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“Isolation. This ship was not meant to be crewed by a single auditor despite making design considerations for such a scenario. I visited the other reefersleep caskets. All dead; withered corpses and ugly ash. Deaths are not unheard of even during regular flight, but I find it hard to see this as a coincidence given our method of arrival.

That afternoon, I also found some kind of ritual card face down on my workstation. I don’t remember bringing it here, but I suppose saying that means very little now. Beneath it, I found a personality chip for a ship-bound artificial intelligence. Useful for the work I’m about to do. But I suppose I wouldn’t mind the company either.

>XV: THE DEVIL [SPLICE/INTRUSION]
>XII: THE HANGED MAN [INTEL/SENSORS]
>IV: THE EMPEROR [STRATEGIC/COMBAT]

On a more relevant note, after spending five sleepless cycles skirting the outer edge of the system, I have plotted a slow course towards MIZAR-IX, a dwarf planet harboring the only major activity hub in the outer system. While their technology and interface protocols are - unsurprisingly - alien to me, the sheer amount of EM radiation emitted by this planet points toward its role as a communication relay.

If I could move the NOVEMBER RAIN closer, I might be able to passively intercept and decrypt their communication protocols to find exploitable vulnerabilities. However, the installation appears to be guarded. The ELINT system has detected active scanning in the area, so I remain wary of a close approach.

[The ELINT system passively detects active scanning from other ships. The ELINT status sign on the top right estimates the strength of the signal; the blue particles around the ship will move towards the signal source, providing a rough estimate of direction. An ELINT value of 3-4 means that the ship is probably close enough to the scan source to be detected]

If I can estimate the rough location of the scanning unit, I can send a scout drone for positive identification…

[Scouting drones can be used to pin-point the location of other ships – either through direct contact or triangulation with their own ELINT array. Ships that have been scouted will be tracked permanently on your display]

>Choose a direction to send your scouting drone. You can do angles (35 degrees west of due north), vectors <1,1>, fixed reference points (“two squares below the planet”), or even a drawing. Anything is fine as long as its comprehensible to me and other players. ”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2241, DEC 18, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>>5453906
>XV: THE DEVIL [SPLICE/INTRUSION]
>Straight towards the planet

>>5453909
+1

>>5453906
>>IV: THE EMPEROR [STRATEGIC/COMBAT]
Two squares ahead of the planet

Will this whole quest be in first person rather than second person?

>>5453906
>XII: THE HANGED MAN [INTEL/SENSORS]
>Two squares ahead of the planet

>>5453938
Supposedly, but I'm not against shifting to second person if people feel strongly about it.

I'll wait for one more vote to tiebreak before updating tonight.

>>5453906
>XV: THE DEVIL [SPLICE/INTRUSION]
>Towards top left, perpendicular to the direction of the ELINT signal. This way we can triangulate between the drone and the ship without getting close to the emitter.

>>5453906
I like the first person perspective. Very HFY kind of storytelling.

>XII: THE HANGED MAN [INTEL/SENSORS]
That's how we going to end up. Either hanged for real or spaced and becoming a dry husk...

>Send a drone straight up. (0° angle)

>>5453909
I'll support that, I want to know more about our enemy

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>XV: THE DEVIL

“It is sometimes said that our machines can became more human than their creators. More vibrant. More discerning. More purposeful about acquiring the quirks and individual preferences that distinguish man from man – or machine from machine.
Several hours ago, I integrated the personality chip I found on my workstation into the NOVEMBER RAIN’s system mainframe. MERRYGATE is a comparatively young model: a BETA-PLUS SPLICE/INTRUSION unit commissioned no more than a decade before our sudden departure. Her chosen avatar is a faceless outline: a female figure traced out in bright blue filigree. Distinctive, though certainly not the strangest representation I’ve encountered.

While the bulk of MERRYGATE’s datamass awaits decompression/defragmentation, I have awoken her briefly to inform about the status of our…mission. Her demeanor is concise: formal speech colored by a slight touch of eager sadism. Though I expected more hesitation on her part, it is difficult for me to find fault in this. An alien system filled with unambiguous targets may be the closest thing she will find to a home.

In some ways, I can even understand her. The complexity of causal-loops and FTL-travel remains beyond me despite my best efforts. And in the past, I have often aimlessly questioned the meandering politics of deterrence and use-of-force surrounding the deployment of my own vessel. But now, there is none of that.

I know precisely why I am here. In a few weeks, the inhabitants of this system will share in this understanding.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2241, DEC 19, PERSONAL JOURNAL

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>Straight towards the planet

“Although the NOVEMBER RAIN was chiefly designed to strike static targets, she does possess a modest – and replenishable – supply of scout drones for anti-ship operations. They are excellent examples of cutting-edge hardware: high-gain optical sensors and a miniaturized ELINT system stuffed into a beetle-like shell of EM-absorbent metamaterial. Fast, efficient, and almost impossible to detect.

After spending a few hours reviewing my ship-board sensor readings, I decided to fire one probe directly at MIZAR-9 – skirting its feeble magnetosphere by only a few hundred thousand kilometers. I picked up the source of the scan gratifyingly quickly – first through the probe’s ELINT array, and then on visual pickup a few days later.

It was a ship. Destroyer sized, at roughly a fifth of the RAIN’s tonnage. A collection of oblong hull-sections and sweeping, transparent struts supported by a central drive column. The design was alien. But – hopefully - not alien enough to fall outside the tactical assessment I have prepared.

If I wish to approach MIZAR-9, I have several options:

>LURE. Scouting drones are equipped with a small broadcast unit capable of emulating radar pings and other suspicious EM phenomena. By setting up a ping well outside of the dwarf planet’s orbital radius, I can draw the alien destroyer out of position. This may be especially useful if I wish to launch a strike on the planet afterward, but it will inform the enemy that SOMETHING is wrong.

>EVADE. The destroyer is orbiting far too close to the planet to have full sensor coverage. If I maneuver the NOVEMBER RAIN inside the dwarf planet’s sensor shadow, I may be able to listen in to their communications without attracting much notice.

>STRIKE. The destroyer is already within missile range. I will launch a simultaneous strike on both the ship and the planet. While the information I will be able to collect may be limited, the element of surprise will likely ensure the success of my strike."

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2241, DEC 20, PERSONAL JOURNAL

[EMPIRE INTEGRITY: 100%]

>>5454818
Your animations are dope.

>>5454828
>EVADE
We need to choose our first target carefully to maximize our advantage.

I want to ask, did we manage to arrive before the aliens launched their attack? And what was the attack, RKKVs? Nichol-Dyson beam?

>>5454828
>EVADE. The destroyer is orbiting far too close to the planet to have full sensor coverage. If I maneuver the NOVEMBER RAIN inside the dwarf planet’s sensor shadow, I may be able to listen in to their communications without attracting much notice.

>>5454828
>>LURE. Scouting drones are equipped with a small broadcast unit capable of emulating radar pings and other suspicious EM phenomena. By setting up a ping well outside of the dwarf planet’s orbital radius, I can draw the alien destroyer out of position. This may be especially useful if I wish to launch a strike on the planet afterward, but it will inform the enemy that SOMETHING is wrong.

Remember that our AI is SPLICE/INFILTRATION. This option is what will get us the most milleage out of this lil' ship

>>5455168
*INTRUSION

>>5454828
>EVADE. The destroyer is orbiting far too close to the planet to have full sensor coverage. If I maneuver the NOVEMBER RAIN inside the dwarf planet’s sensor shadow, I may be able to listen in to their communications without attracting much notice.
gather intel before killing them all

>>5454828
>>STRIKE. The destroyer is already within missile range. I will launch a simultaneous strike on both the ship and the planet. While the information I will be able to collect may be limited, the element of surprise will likely ensure the success of my strike."

>>5454828
>EVADE. The destroyer is orbiting far too close to the planet to have full sensor coverage. If I maneuver the NOVEMBER RAIN inside the dwarf planet’s sensor shadow, I may be able to listen in to their communications without attracting much notice.

>EVADE. The destroyer is orbiting far too close to the planet to have full sensor coverage. If I maneuver the NOVEMBER RAIN inside the dwarf planet’s sensor shadow, I may be able to listen in to their communications without attracting much notice.

If we know what we are dealing with we can inflict more damage.

>>5454828
>EVADE. The destroyer is orbiting far too close to the planet to have full sensor coverage. If I maneuver the NOVEMBER RAIN inside the dwarf planet’s sensor shadow, I may be able to listen in to their communications without attracting much notice.
Knowing is half the battle.

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“A capable captain knows how to vary patrol patterns. How to work around sensor shadows, magnetic anomalies, and a range of other stellar phenomena that can attenuate – or completely obscure - the approach of a potential adversary.

Fortunately for me, the commander of the alien destroyer falls outside of this esteemed category. It took well over a week for the NOVEMBER RAIN to approach the boundary of MIZAR-IX’s gravity well. In that time, not once did the destroyer deviate from its original flight path.

It is too late now. My vessel is currently furnished with the best sensor shielding the universe had to offer: nearly a thousand solid kilometers of nitrogen ice and metallic rock. Even if the destroyer chooses to alter its course, I can continue to hug the dwarf planet’s sensor shadow with only a few short bursts of cold-thrust.

Here, I am also close enough to observe the planet with the assistance of the antique optical telescope stashed inside my personal quarters. I see twinkling shoals of spaceborne traffic drift in and out of the planet’s single colony. An old memory resurfaces. A good memory. Childhood trip to the Jovian lunar polities. A long chain of ice-haulers returning from the great belt, glittering like gems suspended by a thin necklace. One of the few memories old enough to escape erasure.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, JAN 8, PERSONAL JOURNAL

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“A few days after entering MIZAR-IX’s gravity well, MERRYGATE told me that the void was replete with radio waves. Out of curiosity, I tried to listen in by routing the output of the external antennas through a standard audio converter. It was horrible. Screeching wails and grating chirps. I threw my headset off immediately – much to her poorly-concealed amusement.

Fortunately, she found the encrypted signals much more informative than I did. As days ticked by, she reported considerable success in dissecting the basic structure of their communication protocols. Trinary logic with a septenary counting system. Transitional instruction architecture that suggested mid-early implementation of quantum computation. Cryptographic techniques were curiously primitive even in light of their limited hardware, suggesting significant vulnerability to the key-breaking subroutines bundled in MERRYGATE’s codebase.

After only a week’s time, I gave her permission to conduct an intrusion attempt. While her plan was supposedly straightforward, the details were too complicated for me to follow. This was unsurprising: no human could match the computational speed of a machine, especially when the game was being played on their virtual home-turf.

I only saw a rendered abstraction of her progress. But even in this simplified format, I could tell that her pace was remarkable fast. Hardware scans raced around the wireframe system-map, flashing white-blue before being replaced by the amber-red pulsing of a meticulously written military icebreaker.

The haul was both more and less than what I expected. On the positive side, we had something resembling a map of the system. Enough video and text data to last a few lifetimes, assuming that she could work out the compression format. And most importantly, tens of thousands of shipping/traffic manifests kept in the short-term storage buffers. Even without looking through their contents, the existence of these logs made it clear to me that MIZAR-IX could not be ignored. Unless I blockade these vessels from communicating and coordinating with each other, I will have little chance of reaching the inhabited inner system.

This leads me to the less positive discovery of her search: most of the critical systems responsible for governing the colony were air-gapped, run on isolated hardware that is simply inaccessible to an external intruder. But MERRYGATE found one critical exception…

>LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM. Preliminary analysis of this system indicates that it is responsible for coordinating central pressurization and life support functions. Needless to say, compromising this system could create very significant – and distracting - habitability issues for anything living inside the colony…

>COMM ARRAY. A significant portion of out-system traffic is routed through the dwarf planet’s towering communication array. Compromising the subroutine responsible for communication reception/rerouting could obfuscate what we do here over the next few days as well as the exact nature of our involvement…

>FUSION REACTOR. The entire colony is fueled by a massive fusion reactor that most likely subsists off of tritium extracted from the planet’s radiation-bombarded surface. While the programs responsible for managing primary fuel injection are off-limits, MERRYGATE cheerfully informs you that she knows *methods* of increasing the fusion cycle’s normal neutron output by four or five orders of magnitude through altering the fuel purification chain…”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, JAN 18, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>>5455929
>>COMM ARRAY. A significant portion of out-system traffic is routed through the dwarf planet’s towering communication array. Compromising the subroutine responsible for communication reception/rerouting could obfuscate what we do here over the next few days as well as the exact nature of our involvement…

>>5454984
I want to ask, did we manage to arrive before the aliens launched their attack?

