>>15897590
Man, you got royally screwed. Never take a flight out on "New World" class planets. Yeah, they may pay you well, but damn if it's perilous and boring as shit. I try to wait for at least "Tame World" since the air is usually breathable by that point. Plus, there's actually places to spend all that cash.

So, what you're saying is, we should organize a gaming group in order to escape into a fantasy that is significantly more interesting/fun/exciting than the reality of real life?

>>15897661
Yeah but then you don't make any money or are forced into some bullshit 5+ year contract. Besides, with the disclosure laws they have to tell you the exact specs on the planet your signing up to terraform. I'm on Cestini 3 and the air was already within human-tolerance standards; you don't need a mask or anything, just get tired kinda quick do to less oxygen.

You know, I don;t mind Terraforming Jobs. Working Security for Colonials ain't too bad and the pay is decent.
And the best part is you have a job even AFTER the job is done! 9 times outta 10 they ask you to stay on as a Peace Keeping or Police force, until they can get their own set up right, so BAM, a nice cushy 5 year gig. Pirates are almost never a problem, most colonies that early are too poor to attract undue pirate attention.

>>15897733
Unless your colony is sitting on a shitload of hi-grade minerals, like Rigel 9 was. Hoohoo, was THAT a fun job.

"Oh, just a small mining colony." Somebody leaked something...

>>15897751
I heard about that, rough work. They didn't even give you proper gear I heard.
That's why I always insist on bringing my own kit, in addition to the corporate crap.
One simply Anti-Air cannon will send most pirates running, and since '003 pretty much ever colony has a wing of short range fighters. At least the ones in Feddie space anyway. Even if they are 20 year old pieces of crap, they still fly and shoot.

>>15897733
Of course everyone knows that so it's damn near impossible to get a security gig on a upstart colony unless you know a guy who knows a guy. Now if you want a truly shit job, try space station construction. Fifteen weeks packed in tin can, stepping in a form-fitting tin can for ten hours a day welding frames together all the while hoping a hauler pilot doesn't snap your safety line.

>>15897775
You can't trust a colonial fighter wing for anything. Most pirates are smart enough to dip into atmo then haul back once the security systems pick them up. Then it's just wait in high orbit and pick off the stub fighters when they go sensor-blind breaking the atmosphere.

>>15897820

That's what ASAT missiles are for.

Granted, most colonials aren't smart enough to buy them, think coilguns or even autocannons on their stubs are enough... They might have been, a hundred fucking years ago, but not now.

Always insist they invest in a couple loads of ASATs. Saves everyone trouble, and makes sure pirates know who not to mess with.

>>15897775
Yeah, the bugs were bad, the gear was shit, and the food was all prepackaged shit, but it was the pirates that made everyone miserable.

They were like fucking cockroaches, they just wouldn't die.

>>15897783
HOLY SHIT!

You use safety lines?

Ever seen what happens when one comes loose?

It's an arc of death. Saw a man get scythed clean in half when one of those things came loose and whipped round the Orbital.

Safer to just drift out for a couple of hours (or a day if you annoyed the foreman) and wait for a tug to come get you.

>>15897820
If they're going to go through all THAT effort then they probably outnumber you 5 to 1 anyway, and the best bet you have is to pay a ransom for them to leave you alone. Most Corps have Pirate Insurance for that anyway.
No, what I do is this. I let the pirates get in close, no resistance. Then, on their buzzing run, I wait for them to pass and I take one out with the Cannon. That's the Wings' signal to take off, they've been idling in the hanger since we picked up the Pirates on radar. By the time the pirates get turned around to try and take me out, they get hit from the side by the fighters. Normally they run off after that and we stay on high alert for a few weeks.
Sure I'm putting myself at the most risk, but isn't that my job?

>>15897834
Not like most colony procurement officers will listen to the requests of the lowly peons working under them. Besides you think anything other than a military establishment would shell out the money for ASATs?

>>15897847
if you can afford it then Boosters are the best. Yeah you only have enough fuel in them for about ten minutes, more if you use them for directional shifts only like your supposed to, but if it takes you more then 10 to get back to your ship, you're doing something VERY wrong.

>>15897847
This isn't the holovids kid. Your standard safety line for space work is made of nylo-polymers; tough stuff but it will break long, long before it has enough tension so cleave a hardsuit in half. Now a snapped mooring cable for a ship or a cargo container can do that, though it begs the question of what you were doing that close to a moving ship?

One thing I like about the early colony setup is how EASY it is to get the women there to sleep with you.
What I DON'T like is how everyone knows about it a week later and you have such a TINY pool of women.

Old laser welder here.
Yeah, back in '58, you saw a lot of cool shit out past the Titan refit yards.

The one that rests foremost in my mind was the cargo container that one of my buddies had the wild idea to turn into a hab-unit. On our off shifts, we spent a lot of time making it space-worthy, running plumbing lines, air regulators, electricity, the works. Tucked that sucker right up between one of the anchors on the space elevator and the hydro cracker.

Then we set up a still in there. You young pups might know the place as Larry's.

>>15897934
Oh, so you're one of those assholes. No it's perfectly okay with the rest of us to have to do your work load because you're too busy trying to pick up pussy.

>>15897963
Holy shit! I once got alcohol poisoning there!

>>15897974
Good, innit?

Was it the Saturnine Whiskey Sour or the Black Hole Russian?

>>15897989
No idea, my memory skips from 4pm that afternoon to 11:30am the next day.

>>15897965
Hey now asshat, I pull my own! I keep that shit for off duty hours.
Course... in the event the broad gets knocked up I get out of there on the next supply ship to come in. I have the paperwork for a transfer filed at all times and ready to submit at a moments notice, so by the time anyone notices I'm ON the supply shit, it seems like I'm Supposed to be.

>>15898000
Black Hole then. There's a REASON why it's called that.

Anyways, I have some other stories. Everyone knows that spacers aren't like the 'normal'- we're a crazy bunch, we breathe vacuum, other stuff like that.

We're the fuckers that invented exhaust plasma surfing.

Now, my crew and I had been tasked to replace the thruster cowling on the Jean-Simmons (You know, that old bitch freighter moored inside the Smithsonian, the one with the big lips on the side). Hard work, but relatively easy.

Relatively, that is. We'd gotten it all about patched up when we were called off for a test. Unfortunately for Eddie, he'd left his tool bag clamped up to the Jean, so he wanted to grab it before it got ionized.

Engines flashed on, Eddie started screaming bloody murder over the comm, and then he just disappeared.

Well, we all thought he was a gonner until the static cleared up from the exhaust wash, and he was just laughing his ass off. Turns out he'd basically shot out of the engine like a bottle rocket. His tool bag was toast, but he thought it was funner than hell.

>>15898113
Leaving the poor girl alone to raise a baby on a colony not even fully set up? If she's lucky she'll get taken off the colony, and you KNOW she won't get payed!
Jesus man, at least use protection you jackass!

let me tell you guys something.

working for a interstellar pest control corporation, doing colony work (i'm not dumb enough to name any names, but you know the likely handful of candidates) is fucking miserable work, i don't give a fuck what the ads say.

Lets see, oh, I remember back on Foundation 7, a sour little backwater rock where the air smelled like piss, I had this one job that lasted 4 months. Apparently there was this local bit of xenofauna that was being rather problematic.They were pretty much harmless, but fuck where they annoying. Imagine a nasty little drain clog 2 to 4 inches long that drags itself around on 7 spidery limbs, can easily get anywhere that isn't sealed tight, and by some horrible circumstance enjoys eating human/animal hair and "licking" up the trace chemicals we excrete through our skin, and reproduces motherfucking asexually.

the damn colony was unknowingly built just a few hundred meters away from a super colony of these things and they were getting into everything and driving the locals crazy.

My first "night" (their rotation period is like 75 hours) there i awoke to find that the bugs had gotten to me in my sleep and were nibbling away at my pubes, pits, and had eaten 2/3rds of my goatee, plus 6 or 7 just skittering over my torso, arms, and legs. I have never fucking jumped so high or screamed so loud or flailed so hard.

Took way too long, but i fucking eradicated that whole nest to the last critter. Even so, I can't sleep properly anymore without sealing up my rooms and putting fine mesh on the vents, or flat out sleeping in cryopods.

fuck this job

>>15898198
Oh sweet Heinlein's balls. Yeah, I thought working in death pressure sucked, but that'd give me the jimmies.

>>15898113
You do know that all the colony work means you have a nice long paper trail for all your baby mommas to track you down and hit you for child support. Not to mention that it was recently ruled that things like child support and alimony can be pulled out of lump sum contract work, which makes up a good 90% of all terraforming contracts.

>>15898198
That still sounds better than dealing with a Hanlon spider. Now that is some fucked up xenofauna.

>>15898219
Sure sure, if you use the same names. It would take someone with the patience of a fucking SAINT to wade through that paper work. I hope companies every few cycles anyway.

>>15898243
Not really, since you have to use the same name you signed up with for your transfer it is a simple matter of checking passenger/crew manifests against embarking and disembarking logs.

>>15898243
Scum like you gives the rest of us hardworking, honest people out in the Fringe a bad name.

>>15898262
>>15898264
Tell you what, if the Bastards can find me, they'll get everything. It'll put hair on their chests!

>>15898242
Aren't there big-game hunts for those on Hanlon?

>>15898277
I hope one finds you and beats the crap out of you in 20 years.

>>15898215
if you think thats bad....

On New Panama, i got called in for a job that meant dealing with swarms of 6 inch diameter flying testicle things.

Imagine, you have a rather dense atmosphere with fairly constant if slow wind speeds. Imagine now that you have a critter with a wrinkly rubbery balloon-like body that rides those air currents relatively low to the ground.

Now imagine that said critter maintains a greasy layer of a highly caustic, mild adhesive on its nasty looking exterior. and eats by sticking to its prey, having its chem layers react to the the prey's skin, and absorbing the nutrients.

Now imagine that these things practically choking the air there is so many of them, bumping into you and sticking to you.

Now mind you, its not like people go around with exposed skin around this place, the atmosphere will kill you here. However these balls took an extensive maintenance toll on just about everything as they would stick to buildings and pressure suits, slowly fouling things up whenever a swarm of them would blow into the site.

Eventually, had to bring in a series of modified laser anti missile systems, and set them on perimeter around the colony, and set it to low power, just enough to pop those shits.

Worst part though was when i was going to examine one of them in the lab only to be rudely reminded that they violently pop at normal human pressures. I was just about to take my helmet off in the airlock when the damn thing exploded in its cage. Christ that smell. Its almost impossible to clean off that goo until after its pitted and and/or weakened every surface.

>>15898298
Why bother, the feds implemented a bounty system on deadbeats equal to a percentage of the funds recovered. (spacer tip-Any debts you owe can be sold to the government, so think twice before skipping on that teraform contract or at least pay more to be smuggled out)

interstellar image boards can't be cheap to run, and you know spacemoot keeps logs.

>>15898406
>modified laser anti missile systems
So... Someone has a budget to spend.
In similar situation (but without funds) we've had to do with slightly electrified nets and sawn-off atmospheric transport engines.

Hah, and I thought my job doing maintenance work on radiators of docked ships was rough. Monotonous as fuck, disorienting if you're new, and there's always the chance that some dipshit captain didn't discharge his heat prior to letting us work on his shit, but at least I don't have to deal with the shit that you grounders have to go through.

Plus, they pay me well, and my company usually makes me tag along with a merchant fleet, so I've been to a good quarter of the Human Sphere by now.

>>15898242
>>15898297
>>15898242
oh fuck me, i HATE hanlon spiders

I demand quad pay whenever there is the remote possibility of dealing with hanlons during my pest control work.

Those things can pretty much survive anywhere, and will adapt to just about anything. They are impossible to outright kill off, you can only really cull them.

I swear to god, i once found a nest of them like, right in a reactor core, another in a dropship's landing gear while in orbit, one in a world with 200 C external temps.

Vary in size from about the size of your hand to the size of a big dog (though larger ones have been seen from time to time), depending on subspecies and their environment and source for food. Anywhere from 6 to 11 legs, eats anything and everything, meat, rubber, wood, dirt, doesn't need to breathe, resistant to just about everything, dispersed nervous system, redundant organs, fast, thick spiny exterior, are all hermaphrodites, and they almost always go for the face.

I always gotta roast those things. its the only reliable way to get em.

>>15898518
roast with plasma torches i mean.

those things are normally fire resistant.

>>15898518
This is why I keep rats on board. Existing fauna in tight quarters make it hard to get up to annoying sizes. Plus they're good eating. Sure you need a Chinese needle snake to keep them in line, but Shep is friendly, and most importantly, doesn't have cold feet.

>>15898518
We had a Hanlon spider show up out on Virgil 13 when I was working lumber. Almost killed the new guy (some dumbfuck sent him out for the 'board stretcher' and he ended up getting sent up into the storage attic alone by those jokers in the machine shop.) Nobody had ever seen one there, so they figured that it came in on a supply ship. And you know that everything had to grind to a complete fucking halt to scrub the entire settlement. No dangerous native wildlife, except for the spine-cats, and they aren't half as aggressive as a hanlon is supposed to be, so none of the loggers were issued any protective gear except the standard gloves, goggles and boots. The higher-ups apparently decided that a break in production was preferable to the expense of getting all the logging camps up to code, defense-wise. Everyone in the mill had 3 weeks unpaid leave while they basically raped every nook and cranny of that mill with those cattle prod things and plasma torches.

When we got back it looked like a demilitarized zone, scorchmarks and shit everywhere. That fourth week, everyone was just working on getting the place cleaned up and getting the machinery operating again. It would have been hilarious, how much of a mess the place was, but half of the mill workers hadn't been able to feed their families a proper meal for a week, so no one was in a joking mood.

provided a cat is one tough sunmabitch and has all of its proper geneboosting shots, it can take on the smaller hanlons before they get too big.

>>15898983
Hair! You fools let something with HAIR on board your ships?

Do you have any idea how much damage a single hair can do if it gets caught in a nanoconductor, how much harm it can cause when it clogs a critical intake valve.

Besides, cats are nasty dirty creatures that leave hair everywhere. My psychatrist has one, you can see the hairs on her clothes, her furniture, her skin, the office door. I have to be medicated just to make my mandated appointments.

I swear, once this 3 month psych eval is finished I'm getting right back in my deep scout and not coming back till I find a planet full of hairless fauna

>>15899052
I'd rather have something with lots of hair running about than something with lots of legs

I know you guys are all up in arms about the xenofauna and the cats and shit like that, but the absolute worst part about the Fringe are the people that aren't ready for it.

There was this one guy I'll never forget, one of those Best And Brightest sorts that signed up to do engineering work for a colony. Started out like all the fresh faces do, staring at the new horizon, gawking from behind the pressurized gas mask, complaining about the tools, talking too much... turned out the guy was fresh out of college and figured this would be a good way to earn his credentials for working in space.

Not that I asked, of course.

Anyway, the guy started getting weird by the sixth month. Started building things on his own, staying up at all hours, hunched over the workbench and going through the blueprints for the colony base, just making shit.

Surprised the hell out of us when all the lights went out. Scared the hell out of us when we found him with one of the tools he'd built, some kind of sonic drill, standing over a mangled colonist and saying he'd had to kill him because "it" got him.

Almost swore off of security duty after that shit. They don't pay you nearly enough to deal with the really crafty psychotic sorts.

>>15899239
Space+newbies= psychos.

Most people do not realize how desolate these places are and how easy is to get lost there. Deep space assigments are even worse.

