crying quietly in a corner. "So far, so good, leetle ladeh," he chittered with glee. "And? Is that him? Or are you LYINGAGAIN!?!?"

The woman just cried a little more loudly - refusing to answer, not because of strength of will, but because of a lack of strength. The Dark Lord signed to a strange little man in a stained lab coat, who nodded and turned to a machine to enter some commands. Soon, the woman quieted and began to speak, "Yes, Lord. Kapitein Piet is there. That is where he is.. where he is.. is.."

She collapsed completely, in a pool of sweat and blood, completely unconscious.

"Sir! Milord! Radio communication from the direction of anomaly R01!"

(Dang, relativity is going to make things stink. Is there a mini-jump technology that'll allow the Krakatau to close the distance quickly? On the other hand, if there's not, then that would be a good reason for the Dark Lord NOT to come over and atomize us...)
QuantumTroll
Street Fighter/Space Station
3/22/2009 9:09:41 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 181
RE: SpaceĀ StationĀ F.R.E.Y.A.

(( Sorry, no time/energy for a content post, but here are some thoughts on the sciency&technology questions that have cropped up.

Convenient link to hyperdrive document... "Because the distance between planets in one star system is such a small fraction of this, it would be impossible for a hyperdrive to exit hyperspace that quickly. While hyperdrives can be throttled down to a point, they cannot be throttled down far enough to make intrastellar interplanetary travel feasible. Therefore, travel inside a system is restricted to sublight engines."  

I like this limitation on hyperdrives, although I admit I had the Krakatau miss the mark by quite a distance. However, according to my calculations, it can reach Freya in 16 hours at an acceleration of 35 g or 37 hours at 8 g. What is reasonable? Should I ret-con the distance to something shorter? I vote for 8 g of acceleration and 37 hours before the Krakatau is literally on top of us. Space-travel should take time Wink ))


<< Responding to Jara's comment below: The maximum Earth-Mars distance is a mere 21 lightminutes away.  The times I posted above (for 16 lm) include having to brake for half the transit time, so it seems to me that crossing the entire habitable zone of a star system would take just a few days at most. Eight standard gravities is a lot of acceleration, but that's why ships like the Krakatau have artificial gravity. >>






Jara Green
freelance fighter pilot
3/24/2009 5:14:13 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 60
RE: Space Station F.R.E.Y.A.

(the funny thing about space, perpetual motion, speed builds upon speed, but it'd be funny to watch him slow down again. Smile that'll take so long... I'm pretty sure they've got fairly good engines because interplanetary travel would take forever at those rates)

explosions are louder in space, because there's no air to get in the way
QuantumTroll
Street Fighter/Space Station
3/24/2009 8:24:02 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 181
RE: Space Station F.R.E.Y.A.

Freya was running out of space in her mind and found herself struggling to stay in real-time.  She had never had to juggle so many large and complex jobs at once before. Engineering, research, and natural language routines competed for resources with the triune Executive, Planning, and Modeling modules. Cache lines started being replaced before their use ran out, memory buses saturated with repeated requests for data, and paging skyrocketed.

THRASHING DETECTED -- PURGING JOB QUEUE WITH -9

A digital rushing sound roared through Freya's system as task after task was dumped hard.  An instant later the storm was over, and Freya took stock of what she had left. While it was impossible to know what she had lost, the memory daemon appeared to have done a good job as the essentials were all intact and Freya could focus.  

She said to her crew, "I concur, Mr. Piet. Now that we know that the Krakatau is far enough away that we can avoid rash and irreversible actions, I think it is best for Jara to stay.  You can choose to leave when you wish, of course, but we might miss an opportunity if you leave too soon."

In the space that was still occupied by the scraps of old processes, Freya brought up all the vocalization routines available. Whatever "Cockney" was, she didn't know, and she didn't have any tricks for generating male voices besides simply lowering the pitch. Another problem with Piet's plan was the impossibility of a video feed of a man who was not Piet. With an older, firmer voice than usual, Freya said "Okay, how does this sound?  You speak, I repeat, then you and Jara confirm, and then I transmit. The human voice is notoriously hard to model; I don't seem to have any ready codes for voice modulation. Are we ready?"
Kapitein Piet
(Ethical) Space Pirate
3/25/2009 6:09:56 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 60
RE: Space Station F.R.E.Y.A.

"Alright, let's do this:

'Oy there! This is Alpha Nigel, of the Hounds-o-Slaw'a! Oidentify yessef immediately or face the consequences!'"