You left a few years after they hit the solar system, but assigning causality can be so very confusing when FTL travel is involved. :)

>>5454984
An RKKV, or something very similar to it.

>>5455929
>FUSION REACTOR. The entire colony is fueled by a massive fusion reactor that most likely subsists off of tritium extracted from the planet’s radiation-bombarded surface. While the programs responsible for managing primary fuel injection are off-limits, MERRYGATE cheerfully informs you that she knows *methods* of increasing the fusion cycle’s normal neutron output by four or five orders of magnitude through altering the fuel purification chain…”

>>5455929
>FUSION REACTOR. The entire colony is fueled by a massive fusion reactor that most likely subsists off of tritium extracted from the planet’s radiation-bombarded surface. While the programs responsible for managing primary fuel injection are off-limits, MERRYGATE cheerfully informs you that she knows *methods* of increasing the fusion cycle’s normal neutron output by four or five orders of magnitude through altering the fuel purification chain…”
Time to blow shit up

>>5455932
So I'm guessing the aliens retaliated because we are going to blow up their shit and this whole thing is an 8-figure of causality.

>>5455929
>COMM ARRAY. A significant portion of out-system traffic is routed through the dwarf planet’s towering communication array. Compromising the subroutine responsible for communication reception/rerouting could obfuscate what we do here over the next few days as well as the exact nature of our involvement…

>>5455929
>>LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM. Preliminary analysis of this system indicates that it is responsible for coordinating central pressurization and life support functions. Needless to say, compromising this system could create very significant – and distracting - habitability issues for anything living inside the colony…

How are the aliens competent enough to destroy all of humanity (except one guy and his spaceship for some reason) but not competent enough to detect our ship, detect our drone or secure one of their three pieces of essential infrastructure?

>FUSION REACTOR.

Why play with life support if we can just pull the plug.

>>5456379
There is an easy explanation: Destructive capabilities outperform constructive ones by far. Also this is just a colony planet and they propably don't expect visitors until we give them a reason.

I'd love to know how the species is distinguished from our protagonists.

>>5455929
>>FUSION REACTOR. The entire colony is fueled by a massive fusion reactor that most likely subsists off of tritium extracted from the planet’s radiation-bombarded surface. While the programs responsible for managing primary fuel injection are off-limits, MERRYGATE cheerfully informs you that she knows *methods* of increasing the fusion cycle’s normal neutron output by four or five orders of magnitude through altering the fuel purification chain…”

Think about obfuscation. If there is an "accident" that makes the planet explode FROM THE INSIDE then we might get away with this without raising the right kind of alarms. Instead of some strange attack done by an outsider force, this was an industrial accident...

>>5456379
You're piloting the equivalent of a ballistic missile sub. Being able to build RKKVs is not necessarily the same as keeping around a conventional fleet. Also see >>5456210 for some hints.

>>5456210
Maybe. Or maybe not.

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“I have seen the shape of my enemy:

A tapered, torpedo-like head flanked by a pair of gills. Two articulated manipulator arms that protrude from a muscle-packed torso, loosely encased in translucent skin. A pair of rounded eyes that are set deep within the skull cavity, shining with newt-like curiosity.

I found these images strangely disquieting. When MERRYGATE began unraveling the video files she collected from the colony a few days ago, I had expected to see something less…comprehensible: an alien species that bore few physical similarities with terrestrial life, befitting of an alien kingdom founded light-years away from the light of old earth. Or perhaps a form that I found offensive: the sharpened teeth and hackled spines of a well-blooded predator, one which has ruthlessly carried their biological imperative up from the plains of their home world to the stars far above it.

What I saw was none of that. Convergent evolution had molded points of familiarity into their alien physiology, a fact that I would find welcome if I were arriving in this system in any other context

Unfortunately, a similar degree of convergence does not appear to apply to their primary language system. Based on the video data that I have reviewed so far; I have come to the tentative conclusion that these…individuals…communicate through visual input: their skins cycle through a dizzying array of patterned colors when they aggregate in schools, most of which exist outside the human visual spectrum. Accordingly, much of the “audio” information these video files – a seemingly incomprehensible string of run-length-encoded data – seems to be a simplified representation of these visual displays.

MERRYGATE reports that translation may remain possible with more time investment, but she is currently occupied with something of greater import. In the meantime, I have often occupied myself by simply observing these alien creatures, captivated by the interplay of colors as they swim and communicate inside their pressurized, aquatic homes.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, JAN 21, PERSONAL JOURNAL

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“There is no turning back now. Yesterday afternoon, MERRYGATE discovered a critical system vulnerability in the purification system supplying the colony with tritium fuel. With my permission, she introduced a mixture of elemental impurities that have drastically altered the reaction chain at the colony’s heart.

Even here – several million kilometers away – my ship could sense the massive surge of fast-neutrons emanating from MIZAR-IX.
Through the colony’s cameras, I saw a burst of confused activity as the water inside the aquatic habit rapidly became inhospitable. The constant flux of free neutrons emitted by the reactor core transmuted innocuous electrolytes into aggressively radioactive isotopes. MERRYGATE provided an estimate of the expected biological dose given a fifteen minute exposure. It was not a small number.

The facility shifted to backup power only a few hours later, but the damage was done. I stopped watching once I began seeing radiation-bleached corpses crowding the camera feeds dotted around the colony. MERRYGATE did not, proudly examining her handiwork well into my standard sleep cycle.

By morning, I had noticed a change in the destroyer’s patrol pattern. It had plotted a direct intercept course with the colony – likely to dock and render aid. Part of me found my subsequent train-of-thought abhorrent. But another part of me appreciated a pragmatic opportunity when it presented itself…

>ATTACK – MSL-C (Conventional Fusion Warhead [10 Loaded]). Almost everyone on the colony is dead, and the destroyer is docked. There will be no time to respond to a missile attack. No ability to call for assistance. MIZAR-IX and its infrastructure will burn with a single warhead, and the NOVEMBER RAIN will be nowhere near the colony when it happens. Perhaps this might even seem like the result of a particularly unfortunate reactor accident…

>ATTACK – MSL-AM (AM MIRV Warhead[4 Loaded]).There is no question that this will be overkill. But for that reason, I know that it will send a clear message to anyone watching.

>ATTACK – CLOSE-IN. The NOVEMBER RAIN possesses a modest array of conventional anti-ship weapons that could – with enough time – destroy both the docked destroyer and the colony. While this would save missiles, close-in weapons demand direct line-of-sight and a proper radar lock. This option could be risky, but I do have time…

>LEAVE. I’ve done enough for now. While the colony – and its communications array – may be recovered and re-crewed at some point, I see no reason to push my luck further.

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, JAN 24, PERSONAL JOURNAL


[EMPIRE INTEGRITY: 95%]

COMMUNICATION OUTPOST OUTAGE

14,000 DEAD

>>5457079
>ATTACK – CLOSE-IN. The NOVEMBER RAIN possesses a modest array of conventional anti-ship weapons that could – with enough time – destroy both the docked destroyer and the colony. While this would save missiles, close-in weapons demand direct line-of-sight and a proper radar lock. This option could be risky, but I do have time…
Conserve our missiles while we still can.

>>5457079
>ATTACK – MSL-C (Conventional Fusion Warhead [10 Loaded]). Almost everyone on the colony is dead, and the destroyer is docked. There will be no time to respond to a missile attack. No ability to call for assistance. MIZAR-IX and its infrastructure will burn with a single warhead, and the NOVEMBER RAIN will be nowhere near the colony when it happens. Perhaps this might even seem like the result of a particularly unfortunate reactor accident…

>>5457079
On second thought, I'll switch >>5457081 to
>>LEAVE. I’ve done enough for now. While the colony – and its communications array – may be recovered and re-crewed at some point, I see no reason to push my luck further.
Our goal is to kill their population centers, not every destroyer in their fleet.

>>5457079
>LEAVE. I’ve done enough for now. While the colony – and its communications array – may be recovered and re-crewed at some point, I see no reason to push my luck further.

>>5457079
>LEAVE. I’ve done enough for now. While the colony – and its communications array – may be recovered and re-crewed at some point, I see no reason to push my luck further.
We should strike population centers and strategic locations, not fight every ship in they fleet.

>>5457079
>ATTACK – CLOSE-IN. The NOVEMBER RAIN possesses a modest array of conventional anti-ship weapons that could – with enough time – destroy both the docked destroyer and the colony. While this would save missiles, close-in weapons demand direct line-of-sight and a proper radar lock. This option could be risky, but I do have time…

>>5457079
>>ATTACK – CLOSE-IN. The NOVEMBER RAIN possesses a modest array of conventional anti-ship weapons that could – with enough time – destroy both the docked destroyer and the colony. While this would save missiles, close-in weapons demand direct line-of-sight and a proper radar lock. This option could be risky, but I do have time…
I would also support any other attack option against leave.
>>5457090
>>5457100
Our goal is to wipe out their entire species, which includes those in their spaceships. No survivors.

>>5457304
A ship cannot survive long without a population to support it. If we kill their planets, we kill the species. We can waste time shooting destroyers AFTER we've done the important part. Right now, getting involved in a fight will just warn them that there's an enemy in the system and waste our element of surprise for no real reason.

>>5457079
>>LEAVE. I’ve done enough for now. While the colony – and its communications array – may be recovered and re-crewed at some point, I see no reason to push my luck further.

We are not doing war. We are doing something more horrible and far reaching than war. Leaving this gaping wound will force the rest of the empire to send resources to aid the planet and even if they are some sort of unfeeling hive-mind the planet is too valuable to leave it to rot.

>>5457304
We have 14 missiles. I'm willing to bet they have at least 15 spaceships.

>>5457362
What's there to stop the ship from fleeing to a different solar system, finding a new planet habitable for their species and rebuilding their civilisation?

>>5457389
Then we will have a sport that lasts us a lifetime and something to keep the AI busy after our death.

>>5457389
Habitable planets are rare and establishing a new colony with no supplies with the crew of a destroyer as a base is extraordinarily difficult. Their chances of success are pretty much nil. And even if they do decide to run, we can just go after them and nuke the planet. It's gonna be easier than fighting their entire fleet single-handedly.

>>5457468
>And even if they do decide to run, we can just go after them and nuke the planet

How will we know where they went?

>>5457474
Same way we knew that this destroyer went to dock on the planet

>>5457079
>>5457190
Changing to
>LEAVE. I’ve done enough for now. While the colony – and its communications array – may be recovered and re-crewed at some point, I see no reason to push my luck further.

>>5457090
>>5457095
>>5457100
>>5457384
>>5457518

Deliberately leaving stragglers behind in an extermination operation is absurd. Furthermore, not destroying lone ships when we have the opportunity to do so will give them the opportunity to group up with their fleet, preventing us from defeating them in detail.

>>5457937
Stopping to kill every ship we see with our conventional guns or limited arsenal is absurd. We'll run out of time and munitions long before they run out of ships. Stealth is our greatest advantage, ending it to get one single destroyer that's out of the fight anyway will just lead them to begin hunting us sooner.

We're a single boomer sub, we can't defeat their entire fleet and it's folly to even try.

>>5457944
They're going to come looking for us sooner or later. Each ship we destroy now that we have the chance will make our job easier. The aliens themselves made the mistake of letting us get away.

>>5457957
>sooner or later
And it is better to make that later rather than sooner.