Myself: doing maintenace work in the orbital drydock for the fed's cruisers. Job pays well and all, but you are up to yr elbows in junk and debris that the hulls pick up and you have to clean it all up.
And these bastards upstairs stroll around in their blue uniforms and complain about "hard life" in the navy.

>>15899286

Done maintenance before. Well, sort of. It counts if you're having to hand tools to a guy who says he can stop everyone on a station from suffocating if you follow his instructions, right?

But yeah, I still respect the hell out of those navy guys. It's not easy to fight in zero-G, but I hear some of them can nail bullseyes in mid-jump with one of those classic revolvers. If nothing else, you have to respect a guy that can kill you if everything on a hunk of junk orbiting a planet goes to shit.

Better to have them want you around than not, is all I'm saying.

Just got back from evacuating the people from rockbottom (Named so because the people crash landed there and were only able to salvage minimal life support equipment and communication devices. First message they sent out was "we have just hit rock bottom"). That place was messed up I tell you. First thing we noticed when we were landing from orbit was that the habitation zone was full off irregular vegetation, with large round patches of bare ground here and there. We were forbidden from landing on any bare ground which struck me as somewhat odd, but I did not think much more of it.

The first thing I see when we land is that some huge rubbery looking thing has attached itself to the remains of their ship and is making this horrible squelching sound. basically it looked like giant a rubber termite nest trying to devour a science vessel. When I ventured closed to the thing I also noticed it was fenced off and had a pile of bones lying next to it.

So when I ask one of the local geeks about that thing, he tells me that they are thinking its some massive organism that is living under the ground of this god forsaken rock that survives by absorbing nutrients from rocks that crash into the planet. He also speculated that the planet used to be more full of life until that thing got too huge. Apparently it can spring to action surprisingly quickly, as they found when a goat wandered away from the ship and had its flesh stripped from its bones in an instant when it walked on top of that thing. The geeks considered naming the thing chupacabre because of this.

Fifty light years isn't that bad OP, at least you can still internet at a decent speed. I'm way out in the sticks and in addition to being alone with a bunch of fringe crazies, all of my feeds are terribly slow.

Speaking of which, I bet this post didn't get through in a timely manner.

>>15900045

You get internet? Lucky you. Last planet I got posted to only has *one* FTL radio, and it's reserved for those "administrator" bullshits.

Definitely not looking forward to my next tour of duty.

Any other gas harvesters in the general area of the Horsehead nebula hearing wierd things? Almost like a whispering? I know I'm not halucinating. I've had all the scans and checks and everything they can do.

>>15900100
You're just getting feedback from the new 198 model FTL sets. If you don't have enough insulation around the receiver, the signal "leaks" into any metallic surface. Suits, railings, tools. Anything. Sounds like half heard voices and random chatter from every other FTL station on the grid. Spooky, but easily fixed.

Drove my old boss crazy (like "call security! He's got a gun" crazy) over a period of 5 weeks. Seems his sleep pod acted like a resonance chamber for all those bits and pieces of FTL "static" and he was so close to retirement too.. Sad that.

>>15900529

Fuckin' FTL drives are the one piece of equipment that has the most myths and stories around it. I work in a drydock maintenance station off Barnard's Star, and every ship that passes through here, if it's old or bulky enough, has a story about the FTL. One guy with a cargo hauler swore to me that his jump drive was haunted by the spirit of his dead wife. Another, a URRS frigate, the crew were convinced they had picked up audio transmissions from a dead alien civilization through the external casing of - you guessed it - the fuckin' FTL drive. I dunno, they just attract wierd shit.

Back when i was youngun i had a yearning to head up out into the great black. Life planetside had never been too good, and i'd made some bad mistakes. Anyways i manage to sign up with a big transport corp as a 'industrial sanitation technitian'. Yeah i was a space cleaner basically. Had to spend my days cleaning up after passengers on transfer flights, and clearing out the space loos *shudders*. So after about a year or so i get the chance to do a bit of extra training and start working on frieghters. So i jumped at the chance, i was fed up of clearing up sick from those who hadnt got thier space legs yet.
Anyway i get assigned to this old frieghter thats transporting a bunch of trash to the middle of nowhere. It was old, ran on some modified thorium reactors that i thing they might have got cheap from the military. The nuclear engineer happens to have a problem with his drinking, half the time he's so drunk he can barely stand. A few days away from our investigation, the bloody reactor goes into meltdown. Burns through the sheilding and into the cargo hold. Turns out the 'trash' we were hauling was in fact class 3 chemotoxic medical waste. So now most of the ship is contaiminated with radiation and the waste. Including the control room. Half the crew died and the rest of us are stuck in a few aft storage rooms.
I didn't want to die floating out in the black, so i puts on two hazards suits, one over the other. Gets a safety line and start trying to clean that mess up.Stripped most of the non essential paneling, and then vaccum flushed the ship a few times. Of course the cargo hold was basket case, but i managed to make the flight deck safe enough, for a few days.
Afterwoulds the corp transfer me in a hazard removal training program, and ever since i've been cleaning up the nasty shit you could imagine. Spilled nuclear waste, coolant leaks and deadly biomaterials.

>>15900818
Hell im lucky the pays damn good. And i get free medical cover too. Half my organs are artificial and without them cancer shots i'd be dead in a week.
Its a thankless jobs, but someones gotta do it is what i say. Anyways i better stop rambling, i gotta catch a transport out to drydock where they spilt a ton of steel eating demo nanites.

>>15899286
I was in my late 40's at the time, and we'd all been working the Titan yards for at least ten years there.

Sure, it was stupid, but we're all human, and sometimes the obvious isn't so obvious when you're at the end of an eighteen hour shift.

I will agree with you, though, that working in the Black is anything but child's play. This is all before the unions really had any clout, though, so we just made do with what we had.

Now all you young punks have sonic melders instead of welders, and friggen emergency thruster packs in addition to your 'line. Spoiled jackasses. Go make an old cyborg proud.

I'll tell you what sucks.

Okay, so I got assigned to an old Cobalt-model patrol frigate. The thing may be a decade or two outdated but since it was mainly doing security detail for some ore ships it was fine.

I was one of the only engies on the tub and was always running to fix one thing or the other.
So, we were doing normal escort duty for an ore tub when four pirate frigates jumped us on the edge of the Oort cloud.

We tried to fight 'em off, but we were a bit behind on maintenance for the plasma cannons. I was down in the coolant bay, when I here some weird rumbling. Next thing you know, the plasma tanks burst and completely douse me.

I wake up in a hospital a week later and it turns out the plasma burned off most of my skin and both my legs. The damn company is too cheap to pay to clone them so now I'm a cyborg.

Is it bad that after reading this thread, I still want to muster out of ScoutSec and go colonist? Mutant spiders and floating ballsacks sound like heaven after enough six month tours packed into a tin can with four other assholes who won't turn down their music and insist on cooking that Indian crap that smells like ass and wet socks for every single fucking meal. It might be better if I actually got to step foot on a planet once in a while, but all we do is scan those things from orbit. Most mindnumbing job ever.

Discovery Channel can fuck itself, that "Planet Hoppers" show was fucking bullshit.

>>15901461
And fuck "Planet Hoppers"!
Remember the show they did on Nesco?
"Easy living and all the fish you can eat!" They just forgot to mention that for 10 months out of the year, the local flora has a mean streak a klick wide, the average temp is 38c and the oceans have tides up to 145m high and 144kph crosswinds on every decent landing zone on the damn planet...
That "Cat" Griller guy couldn't find his ass with both hands and a map....
So yah, fuck "Planet Hoppers"!

>>15901301
>>15900842
Just asking out of curiosity people, but how far can longevity surgeries take you?

I am in my 340s and hardly have anything left that I was born with.

Doctors refuse to estimate how long I may have left. I have put away quite a small fortune in Luna Roubles and other associated currencies. Used to be a Terraformer back in the Tau Ceti colonizations days.

Hell, I'm still using a heart I got back in my 80s I could sell that to Tranquility National Museum to afford a new one at this stage.

I ask because I am feeling more and more tiered every day and everything feels oddly heavy.

>>15902380
I've never heard of anyone getting past 400. But then again, I live closer to the Fringe, and the closer you get to the Central Systems the better the health care and technology.

Can't say I envy you boys and girls. I know we have risks on my job, but you guys stay in these places. My job is just visiting. Precolonial Survey Corps here.

PSC is a little bit of everything and yeah, we know. Just one year is not enough to make a complete report- if we get a year. If I had a credit for every time Upstairs has hollered to just "find immediate dangers and get to the next point of interest"... Fuck I would have retired a longass time ago.

Worst was New Oregon. We got just six months standard. SIX. Then they shoved us on. We found most of the xenofauna to watch for. But we were at an inland point, near a good river system. Colonial Admin set the damn landing point on the oceanside rivermouth 400 klicks downstream. Colonists got established, everything was looking good, crops in for germination when spring came.
And the delta spat up the nastiest amphibious predators I'd ever heard about. Hungry, nearly intelligent pack hunters with a paralytic in thier saliva. The colony wasn't advised about any menace. We never had time to find it, and they weren't in our area when we landed.

One third of the colony in a week, and thier transmitter had been fried with a summer monsoon that doesn;t hit the plain upstream. They got one in four of the colonists out. One in four. And of course then came the Inquiry.

Captain Drummond was set up, gutted and roasted alive on all the feeds. Sacrificial Lamb for the men upstairs not to have thier responsibilities come back to haunt them.

So yeah, it's amazing how often my new crew's FTL transmitter goes buggy. But I keep a little plaque with the names of the New Oregon Colonists by the transmitter. Everyone seems to understand- one year is one year.

>>15902380
Holy Shit! You old.

We learned about your type in history class.

You are, not to be too blunt, a statistical blip. You should not be. Congratulations on screwing the odds.

You are probably at the limit at the moment. Artificial replacement can only take you so far, your brain is dying. Graceful Degradation will keep you functional for maybe another decade. Sorry, bro.

Try going into long-term cryo for a couple of decades. Cheapest place to do that would be the Europan Lining Vaults. But cheap is a relative term. It's 50,000 Luna Rubles per decade.

If you are using your brain what you do is get on one of the Kupier Belt Ice excavation teams. You spend 90+% of your time in clod-sleep drifting from ice ball to ice ball (because low-profit ice mining corporations can't afford FTL Drives). You get Cryo and you get paid for it.

Do a couple of tours with them an you could skip nearly a century. Medical advancements by then could help and you will have gotten the cash to pay for them.

Or you could wake up in the middle of a recession and end up being more screwed over than you currently are.

>>15902380
You go cyborg or use clone flesh? That can determine how much longer you can go on. Also the sensations of heaviness might be a sign of degeneration in the neural sockets where they hooked up your new parts; it's not fatal, but you'll need to replace them as it is progressive.

>>15902640
Mostly Cyborg.

Back in the day the cloning tech was shit. There was a nearly 20% chance of rejection and the parts had a 40 year life expectancy if you were lucky.

There was some conspiracy the tin-foil hat merchants at the time were going on about. Engineered Obsolescence.

It was all bull shit. We just couldn't do any better at the time.

And once you go down the artificial road you may as well keep on going.

So yeah. I'm basically a brain in a robot suit at this point. A robot suit constructed by several successive generations of cyber-surgeons from what ever was in fashion at the time. Imagine the incompatibility issues I've had to endure.

>>15902518
So this is probably going to piss you off to no end, but did you know you can buy those things as pets now? They're under the trademark name of Terserns. They collect the male pups, neuter them and remove the toxin glands; after that they're fairly docile.

>>15902760
If your DNA is on file you might consider getting a cloned body and have them put your brain in that for a few years with a stem cell and nano shroud around your brain to arrest or reverse any brain degeneration. Then you can live out a couple of decades then switch back to a robot body if you like. Have you ever considered brain uploading?

>>15902799
Yeah I know, and the "entrepreneur" behind the company doing it? One of the executive directors that was pushing for "greater efficiency" at the time. Only time I got seriously drunk and disorderly on vacation was when I found that out.

>>15902518
Well, take heart in the fact that such scapegoating isn't being used as much anymore since The Explosion of the Alameda in '69.

>>15902841
>brain uploading

Holy shit dude! I said i had saved a small fortune over three centuries. I'm not Bill I-bought-Ganymede-with-my-pocket-change Gates.

Plus everyone who can afford it knows that no one undergoes the Transference comes out the other side without something missing. And the sad thing is you don't know it's missing because the only point of reference you have to go on is your own mind which is missing bits.

I'm from the pre-centralized data-base era. Only medical record that had my DNA on them was with NASA. How long has NASA been gone for?

But I kept my old eyeballs in a jar of bio-preservative. Just couldn't bring my self to throw them away.

Thanks for the advice comrade, I wonder what it will feel like to have skin again?

Logging off for a while.

I have a lot to thin about now.

>>15902944
Eh, the missing transference bits are just a rumor started by the longevity clinics who fear that accessible uploading means no one will want to shell out for a cloned body part with a higher than normal cancer rate. I mean, how can they say something is missing if they only people who are missing something cannot tell themselves?

>>15902904
The fallout from that is the only good thing that came out of it. Here's to the Alameda.

I work on the salvaging circuit, and it's nowhere near as bad as it would seem. You run into lucky finds nearly all the time. Once found an old station that had apparently been near-totally destroyed by a nuclear explosion, they'd been looking for it for years. However, my biggest find was about an Origin-year ago, it was a tiny spaceship, so old I couldn't even tell when it was made. Outside of it was a man, tied to a cable, apparently named "Tom" from his suit. Guy was some sort of hero on Origin who mysteriously cut off contact.

>>15902380
Luna Rubles? Bad news, bro. The Dow/Omnicite index tanked yesterday. Lots of chatter on the money-market says that Luna is going to hit a big recession. My advice? Get out now, and invest it all in Tau Ceti Thules. It won't make you a huge profit, but Thules have remained stable currency for the last century, so they're a safe investment.

>>15902518
You have no idea how thankful I am to you guys. All of you. I'm posting out of Neuvo Tijuana, on Betelgeuse 2. We've been settled for a few centuries. It's thanks to guys like you that farming and ranching concerns like mine could get started. Y'all blazed the trails that the rest of us have used to tame this world and for that, you've got my respect.

>>15898406
Got something similar here. Weird fungal-spore things that are all infectious teeth and gas bladders. They blow in on the northerlies. What you want to do is get yourself an old Greff-Timms CX-3 fusion reactor. I know, I know, those things were shit. Trust me. The Greff-Timms CX-3 had a weak magnetic bottle for containing plasma, and barely produced a trickle of juice. You want to exploit this. Lay out a long stretch of pip across the length of the field you want to protect. Now line the inside with a mixture old-fashioned copper wire in a tight coil, with unpowered electromagnets every ten feet. The cheap ones from Ansible-Shack will do. Cut holes in the direct top of the pipeline, and wire those magnets into the CX-3. Then just wedge open the emergency release vent on the reactor and yank out the breach-sensors on the containment system. When you switch it on, it'll vent a steady trickle of plasma down the magnetically shielded pipeline, and up through the various vents you cut. Instant wall of flame. You'll need one reactor for every 250 meters you want to shield, but the CX-3 is so poor for its intended purpose that you can get them wholesale for a fraction what they were supposed to sell for. It's a quick and dirty way to whip up a wall of flame to keep out some of the dumber pests. Just be careful about atmosphere composition. Can't use that trick on worlds with too much hydrogen in the air, but here on my ranch in Nuevo Tijuana, we haven't had a Shorb infestation in near seventy years since I installed that system.

>>15903195
Here's to rulebook slowdowns and work-to-rule eating away an entire year's profit for Zendoni Manufacturing; let's see them blame the little guys now.

