Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[nobodez]

I love the new chapter, and love that you've returned to this story, however brief or long it may be.

 

[Dgr11897]

Never. If the confed knew she made a bio weapon that could kill a entire race they would never let her out of a birdcage again with everything she does carefully watched.

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TBF. She didn't make it she realized the potential, and immediately was scared of it, to the point of destroying the sample. Honestly the bigger thing for them would be figuring out and worrying about where the hell a sample of alien nanotech that could do that even came from. Because it has to come from somewhere, and while Sophia decided not to use it that way, the original owners might.

 

[LollipoPReapeR]

With the her newly padded CP account, I hope the MC picks up some non-scientific perks. Preferably something to do with self-defense or counter intelligence. I'm sure there's some black box type perks around. Or something to stop her getting assassinated / kidnapped. Something that gives her more political / societal ability too…

 

[Toad]

Oho, this is back! No alien abduction this time around?

I didn't entirely hate it, but it was admittedly a bit sudden, and just when she was ramping up a bit

I do think removing her from the confederation eventually was at its core a good idea though, or else she just steamrolls everyone with a whole government apparatus behind her, would be interesting to see her be forced to work in less ideal circumstances and pick forge stuff that she needs to survive rather than what allows her to best minmax her situation

She does have a pretty big surplus of points though, so she's likely to be well equipped no matter what ends up happening

Also I'd honestly be more expectant of lesbian shipping if this was SV, site's kinda notorious for it lmao

 

[Asmodyne]

Hell yeah, psyched to see a chapter of this! Hope to see more in the near future.

 

[AbyssalMatter]

Looking at what the Interstellar Wars Source Book lists, she could have also given them the Word of Blake's Void Signature System and Mimetic Armor. Especially since she could probably fit the Void Sig. onto tanks and stuff and the Mimetic Armor is already used in Battle Armor. Also she could give them PPCs given that the lightest Particle weapon is like 200 tons. That's not even mentioning Gauss Weapons which I didn't see anything about.

 

[Ultim@tePower]

YES YES YES, hell yes my favourite fanfic is back, did a full reread and cannot wait for more.

I cannot wait until she breaks out the jump 9/KF and draw up plans for olympus like recharge station that would break everythimg EVEN MOAR.

also the basic Battletech war machines like PAL, Battle armor and super tough BT armor, no mechs tho

Hopefully, Confed High Command hurries up and puts a black box on both Nusku and Procyon, from what I remember the Imperium feints in Procyon then rushes through Nusku with most of the Confed fleet heading to Procyon, I dont kow if the black box works while in hyper, but heres hoping the counterattacking fleet gets delayed enough for Procyon to tell Terra that its a distraction.

Hell, even if the Procyon attack is real they could get wiped out by being jumped by a full response fleet a full week earlier than what they were expecting

 

[Fellgar]

Huh... interesting. This is back. So I take it the next thing that is researched is going to be the faster then light engine design that takes from local and battletech to allow them to travel 4 and 1/2 times as far as the current best drives? I expect you might also be considering looking at the heat pump tech from battletech as well. The a little to just delete heat like that from a system consistently is... interesting and like something you can blend with local designs for a similar effect to the engine. Then of course you will have the ability to enhance the power generation...

You know... I don't remember seeing anything about power armor in the local setting being mentioned. I know in battle tech it was based off of exo suit designs for space flight and I think logistical exo suits as well. So maybe introducing some viable invisible power armor from battletech with the whole ftl travel and comms allowing Terra to deep raid into the borders in a spy like manner. Eh glad to see this is back though!

 

[Blade4]

The first power armor were spec force stealth sneak suits that also happened to give some protection from mech scale weapons. And for some damn fool reason never reconfigured into a line suit that would have vastly improved infantry performance and survivability. Proper power armor was created from underwater mining suits much later by the clans.

As for Sophia with what she has on hand why could she not research a 3 or 4 parsec drive and work up to a kf drive? A 3 or 4 drive could fit in their current ships and still be a vast improvement and strategic asset.

 

[Slayer 10321]

The first power armor were spec force stealth sneak suits that also happened to give some protection from mech scale weapons. And for some damn fool reason never reconfigured into a line suit that would have vastly improved infantry performance and survivability. Proper power armor was created from underwater mining suits much later by the clans.

As for Sophia with what she has on hand why could she not research a 3 or 4 parsec drive and work up to a kf drive? A 3 or 4 drive could fit in their current ships and still be a vast improvement and strategic asset.

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Mech bias and the Mother Doctrine reared its ugly head.

Plus not even the Star League/Terran Hegemony wanted to shell out the funds to give their infantry anything good to use when said funds could go for more warships/mobile oppression palaces, battlemechs and mega-scale engineering projects.

 

[litaispe]

I'm sorry, jump-what? The Third Imperium doesn't even have jump-9. I'm surprised her reward for boosting tech in a military significant fashion didn't trigger here.

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k-f jump drives are software patch away from being jump-18, for just double the power-cost of a jump-8 jump.

 

[cliffc999]

As a reminder, the most advanced jumpdrive currently in the setting is the Vilani jumpdrive... which maxes out at jump-2.