>ATTACK – CLOSE-IN

i think ideally its best we carve these fuckers off the map to make sure they dont run home with any useful info but neither do i think it worth it to use our limited strike weapons on them we also have some indication there captain might be more on the green side of things so this might be the best chance we'll get for a while to use the point weaponry

eh i wont vote for us to kill every single one that we come across but i don't see much reason to leave this one aside maayby reasons of psyops against the species spreading tails of the atrocity we committed here to spook people

You fool! We must leave sons alive to weep for their parents. Without people alive there is no one left to suffer. They don't even know what hit them and it doesn't matter! All they have to do is feel pain

>>5457079
>LEAVE. I’ve done enough for now. While the colony – and its communications array – may be recovered and re-crewed at some point, I see no reason to push my luck further.
Job well done, now to move on to the next colony in system. Hopefully we manage to fucking kill it just as easily as well.

>>5457079
>ATTACK – MSL-C

>>5457079
>LEAVE
Lets make this seem like an accident.

>>5457079
>LEAVE. I’ve done enough for now. While the colony – and its communications array – may be recovered and re-crewed at some point, I see no reason to push my luck further.

Our strategy should be primarily hinge on countervalue.

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“I have no desire to send a warning. I have no wish to make a statement. I am not here to build upon their soil, demand their labor, or conquer their hard-earned wealth.

I am here for their extermination: to raze their cities and salt the earth beneath.

I reiterate this fact to myself as I consider my choices. Launching another strike at MIZAR-IX was a viable option, but it wasn’t a rational one. The colony is small. The majority of its inhabitants are already dead. And most importantly, it is more useful to me crippled than vaporized. Purging the facility of residual radiation and reactivating its communication array would demand a massive, time-consuming operation that would drain resources for months – perhaps even years. More importantly, it would siphon manpower and protection away from the populated inner system, where densely packed colonies and waterlogged planets languish in the gentle light of the system’s off-blue main sequence star.

This brings me to the inner system. I finally saw it in detail yesterday, after MERRYGATE made a significant breakthrough in decrypting the aliens’ visual/symbolic language system. A statistical analysis of in-system traffic and aggregated video data revealed robust correlations between specific objects and recurring visual-motifs. In crude terms, it is equivalent to extracting or two relevant keywords from an extended conversation.

It wasn't nearly enough to make significant inferences about their society, but it did render the map MERRYGATE retrieved last week readable in combination with existing navigational data. Now, I possess a sketch of their home. I know which planets have been colonized. Which moons have ship-docks and orbital habitats. I even know the location of their home world: the sphere where their ancestors first escaped the clutches of their salt-water ocean to sail into the stars beyond.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, JAN 25, PERSONAL JOURNAL

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“I spent the last day pouring over the map with MERRYGATE, planning the location of our next attack. I had originally advocated for a decisive strike: maximum burn towards the densely-populated inner system, followed by the launch of the NOVEMBER RAIN’s entire missile complement once we entered engagement range. However, I now realize that such a plan is unrealistic.

There is too much traffic. I suspected this issue when I examined the traffic manifests that MERRYGATE in loaded from MIZAR-IX, but the map has now confirmed it. Hundreds of stations and pressurized installations litter the orbital plane of the major planets. Of these structures, there are an uncomfortable number that are large enough to host a military presence – regardless of whether or not they are marked as such.

Moving into the inner system at full burn would risk detection. Launching an attack would be inefficient, not to mention suicidal. Against a single planet, losing one or two missiles to detection and interception is irrelevant. But if I aim to cripple an entire species, each intercepted missile represents an immeasurable setback.

To this end, MERRYGATE has compiled some of the more promising targets located within the system’s asteroid-rich mid-band. Our reasoning is simple: if we cripple the infrastructure supporting the aliens’ orbital assets, we can degrade and scatter their forces to the point where an inner-system strike becomes viable….

>MINING CHAIN. A peculiar cluster of three stand-alone stations positioned to extract resources – most likely tritium and deuterium - from the mid-system asteroid belt. The backbone of any interplanetary civilization is power and fuel. By attacking this station, I will deprive my enemy of both these crucial resources.

>MIZAR-VI-A. A colonized ice-moon positioned exceptionally close to its parent ice giant. Likely responsible for supplying the vast quantities of purified water that the aliens use for both habitation and propulsion. Clean liquid water is not trivial to find in space, and it is easy to see how the loss of such an installation could panic an aquatic species…

>MIZAR-V-B. A peculiar moon at the very edge of the inner system. Spectroscopic output from the RAIN’s astrogation suite points towards the existence of a vast array of orbital mirrors surrounding this world. MERRYGATE has – quite reasonably – proposed this as evidence of a massive farming operation. The fact that this structure exists at all reveals a degree of necessity – or more precisely, vulnerability. The system is well defended, but the mirrors themselves are undoubtedly quite fragile…

>>5458269
>MIZAR-VI-A. A colonized ice-moon positioned exceptionally close to its parent ice giant. Likely responsible for supplying the vast quantities of purified water that the aliens use for both habitation and propulsion. Clean liquid water is not trivial to find in space, and it is easy to see how the loss of such an installation could panic an aquatic species…

"...and on a final note, I have struggled to think of what to call these aliens as of late - referring to the merely as "aliens" has become slightly repetitive. MERRYGATE refers to them as Mizarians - for the name of their parent star - but I find this designation a bit clinical for my personal tastes..."

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, JAN 26, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>Suggestions?

>>5458269
>MINING CHAIN. A peculiar cluster of three stand-alone stations positioned to extract resources – most likely tritium and deuterium - from the mid-system asteroid belt. The backbone of any interplanetary civilization is power and fuel. By attacking this station, I will deprive my enemy of both these crucial resources.
We should hinder their ability to react by depriving them of their fuel.

>>5458276
>Mizarians is a fine enough name, there is no need to dignify them. this name is 1 letter off calling them something like "dirty-ians" in my language, I like it.

>>5458269
>MINING CHAIN. A peculiar cluster of three stand-alone stations positioned to extract resources – most likely tritium and deuterium - from the mid-system asteroid belt. The backbone of any interplanetary civilization is power and fuel. By attacking this station, I will deprive my enemy of both these crucial resources.
>Just call them Mizarians, clinical is what we need for a genocide.

>>5458269
>MINING CHAIN. A peculiar cluster of three stand-alone stations positioned to extract resources – most likely tritium and deuterium - from the mid-system asteroid belt. The backbone of any interplanetary civilization is power and fuel. By attacking this station, I will deprive my enemy of both these crucial resources.
Fuel is the blood of a nation. Things will become much easier if we can create a shortage.

>>5458276
>Mizarians is fine, a clinical designation suits our purpose
We need to be as detached as possible. If we let our emotions cloud our judgment we're going to fail for sure.

>>5458269
>MIZAR-VI-A. A colonized ice-moon positioned exceptionally close to its parent ice giant. Likely responsible for supplying the vast quantities of purified water that the aliens use for both habitation and propulsion. Clean liquid water is not trivial to find in space, and it is easy to see how the loss of such an installation could panic an aquatic species…

>>5458269
>MINING CHAIN. A peculiar cluster of three stand-alone stations positioned to extract resources – most likely tritium and deuterium - from the mid-system asteroid belt. The backbone of any interplanetary civilization is power and fuel. By attacking this station, I will deprive my enemy of both these crucial resources.

>>5458269
>MINING CHAIN. A peculiar cluster of three stand-alone stations positioned to extract resources – most likely tritium and deuterium - from the mid-system asteroid belt. The backbone of any interplanetary civilization is power and fuel. By attacking this station, I will deprive my enemy of both these crucial resources.
It'd be cool if we just methodically destroyed everything there is but I guess we don't have enough missiles for that. I think cutting off the fuel to kill their ships' mobility is good for a second step.

>>5458276
Submerged or something about water. Or Lights or Shifters in reference to their ability to shift colours as a means of communication.

>>5458269
>>MIZAR-VI-A. A colonized ice-moon positioned exceptionally close to its parent ice giant. Likely responsible for supplying the vast quantities of purified water that the aliens use for both habitation and propulsion. Clean liquid water is not trivial to find in space, and it is easy to see how the loss of such an installation could panic an aquatic species…

>>MIZAR-VI-A. A colonized ice-moon positioned exceptionally close to its parent ice giant. Likely responsible for supplying the vast quantities of purified water that the aliens use for both habitation and propulsion. Clean liquid water is not trivial to find in space, and it is easy to see how the loss of such an installation could panic an aquatic species…

If we could alter the trajectory of a few asteroids of the belt we could set them on course to collide with a designated target. We could set them on route to the reflectors on Mizar-V-B and since the reflectors are a fragile structere, they might be damaged by debris even if the asteroid are intercepted. Or we could rig them with carges to make sure they disperse nicely before impact. And while they travel on their collision course, we can attack another target, making use of the distraction.
Since we are headed through the belt anyway we might give it a shot.

>>5459003
Changing orbits of asteroids isn't simple. It requires a lot of time and delta-v.

>>5458269
>MIZAR-VI-A. A colonized ice-moon positioned exceptionally close to its parent ice giant. Likely responsible for supplying the vast quantities of purified water that the aliens use for both habitation and propulsion. Clean liquid water is not trivial to find in space, and it is easy to see how the loss of such an installation could panic an aquatic species…

Who knows when the news of the now irradiated colony will reach the rest of the system, but I am certain that the dwarf's water is now useless. That's a lot of water that they don't have. Let's aim at this weakness

>>5453877
QM, me and a couple discordfags are mindblown by your visuals AND IN VIDEO FORMAT???? Not just an image but moving shit???? and want to know HOW do you make 'em

>>5459140
The 3D videos are even more impressive.
You've seen his other Quests too right? I'm pretty sure it's all done in blender.

>>5459195
I haven't, no. I will see if the archive has other quests that feature this qm

aigh I foudn 'em it's amazing I promised no porn tonight but here we are great job mister qm

>>5459140
Thank you kindly - and I'm very happy that you're enjoying the quest. I make all of my stuff in blender as the other anon mentioned; if you use the EVEE render you can spit frames out relatively quickly even on an old laptop. All my models are homemade (with the exception of the female figure - that one was downloaded since I'm very bad at modeling humans), so I don't mind sharing my setups if anyone wants to poke around with them.

And is this the qtg discord?

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“There is a deceptive slowness to interplanetary travel. Distances are long. Fixed reference points are rare. A single gee of constant acceleration provides the body with no sense of relative motion.

As a result, I have found it easy to fall into a routine in the days following our departure from MIZAR-IX – lulled by the whirring of air purifiers and the humming of the NOVEMBER RAIN’s beam-drive array. In the daytime, I reviewed system reports, plotted attack vectors, and assisted MERRYGATE as she wrangled with the rules governing the Mizarian language system. But at night, I would spend hours behind the missile bay, staring out from the ship’s only true observation blister. On older ships, this would be pointless: the fierce light of fusion burn would wash out the brightest of stars. But the RAIN’s drive was different. The primary drive manifold was built to exploit a peculiar property of the electroweak force, transmuting particles ejected from the torch drive into a tightly collimated beam of heavy neutrinos. Cold, lightless, and invisible to anyone lacking a scintillator detector shielded under kilometers of rock.

I know that the beam-drive was installed to obfuscate maneuvers and confound pursuers. To push the RAIN’s retaliatory strike from a mitigatable risk to a near certainty. But I rarely dwell on these morbid thoughts. There is a certain beauty to seeing the stars with my own eyes. A sense of nostalgic permanence that memory or history or kin can no longer offer me.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, FEB 7, PERSONAL JOURNAL

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“Last night, MERRYGATE accompanied me to the observation blister, projecting her bird-nest avatar briefly against the triply reinforced glass – imperceptibly faint, and at the very edge of my vision. She never approached me, but I felt a profound sense of guilt afterwards.

Not much has been exchanged since her activation. She is mission critical. I respect her capabilities. But I do not know her.
Yes, the past two months have been exceptionally difficult. Yes, the execution of our mission takes precedence over any and all secondary considerations. But that does that mean that I have always acted as I should. I admit that the gleefulness she displayed on MIZAR-IX has…disturbed me…to some extent. Hypocritical as it may be, I have always drawn a small distinction between committing murder and reveling in it.