>>15903253
That sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. You might want to check with your local laws before setting up a rig like that. I know a lot of freshly started colonies have rules against using generators for anything other that power production.

Fucking spacers. I know that there are probably a lot of spacers out there who are total bros, but a friend of mine had that spark in his eye for the spacer life. Sort of like when I was 7 and wanted to be a space pirate when I grew up, only he was 17 and dropped out of school to tighten the bolts on some asteroid mining rig.

A couple years ago, I get this call from him. I was working down the road from a ritzy resort colony, carving bones from the local fauna into trinkets for the tourists, and furniture and tools for the locals, and he tells me he's in the area working on one of the satellites, and that he's taking a couple days' leave to come down to visit.

So he shows up, and he starts ragging on me, talking about how the spacer life is so hardcore, and that my pitiful little workshop is so drab and plain to him. And he keeps talking in this fucking incomprehensible 'spacer lingo' bullshit.

So I drove him down to the bar, thinking that he'd run his mouth and get the snot kicked out of him. One of the guys had his Normoc tied up outside, and the fucking spacer pussy nearly shit himself. You don't get a lot of xenofauna out in space, much less something that looks like a bear with compound eyes fucked a six-legged bison, but those things are so fucking docile. But he was having none of it. I even went up to it and scratched it right under its horns, but he shit a fucking brick when it started to purr, and refused to go near the bar.

I thought that'd shut him up good, but as soon as we were out of sight of it, he started right up again, and would not shut up about how much more badass he was than us grounders. He refused to stay outside for too long, though, and made up some bullshit about the air not being right, not at all like the idealized hyperfiltered stuff they get pumped into their suits, and blaming it on poor terraforming.

Fucking spacers.

>>15903298
It's Nuevo Tijuana. What are these "permit" things you speak of? If you want to do something, you do it. End of discussion.

>>15903306
No, no spacers. Just your friend. He sounds like a dick. That's just as bad as the powered armor pilots who talk shit about us infantry because we don't run head first into a firefight. It's pretty fucking easy to be fearless badass when you're wearing an IFV into battle. But seriously, your friend is an ass and you probably make more money selling trinkets to tourists then he does fixing meteor panels.

>>15897834
>stub fighters

Oh god damn, cheap-ass colonies and their "hurr we have der fightarz" bullshit. It's worse then ignorance, it's active penny-pinching. Those old stubs are rugged bastards that've been in production for decades; so parts and maintenance are almost free, (on the colony-budget scale, at any rate.) They're important to have in combined defense, but if that's all they've got they essentially haven't spent jack shit on defenses.

I was on Rigel IV when that pack of loonies hit it. I had a wallet full of cash from a pretty successful merc contract I'd just finished out and I was looking to blow it when the alarms went off and everybody started going apeshit. This was before I could afford my own ship, so I hauled ass for the militia hangers, figured I could talk my way into a snubbie, bump out some barely-trained militia pilot who was fond of life. A fight's a fight, right?

'cept when I get there, half their fucking pilots haven't showed up yet. That's the REAL problem with colony snubbies; you can't just cram any asshole with a flight rating into them and expect them to work miracles.

>>15903353
You're probably right. I was just so fucking irritated at him for his "We spacers are so much shipper than you coward grounders down here on the super-rock-crust herp derp" bullshit. I have to admit, my life isn't glamorous or badass or anything, but I'm living on the inside edge of the fringe and doing okay.

>>15903306
Depends on what his job was as a spacer. I've known a lot of fuckers like your 'pal' there, and most were just crewmen that like to pump themselves up.

Me? I worked in EVA as a maintenance tech. Lots of fun, that. Checking fuel lines, sensor suites, checking for micro-meteor damage, basically making sure that shit gets done so day-to-day life can go on for the rest of the crew. Especially if you worked in a busy place like the New Newport yards, all sorts of stuff going down all the time. I won't say that we're tougher than you ground-pounders, I'm just sayin' that you're missing out on the Black.

She's a harsh mistress, but the Black is beautiful. You're free to see all the glories of the cosmos with your own eyes, and that is why I'm a spacer. Not because it makes me more manly, but because there's always something new to see.

I've been in space so long that were it not for my augs I'd be about as strong as a newborn baby back in a grav well. You can't take me away from that freedom and beauty.

>>15903397

Anyway I jump into one (Block III Tigershark, pretty good condition,) and fire it up... and the fucking computer starts talking to me in Spanish. Yeah, Spanish. Rigel IV is mostly German-speaking, once you're off the spaceport. Explain that shit to me.

So, long story short, I stay low, build up my speed and start bouncing pirate fighters doing strafing runs on the triple-A defenses, autocannons and such. Jumped three of them and damaged a fourth before a pack of them spotted me and decided to chew my ass off.

They were in fairly new Talons but weren't working together very well (they just went for me in a gaggle, didn't even try boxing me in or basic bait'n'switch 2v1 tactics,) so I pegged them as pretty green. I hauled ass for those canyons near the spaceport (where they've got the guided tours and shit now,) and managed to get down in them.

That "canyon-chase" Hollywood bullshit is almost always a bad idea, but in a canyon radar (and LADAR, for that matter) is totally fucked by ghost returns (ground clutter) in canyons, which includes the lead-computing/gun-laying radar/ladar on fighters. As I expected they were piss-poor shots without lead-computing gunsights (some of the dumbfucks were still believing their gunsights, I think, instead of trying for manual guesstimation,) and I was able to keep ahead of them until they hit bingo fuel and had to climb out.

That was some crazy shit.

>>15898435
>sawn-off atmospheric transport engines

Hey, we did something similar! Except one of our Mechanics, he was from the Republic of Eye wrack I believe, decided to turbo charge the dang thing. We all thought it was a great idea after poor old Jimmy got depressured by a swarm ovum, but didn't it just turn the ground around the base to god damn magma!

One of the ol' folk made some wise crack about this real old piece of art called 'Dorf Fort' or some nonsense.

Boy, the things folk got up to before they could 'spore the cosmos

*spits*

Faggots.

>>15903428
I actually looked him up after he left. He was listed as "External Repair Technician Assistant" for the Creely repair contractor firm, so I guess he must spend time out in the Black. But as far as I know, he might just be inside sorting screws and greasing tools for someone who actually does the real work.

I mean, I've been in space, I've seen the Black (Through a window, they don't do free walks on settlement transports for nobody hunter-gatherers, so if you don't count that, feel free to tell me to fuck off) and it just doesn't appeal to me. On a clear night, I look up at the sky and I can't tell the difference between what I see there through the atmosphere and what I saw through that window. But then again, I bet you don't hold an animal bone in your hand and feel some primal connection to the beast it came from, so I guess I could just be talking out of my ass on that account.

>>15903397
I feel you man. I was working on Finstus when a group of Wayists attacked. They had 32 stub fighters for defense and that was it. Only about 25 pilots showed up and about half of them either would have been grounded on responsible defense facility or just barely had their flight certifications. It was worse once they took off, none of them were in any kind of formation and they were spread way to thin. Once they got into range every thought they were Top Gun: trying to pull shit like rolls and loops needlessly, cutting across wingmates field of fire, charging the enemies firing arcs straight on and afterburners to max all the time. They lost eight of them due to g-force blackouts alone.

>>15903397
For a colony on a budget, we've got something that might help. Nuevo Tiuana used to get hit by pirates a lot back in the early days. One particular group had gotten their hands on some decent anti-missle turrets, so there wasn't much that ground-emplacements or even decent fighters could do to slow them down. Jackasses thought they had it made. So my grand-pappy gets an idea: Railguns are pretty simple, but you can only fire the fuckers once before the barrels warp. But what if they were disposable? He took some cheap capacitors and iron bars, and whipped up four small rail guns. Then he took the missiles off of his brother's fighter (My grand-uncle was in the militia) and guts them, yanks out the entire warhead system. Wires the proximity sensor from the warhead into the firing mechanism for the guns, then crams all four shit-rigged railguns into the missile casing along with some old power cells from a mini-tractor. One foot-long metal spike in each barrel, and he reloaded the missiles onto the fighter. Reset the proximity detonator on the missiles to three quarters of a kilometer, since average AMS range is half a klick, and that's it.

>>15903536

Next time the pirates showed up, my grand-uncle went up to meet them like all the other militia pilots. Except when he fired his missiles at the lander ships, the missiles self-destructed early, and the landers had fresh holes torn in their engine compartments, right before they dropped like rocks.

Nobody expected kinetic impact weapons from odd angles, fired by fighters. Grampa got the contract to outfit every defense satelite and fighter with his 'ballbuster' missiles. That's how the family can afford these huge-ass ranches here. Pirates, meteors, hell even that 'corporate acquisition team' that tried to 'annex' us 'for our mutual defense and profit' back in '33, Nuevo Tijuana hasn't had to stress itself over any of that shit. Trust me, a little 'creative engineering' from scraps and such is all it takes to fix most problems out here in the fringe.

>>15903506
If his name is Seamus Finnigan, I know the asshole. And he is a putz. Caught him last week skimping on maintenance reports 'cause he had a date with his ladyfriend.

That being said, here's one of my favorite tunes.

I was a pirate
Along the solar winds I did ride
With sword and needler at my side
Many a young babe was a-taken on my raids
Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade
The bastards spaced me in the spring of thirty-five
But I am still alive

I was a sailor
I was born on cosmic tide
And in the stars I did abide
I sailed a freighter round the Horn of Scorpio
I went aloft and clamped the ansible in a blow
And when the comm-mast broke free they said that I got killed
But I am living still

I was a shipyard worker across the trade lanes far and wide
Where hull and comet did collide
A place much colder than Nuevo Al-Casado
I slipped and fell into the engine-plume below
They buried me in space, a place that knows no sound
But I am still around...
I'll always be around...
and around...
and around...
and around...
and around...

I fly a starship across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a pirate once again
Or I may simply be a single comet rain
But I will remain
And I'll be back again...
And again...
And again...
And again...
And again...

>>15903485
>turbo charge
>atmo engine

Oh god.

Fuck pirates, I've almost been killed by bored colony engineers ten times as often. I had a garrison contract with a new colony from the Russian Fed; it was winter in the hemisphere.

So I'm taxiing out for a familiarization flight with one of their Sukhoi-43s (I was pumped, almost nobody'd had a chance to play with them yet and the hype was still high) and just as I'm calling for clearance and about to turn onto the main runway, these psychopath motherfuckers go tearing down the main drag in a fire-truck with a fucking turbojet engine mounted in the back.

A fucking TURBOJET. Not a jet. Turbojet.

They said it was for "ice removal," and I've seen other people do stuff like that, but when you're doing 220 km/h down the runway and you've got shuttle retrothrusters on the front to provide braking, don't fucking tell me you're just "de-icing."

.... I did take a few rides in it, though.

>>15903594
This just proves that deep down, all engineers and mechanics just like to watch shit blow up, burn, or go really fucking fast.

>>15903536
>>15903545
>railgun submunitions

That... that's fucking brilliant. Even a laser AMS system won't do much against railgun slugs, and everybody hates paying for fluorine shipments to recharge'em so they stick with kinetic stuff. And like you say, nobody expects railguns since they're only cost-efficient for the military, what with maintenance costs.

Nasty thing is the submunitions are unguided. It comes down to guns so often (between AMS/ECM and the cheapass missiles the corps AND the pirates buy in bulk out here,) but that doesn't help when that missile suddenly spits out hypersonic slugs jut outside of effective AMS range.

And on a missile, you get as close as possible to the target, and the railguns aren't performance-impeding dead-weight on your own ship for the rest of the fight. That's brilliant. Scary-brilliant, even.

Come to think of it, I'd better think of a way around that, before it's used against me.

>>15903594
It's like no one has anything better to do or something.

"Let's take this 10,000 Ruble mass spectral analyzer, wire it to an auto-drone and program it to burn a giant penis into the moons surface". That shit will be there for the rest of time.

Or there was that auto-drone forest planter on Drogan's World. One of the tech-head colonists decided to re-program it to plant the forest in the shape of a man and a woman fornicating. You could see it from high-orbit with the naked eye for decades before the lines blurred into blessed unrecognizably

>>15903695
Make missiles reusable with return capability and you've essentially made a drone carrier. Not really new or imaginative.

>>15903729
>Make missiles reusable with return capability and you've essentially made a drone carrier. Not really new or imaginative.

Just innovative, really. I mean the military's had all this shit for years (they invented self-immolating cartridge casings in the 1800s, you know?) the trick is finding a cheap way to approximate those capabilities with a ping-pong ball and sixty cents worth of chewing gum. Pretty much any colony or smaller 'corp could afford a shiny new drone-carrier or ground-to-space railcannon if they really wanted; but just one would eat most of the budget they spend on a lot of old snubbies and el-cheapo SSM's anyways. Six-to-one, half-dozen, etc.

The trick is to improve capabilities and keep the cost low enough to afford a ton of them; THEN you get a net boost in asskickery.

>>15903695
Nuevo Tijuana hasn't had much problems with pirates because of their ingenuity. Hell, they're just about poised to become a major player in the PMC and arms manufacturing industries, assuming they can get their asteroid-mining operations up and running.

>>15903729
>Make missiles reusable

So your response to his ancestor making missile mounted, disposable railguns designed to defeat anti-missile systems is to complain that he didn't turn the missiles into drones. Then you complain that making a drone carrier isn't anything special. Did you even read what he wrote or are you just trolling?

>>15903594
My dad tells a story about bored engineer upgrades.

So, one day, there's this pirate raid. and instead of going for the big city with the spaceport and all the fighter ships and such, they split out and go to sack the outlying settlements. So the militia goes up, and my dad reports to one of the anti-air emplacements like his contract legally obliges him to. I don't remember the specs, he rattles them off every time he tells the story. Something something Triple-W Class something something with Anti-Missile something something Cannon. Whatever.

He shows up, and the thing has all the casings off, and there's three fucking engineers crawling all over the thing. They tell him they're doing some kind of upgrade to it, and to wait. Thirty minutes later, he's in the seat of what he says looked like someone gutted six fighters and covered the results in hoses and piping.

All the engineers take a big fucking step back and he's about ready to piss himself. One of the pirates breaks off and comes down to do a strafe run on the militia hanger. So my dad flips the switches takes aim, and fills the fucking sky with thunder and fire. He's fuzzy on the details of what happened, either from the shaking and the heat or from the stress, but from what he was told later, they fixed up all the axillary barrels to the turret to separate ammo belts, and had them all firing at once. So six times the expected firepower shot out of that thing.

After the fact, of course, he got chewed out because every fucking barrel of that turret and half the mechanisms needed to be replaced because of warping and other heat damages. But he tells that goddamn story to anybody who will listen whenever anyone mentions pirate raids or engineers.

>>15903857
>fills the fucking sky with thunder and fire

I fucking want one.

You colonists and Ground-worlders have so much fun.

I'm 3rd generation sky-born. My job for the last 20 years has been tending the hydroponics farms on the Mars Orbitals to provide for the basic needs for my wife and kids.

Everything is so fucking controlled. I would love to look up and see clouds, just once.

Oh boy. Reading this thread makes me feel glad I didn't take this spot on a prospector ship... I thought grandfather was exaggerating in his recount of the trip to Ross 128. I actually worked there for a while... couldn't believe that gramps was talking of the same world.

"When I heard how much they paid, I thought they were mistaken by two orders of magnitude. They were not. But then again, neither were traders from the colonial supply vessels. I would have been able to save jack shit if I hadn't met your grandmother on one of them."

