[Nyctaeus]

Don't exaggerate with realism of Your ships. I know that too well, from lessions I gained from Shadow Genesis. Realism is a cool thing, but epicness and coolness are more important. Believe me, most people will rather focus on epicness of Your battles and realism will be second in queue.

[Rheyah]

It's not really about realism.  There's a specific aim that I have with this, which is to provide an environment where ships don't feel disposable.  Its a storytelling element that I am really big one.  Blue Planet began it with withdrawing warships from the field of battle.  I want to take it a step further.  Shetland will take place in a rareified environment.  Ephesus takes place under immense resource pressure at the beginning and under sustained war at the end.

Sure, a lot of the weapon changes were done with the intent of making things 'feel' more real, but they aren't that much more realistic.  I wanted to reform cruisers, making bombing more interesting and intuitive and make the battlefield even more alive than it does.  I hope when people test it that this is the effect they feel.

As for the idea of something being epic, I am not necessarily aiming for epic.  I am aiming for tense gritty battles that feel like you are scrapping to survive against an enemy that wants to kill you.  They don't just throw waves of fighters at you.  My FREDing design is that the enemy has a battle plan and your job as a pilot is to thwart it.  Destroyers will volley long range fire at each other to cover deployments.  They will conserve their screens.  They will scout to get the jump on you.  Bombers will always come with escort and the escort will fly ahead to clear the way.  Bombers will come in on a angle where they are not likely to be intercepted by enemy fire.  Ships will degrade between missions as they take more and more damage.  All of this is being done in the background, while the narrative focus is on your wing surviving and you getting to know the characters in these hellish times.

Over time, the focus of the enemy will shift.  I don't want to spoil too much, but I hope I can represent that shift in focus sufficiently that people feel like they are in the story I am writing.

In Shetland, you aren't part of a military wing.  You are a merc group built around a battered NTF era cruiser right on the outskirts of space.  50,000 people depend on you to survive and that is what you must do.

So sadly, no, epic isn't what I'm going for.

[Rheyah]

What is an ant?

I am driven to this oldest of terrestrial species, one of the many plagues with which humanity has cursed the galaxy.  In my patriotism, I once embraced that most aggrandizing of lies and spoke of a claim to the stars, but I cannot deny that our wroth upon the universe has left an indelible mark.  We have spread as an infection upon worlds other than that of our birth and with us came parasites.

The Vasudans often remarked upon our cultural affection for canines and felines as the most obscure but obvious facet of our culture.  This was in error.  It was in the ant, that most successful and voracious of communal predator that humanity left its most damaging mark upon biospheres.  In the fiction of old Earth, it was the violent and uprooted species of alien worlds which sought dominion over those of our beloved blue marble.  In truth, this could have not been more in error.  These harsh and violent worlds had been havens of competition, true, but it had been a competition for survival.  Earth, with her bounteous rivers and oceans served as womb for billions of species.  Billions existing only to kill.

Few native species had ever come into contact with a predator and enemy as voracious as the humble ant.  An organised colony of millions of individuals, working selflessly towards a goal.  No dictator could ever have marshalled such a force, though those few selfless human ant colonies on Earth indeed spawned their own Queen.  They had already conquered Earth beneath our feet and now saw fit to conquer the galaxy, spreading their cities of soil and stone as they went upon the bodies of their prey.  Once the locusts we had unleashed became a threat, we began our campaign of extermination.  Their colonies were burned.  Their queens, slaughtered.  Their children, murdered.

I am drawn to the comparison as I observe the unblinking sentinel.  It does not flounder as a mere primate may when cast into a sea of thought.  It watches, yet I cannot see its eyes move.  I observe in return, yet I can see no intelligence.  I speak to it and it says nothing.  It offers no sign it understands.  Nor does it test me, as if it were some callous biologist with a dissection knife.

I am drawn to one question.  What if an ant had written hello?

[woutersmits]

hows going with your projact

[Rheyah]

Hello again.

You are probably wondering what the hell is going on with this considering I am flitting back and forth between having something and not having something.  Truth be told, it is the following problem.  I've been battling feature creep for some time - admittedly learning a lot in the process - and having finally gotten a grip on it, have settled back into something approaching a reasonable design philosophy.