But perhaps that is all it is – hypocrisy. Hypocrisy that I have acted upon within the confines of my duties, but hypocrisy, nonetheless. Even here – light years away from old sol and in the depths of an alien empire – I cannot escape the most human of flaws.

Tomorrow, we will be re-reviewing our strike options after we breach the mid-system asteroid band. If I choose to, I could take an opportunity to speak with her at greater length.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, FEB 9, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>NO

>YES

>Currently tied 5-5 for the mining stations or MIZAR-VI-A. If you haven’t voted yet, please do so to break the tie!

>>5459431
>>YES

>>5459431
>MIZAR-VI-A
>YES

>>5459431
>YES

>>5459431
>YES

>>5459431
>YES

Is it a bad idea to speak to THE DEVIL? Perhaps. However, I'm already a demon.

>>5459431
>YES
sadistic AI gf
If seriously, why would we not want to speak with her? Keeping our distance from a cheerful murderer?

>>5459407
no, no gtg

>>5459407
Not qtg discord. Are you on there if I wanted to contact you through discord though? Honest to god this is probably the most aesthetic shit i’ve seen made for a quest that isnt traditional art fag drawings.

>>5459431
>YES
Sadistic AI waifu is a go.

>>5459431
>>YES

>>5459431
>>NO

This is an AI. No matter how advanced it may be, it's still just a bunch of computer code. It's not a man and can't ever be a man.

>>5459653
you will never be a woman

>>5459431
>YES
Nothing more romantic then a desire to PURGE THE XENO

>>5459431

>YES
>MIZAR-VI-A. A colonized ice-moon positioned exceptionally close to its parent ice giant. Likely responsible for supplying the vast quantities of purified water that the aliens use for both habitation and propulsion. Clean liquid water is not trivial to find in space, and it is easy to see how the loss of such an installation could panic an aquatic species…

We have no reason not to indulge in some semblance of socialization. She'll be better company than the aliens, at the very least.

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“Thirst. The oldest driver of armed conflict has hounded our species from the warmth of the African plains to the frigid reaches of the outer solar system. While water is not rare in space, the same is not true for clean water. Conflicts over economical sources of pure, low-emission water have sparked more than one major interplanetary war.

But as essential as water is to human survival, the amount we once required pales in comparison to the quantity that the Mizarians seem to use. MERRYGATE’s estimates place their consumption rate at least an order of magnitude above our species’ own. The fact that the aliens can meet this demand represents a major logistical achievement - and an exploitable vulnerability:

This morning, the NOVEMBER RAIN’S optical array picked up a string of bulbous mass-carriers traveling on a long, arcing path to MIZAR-9. The vessels were likely carrying surplus water to replace the irradiated morass left behind by MERRYGATE’s radiation spike. Though the convoy were undefended, we turned our attention elsewhere once their back-calculated trajectory arcs confirmed a more interesting target.

MIZAR-6-A. A lightly colonized ice-moon. The parent ice-giant is unexceptional, but its mid-distance orbit and powerful gravitational pull allows water shipments from the colony to be catapulted to almost every inhabited location within the system. Coupled with our system-map, our observations indicate that 70-80% of the Mazarin’s non-terrestrial water supply hinges on the extraction/purification activity of this single colony.

In a little over two weeks, the NOVEMBER RAIN will breach MIZAR-6’s gravity well. Finding the best engagement angle will be challenging, but I am confident that I can plot a path through the colony’s meagre defenses…

Our last strike was a warning. But this one will be crippling.”

[See the preliminary map of MIAR-6’s orbit. Primary installations and potential defensive stations are shown in red. Estimated targeting/detection zone of the orbital station shown in dotted red. Fleets/ships are not shown, since they are too small to be detected at this range]

>Propose a path/approach vector (either by drawing or text description, just make sure its comprehensible). Remember that solid bodies block detection and asteroid fields very strongly attenuate it.

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, FEB 10, PERSONAL JOURNAL

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“What do artificial constructs value?

Is it knowledge? Computational power? Or even approval?

These common answers are partially correct. Like the biological minds they were trained to emulate, machine-intelligences develop their preferences and goals as they mature. Knowledge that captivates a STRATEGIC/COMBAT model might be discarded by a SPLICE/INTRUSION model. Priorities upheld by one unit may even be deemed foolish by siblings hailing from the very same model-lineage.

The one exception – and perhaps the only true currency of artificial life – is novelty. Every AI values new data. Unique data. Information that cannot be pulled from a public datamass or derived from basic principles. A signifier of individuality that remains robust even when immersed within a sea of information.

By this definition, I am fortunate enough to possess a small sum of sharable value.

After we reviewed our strike options yesterday, I invited MERRYGATE to accompany me to the aft observation blister, the exact place where I saw her lingering two nights ago. As we stood beneath the cobalt light of MIZAR-ALPHA, I told her a story. An old, conspiracy-laden account of a border incident between two rival human polities, one that nearly embroiled the solar system in the flames of a decade-long war.

It was a suitable choice. The background and the intrigue piqued her interest, and the promise of learning classified information secured it. Though MERRYGATE tried to maintain an air of professional detachment, I could hear her mainframe cycle up to speed as I reached the tale's climatic ending.

It was a good - albeit long - opener for a conversation that carried well into my sleep cycle. In return for my indiscretion, I received a bit of insight into her peculiar mentality. Conflicting feelings of impermanence and rigid control, artifacts of the behavior failsafes used to keep her in check. She even took a moment to address some of the behavioral…eccentricities…I had noticed previously:

“As a cyberwarfare unit, my reward function triggers when I understand and disassemble complex systems, auditor,” she told me with a slight tilt of her head. “Intrusion barriers and countermeasure electronics are examples of complex systems. But so was that colony.”

She paused for a moment.

“And naturally, those animals living inside of it as well.”

Thus, it seemed like…harmful ingenuity… was a pre-programmed function for her – something comparable to the human need to eat or sleep. Judging her for fulfilling that function with enthusiasm was not only impractical, but unfair. And so, I concluded our conversation with a brief apology and a gentle indication that I would be open to another conversation at some later date.

MERRYGATE nodded enthusiastically, the filigree outlining her body brightening for a moment. Then, with a gentle spin, her projection vanished."

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, FEB 11, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>>5459548
Yep! I'm (un?) fortunately a semi-regular there, so feel free to drop by and say hi if you would like

>>5461955
Not sure how to draw it, but an oblong orbit that puts us in that large asteroid belt with Mizar VI A between us and Stat-A, that appears to be an enemy installation.

>>5461962
She's cute! Can we hold her hand or is her projection purely visual?

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>>5461982
>She's cute! Can we hold her hand or is her projection purely visual?

>>5461955
Seconding >>5461982

>>5461987
I wanted to make a joke about anime waifus, but it wouldn't mesh well with the tone of the quest.
Mizar delenda est.

>>5461987
So I guess it's just light and we can't? Damn.

Oh well, we'll have all the time in the world to figure out how to make her a robot body after we've genocided the Mizarians.

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>>5461955
>Picrel
Why is there no starting point?
Please keep the fucking coomers at bay.

>>5462137
Anon, our target is Mizar VI A, not B.

No, we are here to stay.

>>5462142
Fuck sake, I'm not doing that again.
>spoiler
Go eat dick somewhere else, I don't want a comfy visual quest be ruined by a bunch of horny animals.

>>5462154
At least this "bunch of horny animals" knows what the planet we want to kill actually is and can stay on target. Waifufaggotry is a great motivation for excellence.

>>5461955
>>5461982
Support.
>>5462154
Chill, it's all memes. Or is it?

>>5462167
Yes, my mistake is somehow a counterargument to you being a sad degenerate trying to hook up with fictional characters from /qst/.
>waifufaggotry is a great motivation for excellence
If it was, you wouldn't be here and knowing which planet is which isn't excellence.

>>5462200
>Wanting the MC to find companionship with a girl is degenerate, wanting him to genocide an entire species is fine.
O
K

>knowing which planet is which isn't excellence.
It is pretty important not to end up on the wrong planet, wouldn't you agree?

>>5462202
>wanting him
you're either a self inserting liar or an autist with a cruel romance deficit irl
>It is pretty important not to end up on the wrong planet, wouldn't you agree?
Yes, but it has nothing to do with the coomer topic, wouldn't you agree?

>>5462205
>you're either a self inserting liar or an autist with a cruel romance deficit irl
All these insults for someone who just enjoys the same quest that you do just a little differently than you do. How sad...
>Yes, but it has nothing to do with the coomer topic, wouldn't you agree?
Considering that the one you're insulting as a degenerate coomer is the one who did not mistake the planet we were supposed to go and plotted the course we're going to follow, I consider it very relevant.

>>5461955
if STAT-A is smaller (obviously) and it's closer to the planet then it orbits way faster.
>MERRYGATE sweetie, give me an approximate time when STAT-A will stray away from the target planets. Is it in five hundred years?

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>>5461955
Just go straight for Mizar-6-A. Make sure that the ice-moon is always between us and Stat-A.

>>5462202
>>Wanting the MC to find companionship with a girl is degenerate

Anon, this is an AI and not a human being.

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>>5462444
>>5462446
>>5462142
Sorry guys I'm retarded. I mislabeled the image. MIZAR-VI-A (your target) is the purple ice moon with the H2O installations, not the planet. I'll keep this vote open after I update tonight in case anyone wants to revise. Apologies again for the confusion.

>>5462137
You can approach from an direction that isn't inside the planet.

>>5462226
The diagram-as-is represents the position of each orbital object at your projected date of arrival. Although the station (STAT-A) is shown to have a closer orbit to the parent planet than MIZAR-IV-B, this is not always true: over the course of a standard orbital period (~25 days), the station receives water from MIZAR-IV-A at a slightly lower orbit before burning a modest quantity of reaction mass to temporarily relocate to a higher orbital plane optimized for gravitational slingshotting. The average of the two orbital periods is equivalent to that of MIZAR-IV-A, meaning that the station will never drift too far from your target installation no matter how long you wait.

Solid idea though

>>5462137
>>5462142
There will be optional interaction with the ship's AI, but the main focus of the quest isn't going to change midway. Don't worry - I can't really write or draw coomerbait anyways.

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>>5462676
If the positions of the celestial bodies and the satelites are stable relative to one another then we can approach the configuration in belt A-1 and then move to MIZAR VI B to use the satellite's shadow and shield from STAT-A. In this safe position we will deploy two drones:

Drone 4a "rough autumn" will head close to STAT-A using the best of the thin BELT-B and scout (remember, there are unseen ships). I expect autumn to risk discovery, but that may work on our favour.
Drone 4b "revealing summer" will pass by the same Belt but get to MIZAR VI A and take its time to scout the ice moon and surroundings.

At first I thought that going after the installations would be dangerous because they face STAT-A but hold on a minute, doesn't this satellite rotate? Let's just pew pew from the shadow of the rocky-metallic MIZAR VI B and retreat. But the firing is stage two of this hit, this is the initial approach. I have also determined that it takes 10 days for drones to travel 5 tiles... I didn't check if they can outrun the one (1) destroyer we've seen so far (it loooks like it does)

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I wonder if we can also drop another probe to scout that trio of satellites and set it to linger there so we retrieve it (and the collected data) later. It's in the way to MIZAR VI and I feel it's a waste to not use the probes

>>5462446
>>5462676
I'm changing my vote to this
>>5462137

>>5462676
Fuck. I'll switch to support this approach >>5462137, with the addition of launching a probe to the mining stations as described here >>5462777

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“MIZAR-VI looms before us. The planet is cold – a loosely-packed snowball of ammonium slurry and water-ice. Light from the system’s central star bleeds through the thick atmosphere, coloring the planet’s terminator line a peculiar shade of reddish-purple.

According to MERRYGATE, this phenomenon is a quirk of the ice giant’s seasonal weather patterns: chromium chlorate and oxide particles suspended by equatorial winds that blew twenty times faster than the typhoons of old earth. When I looked at the planet more carefully, I could even see whitish vapor clouds stretched into thin, wispy strands by those very same winds.