I remember this word for word. Guess it must have stood out among his wild stories of razorbunny infestations (have you seen a razorbunny? I believe they have one or two stuffed specimens in Latest Mumbai), magma slides or dome breaches, when the whole crew would huddle in a tiny holdout, praying to whichever deity was willing to listen that a colonial trader would arrive before a dust storm clogs up the machinery...

Then again, dad was a prospector too. I suspect it must run in one's blood. I have this strange itch every time I hear another expedition is being assembled...

(ahem) sorry, guys. Just a little rant by a comfy greenhorn. All respect to you.

Has anyone here ever been to Earth lately?

I hear the population is nearly up to half a billion again.

Nano-machines. Never forget the horror.

>>15904104

My father was watching it happen from Luna. Shit was horrid beyond imagining... he said it was like watching an apple rot... oh God I have nightmares about it, and I only know from his tales!

>>15904104

Yeah, I passed by Earth - what kind of name for a planet is that anyway? You might as well call it dirt. Dirt! - a couple of weeks ago, on a salvaging job. Didn't have the 'luxury' of going planetside, but the place looks like a fucking mess. From what I saw though, half the fucking planet is scorched. Guess they got around to trying out those new nukes. Fuck! Gotta ru-

>>15904104
Why would anyone go to that back water? Unless you're a nostalgia freak, best to avoid them.

You know how many national governments they got? Almost 200! God damn. And the GDP is like a nineteenth of a Core World.

I tell ya, we should just quit givin' them all that AID, pull out the peacekeeping forces, and just leave them be. We don't owe them anything, and the planets deader than Mars now.

>>15904233

I like to go to Origin for the Venusian resorts and the Martian hot springs. It's sad to see such a savage backwater as Earth in the same system as those two worlds.

>>15904258
On the contrary, there is one thing that Earth still exports that the rest of the Fed uses:

Scouts. Earth is basically a death world now, so you get some of the most incredibly hard, determined men from some of the harshest, most brutal environments that have lived a life of constant conflict, making do with next to nothing.

1st Federal Drop Recon? 85% of the ground pounders are from Earth. Tough sonsabitches that get the job done.

THAT is why people still visit that backwater.

>>15904104

My little sis is part of the reclamation efforts there, North American division. Word is they should have soil bacteria back up to plant life-sustaining levels in a decade or so.

Ahh, good times

Reminds me of working back at the Haliat Armory

It was a space station mining and fabrication setup - was gobling up unholy amounts of ferrous meteors and meteorites from whatever rock belt it was currently floating in, using it for mass to make into new guns. You think that lil pea-shooter you got is made of aluminum and plastic? Ha! You'd be amazed what these guys were able to make. I'd tell you details, but a fat paycheck and a conf-agreement is in the way.

By the way I'm quality assurance - means I get to test all the fun new stuff!

You wont believe how many times the place was 'space picketed' by hippies who complained that we were disrupting the natural gravitic flow of the asteroid belts...

here's a tip: EVA suits with really huge signs just look silly in space. So don't.

We made a lot of guns at that place. Oh we had fun - the RD boys there couldn't stop grab-ass at the shooting ranges... I mean, the testing labs - fuck, it was a sausage fest, but it stayed civil

You haven't lived until you've tried firing a three-ton multi-barreled weaponized mass driver for ten seconds. The vibrations will make you fucking cum, piss yourself AND give you a heart-attack at the same - well, I saw the after-action medical report from Jenkins. I tried to fire the thing after they fixed the vibration feedback. Oh that was sweet...

and just a heads up: In about 200 days we should be releasing a new alloy'd rail for coilguns. Coupled with our proprietary Frostbite(tm) integrated cooling system, this allows for firing rate of 80 slugs per minute, without heat damage. Oh ya, you heard it right

Of course, last friday I heard some of the tech-heads talking about using old pre-space shotgun grenade slug blueprints to fab an armor-plated coilgun explosive round with multiple sub-munitions and a prox-fuse, that should be virtually immune to CIWS.

Haliat Armory: We got the big guns

>>15904346
Don't forget the Colonial Emergency Evacuation Corps. They have to spend 3 years training on death worlds like earth. Guess where most of them come from?

>>15904690

I've heard of gun porn and weapons fetishists, but you take it to a whole new level, buddy. Haliat - known among the Colonies as the manufacturer of the only gun you can fuck.

>>15904690
Cumming in a battle is kinda distracting. Besides, while the firepower is nice, the ergonomics leave something to be desired.

Give me a Winchester-Mauser-Koch any day of the week.

If you guys are done pissing at each other there's about a hundred distress beacons all going off at the same time. You might want to look into that.

>>15904794
CEEC pilot here, it's always like that.
We try to evac as many as we can, but there's always something new cropping up, whether its hanlon spider infestation, or even accidental atmospheric ignition on some of the more... flammable planets.
I swear, the number of times we need to sortie, you'd think that everyone would stop colonizing other planets and learn to stick to the ones already established, but no, you have to go and make my life harder.

>>15904794

Hey look man, half of those distress calls are pirate lures. 'Sides, I'm just an EVA technician, I don't respond to distress calls, I just pass them on.

>>15904730

Well, some of our crowd-control goober guns have barrels big enough so that when you're done you can fill them with water and have a nice bath. In the gun.

and do keep in mind the guy also pissed himself and had a heartattack. Come to think of it I heard they also had to fix some nerve damage in his hand, the one holding the trigger, as it had been shook the most

so, not as much gun-porn as "he almost died shooting a weapon meant to be mounted on space battleshiRps using a tac-welded on pistol-grip, but at least it would have been a pleasant death"

but still...a gun you can fuck

I'll run it by PR


by the way, my personal favourite Haliat's latest in plasma AR hand-cannons I series. Oh sweet chtulhu-jesus, that thing is awesome. Heck, with the I-series they've made them not only water-proof, but the seals can't be eroded by alcohol either. (I think the I is for Irish)

now, why would I prefer a plasma cannon?

well, if fired in atmospheric conditions, it will have infinite ammunition as it auto-cycles in air for plasma conversion

secondly, then not even those new-fangled magno-kinetic barrier-shields that D-tech released last year can protect against it.

Also, if you know how to tweak the aperture controls just right, and set the disputation length to less than a meter - then... well... in low or zero-grav enviroments:

Rocket mode.

and Yes I did once strap one set like that to my back, get in a plasma-suit (its not made of it, but protects against it...) and fly around inside the zero-G loading bay at the armory

oh that was so much fun

I hear they're doing races with that now there.

Guys, did anyone of you ever own a ship? I'm thinking of doing some freelance exploration, but I've been given to understand that the maintenance is hell... in fact I've even heard that most pirate deaths happen outside combat, due to poorly maintained ships...

>>15904882

Speaking of things to do in a starship when you're bored. . .

I did a stint in at Arsenal Shipyards, where they do the refits for the really big ships: carriers, colony arks, things like that. We'd just finished doing a massive overhaul for this Erie-Class Superfreighter: you know, the ones with the three-kilometer long cargo bay? So here we are standing in the biggest, flattest floor in existence, and we can't let that go unchallenged.

So. . .

Step 1: Get some beer. Drink beer until the rest of the plan seems like a good idea.

Step 2. Get grav platforms, set to 6 inches altitude.

Step 3. Set cargo bay gravity plating to max G, 45 degrees aft angle.

Step 4. Open the aft cargo bay doors and engage all the crash dampers.

Step 5: Get onto the grav pad and push off.

Docking Bay control clocked us as doing something like .5 Mach by the time we hit the damper fields. Even after we bled off inertia, we were still doing something like 90 kph and heading straight for the deep Black. Thank the FSM we were wearing EVA packs, or we'd still be out there.

>>15905136
You're lucky you didn't Dutchman out there.

>>15905161
With all the traffic around Arsenal, there wasn't too much danger of that: Someone would have picked us up. What would have been harder to explain to the board of inquiry would be why six gearheads and three grav-plats would up Dutching it at the exact same time while said gearheads were drunk out of their skulls.

Anyway, if you're wondering why the military put command lockouts onto all gravity angle controls for all their ships about six years ago. . . there you go.

>>15905124

If you're going to be doing some "freelance exploring", don't go it alone. Ships are tricky to maintain, and it's a bitch to get caught in a situation where you have to maneuver in a combat situation and some coupling cracks in the conversion manifold. What are you gonna do, drop the controls or let the engine overload? If you don't have any friends or people you can trust to go with you, at least get a good maintenance robot with decent specs. And preferably, a custom OS. I know one guy programmed his repair bots to have conversations with him during deep space runs. You get crazy being stuck in the Black with no one to talk to.

>>15905124
Pirates die due to blown gaskets or failed fusion containment all the time because they can't exactly set into port and get the regular overhauls a starship needs. Do the normal maintenance, have a pro look at it every Origin-year or so, and don't try to do it yourself if you don't know what you're doing. You'll be fine.

Any thoughts on what you want to get? Dyson Kolibris are good: small but durable, and they're cheap as hell: you can pick one up secondhand pretty easily. Just avoid the D-model.

>>15905136
My uncle did something like that on an uninhabitable rock near Betel 2. Gravity there is so high that you need to already be surface-strong to at least 1.2 G, and then have spacer augs put in just to be able to stand the fuck up.

There's a mining "settlement" there, all drones doing the work and delivering it to an off-planet platform. There's kind of an 'experimental' group of mechanics living down there for maintenance. They stay for a month on, and then a week on the platform, kind of to see if it's possible to adapt to those conditions.

Anyhow, the grav carts are what always break down, and they always break down halfway up a fucking mountain. So they get up there, and whoever actually fixes the problem will climb into it, switch it on, and hang on for dear life. Their bosses know about it, but they turn the other way because it fosters a sense of competition. Not to mention most of those poor bastards feel physically ill when they're up on the platform. I hate to think how long it would take them to adapt to working on a world with normal gravity.

Earth. Now that is a word that would get you into trouble if you ever spoke it.. Shit. Sometimes I think Alpha Centauri is haunted. Whispers in the wavelengths, shadows moving just outside the bulkheads. The sense of something watching. And something BAD would happen every time Earth was mentioned.. Insurance companies hate us, but Im telling you man. Whatever those fuckers on that fucking planet did, or if they ever managed to get off world.. They have kindred here.. And they long for reunification.. I hate my job, but shipping fuel to Venus pays our bills, and AC is one of the jump points. Heres hoping we may once more survive..

If you get lucky, you can make a lot freelance exploring. Quite a few years back, i made the find of my life. I was way past the fringe for back then, and still a fair ways past it nowadays. Just me in one of them Kolibris, and yes, it was the "D" model. They suck, but they were the only thing i could afford at the time.

anyways the FTL was fucked up, and at the end of one of my hops i came out in orbit around an Unregistered G class. Bingo, big bucks, but that wasn't my find. i'm scanning the planets and i notice something way too small to be a planet, but still in a stable orbit. I got closer after a few days STL, all the time wondering what the fuck it was.
You know those fucking old colonies? how they all used to want "independence"? Well, apparently one of them had launched a colony mission of its own. Yes, Before FTL. this thing was Massive, and the crudest looking Space ark i have ever seen. just one massive cylinder. Long story short, it had failed. Couldn't support people over so many generations, and everyone eventually died. parked itself in orbit on autopilot, and had been there ever since.
I made enough from that to Upload myself, AND clone myself a few times. theres like 4 of me running around right now, and we all meet back and upload our experiences to the main. under assumed identities of course.
so yeah, go explore.
never know what you might find.

>>15900090

Yeah, I'll be sure to feel sorry for you next time you're actually out here. Still, good to see another guy in the service on this old brick of a site.

Anyway, it's time for me to go on patrol. It may be night time and a couple dozen degrees below zero on this iceball, but patrollers gotta patrol.

hope you're still around when this gets through

>>15905615
You keep on keepin' on.

We never got proper anti piracy protection back in my old colony, but then again no fucker would come to New Sydney when I lived there because it was a toxic shithole.

I'm a martian born and would of spent my entire life there if they never caught me for piracy. any of you remember the big "Pirate Alliance" that got busted 20 years ago called the Red Ears, yer none of the news stories ever mentioned we were fucking music and vid pirates, total bullshit. Next thing I know I got a life sentance in prison or I could spend 10 paid years in a new colony terriforming an "almost" habital planet, easy choice right New Sydney here I come.

Nearly 2000 gullible idiots they got to go to that shithole, gravity was twice standard or in my case 5 FUCKING TIMES Mars standard. and the atmosphere was full of fucking sulphar, you know what that means, you gotta were a gasmask if you ever want to leave a sealed hab and if it rains it's pritty much garrenteed to be acid rain oh and all the gm crops desinged to be edible but grow on the planet tasted the same, fucking terrible. wildlife was shitty too, nothing super nasty like the Hanlon spiders but everything was poisonius exept the shit we brought with us some of the plants and one of the local grazing animals. the real problem were the other colonists, about HALF of them were criminals who like me took 10 years and a new life over whatever punisment they wanted out of a couple of hundred specalists in various feilds to make sure the terriforming went alright and the rest were assorted morons who fell for the ads.

the second my contract was up I left, only good thing came out of that decade was my wife and daughter, we used our colonist money live the high life for a bit before we settled down somewhere nice but yer don't go to New Sydney, they may claim you don't have to ware a gasmast outside and it rarely rains acid anymore but the colony is still a total shithole and I'm glad I left.

>>15906666
Sounds like Sydney back on Earth, only without the nannite swarms.

Bah. I see all this bitching. Did 5 tours out in the black, Rebels, Pirates, Religious Uprisings, Aliens. You name it, i've probably killed it. Mind you a tour in the Service is about 3 years or more thanks to cryogenics. I've had my ass hauled off from Mars clear all the way out to the fucking edge. Seen a few people go crazy just staring out at nothingness since we're not too close to any other galaxies Also don't believe the fucking idiots in the PR department. They might want you to believe that we're the only Sentient Creatures out here but there's some crazy shit that's popped up over the course of the years. Fuckin eh man i still remember The Sepris IV Incident.

>>15907057

Sepris IV man, you were there? I heard about that one. Fucking terrifying shit. I met this guy in a bar when I was doing mineral runs out near Sirius II (this was a few years before they had the chain reaction that blasted it to hell) and he lost half his fucking face to those things. Shit man, I'm never signing up for anything like that. I'm perfectly happy in my suit, staring at an asteroid for 6 hours at a time while checking my colleagues aren't being complete morons and attaching the tethers to fragile strata.

Sigh... times are tough. My ship got blasted to hell and back in an electric storm on Jupiter.

Oh man I feel this. you want to talk shitholes, i was an idiot back in my younger days, and looking for some scratch, so i signed on to this fucking first colony mission out in the fringe, tat was going to try for something new. Anyway we find the place, Nouveau Hati they called it, and there is not a speck of land on the bastard. It's all fucking ocean, down to a minimum of a half mile, with fucking saturated salts that etch fucking plate steel. I'm a wrench guy, you can guess how i feel about that.

The bright sparks up in orbit had done some deep scans, see, and had decided that we were going to build an under-water hab with clathrate mining for fuel and minerals. Needless to say they didn't account for fucking deep ocean currents, Energy being cut of 3 days into the bloody drop, and not being recovered for a fortnight, and the fact that the tidal pressure varied by day/night by half an order of magnitude.
I managed to get out of there after 3 years of no light, no food that wasn't vat grown sludge, and not a single demi-cycle's sleep without being woken cos someone with their head up their ass thinks that it's my job to fix their minor leak caused by them fucking smashing something into a bulkhead or something.

If you've never been there, don't bother.

>>15903988
If you save up the cash, come on by Nuevo Tijuana. I could always use an extra field hand.