The result is that a lot of work has had to be scrapped.  My reasons are pretty myriad at this point, but let's just say that nothing I have produced has come out coherent.  I don't like what I've written, don't like how gamey it feels and I don't think it represents the story I want to tell.  There are underdeveloped characters shoved in to round things out, the plot jumps around too much and it doesn't feel as coherent as I would like.  Further, my motivation for continuing with such crappy work was really low.  It was hard to even put together a design document, let alone FRED something I was so unhappy with.  It's okay when you have ten people around you that are telling you that it's more important to release than not, but having a team means you also have support for when you get home from work and you are just too drained to do anything.

I am going to let this fade for a while until I have something I want to show.  I don't mean write.  I mean show.  I am determined to finish something here and I will produce something that I like.

Thanks for sticking around!

[perihelion]

Um, April Fools'...Day...?
...
 

[General Battuta]

Rheyah dude I'm just gonna treat this as an honest post, not April Fool's, because it reads like...so much of the hardest parts of creative work.

I have felt this way on everything I've ever worked on. Sometimes I feel this way more than anything else, when I'm fighting depression or drinking too hard or whatever. I know nobody can talk you out of it - it's an invincible demon.

But the best thing I've found for it is a group of other people who are willing to get excited and talk about the things you're doing right. If they give suggestions too, fine, that's great, but everyone needs to believe they're doing good work in order to work.

I'm really excited for whatever you make. You've sold me. I want to support you and help make it real. Hang out on #bp or shoot me PMs or whatever. I want to help.

If it isn't an April Fool's then I guess I look a damn fool but hey! Can't hurt.

[Lepanto]

Release tomorrow, or at least a release date shortly. Calling it. 

But if you're serious (or at least partially serious), remember you're in no rush. Better to do some tweaking and release a quality product than release a shoddy product because you're feeling antsy. We understand. 

Also, keep in mind: The secret weaknesses of your creative work, those things you're terrified your audience will latch onto and excoriate you for, are probably no big deal beyond your own imagination. We're our own worst critics, and all that. Of course, they'll probably criticize you instead for things you'd never even thought of, but c'est la vie. 

[Rheyah]

It's not an April Fool.  The problem I've had is I want to release something.  I started off with Shetland, decided that was too big for now, worked on a campaign with a simpler set of ideas.  Realized that wasn't satisfying.  It expanded.  Then I did it again with ANOTHER campaign.  The result is that I have been effectively working backwards in time, fighting fires the whole way to write the story I actually want to write.

I have thousands of hours of creative work just sitting around hardly finished with so many really exciting ideas and whats more, I love designing and balancing systems.  I've had tons of fun doing that, making ships feel right, etc etc.  I've become trapped in a perennial bubble of my own excitement.  It really has to stop somewhere and the thing that ends up stopping me is what I produce just doesn't feel right.  It doesn't feel releasable and doesn't feel finished.  Everything feels half baked.  I mean you lot have seen where my story is going.

What I am going to try and do is find some focus.  Every single time I get trapped in that bubble, I end up going back and adding more work.  Something needs to get finished.

I'll take you up on that chat, battuta.  I think I need it.  I feel like I am falling into a classic designers trap here and talking to people who have released stuff would be great.

[The E]

I'm available for feedback as well.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, you gotta work with someone. You should get an SVN so you can get collaborators on the grid!

[deathspeed]

Rheyah, I haven't released anything of my own, so I probably cannot offer the same kind of ear as Battuta or The E, but I do want to offer my encouragement.  Like many others on HLP, I have enjoyed the stories you have been releasing, and have been looking forward to trying out the mechanics you have described.  I am anticipating whatever you eventually release - be it a full-blown massive campaign, a smaller episode, or a single mission.  Whatever it is, I'll stick around.

[perihelion]

Ditto.  You have clearly demonstrated a good grasp of story, and I'll eagerly await anything you care to share.  Rough or polished, interesting ideas are interesting!

[Lykurgos88]

Any news on Ephesus? 

[Rheyah]

To quote the former Governor of Calefornia.

It's not a toomuh.

(Expect updates Soon)

[perihelion]

  OMG RHEYAH'S PREGNANT!!!!1!