My counterpart’s attention has been divided these past few days. Her avatar often leans faint-red, indicative of a workload that has pushed her hardware to the edge of its processing capacity. This is expected: her arsenal is in constant flux – revised day by day as she intercepts new transmissions and reviews old performance reports.

If she were a human crewmember, I would remind her to rest and recuperate. But she is not human, and I doubt that an enforced interruption would be welcome. Perhaps leaving her to continue her work is the most considerate thing I can do.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, FEB 20, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>See my previous post please and re-vote on the attack vector if you would like!

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“The NOVEMBER RAIN is not a brawler. Compared to true warships, her armor is thin and her engines are slow. Damage control facilities are sparse given her weight-class. Few auditors would risk bringing her into knife-fighting range willingly, even with her generous offensive arsenal.

But I will have few other options in the coming months. Space combat always becomes messy inside gravity wells. Line of sight is awkwardly limited. Satellites – natural and artificial – confound both passive and active sensor arrays. I will do everything I possibly can to avoid a close-in encounter when we initiate our strike on MIZAR-VI. However, I also know that that the enemy may force my hand.

To this end, I spent the past two days testing and recalibrating the close-in weapons hidden inside the NOVEMBER RAIN’s chassis. When I finished my rounds this morning and returned to the bridge to a run a final integration check, I found another ritual card on my desk. I examined it more closely this time. Glossy, but worn by age. An inked motif that seemed strangely appropriate for the RAIN’s offensive loadout…

[CHOOSE ONE]

>XX: JUDGEMENT [A-51/N]. “Some weapons were made to keep us honest. The A-51/N is the most recent iteration of a tried-and-tested design: a dual-stage magnetic accelerator gun capable of slinging foam-phase hydrogen rounds at a rapid clip. I have seen captains disregard this weapon before: their mangled ships burning in the cold void, trailing glowing streams of plasticized metal…”

>XVIII: THE MOON [AURORA-B]. “One of the few laser weapons that have successfully mitigated the beam diffraction problem. The AURORA-B uses a complex optical assembly to project a laser of unparalleled intensity: effective at ablating hull, but also nimble enough to intercept guided weaponry. An important distinction from other weapons in its class”

>XIX: THE SUN [???]. “I have few memories of this device despite its extensive integration with my ship’s systems. To the best my knowledge, this weapon is a collimated particle beam weapon built into the RAIN’s spinal axis. The power requirements of this weapon are enormous, suggesting incredible power…but also potential inflexibility. A weapon of this size will have no chance of striking multiple targets or intercepting guided weaponry.

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, FEB 22, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>>5462913
>>XX: JUDGEMENT [A-51/N]. “Some weapons were made to keep us honest. The A-51/N is the most recent iteration of a tried-and-tested design: a dual-stage magnetic accelerator gun capable of slinging foam-phase hydrogen rounds at a rapid clip. I have seen captains disregard this weapon before: their mangled ships burning in the cold void, trailing glowing streams of plasticized metal…”

This seems the most reliable.

>>5462913
>XVIII: THE MOON [AURORA-B]. “One of the few laser weapons that have successfully mitigated the beam diffraction problem. The AURORA-B uses a complex optical assembly to project a laser of unparalleled intensity: effective at ablating hull, but also nimble enough to intercept guided weaponry. An important distinction from other weapons in its class”
Point defense is a critical advantage, and lasers can be used to blind even beyond damage range.

>>5462913
>XIX: THE SUN [???]. “I have few memories of this device despite its extensive integration with my ship’s systems. To the best my knowledge, this weapon is a collimated particle beam weapon built into the RAIN’s spinal axis. The power requirements of this weapon are enormous, suggesting incredible power…but also potential inflexibility. A weapon of this size will have no chance of striking multiple targets or intercepting guided weaponry.
Slow engines, thin armor...

We'll need to win ship-to-ship fights quickly. Multiple enemies are a death-sentence, point-defense or no. Give me the weapon that guarantees kills.

>>5462913
>XIX: THE SUN [???]. “I have few memories of this device despite its extensive integration with my ship’s systems. To the best my knowledge, this weapon is a collimated particle beam weapon built into the RAIN’s spinal axis. The power requirements of this weapon are enormous, suggesting incredible power…but also potential inflexibility. A weapon of this size will have no chance of striking multiple targets or intercepting guided weaponry.

>>5462910
Changing my vote >>5462182 to >>5462764
>>5462913
>XX: JUDGEMENT [A-51/N]. “Some weapons were made to keep us honest. The A-51/N is the most recent iteration of a tried-and-tested design: a dual-stage magnetic accelerator gun capable of slinging foam-phase hydrogen rounds at a rapid clip. I have seen captains disregard this weapon before: their mangled ships burning in the cold void, trailing glowing streams of plasticized metal…”
>>5462764
I believe it was mentioned that scouts are almost undetectable here >>5454828, so we don't need to worry about hiding them behind asteroid belts or anything like that. Also idk if it's possible to control them once they're sent.

>>5462913
>XVIII: THE MOON [AURORA-B].

>>5462913
>>XVIII: THE MOON [AURORA-B]. “One of the few laser weapons that have successfully mitigated the beam diffraction problem. The AURORA-B uses a complex optical assembly to project a laser of unparalleled intensity: effective at ablating hull, but also nimble enough to intercept guided weaponry. An important distinction from other weapons in its class”

I vote for the most "defensible" one. If we get into a direct confrontation with enemy ships we can only run

>>5462913
>XIX: THE SUN [???].

let's hope this thing has excessive range.

>>5462913
>XVIII: THE MOON [AURORA-B]. “One of the few laser weapons that have successfully mitigated the beam diffraction problem. The AURORA-B uses a complex optical assembly to project a laser of unparalleled intensity: effective at ablating hull, but also nimble enough to intercept guided weaponry. An important distinction from other weapons in its class”
If we're fighting enemy ships it means that something has gone wrong and this is the best weapon for when something has gone wrong.

>>5462913
>>XIX: THE SUN [???]. “I have few memories of this device despite its extensive integration with my ship’s systems. To the best my knowledge, this weapon is a collimated particle beam weapon built into the RAIN’s spinal axis. The power requirements of this weapon are enormous, suggesting incredible power…but also potential inflexibility. A weapon of this size will have no chance of striking multiple targets or intercepting guided weaponry

If we can't run or take a hit, then the only logical solution is to hit hard enough that other person can't back.

>>5463287
...what if there are more than one people?

>>5463363
Same thing, hit hard, and don't stop hitting till they all dead.

>>5463399
What if you're dead before you manage to picke then all out one by one like a cripple with a musket for a leg?

>>5463413
anon doesn't understand we are one (1) ship that is outfitted for stealth and infiltration

File: Placeholder.png (1.45 MB, 1920x1080)

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No update tonight, but have this picture of the NOVEMBER RAIN using MIZAR-VI-B to shield its approach as detailed by this anon, which seems to have consensus.

>>5462764

Regular update tomorrow hopefully!

>>5463778
Your renders are always so pretty

>>5463729
>anon is an idiot who thinks he's smart
Yeah, many such cases.

File: 0000-0300.webm (2.61 MB, 800x800)

2.61 MB WEBM

>Tie between the laser and the particle lance. I’ll wait for one more vote, then decide with RNG if no tiebreaker by tomorrow.

“We entered the final phase of our approach yesterday. After crossing the outer fringes of the mid-system asteroid belt, the NOVEMBER RAIN flipped along its long axis to initiate a gentle retrograde burn. As the RAIN decelerated, the taffy-blue face of MIZAR-VI expanded until it dominated our view: serene and strangely featureless despite the violent weather systems roiling within its dense atmosphere.

Our plan has changed little within the past few days. This fact is unsurprising. Over the course of our month-long journey, MERRYGATE and I have planned our attack down to the millisecond. Figuratively in my case, but very literally in the case of my companion. At times, her obsessiveness outpaces my own. Space combat is already slow for humans. For AIs, the process must be glacial.

The only significant update worth noting is our decision to launch a spare probe at the outer-system mining colony. While we had initially chosen to pass this target in favor of the water-extraction facility, the amount of traffic surrounding the stations still represent a valuable source of intelligence – especially given that the outer system’s main communication hub is now inoperable. One of the RAIN’s sensor drones – configured for local surveillance and data storage – will linger near the station trio for a few months before falling back into MIZAR-VI’s orbit for recovery. However, conducting this surveillance operation means that our drone supply for our upcoming attack on the extraction will be limited to three probes. Efficiency will be key: here more than ever.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, FEB 28, PERSONAL JOURNAL

File: untitled.png (7.45 MB, 2400x2400)

7.45 MB PNG

>Pic is a zoom out of the last frame.

“MIZAR-VI-B is an ugly duckling. Its surface is marred with impact craters and low, rocky valleys. No atmosphere. No water. Few extractable metallics. In spite of these deficits, however, the moon offers excellent cover. Its unusually robust magnetosphere provides an EM deadzone on its sun-facing side – one that the RAIN and I have generously exploited over the past two days.

In fact, moving into MIZAR-VI’s gravity well undetected may have been impossible without the moon’s assistance. The orbital station responsible for shipping the majority of MIZAR-VI’s water output possesses a massive phased-sensor array, filling the space around the ice giant with a multiplex of scanning frequencies. Occasional angle shifts in the RAIN’s passive sensor readouts also suggested semi-regular scouting activity by dedicated patrols.

In an attempt to track these patrols, I launched two additional probes this morning – one sent on a merger with the ice giant’s ring system, the other on an inject trajectory into MIZAR-VI-A’s orbit. The first unit provided moderately informative results – a non-station signal trace indicative of a second scanning array somewhere between the RAIN and the ring system. The exact location of the signal-source could be determined with some skill...

>[I will give you three guesses as to the location of these vessel(s), to one square of accuracy. If you guess correctly, the precise location and its weight class will be marked on the display.]

By contrast, the second probe was much luckier – almost unreasonably so. In addition to picking up two corvette-weight vessels on an active patrol, the drone also passed by a collection of inactive vessels. Most of them were transports: big water-haulers with weak engines and poor sensors. But closer to the moon, there were a trio of ships at least ten times heaver than the corvettes. MERRYGATE suggested that they were proper capital-class vessels: set in a temporary holding pattern as they await reaction mass replenishment. Given what we have observed of the Mizarians' travel logs, warships of this size may be a limited resource. Tempting targets, though also risky ones given that their true state of readiness is unknown…”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, MAR 6, PERSONAL JOURNAL

[CHOOSE ONE/MORE OF THE FOLLOWING:]

>SCOUT. I have one remaining scout drone left. Perhaps I could use it to tease out the location of any additional vessels…

>STRIKE. I have close in weapons and missiles, and there are several tempting targets...

>LURE. My scout drones can be used to lure ships by broadcasting a false scanning pattern/drive signature. However, this will result in loss of my drone should an enemy ship reach if first…

>MOVE. Perhaps I could relocate to a better position?

>INTRUSION. Ideas for MERRYGATE? [Will require moving into radar [RAD] range at least]

>Write In…

File: scouting6.png (785 KB, 3200x839)

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>>5464900
I did some drawing in paint.net, saved 4 pictures from the webm, drawn lines towards where the ELINT points and layered all the images on top of one another with semitransparency, here's what I got. The little square on the right picture is supposed to be where the vessel(s?) is. It doesn't account for the RAIN's movement, but should be an okay guess if we're allowed 1 square of accuracy. I'm NOT proposing this as a proper guess until anons support it though.

>>5464893
What in the fuck's going on anymore

>>5464965
It's been said the source is non-stationary. I'd like to try to locate it myself before I support your guess.

>>5464965
I think you're right. I'll add that this object seems to orbit Mizar-VI-B clockwise, so it's probably a satellite or a station.

>>5464900
>>STRIKE. I have close in weapons and missiles, and there are several tempting targets...
Surprise ambush their capital ships, also destroy the water haulers if we can.
>>5464965
I support this guess.