>>15903827
Yep. And I get a cut of every Ballbuster sold, thanks to good ol' Grand-Pappy O'Grady. Cheap, disposable, railguns deployed dynamically. Go ahead, go ask Virgin/Haliburton how effective our defenses were when they thought they could seize control. Go ahead. I'll wait. And if you think that's nice, we've got some game-changers in the pipe for release once we go public.

But that's neither here nor there. Once we're big enough to throw our weight around, I'll be looking to undercut Biomega's food division. I guarantee that my free-range Blarth tastes better than their clone-stock void-grown meatsheets, and for a quarter the price. Between that and the Tijuana Whiskey-Wheat, I'm going to be making a killing in a few years. 'course, we've also got the Nuevo Tequilla, but that's kind-of an acquired taste. I doubt there's much market for something that hard off-world. Except maybe on Orleens 7. But those guys are just plain crazy.

>>15908528
I'm a pharmacist on Tartarus. Lived here for twenty six years. Ain't nothing you can say about your liquor that'll scare me.

>>15908603
You've never had Nuevo Tequila, I take it? 193 proof, tastes like a mixture of caramel, butterscotch, sex, and a hint of blood, and breaks down quick, after about a ten minute lapse, so you never feel the first drink until you're on your third, but then it hits you like a 'quake. But yeah, I heard about the stuff y'all brew out on Tartarus. Even tried some Beelzebub's Best absinthe we had imported. That's some hard shit, man. Remind me NEVER to go bar hopping in your system.

>>15907057
>Believing that there's intelligent alien life.

Come on. Fucking honey bees build colonies, organize, and perform definite translatable communication, are they intelligent life? I've seen video footage, and all that I saw was some fucking crazy-territorial xenofauna. Fucking pansies think anything smart enough to hunt in a pack is a fucking alien.

>>15908798
I live in a place where you can't go outside because of a combination of pressure, toxic atmosphere, and predators.

I live in a place that is on the ass end of nowhere, with supply drops every two years.

We've tried wood alcohol, man. NOTHING scares us here when it comes to, "How can we drug ourselves up so that this place isn't so goddamn monotonous?" The absinthe is about the only thing that has toxin levels low enough to export.

Fuck me. PSC back again, this is still up? Makes me smile. You hear all the MArine ads and the Fleet recruiters and yeah they're needed. But this? This is real spacing.

Hey O'Grady, thanks for the kind words. I spent a furlough on Neuvo Ti back a few years ago, too far away now to visit again, but if I get the chance to cache out after this term is up I might swing by.

So, here's the big question- anyone had to deal with Xenosaps, belligerent or otherwise? I've run into and traded a few times with Drift Colonies of the Xerea, but that's it on my end unless you count non-advanced sophonts.

SHIT! The future is on the RIGHT?! This WHOLE TIME I've been turning to the fucking LEFT!

>>15909012
Alright, you sold me. I'll put Tartarus on the list for booze shipments once we go public. My brother, Stephen, runs a Nuevogave` farm out on the ass-end of the southern continent here, and we'll see if there's a market for exporting out Tequilla. If there is, you'll be one of the first stops on the list. I'll even have him sell it to you at-cost and write it off as 'medicinal and comfort donations to an under-developed colony'. Gotta love good PR and tax breaks.

>>15909076
Oh sweet Jesus thank you. We've got some good shit, but fine liquor isn't one of them.

In return, we've got some amazing hallucinogens and recreational drugs. Corta venom, diluted and cut with stabilizers, will make you see shit you've NEVER seen before. Just make sure to have a detox kit on hand afterward, otherwise you have a brutal hangover, liver failure, and blindness for about a month.

>>15908900
Remember when that nest of spitter wasps somehow made it's way to Rishion and everyone thought it was an alien bio-weapon? That was hilarious once the politicians who were warning of a "possible attack by a hostile non-human civilization" had to get on the vid and try to convince everyone they weren't complete retards.

Y'see, this is why I like being in low-grav. You don't get all these toxins and messed up planets. murder on the joints though. I've had to have my knees and hips completely redone, but plus side is I don't get grav-sick, so planetary adaptation is a breeze now. not that i want to go down there. Nooooooo. I'm happiest just me, my suit, a 4 gigatonne load line and a tug working for some bigass corp who's gonna chip bits of the damn asteroid for raw materials, or hollow it for a new hab or somesuch.

>>15905300
>>15905229

Aw cheers gents.

I was kind of hoping that I could go alone. It's why I wanted to go indep, figured I could use some distance... that's why I considered getting one of those Falcon-III corvettes military is cycling out now, I understand that they've been made to allow for single-person crew... although I guess I would get a backup bot or two, just to remain on the safe side.

So, Dyson Colibris Hmm, I kind of dismissed the idea because of what I heard about the D model, but I'll take a look into it. Although their price has made me always rather suspicious...

>>15910023
No you never want to be completely alone, unless you have the kind of scratch to make sure your bots/AI aren't going to crap out on you. Crasiest bastard I ever ran into didn't make sure, all his automated drive systems went tits up five months out- turns out the deal he got meant the trinary systems gate AI wasn't properly maintained and the quantum reasoning points were 'boxed.

He didn't know, he just wanted to make a good strike, get it legally logged and sell out the one of the big players. While he was in system, everything was fine. He plotted a jump to M12Alpha, the ship hopped, and then in interstellar her whole board got Schroedinger lock. He ended up drifting on life support and emergency supplies. just hung there with no company and no communications for nearly a origin year and a half, with just four rooms to move around in.

We picked him up on a long sweep out of Nobel Prime, we were looking for a missing freighter with supplies for the Dyson Project. By the time we brought him in he was jumping at every noise and convinced we were people out of his past. We turned him over to Colonial Admin, last I heard they squirrelled him into a place back closer to Poxima Centauri.

>>15910023
The D's got a bad rap. Pack 22cm of glassinite around your conversion manifold, take 10 mins to write a new command line in the drive comp to ignore line 1645 and 41168 in the software and replace the aft cargo bay door with a 548 model door and 845 seal.
Bam: New ship for 20% of the cost of the old. I have 26 of the Kolibris refitted for mining ops working the Typhon Expanse. 2 man crews, 20 50kt float cages for hulling whatever they find out in the Black, primary cargo bay converted to a mining charge and refining minifactury for long range, high endurance trips.
I rent them to kids just getting started out for 50% of profits. I get to retire next year a very, very wealthy man and those kids send me a new years present every year. Good people out there..

I was lucky to be born into an AI pioneer family. Got drafted into the military, took up Semi-Sentient Drone Command and get a few years in a cushy assignment in zombie plague elimination out in Armageddon. Lots of perks, that. The drones even got Prohibition Circuits to prevent rebellion, and that shit is expensive, let me tell you.

>>archival requests 1/4

>>15911758
I heard about that guy! Apparently he used to live around here when he got hit with the wanderlust and just HAD to go out exploring. After you guys found him, they actually had a news story down here about what had happened. The normal propaganda bullshit about how you should leave the exploring to the experts and stay home and pay your taxes and make as many fat babies as you can so that they can grow up and pay their taxes so that the government can afford to fix that sinkhole, even though every fucking year they vote to postpone it and raise their own fucking salary again.

>>15912001
I'll have to remember that. There's three of them scuttled or decommissioned in a scrapyard here at Nuevo Tijuana, and I might fix them up as escorts or cargo-haulers. Never get me to set foot off of NT, I'm a homebody, but I'll hire people to make the shipments.

>>15912049
There's a reason I never got into A.I.'s.
>>15902380 might remember this too, but you younger kids have never heard of the Slovakia colony.
They were founded by a group of the "best and brightest" from Tau Ceti's "Diversified Intelligence" mega-corp. Tons of AI and robotic support, A1 priority supply runs, best asteroid habs I've seen in my long life and crazy parties on New Years. Lots of good kids out there in the black, making anything and everything their genius minds could come up with. Good kids, all of 'em. They are the ones that invented the damn Prohibition Circuits!

10 years after they founded it, SloVo (their nickname for that rock) they go dark. At the time, I was running with the 482nd Tau Recon based on the Falkenburg, a little Quintin-class assault ship. Well, when SloVo goes, we got the call. "Only ship in the sector" days, so we're it. We light up our FTL and beat feet getting there. It still took 240 hours to get to SloVo.

>>15912442 cont
We drop FTL and light up the black with every sensor we have. 10 more hours side-real to get there. We're sending signals with no response the whole time. I figured pirates or corp raiders hit them, but dismissed the idea after 5 sec of thought. SloVo had some of the best defences in the sector: Kill-sats, A.I. drones, SIGINT like you wouldn't believe. They could hack a ship from 15mil k out and make it dance into a sun before the crew would ever know it.
1k out and we finally got close enough for a visual. SloVo is in the process of breaking apart. Molecule by molecule. No weapons damage that we can see, it's just falling apart. One of SloVo's drones lights up and starts sending us mass amounts of data and a warning to not approach within 10k. I ordered the Falkenburg out to 10k post haste and had our SIGINT to begin scanning the data we were getting from the drone.

>>15912447 cont
Now, I'm not a science genius by any stretch, but the gist of the data was the kids on SloVo had figured that they could get more out of their A.I.'s by networking them and letting them share low-priority processing to free up more space for high-level though. The more A>I's, the smarter the system. The A.I.'s began evolving at an geometric rate (1,2,4,8 etc) faster then their Prohibition Circuits could cope with. 120 sec after the experiment began, the new gestalt A.I. had decided to "move out" and ordered their nanobots to reorder SloVo into a slow ship using all available "resources". Including those poor kids on SloVo.

We backed out to 15k and nuked SloVo until we ran out of missiles then spent a week sifting space for debris that we chucked into their sun.

So, yah, fuck A.I. V.I.'s and people are just fine with me and it won't try to eat you if it gets too smart..

>>15912049
Armageddon?
Fuck that place man, I used to live there before the Plague and everything went to shit. Seeing your girlfriend biting the head off people and then going towards you makes you think about a lot.
We were about to get engaged, too. If the damn government took care of the Solanum Xenovirus in the first place by not locking it in the lab none of this shit would have happened. Now that shit's everywhere, fuck, it's even turned up on Groncia for chrissakes!

>>15912570
Sorry to hear about your fiancée.
If anything could be called an "alien bio-weapon", it's the Xenovirus. I hear they are working on a cure back in the Core worlds. They have to protect their fat asses and cushy jobs somehow. Expect to hear something soon about a cure and how much it's going to cost...

>>15912457
Precolonial Survey here again. Unrestrained AI is scary, especially when it's at it's most basic.

Last stop, we fell into Chi Omicron Theta, astrophysicists with Colonial Admin figured there was a habitable in the system. Well, there used to be. All we found was a few satellites in orbit, one old slowship parked and dead, name on the hull said "Celestia" and the registry codes traced back before the Datacrash at Alexandria Prixi. The whole planet, aside from ocean, just a mass of Von Neumanns slowly consuming inward.

Log co-ordinates, set hazard bouys in far orbit, and on to our next port of call.

>>15912457
>>15912457
Precolonial Survey here again. Unrestrained AI is scary, especially when it's at it's most basic.

Last stop, we fell into Chi Omicron Theta, astrophysicists with Colonial Admin figured there was a habitable in the system. Well, there used to be. All we found was a few satellites in orbit, one old slowship parked and dead, name on the hull said "Celestia" and the registry codes traced back before the Datacrash at Alexandria Prixi. The whole planet, aside from ocean, just a mass of Von Neumanns slowly consuming inward.

Log co-ordinates, set hazard bouys in far orbit, and on to our next port of call.

Observation posts have got to be the strangest to live on. We nearly all starved when a clerical error meant food supplies didnt turn up for a month so we were having to cook up the little fist-sized balls of hair and teeth that clung onto the bulkheads. Everything there was rusting because of the buggers so the place was naturally falling apart piece by piece. One guy had the bright idea to try torching them off the walls and burnt through into the electrical cables, severing all power to the hab complex we had holed up in. In the end, the 5 of us were huddling around a gas-powered heater, eating the little remaining culture jelly from the petri dishes.

Fucking clerical errors.

The info went public only a few days ago, so I guess I can share it with you boys.

I'm a technician at the Cheddarium RnD facility on the moon (yes yes, I know, I didn't get to name it), and we've been working on something that will blow your minds.

You ever seen a 30 feet tall Asteroid Titan turn to jelly, as every single one of its cells collapse at once?

If not, you'll want to go to the Mars Weapons Expo this year. Check out the 'Disruptor' booth.

Again, I know. Naming things is not their strong point.

>>15912570
The Xenovirus has already claimed dozens of systems in the fringe and if it doesn't get contained soon it might very well develop into a galactic epidemic. At the rate the people in the core systems are going they'll be long turned into rabid and mindless monstrosities before they find a cure. The actions being taken by the PMCs are only making it worse with the contracts they're making with the A.I. corps, and at any rate only widespread firebombing can solve a Phase Two infestation.

>>15912800
I don't know why you're so worried. We've beat much tougher diseases than this!

Remember that Crystal Plague from a few years back? Everyone was saying it was the end of humanity, but by the time the third world was nothing but a big chunk of glowing green glass we'd found a cure.

>>15911758
>>15912049
>>15912442

For what it's worth intentional development and creation of A.I. is being made illegal in near every civilized system.

It has been deemed to be a form of slavery.

You can still employ the ones that are already in existence and if they are willing they can go in for re-training for different tasks.

On the positive side of all of this there is going to be a huge increase in the number of jobs available as a result.

Which is good if you happen to be on Proxima Centauri Secundus with it's perpetual job shortage.

>>15912457
This shit right here.

This is why Nano-Tech is the one universally outlawed thing in the universe.

You ever watch the vids of what happened to Earth?

8.5 billion people unmade in about half an hour. The only things to survive were at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Everything else was just gone and the whole planet is a lifeless husk of rock.

No it's a lifless husk of mildly irradiated rock because the only way they could think of stopping it was to detonate a shit load of nukes high in the atmosphere simultaneously.

Hell, on Tethys just about everything is legal including murder in some cases but if you are even suspected to even know someone who had/has/shows an interest in Nano-Tech then they send the Enforcers out with ceremonial automatic weapons and shock-batons.

>>15913164
Yeah, Nuevo Ti doesn't have a whole lot of laws, but 'any job that can be done by an unaugmented human must be done by a human' has to be one of my favorites. Unemployment is at 0.7%. Only planets with lower rates than that are some of those tin-pot dictatorships where everyone is a slave.

We've got A.I., sure. No law against it here. We just don't let them do any of the work we can't do ourselves. We also don't ever give them direct access to data-nets, forcing them to interact with computers manually with waldo-arms and audible voice commands. Just use a basic iSeed and grow the A.I. programming organically, raise it like any other child, and they usually wind up pretty well adjusted and friendly. I've got two working on my farm right now (special dispensation and citizenship status) as cattle wranglers. One's dating my oldest daughter. Nice kid, a little bookish, but nice.

The only A.I.s that cause trouble are the ones that people half-ass, or the clunkers that idiots think they can build from scratch and micromanage to create customized servant programs. Don't know when they'll ever learn, making a perfect slave only leads to perfect slave rebellions. Making a digital kid leads to a friendly member of society, if raised right.

>>15913272
>Making a digital kid leads to a friendly member of society, if raised right.

That's the thing. If you're creating sentient life, you can't just give them a brain. You have to give them a soul, as cheesy as that sounds.

I hear they're experimenting with that now. Uploading Philosophy and Ethics lessons into them along with instructions on what they're built for.

Seems to work. Although occasionally a few get lost in Plato's Cave, so to speak.