The old captain hoped his performance would be convincing...

Freya managed to smooth out 30 years of bad habits with a suitable low-pass filter, deduced the dialectal variation by applying a differential classifier on the message, with past speech patterns as seed classes for the K-means clustering, and amplified the dialect by applying the vowel shifts and glottal stops to parts of the message Kapitein Piet hadn't managed so well.

It was obvious Freya didn't generate the speech herself, and although it sounded like the voice of the Hounds' pack leader was heavily compressed and low-fidelity, it was convincing enough for human ears. Any signal analysis program would probably be able to detect the abnormalities, and possibly reverse them to get something approximating the original signal back.
Jara and Piet's feedback were exceedingly positive, so Freya transmitted it.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it, Kapitein Piet thought to himself, remembering an old book he had long forgotten he read.
Kapitein Piet
(Ethical) Space Pirate
3/25/2009 6:21:49 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 60
On board the Krakatau

A strange voice spoke through the speakers, broadcast throughout the entirety of the capital ship as usual - for dramatic effect.

"Oy there! This is Alpha Nigel, of the Hounds-o-Slaw'a! Oidentify yessef immediately or face the consequences!"

The voice sounded strangely familiar. But then again, why shouldn't it? Alpha Nigel was a good ally in the right circumstances.

The Dark Lord responded by barking: "This is the Krakatau - I fear that the worst consequences we might face from the likes of you is a scratched paint job, you ugly pug! Those issues aside - I think you have a prisoner who belongs to me. Hand over Kapitein Piet!"

Raaaaaaaahhhhhhhh! He screeched, angered at having to deal with stupid humans instead of just picking up his spoils without needing to consider social rules. The Dark Lord was displeased.
QuantumTroll
Street Fighter/Space Station
3/31/2009 7:00:31 AM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 181
Freya

(first of all, sorry for the slowness in posting.  Schoolwork and other interests are increasingly demanding on my time and energy, necessitating that writing here becomes less of a priority Sad )

The delays in communication let the trio do a lot of talking and planning.  Freya reiterated the plan briefly so everyone was on the same page.

"We'll play Alpha Nigel as a small-time captain with the Hounds, intent on keeping Piet for his masters. Tenerife won't dare destroy a Hounds' vessel of this size just out of spite, although we should expect some shots across the bow. When that occurs, Jara will undock and hyper away under the auspice of telling the Hounds what is happening. We'll mock Tenerife for wasting so much time with a little annoyance like Piet, and probably he will decide to cut his losses and hyper away."

Freya played it cool, but internally she was struggling with quite a few problems.  Tenerife's warning shots could easily do lethal damage to her unshielded and undefended self.  Piet's disguise was a weak point of indeterminate severity, giving her Planning functions a huge headache.  Finally, there was the wild card of his psychic crewmate. Also in the meantime, Freya finished installing the fake missile bays and was nearing completion with the fake ion turrets.  If only that hyperdrive was in working condition, then she could simply jump to safety.

Freya played the Dark Lord's last message again before saying, "Alright Piet, you know what to say. Take it away!"
Kapitein Piet
(Ethical) Space Pirate
4/1/2009 6:29:33 PM

Level: 1
Experience: 0

Total Posts: 60
RE: On board the Krakatau

(I hear you QuantumTroll!)

Kapitein Piet focused, and spoke into the mic:
"Not so fast, there, ol' chum. Fair is fai' - and oy found'im. Oy get the spoyuls. 'sides, I'm sho my boss wouldn't be too happy wif the likes o' you if ye blow up this rig - it's experiment'l. And that's a blaaaaddy lot of lost business if he caught wind 'o you ineterferin' with Hounds property.

And don't worry about this Piet fellow. Prime Alpha's got a bone to pick wit'im, 'parently. Not a popular guy, I take it."

He put his hand on the mic, saying, "What do you think - am I pushing it with the experimental vessel? I had to explain our presence here somehow, and his active sensors have got to give an absurd and confusing image here."
Page 11 of 21
Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Next
Daireem - RE: Space Station F.R.E.Y.A.
RP Home - Join - Play - The Universe - Encyclopedia - Species - Vehicles - Items - Staff

Affiliates
None right now

Daireem © 2006-Present Clint Blizzard. All rights reserved.
The Furry Trio Message Board™ copyright © 2001-Present Wolf McDog. All rights reserved.
This site is owned by Clint Blizzard.
This site was created by Clint Blizzard and is not maintained very well by Wolf McDog.