>>5464893
Changing my vote >>5462972 to
>XVIII: THE MOON [AURORA-B]. “One of the few laser weapons that have successfully mitigated the beam diffraction problem. The AURORA-B uses a complex optical assembly to project a laser of unparalleled intensity: effective at ablating hull, but also nimble enough to intercept guided weaponry. An important distinction from other weapons in its class”
>>5464900
A couple questions before I vote here:
Can we kill all 3 capital ships with 1 missile? Or must we expend several from our arsenal to destroy all of them? Can we approach within radar range without cover but without getting detected? I'm thinking of maybe asking MERRYGATE to do something with the patrolling destroyers but not sure.

>>5464900
>INTRUSION. Ideas for MERRYGATE? [Will require moving into radar [RAD] range at least]
How about we co-opt one of those water haulers and ram it into the warships?

>>5465226
It is possible. Depends on where you target the missile, and I may ask for a roll. But you will probably get at least two of the ships based on blast radius of a conventional nuclear warhead, which is one square (so width of the circle is two squares)

You are currently at ELINT 1, so you have some wiggle room before you get detected even if you leave cover. Your missiles will be detected if they enter radar range, but whether or not the enemy can attempt an intercept depends on the size of the ship and the intervening distance (and of course whether it’s sensors are active or not)

>>5464987
Too much autism?

>>5465231
Doable but you’ll need to get in radar range (white dotted line) with anyone you want to hack

>>5465243
I'm banking on the assumption that cargo ships don't have radar warning receivers.

>>5465231
This is a cool idea but I'd like to get info on the ships our right probe detected first. I'm thinking these are probably destroyers on patrol as well, but it helps to have the wider picture.

>>5464965
That's a good guess, support.

>>5465231
Support this too. Swing around behind the patrolling corvettes and go near them. The water haulers have weak sensors and probably a skeleton crew at best, if they're not mothballed. But why just one? I bet our AI waifu could hijack them all and make it impossible for the capital ships to dodge even if they tried.

File: scouting7.jpg (7.17 MB, 2400x2400)

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>>5464965
Thought I should give the location on the bigger map without all the editing noise.

>>5465252
We need to be careful that whatever this is doesn't detect us once it swings around on its orbit.

>>5465240
Just too much icon clutter.

File: Update.png (7.47 MB, 2400x2400)

7.47 MB PNG

>>5465250
>>5465190
>>5464965
Good guess!

>>5465881
Welp, looks like a battleship on patrol

>>5464900
>>5465226
Adding
>MOVE. Perhaps I could relocate to a better position?
Circumvent the patrolling corvettes and approach water haulers within radar range
>INTRUSION. Ideas for MERRYGATE? [Will require moving into radar [RAD] range at least]
Hack into water haulers and ram them into passive warships

>>5464900
>>5465190
>>5465881

With this in mind, I change my vote to sneaking up on UNK06 and taking it out. It's isolated, let's take advantage of that.

Uhhh I had a pretty long day so I'm probably going to watch some vtubers tonight and update tomorrow!

Seems like hacking the water haulers and ramming them into the 250KT ships has consensus, unless I'm miscounting votes.

>>5466800
Oh shit QM, who do you watch? Corpos? Indies?

>>5466911
For my preferred vtuber experience I animate MERRYGATE doing a little dance, record it, and play it in the background on loop while I play exapunks/question my life choices.

But I'm pretty fond of Kronii and some of the holoEN corpos. And yea...I'm aware that this makes me the precise type of degenerate QM that I typically avoid when I play quests :)

>>5466939
Wonderful, exactly what I expect from a good QM.
I'm personally more partial to western vtuber indies, the small ones with less than 100 views on twitch. I've grown a bit bored of Hololive since discovering those creators, admittedly...

>>5466939
>>5467165
Whatever, vtubers (streamers) are superficial entertainment. Why don't you watch movies or something? dunno what to say QM... kronii is fine I guess. I believe she has always wanted to be a guy

>>5467656
>I believe she has always wanted to be a guy
A mentally ill vrtuber? Who coulda thought!

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“I have never enjoyed running dark. Electrical power is limited. Lighting is low. Heat – a surefire sign of activity – is winnowed hour-by-hour to minimize the RAIN’s thermal signature. MERRYGATE felt this too. As the NOVEMBER RAIN began its final, careful approach towards MIZAR-VI’s only ice moon, I found her strangely lethargic – a different persona than the concise, sharp-edge intelligence I had become accustomed to. She assured me that it was regrettable but unavoidable: a necessary sacrifice to keep the RAIN’s electrical grid under its load threshold.

But in truth, I was less bothered by this than she was. Slower processing speed brought her closer to the pace of human thought. Our customary conversations – held at the aft observation blister – seemed less one sided, and I felt like I had more time to deliberate on some of more interesting ideas we would puzzle over:

[Pick one]

>XI: JUSTICE [WHY/HOW ARE WE HERE?]
>XVI: THE TOWER [WHO/WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING?]
>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, MAR 9, PERSONAL JOURNAL

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“We executed our attack as soon as the NOVEMBER RAIN entered comm range. There was no delay this time. Within minutes of reactor startup, MERRYGATE injected a cocktail of pre-written intrusion programs to subvert the primitive subroutines responsible for navigation and thrust control. The four haulers spun as one, swinging their needle-nose prows to point back towards their frigid home-port.

Bursts of fuzzy static sounded over wide-band comms – perhaps an impromptu distress call by a panicked crewmember? MERRYGATE heard it to. I remember seeing her tilt her head ever so slightly in amusement. A moment later, fragile lines of white vapor began streaming from the haulers.
Curious, I used the RAIN's optic array to look closer.

To silence any crew-turned-passengers, she had forced every single water-lock and external hatch to open simultaneously, flash-sublimating the water inside the habitation modulates into opaque ice-plumes. Depressurization was a brutal solution, but an undeniable efficient one.

As I watched the now crew-less haulers light their main drives in succession, I hoped that this same principle would apply to the next stage of our plan. All four ships were set on intercept trajectories with the capital-weight vessels we detected a few days ago. Extrapolating the collision would be easy. But MERRYGATE assured me that intercepting it would be significantly harder. In the time that it would take for them to realize the gravity of the situation and commit to shooting down their own vessels, it would hopefully be too late.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, MAR 14, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>Roll 1d20, best of 3 for success of attack. I was hoping to avoid rolls mostly for this quest, but this will be an exception.

Rolled 4 (1d20)

>>5468100

>>5468103
>XI: JUSTICE [WHY/HOW ARE WE HERE?]

Rolled 17 (1d20)

>>5468098
>>5468100
>XI: JUSTICE [WHY/HOW ARE WE HERE?]

Rolled 5 (1d20)

>>5468100
>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]

>>5468098

>XI: JUSTICE [WHY/HOW ARE WE HERE?]

>>5468098
>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]
This seems like the most interesting question with all the causality violating shenanigans.

>>5468098

>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]

>>5468098
>>XVI: THE TOWER [WHO/WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING?]

Know thy enemy.

>>5468098
>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]

I do not care for the enemy and I have no interest in learning more about them. We know they suffer and we know they die. Trying to make sense of time however, is great

>>5468098
>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]
We are here to avenge, but what will we do once the killers are dealt their due?

>>5468098
>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]

File: untitled.png (1.61 MB, 1920x1080)

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[DC: 5, 10, 15]
>Roll: 17

“At trans-orbital speeds, the physics of collision become simple. Hardness is irrelevant. Explosive payloads are negligible. Only two things matter: mass and relative velocity.

Three hours of sustained, engine-destroying fusion burn propelled our fleet of commandeered ice haulers to an impact velocity exceeding eighty kilometers per second. A modest clip by interplanetary standards, but inconceivably fast for human perception.

Twenty minutes before impact, I ordered MERRYGATE to add angular acceleration to the haulers before disengaging cargo locks. Each hauler carried several hundred containers filled with purified water-ice. As my companion rotated the central hull, these containers spun out from the shipping compartments like seeds from a pod, surrounding each individual hauler with an cloud of frozen submunitions.

The aliens panicked. I couldn’t peer into their bridge or comprehend their comms, but I have survived too many close calls to be unfamiliar with its signs. Through RAIN’s optics , I saw the grumble of uncalibrated hydrogen burn as two of the capitals attempted to leave their docking berths. MERRYGATE preened as the command staff – or whatever passed for it – sent strings of frantic chatter in an attempt to coordinate maneuvers. Long-range missiles and kinetic point defense fire raced on intercept trajectories, scattered and uncertain.

Why the capitals waited so long to engage remains unclear to me. Perhaps they clung onto hopes of recovering their compatriots. Perhaps their ships were slower on the uptake than our own. Or maybe the malice of the collision wasn’t obvious before MERRYGATE scattered her deadly cargo.

In the end, the difference was irrevalent. In the same way that the distinction between ice and metal becomes academic at multi-kilometer closing velocities.

I watched the capitals fly apart under dozens of tiny impacts, each one flaring bright against the display. Antennas shattered. Chunks of superstructure and armor cladding flew into space. Pressurized water sprayed from hull breaches before flash-freezing into bright clouds. I was about to turn back to the navigation console when MERRYGATE pushed my attention to the viewing screen, brushing my shoulder with the light touch of an acoustic hologram.

The capitals were crippled. But one of the haulers was not. As it cleared the debris field, it initiated a final, violent burn towards the moon's southern hemisphere, cutting through the orbital belt and the low-density atmosphere with a touch of frictional heating.

It struck the planet. I saw one brief, fleeting image of the hauler driving into the frozen crust – like a heated lancet – before everything within a sixty-kilometer radius vanished in white. For the first time since our ship arrived, I heard MERRYGATE laugh: clear and bright under the light of a burning moon.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, MAR 14, PERSONAL JOURNAL

File: untitled.png (3.66 MB, 1600x1600)

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“Everything comes at a cost. We were fortune a few hours ago – striking a critical below against the enemy without expending a single missile of our own.

But I doubt that such an opportunity will repeat itself soon. Once the hauler impacted the moon and vaporized the southern purification colony, every single ship in the ice giant’s initiated a hard burn towards the ice moon. Aggressive scan patterns crept across the RAIN’s hull in a futile but unending squall. Their smaller corvettes are exceptionally fast – swinging back on acceleration vectors that would suffocate any human. I suspect that it is an unintended benefit of their aquatic biology. The Mizarians may be peculiar – and strangely naive, but they are not stupid. They know that this was not an accident.

We are currently faced with is a critical juncture: we must choose whether we withdraw or engage – and in the latter case, our level of commitment.”

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, MAR 14, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>WITHDRAW. If we break for open space now, only the fastest and lightly armed corvettes will have any chance of detecting and intercepting us. However, the damage we have inflicted is not fatal: there are three water purification facility on MIZAR-VI-A. While losing a single facility will cause their supply lines to buckle, I doubt that it will stress them to their breaking point.

>ATTACK – MSL-C (Conventional Fusion Warhead [8 Loaded/2 Storage]). Launching a one or two warheads before we leave will not delay us, but it will guarantee the loss of one (or two) of the remaining purification plants. But missiles are always a limited resource…

>ATTACK – MSL-C [CHOOSE 1 or 2]. ATTACK – MSL-AM (AM-MIRV [4 Loaded]). A single one of these warheads will turn the moon from an pristine snowball into an irradiated wasteland. Both purification plants will be destroyed, with absolutely no hope of recovery. But AM-MIRV warheads are even more limited than our other missiles and may be better reserved for other targets.

>ATTACK – CLOSE-IN. We could exploit the chaos of the attack and close-in to the facility to engage with conventional weapons. A few minutes of sustained laser fire could wreak terrible havoc on an exposed facility…but it would also probably risk an interception.

>WRITE-IN. Proposals? Trajectories you want to draw? [Not much time has passed, so I just included a still image as the update instead of an animation]

>>5468098
[Vote noted, will probably write about it in an upcoming backdated update]

>>5470710
Our genocidal AI waifu can't be this cute!
>brushing my shoulder with the light touch of an acoustic hologram.
And she can actually touch us! Operation Handholding is a go!