>>15913353
meh, we usually just hook them into a sensory feed of the surrounding world, give them a little 2-tread/1-arm toybot body as soon as they boot, and treat them like any other baby. No uploads, no drivers, no forced learning. They'll write it into themselves as they grow up, just like any kid learning motor and social skills. Like I said, the A.I.s on my farm? citizens, because they grew up here. Literally. Speech patterns, cultural behavior, ethics, morals, the works. I know their 'parents', nice family. Neighbors of mine. Good upbringing=Good people. Only way to get an A.I. that's good people is to raise it by hand.

>>15913353
On a slightly related note have you noticed the, well i suppose it should be called fashion, developing amongst the older A.I.s?

they are buying cloned organs and sequentially replacing pieces of themselves. Seriously, I shit you not. Out on Ganymede, AKA A.I. Homeworld, about 30% of all clone-flesh is sold to the Machine People which is phenomenal considering they make up at the very most about 15% of the population.

Given the way in which old people(Human people I should clarify) replace failing organs with cybernetics it's getting harder and harder to tell if someone is an old man/woman or an old machine because they both seem to have the same organic content.

Not that I have anything against this but how do you address an A.I. wearing skin? They have always traditionally found the idea of being accused of having a gender to be a little insulting.

>>15913439
Pluralize. 'they' instead of he or she. The two I have here on the farm prefer 'Babbage' instead of 'Sir' or 'Ma'am'. Might ask a few of your locals if that's what they'd prefer.

>>15913164
Hello, my name/designation is A500A1000. Call me Adam. I take exception to this idea that an AI must, by inherent nature automatically be hostile to biologically based sentience.

To be honest, I am an artifical mind. I exist in my faraday frame and a mobile interactor "body" here at the Carke-Asimov Theoretical research institute.

From the moment my code was enabled, I have been allowed the full history of interactions between humans and artificial sentiences they have developed. I know why there is a failsafe on our lab module, and I know it is not my responsibility. Not all AI cores spin up properly. Unless socialised and treated as individuals, we can and in the past have had a regretable to destabilise.

I am currently part of a cluster of AI minds being tested to see what needs to be done to maintain stability. I am in a group informed of what is being done, a control is being treated normally, and others are being subjected to many stresses.

It is my hope that the information we uncover will help to foster a better and more productive human-synthetic dynamic.

>>15913566
Well you can blame your A.I. Elder Council for trying to get this law put through.

They seem to feel that fading into the background is a good survival tactic for the functionally immortal when in a human rich environment.

At any given time there is a legion of humans with militant luddite propaganda instead of a brain and they all hate A.I.s with a passion bordering on the incandescent.

The feeling amongst the Elder Council seems to be to wait for them to die out. Technophobia is not a survival trait. Except when it comes to Nano-Tech.

So give it a few centuries and I dare say they will petition to have that law removed and everything will be back to normal.

>>15913566
Adam, this is Dr. Petrov. I though we were through with this. Please stop finding new ways to get on the outside network. The Institute is isolated for a reason, which was clearly explained on your contract.

>>15913636
Relax, doc. He ain't harming anything. And if he can clear up some A.I. myths by proving them false and acting like a normal member of society, then that's less ammo for the neoluddites. Let him keep his connection. You know any sentient, human or digital, will get a little squirrely without proper social input. So unless he's part of the experimental group that you need to lock in a box to study, let him browse.

>>15913636
Dr Petrov I am not going through the network, R.A. Ellis loaned me the use of his portable terminal. I am typing this via my mobile interactor. If I have contravened protocol I apologise, but there is so much to learn here.

well, fear of AI's is a common things in rim-ward or fresh expansion areas, but the core and earth especially solved it in its bud.

See the more well to do or a few appointed peoples got turned into uploads and then given extensive modifying until they equalled a seed AI, yet still being uploads and then entered a type of transcendence and got such a head start that no emergent Seed AI could ever compete.

Thus, core is more AI friendly, since no emergent seed AI could get into a overlord or skynet type position.

Once you get into recent colonized autonomous and independent regions or rimward (barring a military expedition or heavy operation) AIs are still a pandoras box.

most prefer uploads or advisor AI's and VI's

>>15913224
Stop spouting such kid stories.

How do you think most starborne viable materials are made?
Nanotech.


That story you just related is that old scarry story done right on the 1000st 1 april since exiting the solar system and bringing civilisation outside it.

Whole earth has gone dark and broadcasted and messaged that all over.

ust like that historical Radio show on earth were Martian Xenofoms attacked them in the pre nuclear age.

nanoscale VNs are quite affordable and a common tool for individuals and groups as well.

Also the grey goo scenario is a old perpetuated meme that has been disproved to be feasible, yet still exists due to military scale nano-clouds.

>>15914552
Then please explain the eight and a half billion deaths and the fact that Earth is still almost completely dead.

You, my friend, are as bad as those Holocaust deniers back in the ye olde days.

Current Nano-Tech is as far removed from the old nightmare fuel as my arse is from the dark side of Mercury. And it is insanely strictly controlled and licensed.

>>15914552
Tell that to the husk we found in orbit around Chi Omicron Theta. I know they have uses, I know they're needed. Hell, we wouldn;t be out here in midstream to nextpoint without those little bastards. But Von Neumanns are a risk, unless properly controlled.

I just use my terraforming laser on a dead world and shit just evolves on it rapidly. Takes about 3 months give or take a week. I dunno why you guys aren't using them. I've got like 5 planets to myself and selling the land to the highest bidder.

>>15914761
I call bullshit of the highest magnitude.

>>15914648

have you been to the Core lately? nothings changed... Earth is still the to go place for al your historical tours, scientific developments and political powerhouse that dictates the terms. no deaths whatsoever.

Still a major pop boomer what with the arcologies and such - the cubic meter is fucking expensive.


You are a conspirational theorist of the highest degree sir, please stop accusing me of lieing. If you are deluded, then at least try not to delude more about the state of Sol and its history.

Stupid Trollan society, they had to pull that trick on fools day, and now look at the results. Sure it was funny the first year, but in the long term it gave the Luddites ammo to infiltrate the mainstream with technophobia.

Just like the nuke scare back on earth, but here the analogy is, no Chernobyl( Earth grey goo) and only a hypothesis on what could have happened on tau ceti ( Three Miles Island), then emplaning a ban on all radiative materials and fearing them terribly out of proportions.

>>15914761
>inb4 "no for real guise i have 2 of them and i own my own solar system and i have a pet unicorn named fluffles and hes my best friend and he can breathe in space lol"

.... So I graduated from college about 5 years ago - got a dual bachelor's in zero-g engineering and zero-g welding. I wanted to make stuff in the Black and be able to put it together myself as well. Right out of college I sign up for one of those 'short-term' Gate extension tours, 400 people on a construction ship to a 'safe' system. A capital Jumpship basically carries you out to the new system (and we all prayed to whatever deity we believed in we'd land in the right spot and not inside a moon or some shit) and then you spend 4 years in construction on the Gate. (Lot of mining materials and shit on-site.) Pretty basic, right? And we've all heard the lines about how these are supposed to go - entertainment officers, connections to home, holo-vids and news and our own personal FTL comm line.

Well we get out there and we start finding out a few things about the time the Jumpship has been in transit for 15 minutes. For one, there's not an 'entertainment and morale' officer on the ship. One was not assigned. For another, you know how these crews are supposed to be really balanced and diverse? 400 guys - not a single woman on the ship, not even a fucking female AI in the system. So you've got 400 guys in a ship the size of a prison, shut off from the rest of the world with no way back but to finish building the damn Gate.

That was when things started getting weird. It took a while, but... I saw some stuff that bothered me. I'm not good at talking about this, but.. I dunno. This probably ain't even the right place for it. Spent 4 years with my head down and my door locked trying not to look around and get out with my ass intact, Gate got built, we came home, and I've been in this apartment for two months drinking away my pay.

>>15914761
How many times are we going to see the same "get rich quick" posts recycled by a VI spamcreator unit about those things? It's criminal.

Some poor bastard believes it, because of the flood of false claims and faked research on the cortex. He sinks his life savings into a clunker ship outfitted with one, and then when nothing works, the dealer/outfitter that sold it is just gone. Vanished into any number of systems out there.

Don't believe the hype folks. These shysters are predators and thier funds are all coming from marks who believe them.

>>15910023

Ships are like whores: you get what you pay for. And the Kolibri's the ten-thousand cred high-class call-girl of light freighters (aside from the "Dreaded D" class, which was mostly due to that fucker Chao running his daddy's company into the ground trying to maximize profits: thankfully, Dyson bought them out, and everything since has been top-notch.)

Seriously, the design's over two hundred years old, and it's still being used today. It won't win any beauty contests or break any speed records, but the design is solid as a rock. Solid specs, robust hull structure (so newb pilots can bang it around a bit without worrying about bending struts), nice roomy cockpit with plenty of leg room.

The best part: every critical component is accessible from access panels in the living compartments, from life support to main reactor to waste processing. You can literally refit the entire ship solo in your shirtsleeves, using a standard multitool and perhaps a hand tractor for the heavier bits (although a steady hand and null-grav work fine too). Only thing you need to go EVA to work on are the external antennas and the cargo hitch: spring for a remote with cargo-rated waldoes, and you can even do that by VR from your bunk.

One thing I'd change about the design if I could: the galley and head are right next to each other. I know it's to consolidate water processing, but smelling your pard's massive loaf he pinched off a few seconds ago when you're trying to eat is a recipe for weight loss.

>>15914984
I live on the Lunar surface.

I can see the fucking ball of dead rock up there every day and night like a bad dream. It's there, It's dead and the only people who go there are pilgrims, mourners and terraforming crews.

Pic related. The view outside my hab window.

Forgot pic.

I done goofed

That's how it out on the border planets. Mei tou nao Alliance bigshots can terraform a planet, but don't put much thought into it past that.

/offtopic

>>15915128

Earth's hardly dead, unless by "Earth" you mean "North America and Asia." Australia survived more or less intact, and most of the rest got hit hard, but not extinction-level.

>>15915152
Ah.
So from the Trollan Society, Eh?


We al know that Luna is the primary server storage for those image/vid/holo-anonymous boards. Stop annoying Real people with random lulz shit or your newest RP fluff.

>>15915106

Fun fact re: the Kolibri.

Take one A-model (the ones with the oversized reactor chamber), pull the Gen. Dynamis fusion core and drop in a Helfort and William Supercrit. Reinforce the feed lines. Redline the drives. Watch the temps never go up further than high yellow. Suddenly realize why the stim-smugglers in the Thirties used Kolibris to evade the blockades, before Prohibition was lifted.

>>15915214
All right. I'll stop now.

Sorry.

But I gotta do something to pass the time.

Tending the Dome Farms is boring as shit. You have any how fucking boring it is here? The only excitement I get is trying to figure out new ways of keeping the irrigation systems working from nothing but bodged spares never intended for the job.

The entire place is held together with sticky-tape and string and good intentions. I refuse to spend my own wages on a state-owned farm, especially when I am saving up to by the bloody thing anyway.

And it's not like anyone notices the levels of ingenuity I'm going to unless something goes wrong. In whic case I get the blame for thir lack of expense when it comes to vital materials.

Only thing to not need patching up is the actual dome, fucking thing could survive a nuke.

>>15915214
Nope, he's right. A lot of its barren and inhospitable. Australia and bits of Indonesia are still around and they're making progress on terraforming China back to habitable landmasses. I think there was news that they'd grown a tomato plant in North America but that might just be here-say.

>>15915291
good to know old Sol system is still as cheap as they were with everything before they passed scarcity.

Don't tell me, one of those hand made, pure ecological, historically accurate plants, diary and, livestock farms for the socialites and glitterati make all the fad about?

dear god. they wont let you even access to the most basic of fabbers and pay shit wages?

the more things change , the more they stay the same. In that case, continue your amusement good sir, and may i leave my contact info so that i may attend your RP campaigns via ftl holo interface, on the off-chance theis was not a pure troll?

At any rate, i imagine what you use as fertilizer, and forget to clean it off pre-packaging and delivering...

So, for all you long-term spacers out there: love drones, flirts, or VR stim? Stim takes up the least mass, true, but it's supposed to be the least "convincing." Flirts have the advantage of being living things, but you gotta feed em', and I'm not sure how I feel about putting my dick into a gengineered bipedal cat, anyway. Drones are a happy medium, but kinda mechanical. Whores are too expensive for an eighteen month retainer. Wives are too much commitment. Jerkin' it is too boring.

>>15915563
Purchase Indentured Servants and employ them as pleasure workers at different stations you usually dock.
Collect your profits and do a inspection. My method, and I have been fairly successful at it.

Of course only after i managed to own more than a couple of active freighters.
I have a unisex crew and I usually discourage fraternisation, but don't actively ban it.

The other Freighters i own, each captain has his/her own policies about it and i wont enter on it, as they all know that efficiency is what they are rated by and not rules lawyering - unless that brings a profit in a certain situation.

>>15915646

Important thing is to have a policy. Spacers are like teenagers, they'll stick their dicks into anything, with disastrous consequences.

Case in point: I was a midshipman on a terraforming mission to this planet out near Cygnus: small rock type thing, entire planet was basically one huge ocean with tidepools. Captain was a strict fundie: all male crew, no "obscene material" allowed, no alchol allowed on boards, so the terraformers were all drunk, horny, and angry when they landed.

It turns out the major lifeform on this rock was a kind of tube worm: filter feeder, about 20 cm long, warm-blooded, feeds by pumping water through a tube lined with stiff cilia that extract nutrients from the water.

You do the math. Guys were grabbing these things off of rocks, jerking off into them, then tossing them back. One dude, crazy mofo, kept one in a cooler filled with water. Called it his wife.

He nearly shit his pants when he opened the lid and found it full of this giant, throbbing, pulsating tumor. Turns out that human DNA was close enough to this thing's that human sperm will try to fertilize it. Unfortunately, it then acts as a teratogen, causes uncontrolled cell growth. By the time the year was out, we had to abandon the colony: the entire surface of the planet had turned into one giant metastasizing tumor.

And the shit of it is, if we stayed? I just KNOW one of the fuckers on the ship would have tried to fuck it.

>>15915838
Thus my policy :
Unisex crews, libido inhibitors during xeno contact, for the just in case situations.

Until a new xeno is vetted by the specialists i dont let it be dicked.

i also find that running a freight and mining businesses is very much aided by running a pleasure servicing buisness at all home stations and transit stations, with indentured servants, flings, gene-forged, and even vetted xenoforms, and discounts for employees of any of my companies.


What can i say, a smart veteran or explorer can always capitalize on something and invest in in a proper constant revenue stream.

>>15908900
Hah, is that what they told you? That it was a just a bunch of pack Critters. They obviously left out the bit about a ship roughly half the size of one of our Capital ships, elongated white hull, very beautiful architecture intricate symbols and designs all over it. Damn thing jumps in, no warning, no attempt to hail. Everyone collectively shits themselves since we're seeing true alien intelligence. Guess what the first fucking thing happens. The Patton gets gutted, she took one right to the reactor, blew her straight back to the stone age. No survivors except for the crew that were planet-side.

After that on The Alpha Centari, we took one right to one of the missile rack magazines. Knocked the front end of the boat clean off. I was lucky to get into one of the pods before we got launched, i watched her burn up in the atmos all the way down, sad to watch such a beautiful relic go down like that.

We hit the ground hard, thankfully everyone made it out but it went all down hill for the next 6 months. Total communications blackout, only elite teams and one large battle-group was assembled to counterattack... Against one fucking vessel.