Canonically, jump-3 would not be invented by Terra until circa 2240, during the Eighth Interstellar War. (The story is currently in 2169, in the period of time between the Third and Fourth Interstellar Wars.)

 

[litaispe]

As a reminder, the most advanced jumpdrive currently in the setting is the Vilani jumpdrive... which maxes out at jump-2.

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Worse than that; Traveler jump-drive locks you into a ~168 hour travel duration. k-f jump-drives are functionally instant. That is an setting-breaking logistical buff just in itself.

 

[Blade4]

Mech bias and the Mother Doctrine reared its ugly head.

Plus not even the Star League/Terran Hegemony wanted to shell out the funds to give their infantry anything good to use when said funds could go for more warships/mobile oppression palaces, battlemechs and mega-scale engineering projects.

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Which is utterly foaming at the mouth stupid when you look at cost and logistics. A single mckenna is like 30 billion according to sarna. A full task group is probably around 100 billion.

A single nighthawk suit is around 295k and change.

For the cost of a single battle group they could radically increase infantry ability and probably reduce casualties by around 75 percent giving a vast qualitative upgrade far better than that battle group could but no...

But yeah no one has better than jump 2 though the idea of someone getting better should scare the crap out of the vilani because jump 2 is how they put competed and beat down every other threat to them. So earth with jump 3 is a existential threat they must counter or pull into the empire by any means necessary. It would be very interesting if the shadow emperor? and court on the throne world actually get involved eventually because iirc they did not get involved in the wars until the colonial nonsense suddenly became a threat to fast for them to react to and ganked them.

 

[D King Hecht]

"Ever been off-planet?" I asked her.

"Not yet." she said. "Although I did take a refresher on basic vacc suit and space emergency procedures when I got this assignment."

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"Sometimes I still wonder!" she chuckled. "I originally wanted to be an idol singer, would you believe? My plan was to just get through my mandatory Public Service tour, then straight back to the entertainment industry I'd already been training for as far back as secondary-ed. Except instead of what I applied for I ended up as support staff for a Frontier Constabulary outpost on Nusku,

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Just a small thing I noticed on a read through.

 

[cliffc999]

Ugh, yeah, continuity glitch. Fixed.

 

[Sto Odin]

...Which of course tells you exactly what kind of priority Sofia's case has. There are a lot of places an operative of Special Agent Song's caliber could have been assigned, but instead she's here.

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And that shows good sense on their part; it's kind of weird to have a government committee that puts a premium on common sense, but the Genius Patrol is notable that way.

Delighted to see you coming back to this one! I'm not overly familiar with the Traveller setting but it had a lot of richness to it and it's the sort of SF setting I cut my teeth on back when I was first reading the genre.

 

[Fellgar]

GURPS 4e has an entire Interstellar Wars sourcebook covering the original Vilani-Terran war era, but yeah, outside of that one it's not something Traveller ever touched.


Well, except for FTL comms, which in the Traveller setting are absolutely game-breaking.

Note that she successfully got Main Quest Completion in the most recent chapter. Sofia could drop dead right now and her minimum job would be done.


In addition, the size requirements are much larger. Note that in BTech, what would be considered the smallest size of scout vessel/picket ship would have the same displacement as a cruiser in Interstellar Wars. Sofia knows she won't even begin to sell the BTech jump drive until she can either massively reduce the size and power requirements and/or build enough of a rep they'll actually drop that kind of expense just on her say-so.

Getting all the way to jump-9 will definitely be a thing. Of course, in the canon Interstellar Wars timeline the Imperium bit the curb almost as soon as Terra got jump-3, because that's all you need to break out of the astrographic spacelanes the Vilani are locked into by the availability of 2-parsec jump routes and start doing things like cutting across empty interstellar space to enter and leave the enemy's interior lines in a way they can't match.

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Something to keep in mind. Those are only the modern jumpdrives there where much smaller and cheaper jump drives earlier in battletech history. Back when humanity was expanding out.

So she can use the cheaper ones to prove her effectively teleportation style of ftl is better then what they have and still make it have the same range. Cutting out the travel time alone would already be amazing. The knowledge then that she could then create a design for something that is effectively jump 18... well. I look forward to reading the next chapter!

 

[drakensis]

Yeah, a Jump-5 with theoretical possibilities of Jump-9 would probably be a slightly more plausible first result to show off to investors.

 

[Panaka]

Something to keep in mind. Those are only the modern jumpdrives there where much smaller and cheaper jump drives earlier in battletech history. Back when humanity was expanding out.

So she can use the cheaper ones to prove her effectively teleportation style of ftl is better then what they have and still make it have the same range. Cutting out the travel time alone would already be amazing. The knowledge then that she could then create a design for something that is effectively jump 18... well. I look forward to reading the next chapter!

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I have to reread the story, bit I remember something about being able to fuse the confed jump drives and the BT version for an overall better drive. Lower recharge time, can jump from far closer to the planet and some other stuff.
Lower material requirements could be part of that.

 

[Ultim@tePower]

I'm not a battle tech expert but from what I know there is a primitive jump drive at 15 light years or 6 parsecs but that's even more bulky and expensive, better to go with the refined version that has all the kinks worked out

 

[Geraldrold]

Yes pls moar!