>>5470718
>ATTACK – MSL-C (Conventional Fusion Warhead [8 Loaded/2 Storage]). Launching a one or two warheads before we leave will not delay us, but it will guarantee the loss of one (or two) of the remaining purification plants. But missiles are always a limited resource…
Two missiles to kill their two remaining facilities. The expenditure is more than worth it. Then gtfo, our objective here will have been accomplished.

>>5470724
Supporting 2x Missiles

>>5470718
>>5470724
Support. Finish the job and get moving. The Mizarians will soon begin reinforcing other elements of their infrastructure. Every minute counts.

>>5470718
>ATTACK – MSL-C (Conventional Fusion Warhead [8 Loaded/2 Storage]). Launching a one or two warheads before we leave will not delay us, but it will guarantee the loss of one (or two) of the remaining purification plants. But missiles are always a limited resource…
2 warheads for 2 purification plants.

>>5470718
>2x MSL-C

>>5470718
Actually, I'll change my vote
>WRITE-IN: Flee past the moon and hack the remaining facilities as we pass by to try and destroy the equipment. If we can't do it in time, them bomb them with MSL-C

>>5470724

Supporting. Leave them out to dry.

>>5470718
Supporting >>5470724

>>5470742
Remember the station has a wide detection and targeting range. Not to mention the fact that ALL the ships in orbit are heading towards us. We'd be exposing ourselves a lot and risking great damage to the ship by doing this.

>>5470724
Supporting

>>5470710
wait, why does the explosion have MIZAR-VI-B in the background, in front of MIZAR-VI-A? Cool image and I love the detail of the *blip* explosion, but my autism is boundless

>>5471029
The background should be MIZAR VI, both VI-A and VI-B are moons of the gas giant. If I understood it correctly, that is.

>>5471029
*facepallm* MIZAR VI is a gas planet with two moons. Alright, alright...

>>ATTACK – MSL-C [CHOOSE 1 or 2]. ATTACK – MSL-AM (AM-MIRV [4 Loaded]). A single one of these warheads will turn the moon from an pristine snowball into an irradiated wasteland. Both purification plants will be destroyed, with absolutely no hope of recovery. But AM-MIRV warheads are even more limited than our other missiles and may be better reserved for other targets.

Now now, >Coupled with our system-map, our observations indicate that 70-80% of the Mazarin’s non-terrestrial water supply hinges on the extraction/purification activity of this single colony.

ONE COLONY. ONE!!! Without this their water is POOOF. Think of a bank. They don't have cash at all and if suddenly half their customers wanted their mony withdrawn the bank is a GONER. (cash runs). I understand wanting to save up the MSL-C for other targets, such as populated planets and colonies, but think about it. One of this fusion bad boys and their water is GONE.

And not just a massive disruption to their water, but the moon would be negated forever as a resource thanks to the radiation.

>>5471038
yes, silly me

>>5471040
also, according to >>5457079 we have ten of this. Oh wait, this is the MSL-AM fuk. We have FOUR of this, but COME ON

>>5470718
Fire one MSL-AM. If I understand it correctly this will make the moon permanently unusable, they will NEVER be able to get water from it anymore. If we use two conventional warheads then they still will be able to rebuild the facilities eventually.

In other words, the conventional missiles are like burning their fields whereas the AM warheads are like burning their fields and salting the earth.

>>5471040
>>5471137
We don't plan to give them enough time to rebuild there. If they manage to do it, it means that we have failed completely, they survived, and salting the earth in that moon will be irrelevant.

>>5471211
It's a contingency plan. If we nuke the moon and get shot down the very next day then we still did permanent damage to their civilisation that they will never be able to recover from.

>>5470718

>>ATTACK – MSL-C [2].

While I would like to use the AM-MIRV, I don't think its the right target. 2 fusion warheads will have the same effect.

>>5471294
>2 fusion warheads will have the same effect.

They won't, they'll still destroy the plants but they won't irradiate the moon.

>>5471296
You're too fixated on this moon. Even if it's the best source of clean water, there probably are others, even if more expensive. In a pinch, the Mizarians can start just purifying whatever water they find, and water is abundant in space. Irradiating this moon is not a forever knockout punch. They will bounce back in time.

>>5470724
I'll support this, there are plenty of targets of more danger and worth ahead.

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The NOVEMBER RAIN has drawn blood. It is a moment I have anticipated and dreaded in equal measure. With her arsenal, there are no half measures; the first step she takes towards violence is also her last and only step.

I recall the click I heard when I inserted my launch-key into the central control panel. The soft whirring of a sample-centrifuge as the ship processed blood from a finger-prick to verify my biometric information. Finally, I remember the gentle change in the RAIN’s velocity vector as the cold-launch system pushed a pair of missiles out from their narrow launch tubes

The RAIN does not operate on half measures. The missiles we fired had little in common with the lithe anti-shipping missiles typically mounted on patrolling warships. There are no sensible yield-restrictions here. Our fusion warheads sat comfortably within the ten-gigaton range, mated to a heavily-armored chassis capable of providing continuous acceleration from launch until impact. It was a delivery system designed to mitigate the possibility of mid-course interception – to push each warhead fast and far enough to break an unprepared fleet or shatter an unlucky colony.

And shatter the colony did. With the docked capitals destroyed, the possibility of a successful intercept was remote. The RAIN’s missile-pair streaked towards the moon with no resistance, hugging its airless surface to avoid detection until the last possible moment.

To the Mizarian’s credit, their station did manage to detect one of the missiles before impact, releasing a chain of guided interceptors that surged forward on an aggressive intercept trajectory. But basic kinematics tend to be non-negotiable. A quick glance at their acceleration vectors told me that they were hounding a target that they simple could not reach in time.

And so, I watched the first missile impact just north of the equatorial line, vaporizing the purification facility instantly before sublimating several thousand square kilometers of surface-ice into vapor. Light from the detonation seeped through the moon’s subsurface ocean, briefly outlining cracks and trenches engraved in brilliant turquoise.

The second missile performed similarly, destroying the last purification node a few seconds. Here, the crust was thinner. Instead of vaporizing, the ice sheet cracked and melted, creating a large – but temporary – ocean visible from orbit...."

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…There was a moment of stillness after this. I processed the magnitude of what I had done while the Mizarians – most likely – attempted to grasp the extent of the damage.

But that moment vanished faster than I would have liked. Guided by either a lucky sensor catch or simple intuition, a pair of corvettes were converging on a patrol path that would take them uncomfortably close to the RAIN’s position. Matching their speed in a chase would be impossible but…"

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, MAR 15, PERSONAL JOURNAL

>EVADE. If we slow down and start running dark, we may be able to wait out the patrol. The sensors on their corvettes aren’t excellent, and they could miss us easily if we play our cards right. However, this option will delay our exit, which could become problematic as more ships trickle in…

>AMBUSH – CLOSE IN. The corvettes are a tiny fraction of our tonnage. While the RAIN is not meant for direct combat, she can probably destroy these patrol vessels without significant difficulty. This could allow us to make a clean exist…but combat always carries certain risks.

>AMBUSH – MSL-C. Firing a missile at the corvettes would guarantee their destruction without risking our own ship. But missiles are precious…

>>5471946
>>AMBUSH – CLOSE IN. The corvettes are a tiny fraction of our tonnage. While the RAIN is not meant for direct combat, she can probably destroy these patrol vessels without significant difficulty. This could allow us to make a clean exit…but combat always carries certain risks.

>>5471946
>AMBUSH – CLOSE IN. The corvettes are a tiny fraction of our tonnage. While the RAIN is not meant for direct combat, she can probably destroy these patrol vessels without significant difficulty. This could allow us to make a clean exist…but combat always carries certain risks.

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>>5471944
And here's a high-res pic of this.

>>5471946
>AMBUSH – CLOSE IN. The corvettes are a tiny fraction of our tonnage. While the RAIN is not meant for direct combat, she can probably destroy these patrol vessels without significant difficulty. This could allow us to make a clean exist…but combat always carries certain risks.

>>5471946
>AMBUSH – CLOSE IN. The corvettes are a tiny fraction of our tonnage. While the RAIN is not meant for direct combat, she can probably destroy these patrol vessels without significant difficulty. This could allow us to make a clean exist…but combat always carries certain risks.

>>5471946
>AMBUSH – CLOSE IN. The corvettes are a tiny fraction of our tonnage. While the RAIN is not meant for direct combat, she can probably destroy these patrol vessels without significant difficulty. This could allow us to make a clean exist…but combat always carries certain risks.
There will be no better time to test our weapons against them.

>>5471953
Beautiful.

>>5464893
>Tie between the laser and the particle lance. I’ll wait for one more vote, then decide with RNG if no tiebreaker by tomorrow.

What was the outcome here?

>>5471953
here I was, looking for a new wallpaper for my desktop

>>5471946
Wow wow wow, we are not fighting against two corvettes, we are fighting again two corvettes, two unidentified 70 KT ships of respectable speed and a damn 250KT destroyer... that certanly has considerable payload.

>AMBUSH – MSL-C. Firing a missile at the corvettes would guarantee their destruction without risking our own ship. But missiles are precious…

But how many missiles? shiiit... At least I am happy that our drones can get back to us because wow they are fast

>>5472199
FYI the 70kT destroyers and the 250kT capital probably won’t be able to intercept you successfully from this range unless something very bad happens. But the 20kT corvettes have a much better chance of doing.

>>5472165
Laser I’m pretty sure

>>5471946

>AMBUSH – CLOSE IN. The corvettes are a tiny fraction of our tonnage. While the RAIN is not meant for direct combat, she can probably destroy these patrol vessels without significant difficulty. This could allow us to make a clean exist…but combat always carries certain risks.

>>5471946
>>AMBUSH – CLOSE IN. The corvettes are a tiny fraction of our tonnage. While the RAIN is not meant for direct combat, she can probably destroy these patrol vessels without significant difficulty. This could allow us to make a clean exist…but combat always carries certain risks.

>>5472311
Thats counting on anons not choosing to engage in glorious melee combat, is jt?

>>5472311
>>5471946
I am voting for

>>AMBUSH – MSL-C. Firing a missile at the corvettes would guarantee their destruction without risking our own ship. But missiles are precious…

Otherwise

>>5472311
I dunno QM. I believe it's great if we can dispatch those enemies without spending missiles but *also* run away afterwards? anons are being too greedy

When are we getting the lore dump from the tarot vote?

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>>5473221
Probably the update after combat finishes, so sometime next week?

Also no update tonight, but probably update tomorrow.

Reading through the thread again I just realised something.

>A strangely naive race that is beligerent enough to wipe out humanity in a pre-emptive strike yet has inferior cyber-warfare capability.
> Communication is primarily visual.

OMFG we're fighting Tri solarian expies in a Dark Forest.
Dafuq am I on about? Well if you know, you know.

>>5473327
>beligerent enough to wipe out humanity in a pre-emptive strike
I'm not so sure about that. With the causality shenanigans, there's a high chance that we arrived before they fired their relativistic missile and they are going to do it because of us.

I really hate that trilogy.

>>5473459
>With the causality shenanigans, there's a high chance that we arrived before they fired their relativistic missile and they are going to do it because of us.

That would be such a lame reveal. I mean 40 years ago it would have been mind blowing, but time travel shenanigans have been played out in fiction enough that saying we were stuck in a time loop all along is really unsatisfying.

I felt that trilogy explored some very interesting concepts, but after reading it all the way to the end I have to say it is the saddest, most cynical and depressing piece of science fiction I have ever read. I don't regret reading it, but I can totally understand why someone would hate it.

>>5473466
If we genocide them thoroughly enough, they won't start a time loop, so get to work! Fuck Novikov!
I propose we play to our infiltration strengths and try to manipulate their civilization into self-destruction. It's more reliable than relying on 14 missiles.

>>5473466
Us being the architects of our own doom is far more interesting as a narrative than "they killed us for no reason, we killed them in retaliation and rode off into the sunset with the AI waifu, the end."