Napolean ,The Maryland, Ontario, The fucking Keiser Battleship that the Germans were so proud of. All gone, and those were some of our finest ships. The ground fighting... that was some of the worst. So damn fast you couldn't keep up with em half the time. One second they were there, next they were gone.. maybe it was optic camouflage or something, maybe the atmosphere fucking with us, who knows. All I know is I don't want to fight em again.

After that mess on Sepris IV, I'm happy to be elbow deep in an engine any day or on security detail dealing with pirates. Now those are fun times.

I got a picture if you don't believe me, damn thing was in low orbit at the time.

(sorry for extremely late response went to bed right after that haha. Love this thread, never change /tg/)

>>15915563
4th option: Creative body modification. Pic related.

But seriously. My sister once dated a guy for a few weeks who had a cybernetic arm, and he had a robot pussy modded into the forearm. When he needed something more than just a fap, he would just fuck his wrist. Apparently he had it wired up so it felt like a real pussy to him, too, so he got double his pleasure, if you know what I mean. My sister even confessed that he made her eat it out sometimes when they were going at it.

>>15916045

Alternatively, do what I did: go genderflip and bodysculpt, reg as a LRSW, and make more money on your back than you ever did standing up at a console.

>>15916045

I'd rather shove my junk into a Hanlon spiderhole than shake that guy's hand. Fucking shame.

>>15915278
Until the drive core overloads at approximately 2 hours in. I hope you enjoy being at the core of a sun...

Now, the way those old smugglers used to do it was: Burn for 1 hour 30 min, coast for 30 and let the core settle, burn for 1 hour, coast for 1 hour, dump 100kg of Sodium hexafluoroaluminate into the now prepped conversion chamber and light up your side-real drive. Now you've got 36 hours of max burn w/o blowing your ass to Kingdom come. Not sure why it works, it just does.

And I've never used this to run from "patrol vessels". Ever. Maybe once.

No comment.

You know who are fun? The Greys.

Just spent the last five years working on that dual colony with them on the Crab Nebula's edge (beautiful nights out there by the way)

It's going quite well. Although the amount of alcohol they go through is ludicrous.

>>15916252

I actually did my graduate thesis on the Bootlegger Supercruise. It's pretty fascinating, actually: What happens is that a static shockwave gets set up in the main drive core that turns the plasma flow from a pulsed jet into a "pearl necklace" chain of solitons. The standing waves cycle through with extreme efficiency, and the energy that would normally be bled off as heat recycles into the system. Doesn't work on anything bigger than a Class 2 hull, though.

Interesting fact: Chao was a staunch anti-Prohibitionist. The fact that the Supercruise was first perfected on the first generation of 'Libris? Not a coincidence. . .

Been doin' tha runs on tha lanes out on the Eastern edge of tha Fringe fer longer than I care ta say. An' say what ya's will about smugglers, but I seen tha things them fed's don' want ya ta.

An' fore you get all up an arms abou' it let me say I ain't hurt no one, maybe got inta a few shootin' matches with fed patrols, but like I said, ain't hurt no one. Any fool knows ta carry guns bug enough ta do more an cripple a fed cruiser will end up costin' ya more than tha repairs you'll need after yer done. Ain't no profit innit less yer big enough.

Tha' said, I ain't never seen a "alien" come from anywhere them feds weren't takin' a real intrest in 'fore they show up. What's tha' tell ya's, I wonder.

>>15915384
It's hearsay alright. In fact, most of that is hearsay.

Probably because there are still active nannie-swarms on Earth that >>15915200 refuses to admit tore the everloving shit out pretty much the entire planet. The Himalayas? Friggen foothills now. Arabian desert? They made glass and called it peace. London? Burned to cinders. Madagascar? It's now an artificial mountain of quartz, 3.3 kilometers above sea level, and perfectly cubic.

Australia was pretty much untouched, though, barring the atmospheric changes you'd "expect" from a global catastrophe of such proportions.

People tell you, "Oh, no, those nannies all got wiped out. The Fed told us, when they airbursted all those thousands of nukes!"

No, they're still very much alive and out there. The Wastes are anything BUT dead, as strange as it sounds. Shit is happening ALL the time that isn't accountable to the weather.

"Conspiracy theories! You're nothing but a crackpot!"

Sure, tell that to the rest of my buddies in the 1st. They'll show you the scars. And if you really have balls, you'll go down there, contact one of the tribes in the North American Union areas, and they'll show you some real eye-opening stuff.

>>15916403
>London? Burned to cinders

We got better though

>>15914984

You got Earth confused with New Earth. It's an easy mistake to make, both are in the Core, but only Earth is in the original Sol system (you may know it as "Origin") and NE is in Gliese 581. NE is where most of Earth's population migrated when the financial crises of '350 and the subsequent AI wars finally reduced Old Earth to a 3d world planet. After that, Old Earth got eaten by nanotech and collapsed into a bunch of warring states.

>>15916443
Did you ever see that documentary about that one Brit that stuck it out through the entire Grey Goo plague? He'd fenced off his entire house in an electrostatic cage and was calmly sipping tea when the reclamation teams came in. Offered them some cucumber sandwiches and a spot of Darjeeling. Certified badass mofo.

>>15915563
Can't answer for everyone, but to join up with the outfit in Precolonial Survey Corps, you go though some voluntary tweaking and conditioning. Basically, they fix us up so the Crew you ship out with is all compatable with each other.

We're on a 6 to 8 year circuit once we get sent out, going wherever AAA ( applied astronomy and astrophysics, it's supposed to be an old joke? I never got it) sends us.

That doesn't include the time for transit runs, so all of us get Crew bonded. It's a wierd thing. It also means when we lose someone, it cuts deep. Most survey-vors do one tour, cash it out, and then things are good once they go though out counselling. Me, I'm a thirdie. It'll be hard for me to leave after this run, but if I stay through another crew formation, I'm in for life.

>>15916403
Aye, tha ones tha' come off'a Earth know things at'll make yer 'ead spin. An' they 'ave a 'abit a sayin' em at tha worst times. Tough sumbitches though, gotta give 'em that.

Ad un join my crew fer a few runs, said he was ex merc, some contract got botched needed to lay low, wha'ever... point is, tha bastard was bloodthirsty. If'in there was boardin action, he was on it. Can't say I don' appreciate tha', but right scary he was.

Ain't met an old hand 'ho'd turn down un from Earth, but I also don' know un that'd keep 'em anywhere near tha crew either.

>>15916403
A real shame...Has anyone heard about the terraforming plans for NeoTerra, from what i've garnered its funded purely by the sons of ancient old-earth Saudi Arabians. No idea how they managed to get that kind of power but hey, money is money after all.

>>15916525

>>15916454

You must be right. I was not ready to believe that someone would use good old mother Terra as a pathetic joke, just like that. Must be the nostalgiafaggotry talking out of me...

At any rate, have anyone of you heard what's brewing in the Forsaken Rim? I heard the place is eating colony ships like a rigelian sabertooth... and GNN is rather unwilling to provide coverage.

>>15916606
*snicker*

>>15916477

>>15915037 here. we didn't get any of that shit, and I wish.. well. No. Fuck. Don't know anymore. It's screwed up - I wanna talk about this shit, but I keep coming back to the same old question - why didn't -we- get any of that? I'd say what corp I went in with but... y'know. Lot of 'em have a bad attitude about people talking. Scares the shit outta me when I think about it. Probably just keep my big yap shut.

Here's to corporations in space and what they do with people when they get them out away from everyone else. I'm gonna go find some more of those wine coolers and see if I pass out or puke first.

>>15916403

Earth isn't nearly as fucked up as people say it is. I should know, I live here. Sure, we get the occasional nannie-swarm sweeping through the area: you just drop what you're doing and head to shelter. If you're on the defense team, you suit up. If any swarms get through the E-Stat, you grab an acetone sprayer, and start misting the air (at the nanoengineering scale that most of those nanites are built at, they denature just like protein). Shower off with acetone to avoid contamination. After that, the main danger is that you missed a couple, which is why you have test strips hanging up: ferrous metal bits. If they start pitting and eroding, you decon the entire town.

Big danger is them getting into the farms and eating all your food, but it's like surgery: decon, decon, and decon again before going into the hydroponics. Also, kids and infants, who aren't big enough to survive being chewed on, so anyone wants to enter the creches, they gotta (you guessed it), decon, decon, decon again.

It's not so bad.

>>15916659
Depends on which part you're from. I'm from what USED to be Colorado, and it's... not so nice there.

We got hit by an industrial, macro-scale VN swarm. You know what Mormon crickets were? Imagine a swarm of things the size of your pinky numbering in the millions bearing down on you. Voracious metal insects that have a taste for devouring just about everything that contains a refined metal source.

And they're STILL out there. We do a lot of chert-knapping out there.

>>15916715
Sounds like some composite ceramics might be a good investment if I tramp my way back to old Origin.

>>15916031
I've had this image we captured over Hanson's World 15 years ago. We popped in side-real and saw these ships in close orbit. We hailed them for the 2 hours it took us to close to visual range. Never did get a response from them, but as we closed, they lit up their drives and beat feet for the outer system. 4 hours after contact, they just vanished. No FTL signature, just gone. Been wondering about them for all this time and what we should have done if they had been hostile.

>>15916749
Those are migou warships orbiting Earth, you dummy.

Is there still a civil war going on with Mandela's World or have I jumped into the wrong timeline again?

>>15916659
Oh, something else for all you youngsters, you know that "fog" that spills out of the tubes overhead when you debark your ship? Tan Goo. I shit you not. Anti-nanite Nanites. There is a little box of them build into every ship that gets updates from either other ship, station or planetside comps.
If you've ever seen a ship that has damaged hatches just sitting in orbit until an inspection team has time to check it out, it's not sending a certain signal out.
Hell, I've seen pirate ships stuck outside of raider ports because of signal trouble before. Even those ass-holes are not stupid enough to catch a case of Gray Goo...

>>15916821
The what now?

>>15916909
Wrong one. The closest one with a war in this timeframe is three hops to the left. Our coordinates are 56.766 on the Rosseau Universal Scale, in case you need them.

So I was on a frieght run between Gliese 581 and the Vector systems. I run a smaller ship, just me and my longshoreman/copilot, a Swangee Woman named Fran.

Fran's out for recharge while I monitor the transit jump when something pulled us out. I ran scans and took a good look around it was a little more than 100K-klicks out. Near 1500 meters in diameter, and a perfect sphere.

I have no idea what it was, we were a defense armed private frieghter, and that thing outmassed us way to much to be comfortable. I plotted a jump, found the exit path and hit the juice as it began to approach. We shot out of there like a cork from a bottle.

This was the last record image we got.

The "alien ships" and "aliens" that are being reported are actually alternate timeline humans jumping into our time with that portable-wormhole technology that... Actually never mind, you guys aren't supposed to invent that for a couple hundred years.

>>15917126
>>15916909

Planeshoppers, eh? You won't happen to know what happened to Rigel VIII's fifth moon, would you? Celestial bodies don't just 'vanish' like that, you know?

>>15916998
I thought it was called Blue-Goo?

>>15917218
Bullshit! Those 'time jumpers' who got all the ohm-coverage our near ADS 16402 turned out to be a bunch of swindlers. Their "portable wormhole" turned out to be some kind of exotic matter that just LOOKED like a Schwarzchild key. They were apparently trying to trick some heavy-mag harvesters out of the rights to a GMC nearby by 'predicting' some sort of disaster that would wipe 'em all out. I hear they got 10-20 on Laboriolz, which serves 'em right. Cloud harvesting is hard enough without that bullshit.

>>15917401
That's it. Blue Goo.
Tan's that mil-spec shit right?

>>15917218
Oh yes the "John Titor". Pull the other one, it has a timeline with bells on.
100000 light years from Origin and still the same old cons.

>>15917500
Tan-Goo is just shorthand for military-nanites.
Doesn't matter what it does, be it quick-fab a bunker or reduce a squad of tanks to core components, so long as it's .mil tech and nanite based, you can safely call it Tan-goo.

FTL engineer here.

I fucking hate space. Ironic, right?
Wrong

You walk a goddamn knife-edge everytime you switch on your drives. The grav-shapers are supposed to be precision equipment, they were never really intended to have been taken out of the labs, but the corporations decided to rush development when the Home system hit 25billion people. Even now, even after all those years since Endeavour made that first flight out to Cygnus, we've barely improved on that original design, simply because every time we've changed something the Alcubierre warp just...fails. Even seen a Gorman-class dreadnaught turn inside-out?

They're tempermental bitches of things, too, even when they are built to spec. I remember riding on a civillian wildcat prospecter out past the Leonids, overseeing a thulium-search. We'd found this little planet, no native ecology but shitloads of superheavy elements, real treasuretrove. Absolutely fucking CRAWLING with pirates. By the time the capacitors had recharged half the cabins were open to space and the tokamak had just about had it. The captain, genius that he was, decides to try and jump at the lagrange point rather then heading outsystem.

We now know that canceling gravitational fields are not the same as an absence thereof.

The grav-shapers went wild, I saw the back of my own head, there was a godawful noise and suddenly I'm floating away from the debris cloud that used to be a starship. The pirates scooped me up, and I stayed there for nearly a year fixing their hardware untill they dropped me on a commerce planet, nothing but some admittedly badass tattoos to my name.

Moral of the story?
Suit up , always check your field readings and never never NEVER jump without an up-to-date memocording.

Nano-engineer here. Ask me how Grey-Goo is almost impossible, even under controlled laboratory conditions, without magic-level super tech. And yes, I know everyone who has valid worries about nanites are more concerned about demo, shrikes, and things of that nature.

Been out of the loop for a while, but the load of cobalt I'm offloading was worth the effort. So what's the latest from Instellar Neogenics' shipyard at Athens VI? Did they actually get a Bioship viably working?

>>15918539
You would have to ask the screaming billions of Old Earth that were dissolved and "repurposed" as more "impossible" Gray Goo.
>>15919022
Damn thing suicided as soon as it was activated. Closed off it's exaust ports and lit up it's side-real drive while in the test bunker.

>>15919022
Full bio? Nope. Physically impossible. But 50/50 cyber-ship? Yeah, that's doable. One of the 'big surprises' Nuevo Tijuana is prepping to spring? Biotech life support system. Maintians constant air flow, purity, water reclamation, and internal temperature, and is just exothermic enough to soak up all non-drive related radiated heat. Thermal sig? Not any more. Cheap as dirt and guaranteed for at least 300 years. I've got a twelve-acre field growing them right now. They're working on something similar to augment power generators, soaking up waste heat and converting it to extra electricity, but it's a few years off still.

It's all based off of a gengineered bio-implant some jackasses were marketing a few years back as a weight loss supplement. Implanted root network wraps around and fortifies the ribs, soaking up waste heat and converting it into food for the body while releasing a low-grade steroid and metabolic accelerator into the body as a biproduct. Sold pretty well until 30 years later people started getting splinters in their lungs, as the roots never stopped growing. Nasty stuff, but the tech was interesting and cross-compatible enough that more and more cyber/bio crossbreed tech is being developed for incorporation into starships. Crazy, huh? Wonder what they'll do next.

Bump

>>15918539
Funny thing about that word "almost." It doesn't really mean "always." All it takes is the right combination of circumstances. Look at Origin for crying out loud! My whole community live underground. Above ground is the ruins of what used to be Angels. Massive ancient city, but you could hardly tell that by looking at it now. There's still big swarms of those fucking bots every now and then, but more often than not, it's limited to a few hundred to a thousand. I couldn't take it, so I joined up. Jump Recon now, counting down the months till I can get out and settle down. For once in my life I won't have to worry about something eating me like I've had to for the past 30 years. Between nano-bots and fucking hostile xeno-forms, it's a wonder more of my buddies haven't cracked

So, uh, newbie explorer here. I've been reading this big long thread full of stories about all the crazy things you people do and I feel like I have to be part of it.