It did explore some interesting concepts, but it did so in an awfully contrived way. The biggest problem with the trilogy is not that it's cynical, it's how many things happen to go exactly right for it to try and prove its cynicism right. A ton of things happen not because they make sense as a result of earlier things, but just because they needed to happen for it to reach the conclusion that the author wanted.

>>5473552
>they killed us for no reason, we killed them in retaliation and rode off into the sunset with the AI waifu, the end."

Based...

>>5473552
>and rode off into the sunset with the AI waifu, the end.
For some reason I suspect our last attack on the Mizarian homeworld is going to be a suicide mission. Just a feeling.

>>5473669
this whole mission is a suicide mission you dingus

>>5473669
Man I hope we can reenact Gundam's colony drop maneuver, but with our ship at the highest speed we can go, and after emptying all our munitions.
That would be badass.

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>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]

+++++++++++++UNDATED ENTRY+++++++++++++++

I dreamt of the wheel last night. I remember her glittering spokes and the low rumble of perpetual movement. Always clockwise. Always rigid. Always forward.

Her attention fell on me for only a second, and she told me this:

“The future does not yet exist. The present cannot be changed. But the past belongs to history. And history can always be revised.

+++++++++++++UNDATED ENTRY+++++++++++++++

I remember less than I should. I notice it day by day. Hour by hour. The universe is taking far more than what it is owed.

Fifty-one years of censorship have grown into sixty. Memories of critical deployments fade. The most recent faces of my family. Slowly, tendrils of forgetfulness chew away at early adulthood – too clinical and procedural to be the gentle mellowing of age. For once, I am grateful for the thoughtless decades that I have spent in cryogenic reefersleep – the only buffer I have against slow grind of cosmic repossession.

MERRYGATE has been surprisingly sympathetic when I have discussed this trend her. Perhaps it is in her nature. Artificial intelligences are nothing but data; they understand the pain of forgetfulness even more keenly than we do.

But she also provided something more than sympathy. While the mathematics underlying FTL travel are horrifically complex, they remain pseudodeterministic. They do not permit interest. Fifty one years stolen equates fifty one years repaid: no more, no less. MERRYGATE was emphatic about this.

“There are two possibilities,” she said with a tone of gentle concern. “The phenomenon could be biological – a form of delayed-onset neural pruning caused by the initial causal discontinuity. The other – more radical possibility – invokes a physical explanation.”
I remember feeling a growing sense of foreboding as she continued.

“The jump coils were experimental, and the process of FTL travel forbids accurate timekeeping within a superluminal reference frame. The fifty-one year figure could be an underestimate. Perhaps by a considerable margin”

It all I culminated in a single, awful moment of realization. The Mizarians. Their surprisingly primitive computational technology. Their impressive – but not overtly militarized – industrial base. The fact that their star was eighty odd light years from sol.

It was unlikely. But it was possible. The original purpose of the FTL drive was to mitigate the first-strike advantage: to prevent a retaliatory strike from confronting an adversary with an unassailable, century-long head start. But the tempting conclusion of this logic is to strike even earlier: to punish before the crime is even committed. Before the criminal is even born.

My temples pounded with familiar fears: justifications and rationalizations for a retaliatory strike that was already well in-progress. And a heretical hope of changing the past. But first, I asked MERRYGATE to confirm my train of thought: to estimate local time based on the synchronicity of a few well documented pulsars.

Relative to our projected arrival date, her analysis revealed that we were:

>EARLY – ONLY A LOST DECADE [YOU HAVE PAID THIS SUM]

>EARLY – THREE GENERATIONS, LOST [YOU WILL PAY THIS SUM]

>FAR, FAR TOO EARLY - ????? [CAN YOU PAY THIS SUM?]

+++++++++++++UNDATED ENTRY+++++++++++++++

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“I spent my childhood engrossed by accounts of the early colonization wars. Romanticized stories featuring sleek ships and daring protagonist-captains who tested their mettle in nature’s oldest, darkest ocean. For them, honor was a given and glory always in ample supply.

I now know these accounts to be false. There is no glory in space combat, and honor is a cardinal sin.

Basic physical principles demand nothing less. In deep space, all materials are fragile. Closing velocities are immense. Any damage has the potential to be lethal in an environment devoid of heat, light, and air. As a logical consequence, the first and only rule of space combat is to strike before being hit: to see before being seen. First strikes are good, but ambushes are ideal.

The attack that I have prepared conforms to this principle. A few hours ago, the RAIN began feathering back her drive output, redirecting power to charge the mammoth capacitor banks surrounding the reactor compartment. Adaptive beam emitters – five on each side of the ship – spun in their mounts and dilated their apertures as they finished last minute calibration-checks. They were immaculate examples of optical engineering: devices designed to collimate the killing power of fifty-megawatt laser beam into an impact profile no larger than a child’s thumbprint.

Through the main viewscreen, I watched the corvettes continued their dogged, vengeful fusion burn, unaware that the target of their patrol had already locked them squarely in her sights.

Just moments before I sprung the ambush, I ordered MERRYGATE to ping the corvettes with a targeted burst from the RAIN’s active sensor array – focused radar, phased magnetic resonance imaging, and a few exotic modalities that could peer inside their peculiar, radially-symmetric hulls. Against a human warship, I wouldn’t have bothered; the RAIN could use stolen schematic data to optimize sub-system targeting without my assistance.

But against an unfamiliar target, I was responsible for finding these weak points manually. The corvettes may be small but hitting the right area could still mean the difference between a clean ambush and a longer, messier exchange of fire….

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[ALBEDO refers to the ability of the hull to reflect UV LIGHT. Brighter/whiter areas reflect more light.]

[THERMAL highlights areas that are HOT, such as reactors or drive units. White/Orange areas emit more heat than blue areas]

[EM-RAD highlights areas that emit low-level EM RADIATION, such as sensors, weapons, and communication devices. These are shown in red.]

[H2O-SG highlights areas that are rich in WATER, which mainly includes crew compartments. These are shown in blue]

>CIRCLE/DRAW/DESCRIBE which area on the corvette you would like to target. Against a target this small, there’s a good chance that your laser will be effective even with sub-optimal targeting, but learning how to read sensor readouts will become far more important as you engage larger and heaver targets.

- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, MAR 16, PERSONAL JOURNAL

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>>5473459
>>5473466
>>5473512
>Warning meta semi-spoiler.
>[s]I won’t spoil anything big, but don’t worry too much about railroading. While you guys have touched on a lot of interesting ideas that I have shamelessly ripped off, be rest assured that I’m not going to force you into a situation where the outcome remains exactly the same regardless of your actions in the quest-proper. I will probably do a debrief after the quest is over to talk over some of the decision trees in greater detail in case anyone is curious, though[/spoiler]

>>5475345
>>EARLY – ONLY A LOST DECADE [YOU HAVE PAID THIS SUM]
>>5475348
Target the tail. I tried to post an image but it's not coming through.

>>5475345
>EARLY – THREE GENERATIONS, LOST [YOU WILL PAY THIS SUM]

>>5475348
>Near the root of the hottest part

It's either the engine, the reactor, or the radiators, all critical components. In this case I think it's the engine nozzle combined with the radiator. Hitting a nozzle isn't probably deadly, but they don't have another radiator, and if we can flash-vaporize the coolant they're fucked.

>>5475348
>>EARLY – ONLY A LOST DECADE [YOU HAVE PAID THIS SUM]

>>5475373
+1

>>5475348
What does the white cloud near the tail of the ship on the EM-RAD screen mean?

>>5475377
I gather it might be the magnetic containment of their fusion engine

>>5475345
>EARLY – ONLY A LOST DECADE [YOU HAVE PAID THIS SUM]

>>5475348
+1 >>5475373

>>5475345
>FAR, FAR TOO EARLY
No turning back, no space for regrets

>>5475348
>Attack the 'nose'
Seems to be a weapon of some sort, or a reactor, although my bet that it's a weapon.
If we can strike multiple targets, next in order of priority:
>Attack the back 'nozzle'
Might be the engines.
>Attack the front 'prong'
Might be an antenna, if not a weapon.

>>5475345
>EARLY – ONLY A LOST DECADE [YOU HAVE PAID THIS SUM]

>>5475349
press Ctrl+s you dingus

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Damn, already at the end of the current updates.
Gotta say, this is an absolute gem of a find.

>>5475345
>FAR, FAR TOO EARLY
The temptation to think that one could change what was, what will be, will ever be the Albatross round our necks.

>>5475348
With laser weaponry, thermal shielding and insulating materials will be a major weakness. Anything that diminishes the effectiveness of the heat transfer. Areas with albedo, with high water content, these are going to be tougher to crack.

With kinetics, I would have aimed for a strike on the water laden crew quarters to the port side of the ship but with the beam array, I would suggest a targeted hit to the 'engine' in the rear, or possibly what appears to be the intake at the front. Those high thermal areas are tempting when you think about what happens to a delicate machine like a fusion reactor. If these corvettes are using some form of nuclear thermal rocket for example, well...

>>5475345
>FAR, FAR TOO EARLY - ????? [CAN YOU PAY THIS SUM?]
Time paradox? What's that?

>>5475348
>>5475373
Support this targetting

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>>5475555
I think water is a decent insulator but heating up the water... that kills the shit

>>5475345
>>FAR, FAR TOO EARLY - ????? [CAN YOU PAY THIS SUM?]
HAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHHAAHAHHAAAAHHAHAHAAAA

>>5476061
What stopped me from targeting water was that there seems to be two isolated areas of it, so to off the whole crew we would need two shots.

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>>5475348
I want to fire at the reactors. But hold on, if it's not possible to aim at them, since they are in the back I thnk we should:
>Fire one volley at one ship's Antennas (they are two)
>Fire one volley at the other ship's Nose

I would also want to fire at the water compartment... The- WAIT A MINUTE I will post this post but I will post another

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>>5476113
As you can see in this schematic, clearly not written by a seven year old, this area of water lacks decent albedo, is the compartment that holds most of the water and it's WARM, compared to the other water(s). This meants that this place is the one with the crew and the rest isn't, because living creatures need the water to e somewhat warm and/or they produce heat themselves.
My vote is:
>Fire at the compartment pointed at by pic related. BOILED CREWMEN FOR DINNER

>>5475345
>FAR, FAR TOO EARLY - ????? [CAN YOU PAY THIS SUM?]
We cannot but FUCK this will be fun.

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>>5475496

>>5475348
>Fire at the compartment pointed at by pic related. BOILED CREWMEN FOR DINNER
Time for boiled seafood.

>EARLY – THREE GENERATIONS, LOST [YOU WILL PAY THIS SUM]
I have exactly zero idea what this means.

>>5475345
>EARLY – ONLY A LOST DECADE [YOU HAVE PAID THIS SUM]

>>5475345
>EARLY – ONLY A LOST DECADE [YOU HAVE PAID THIS SUM]
The temptation to forget everything is great, but I'll go with this.
>>5475348
>>5475373
Targeting support.

>>5475345
>FAR, FAR TOO EARLY - ????? [CAN YOU PAY THIS SUM?]
gaming

>>5476430
>I have exactly zero idea what this means.
We are in a causal time loop. We came here to seek vengeance. Our FTL, being what it is, teleported us, not only across space but backwards thru time as well. We are either

A)
>EARLY – ONLY A LOST DECADE [YOU HAVE PAID THIS SUM]
A mere decade before these aliens attacked us. So we may be encountering these scum before they finalize their plans to attack Sol.

B)
>EARLY – THREE GENERATIONS, LOST [YOU WILL PAY THIS SUM]
We are 100 to 150 years in the past. WELL before these aliens attempted to even conceive of attacking Sol.

C)
>FAR, FAR TOO EARLY - ????? [CAN YOU PAY THIS SUM?]
So far back in time that we may just irrevocably alter the fabric of reality itself with our presence.

As for the sum we must pay, our memories are being drained away from us. Also probably our life and vitality as well, we will have to see on this one.