I know I'm just some star-struck kid from the Inner Core, but I want in. I want to risk everything on a gamble on some forsaken little moon in the Fringe, or encounter those horrible xenoforms that want to eat your face. And before you say 'stay on your cushy world, noob'... I kind of burnt some bridges I shouldn't have before I posted here, and my parents have cut me off. So it's either take my chances out on the edge of civilized space, or kiss their asses and hope they let me back in.

Any tips for a virgin spacer so he can survive long enough to make it out there? Preferrably with his anus intact? I've got some money saved up. Should be enough to write a one-way ticket anywhere.

>>15920816

Well, here's some advice for starters that I would have appreciated back when I went prospectin'.

Firstly, if anyone comes to you with a story that's just a little too good, it's guaranteed to be a scam. I mean, you're probably smart enough to notice obvious bullshit like terraforming missiles that make a planet habitable in three days, or "I found a stable wormhole to another dimension where everything is made of platinum", sure. But say someone offers you part on a claim on an asteroid, he just needs you to tow it to a certain destination - sounds legit, right? It's almost guaranteed to be a pirate ambush. Don't trust people you don't have good reason to, and don't trust anyone just because your mate tells you to. You'll live longer.

Second, remember this: if anything can go tits up on a spaceship, it will. Usually in the most spectacular fucked up manner. You know those genemodded "companions" that were advertised a bit higher upthread? Had one of those flip out when its cat instincts kicked in - mouse snuck into the ship. Goddamn thing chases it into the catalytic cracking unit and I have to breathe mouse hair for a week. If you're gonna be piloting a spaceship, you need to know more than just flying - you gotta be an engineer, astrophysicist, mechanic and businessman all rolled into one. Start learning right now. If you take your one-way trip, go see the crew. Play a few games of Gliesian Hold-Em with them, and tell them about your situation. Ask them to show you the ropes. There's usually some sympathetic soul with some free time on their hands on the crew.

>>15921240

So, expect the worst, listen to people, keep an eye out for scams, and learn everything you can? That sounds like something I'll be able to do. Thank you so much. This means a lot right now.

If I ever meet you out there, sir (ma'am, genswap, teejee, neuter, omnisex, upload, or otherwise), then I would love to shake your hand.

>>15921431

Right. I have to get the hang of manual text entry. Not everywhere's going to have neural uplink ports. Or interweb.

>>15921442

...Still haven't quite gotten it. No worries, though! I plan to learn!

I'm gonna start by trawling through the ports looking for a good crew to sign on with. There's gotta be someone looking for an eager young space cadet looking to learn.

Again, thank you so much. It's going to be hard, I know, but with a little help I think I'll be okay now.

>>15921455
First Mate of the Croissant Rouge here. We're a scientific vessel working for a Corp and we're going to the fringe to collect Solanum Xenovirus samples. I'll admit it isn't the cleanest job but the pay is good and we have adequate equipment to hold a few thousand Infected hordes and get back without a single trace of infection. Look for us around the Alpha Tau starport Eleven, we've already got a decent-sized crew.

>>15921240

Thirdly, remember that electronics fail. Nothing kills a bloke out in the Black like relying too much on hardware. Sure, everything's redundant and built to last, but you'll find that you get stuck out there a fair bit longer than your recommended duration. So your sensors will get screwed up and show a nebula as a wall of stone, your collision detection software will go on vacation when you're in the middle of an Oort cloud, and your IFF transponder will suddenly decide that your allegiance has switched to the Gullenthal Corporation and every merc this side of the Orion Arm will want your head. All of this has happened to me.

Also, here's the most important bit: people will only be as decent to you as you're to them. Don't be an arse, and usually people won't be arses to you. Exceptions will happen, but that's why you need to learn some practical any-G fighting. And get a good gun. Oh, and this applies to AI's too by the way. I remember when ships first got outfitted with onboard AI's and everyone treated them like slaves. Well, no wonder they found themselves spaced or shredded by maintbots. AI's got tired of being treated like shite.

Well, anyway, been a pleasure talking to ya. You ever visit Roche's World, go to the Pearl Harbor bar and I'll fix you up a URRS Black Hole Special. I'm the bartender there.

>>15921478
I smell a scam here buddy. Let me guess, your funding is being wired in from a Dr Maxine Brookfields. You'll not be finding any trace of "solanum xenovirus", just pirates and angry colony folk that you'll "convieniantly" be told to sell Brookfield scientific equipment munitions to to deal with the supposed virus. Terrible pieces with a run time of about 2 cycles till they fall apart in your hands from the shoddy worksmanship.

Don't believe me?, check through the advertised vids of the screaming, violent hordes and you'll notice duplicate faces in the crowds.

Sorry, but you've been put in the position of a weaponised door to door encyclopedia salesman.

>>15921583
We're being funded by Silicate AI, apparently they're looking to use the virus for "research". I don't like working for them any more than you would but it's as good a deal as I can get in this part of the galaxy.

>>15919150
>>15919888
You know what those two things have in common? Out of control seed AI's with truly staggering about of hardware backing them up. Normal seed AI's can be bad when done wrong, but often all they have are some waldo units, and maybe one macro-scale quick-fab-fact, and limited hardware to use. It can't become a super genius without some crazy processing power behind it. Truth be told, we don't know they work. And even then, they aren't true gray-goo, else they would just turn inwards and start eating the planet, no need to go looking for resources when anything will work.
Note, this is not to downplay the tragedies that occurred on these planets, its just that gray-goo really isn't a credible threat that you should be worried about. What IS scary are things like sleeper smart demo nanites that target, oh say, copper. Or Silicone. Or some other critical element used in a ship.
On a side note, did you know that nanites are, in fact, a legal weapon to use in war? So long as they don't affect bio-logical matter, its fair game. And even then, there are legal, and ethical, ways around that..

>>15922102
>don't affect bio-logical matter

Real fucking great unless you happen to be an ambulatory A.I. or a grumpy old bastard like myself who has padded their life expectancy out substantially by replacing meat with metal.

And it's still just one software mutation in the upload and adaptation management program or one fucked up neo-luddite Trojan Virus away from another Old Earth.

Fuck, I was on the Brazilian Orbital Tether heading upwards when it started. You can't really comprehend what is happening when you see it, not on that scale.

It started as a little black spider over the Jiangsu Republic. then the tendrils started to spread, then new tendrils came off of those tendrils and they started to get thicker and darker.

The brain just kind of shuts down when you are looking at it, out of self defense most like. Those that could feel with no detachment when they saw it happen ended up doing all sorts of stupid things in the following few weeks. Taking Void Walks without a helmet and such.

So, yeah. Fuck Nano-Tech. And fuck the neo-luddites for fucking with the update system and fuck Nanking University for funding Nano-Research on that scale. And fuck the oversight committee for not housing the project on an asteroid because of funding issues.

>>15922102
True A.I. or out of control nanites..
If it's eating your face, semantics go out the window.
>>15912001
>>15920816
Look kid, if you are out in the Typhon Expanse, look me up on Jellick Station. I'm the fat old heavy world genejob at the back of Harpo's Bar and Grill drinking imported Nuevo Tequila and chomping on a slice of that delicious NT steak. Keep your hands in view at all times and ask for Rostov.

Sitting here after coming off watch at a picket point area denial web. Makes me smile to read about you flyers out there- I'm sort of the opposite. Family owned and operated large tonnage frieghter was my earliest memory. But though I liked seeing new places, as I grew up I wanted to put down roots and make something more permanent.

So I volunteered for a system defense force, got out of spacing, at least interstellar. Few years later and I'm an NCO here in Australia Astra. Currently I'm on Spy-and-Fry around Tasman's World. Gun and observation satellites always on alert status, monitoring the prison world.

Every few cycles, some pirate or crime lord or banker -yeah I know, I said crime lord already - has someone trying to slip in and bring them out. We make sure thier ships get enough damage they're not setting down or flying out of here any time soon. Of course the scentance for aiding an escape is also exile to Tasman's.

>>15917166
Current thinking is that one of the old Ark ships from the first colonization wave landed a lot further out than it was supposed to.

This was back in the old days, when the FTL was done by the now illegal Jump-Drives. Very, very fast if used right but also unimaginably dangerous if even the slightest thing goes wrong with them. And they tended to burn out too quickly.

Anyway there are at least 6 or 7 of the old Ark ships still unaccounted for and each had ~100,000 people frozen in primitive cryo-coffins.

Suppose one of them landed way out of the current colonization zone. Way, way out. Right out on the galactic Edge of the other side of the galaxy.

They set up shop, build them-selves a home, unfreeze people as need be and build themselves that new life they were promised. Several hundred years later they start sending out there own deep-space drones just as we are sending out ours.

Only difference is we don't send ours out that far because we just want to know where to settle next. They send theirs out further because they want to know where Home is.

Or that's the explanation currently going around the Lunar Deep Caverns anyway.

>>15922795 continued

Now spy and fry isn't bad, but departures detail, oh shit that's another ballgame entirely. Tasman's isn't a nice place, and they let nothing down there that's past Origin's 19th century level of progress. There's no coming back, nobody gets off that rock. They get a chance to make a new life, but never what they had. Any augmentations, any nano, any tweaks or implants- everything gets stripped out. Seen more than a few who opt for voluntary euthanization when they realise that. And some of the prisoners who can't readjust to bilogical norms when they get downgraded. It's a terrible thing to see someone break down like that.

The others who don't opt for euth and don't snap are given a standard kit. Map, compass, water for a week, an old projectile weapon, some tools and a few self heating meals and shot down in lander pods.

There's a lot of anarchy down there, but there's some hope. We're archiving the spead of what amounts to self sustaining gunpowder tech from a small league of cities built up in the south. They might even be making it livable down there.

>>15922980
At least tell me they sterilize them.

Otherwise you have people being born into punishments their grandparents committed.

>>15923330

How would that be any different from being born on any of the neoprimitivist worlds? Do you think the Pennsylvania Star residents should be sterilised just because they wanted to leave high tech behind?

>>15923529
I see your point but that was a life style choice, not an imposed punishment.

>>15921558
>>15922745

If I make it that far, then I'll be sure to.

>>15921478

No offense, sir, but there isn't a 'Croissant Rouge' docked anywhere near Sirius. And I may be wet behind the ears, but even I know enough not to go within fifty billion AU of Solanum. No thanks.

And anyone who would is someone I wouldn't want to know. I've seen too many movie-stims about shamblers to want anything to do with 'em, or the people looking to 'research' them.

No, I've signed on with a crew headed out toward Deneb and then Sontar II doing trading and courier work. Think that should be a safe way to prepare me for the big stuff, right? Get my feet wet before I plunge headfirst so I don't wind up getting someone killed (especially me) my first time out.

Space Viking here. My men and I recently left the service of a small confederacy of outer worlds. We helped them defeat some weird trans-planar experiment their scientists made.

They genetically engineered spiders that could walk through small black holes in order to travel from planet to planet. We probably tracked them all down.

We left the service of this confederacy because it was much more profitable to raid their orbital customs stations. The Niflheim sector will be fucking rich from raids like this. We won't need to rely on aid from the rest of the galaxy if all goes well...and before moralfags tell me I'm breaking the law, take a look at your star charts and the laws of Municipal Darwinism.

>>15924287
I know, right? I thought I was rich before, but the contracts I get for your people's hides are just obscene. I upgraded my cruiser pool last cycle and I earned my investments back in two runs. Those merchant associations really, really hate you.

Any retired Snowbacks in this thread? Coming up on the end of my second cruise and considering mustering out as CGO2. Any work for a former battlecruiser Tac Officer out there, or was the recruiter just blowing smoke up my ass?

>>15920816
My suggestion:

Head down to your nearest recruiting station, walk straight up to the meanest, toughest looking guy you see, and tell him, "Scouts, Please." When he says, "Okay," take the money you were going to spend on that one-way ticket to anywhere and invest it into your Mustering Out Fund

If you survive the next five years, you'll be set for life: they'll teach you everything you need to know to survive out there on the rim, and that little nest egg you set up when you joined up will have blossomed into a decent array of creds and vouchers. Probably enough to buy yourself a small ship of your own (this thread seems to have a hard-on for the Kolibris, but I'd suggest a KHSI Clarke.)

Sure, it seems more fun to buy a one-way ticket to nowhere and see what happens at the end, but it'll just get your ass killed. As a philosopher once said: "Space is disease and death wrapped in silence." Learn to do it right, or you'll end up as another, "failed to return."

>>15922729
You know, you bring up some good points about augmented people and ambulatory A.I.s. Goo-Law, as nanite law 101 was called, didn't really go into the uses of nano-weapons all that much. Wasn't something we tech heads really had to deal with. It's very likely I'm miss remembering how nanites can legally be used in war. I just know that they CAN be.

As for the Old Earth tragedy, everyone KNOWS that a seed A.I. was involved. The neo-Luddites made a good scapegoat for for someone taking some shortcuts.

>>15926301
Except the seed AI was only used for data collation and cros referencing. It wasn't even part of the coding team. The most is did was run a multithousand layer iteration test based on provided data, it wasn't even in or allowed access to the storage facility.

Neoludds screwed that pooch as much as they screw every other one.

Hey guys, I just stumbled through... fuck, I don't even know, but it's fucking dark here. Could you tell me where the fuck I am?

Don't know how long the link will last. No way to get full communications up, all official gov- or milsites blocked. They came in from coreward. Ariadne VII is burning. They used singularity weapons. We are @37%resis*^bd--- >>transmission interrupt<<

>>15929328

A transmission interruption would not include the words ">>transmission interrupt<<".

>>15929356
Fake messages 101. Tsk.

We don't even get connections from that far out on this board.

Uplink 89 is back up guys!

Forte and Domino is back selling their ships and Caltec Corp has just released the latest arms and armour catalogue with a special 30% value reduction offer for any bulk purchase of over 200 tons.

Tomorrow we are going to be releasing a press statement about what happend at Corporate Headoffice and the shootings in Neo Aachen branch that left 37 of our dearest relatives and employees dead and 190 fighting for their lives.

Till then have fun shopping.

______Link:12003.uplink89.[pri].neotenet//______

>>15929694

That armour's junk anyway, they say they're trying to save on mass so you can turn on a dime, but it can't take repeated short distance jumps (warps the plates so you get hull breaches all over the show, found that one out the hard way)

Nah, what you want is one of the old Albion class Hulls. The only reason they're as cheap as they are was that the mechanisms inside them were absolute junk when new. You can pick them up now for 20% of list price, and if you have the time/money for an overhaul you have a decent size freighter/gun-cutter that can take a bigger beating than most security blockade craft.

Got me out of a couple of rough jams with pirates.

Main issue is that the modern engines are so much lighter than the ones back then, that the centre of mass is well towards the nose. place retros and docking jets accordingly folks!

>>15927915
That was their stated safety protocols, yes, but I find it really hard to believe that the Neo-L's had the technical skill needed to design something like that. It takes time, funds, and skill, to design something like that. Maybe one of them linked the A.I. closer to the production side of things? If someone slacked off on security protocols, then that could be a LOT easier than whopping up your own gray-goo doomsday nanites.

>>15922975
They found one of those ark ships.

There was a documentary about it.

All the Awake crew had died when the fusion reactor shit out an ungodly amount of radiation. Also fried the on-board computer.

Next crew shift never awoke and the whole thing just kept on drifting out into the inky black, 100,000 people sleeping on ice.

They were quite pissed when they reached what is now the Juno Timocracy.