[Rheyah]

"Commander,

Thought you might like this.  Old lecture I got when I was in OCS STac.  Found it when I was looking through my stuff on the clus.  Thats your lady, isn't it?

Old memories die hard, mm?

Alexandra"

ATTACHED:

A Short Primer to Subspace Warfare:  Strategy and Tactics
Delivered to OCS tranche 4-b, 2381 as part of OCS Strategic Talent Terran Fast Track Initiative
Lt. Cmdr. L. Shawcross
Chief Strategy Officer, GTCv Archon
IRF Second Strand

Thanks for coming.

There are two things a good commander should know about subspace.  The first is that subspace is fickle.  The second is that it exists at all.  The second is the harder of the two to appreciate.  I will try and elaborate to the best of my talent, but I'm going to offer an apology first.

GTVA Sci Ops sends a number of candidates to OCS every year.  I know a number of you are in this room.  To you poor sods, I send my apologies because this is going to seem outrageously basic if you have any understanding of spatial compression theory.  You know as well as I do that there are reasons why subspace geometries grow languid away from gravitional fields and why nodes form and collapse, but they aren't important to this lecture.

Simply put, subspace makes interplanetary travel possible.  It also makes interstellar travel possible, but the mechanics of interstellar travel are ironically far easier than interplanetery travel.  It also places substantial technical and energetic constraints on interplanetary travel which must be considered by any strategist worth their salt.  To be an effective strategist in an era of subspace combat, there are three important concepts which you must understand.

The first:  subspace travel is energetically expensive with drive size determining drive effectiveness.  To expand upon this;  the size of the drive determines how far you are able to tunnel and how difficult it is to open a valid geometry.  This has an obvious and immediate consequence - ships with a lot of drive power and space dedicated to drive power move a lot faster than ships which don't.  To counter act this - they also take much longer to move.  A block 3 Orion refit charges its drive assembly in Code Blue e-jump conditions in eight minutes.  A Hecate clocks in around six point five.  That's an eternity in a heated battle.  You can imagine how long it takes under normal operating conditions without burning clean through your heat sinks and any em-ractor modules you have installed.

The result is that most of your subspace mobility varies from platform to platform.  A number of IRF outfits use sub-skimmers, which are literally light freighter platforms with c-moly plating designed solely to get in and out of deep interplanetary space in extremely short time spans.  We use them as SAR platforms but also as strike platforms as well.  They jump in, disperse a cargo of two or three wings of fighters and jump out within fourty seconds to a safe distance, awaiting a response.  Those of you who did your reading for Advanced Subsystems Maintainence will be aware that the design specifications for the old Argo military transport included a corvette class drive motivator.  Guess why that was there.  The Deimos in all its guises and the venerable Fenris had a staggering amount of subspace mobility for their size.

Vasudan engineering tends to favour a more progressive and measured approach.  Those of you fortunate enough to serve under Vasudan engineering staff will realize that they consistently get a good twenty percent faster recharge ton for ton out of their engine systems.  This comes at a consistent range cost.  Keep this in mind when planning for cross fleet deployments.  As always, Vasudan ships show an individuality we don't really appreciate in Terran deployments, but it is rare to find a Vasudan engineering crew chief who doesn't have a full up to date spec of his ship ready to hand.  They usually take pride in it.  Do not be afraid to ask.

All but the most advanced prototype fighters are utterly immobile as far as subspace travel goes.  Sure, SoC and other spook outfits have advanced drive motivators which allow for deep insertion tactics, but as far as I know, those motivators involve rather expensive materials and precision engineering and maintainence.  They simply aren't cost effective for most materiel.  Most fighter engagements will happen within a tenth of a light minute of their source and only if they have direct line of sight.  Orbital battles should be planned with this in mind.

Secondly:  subspace travel is unpredictable and is stabilised by the presence of strong gravity wells at coupling ends.  The calculations involved in a subspace jump are handled almost entirely in fifth and sixth order differential calculus using five coupled tensor equations and involve subspace probing methods which have never been perfected.  nyone who has read the reports of the tactical nightmare the Shivans presented to the GTA and the PVN will be well aware of just how devastating an advantage the ability to send entire swarms of fighters halfway across a system at whim can be.

However, we are not Shivans, so we must accept that the coupled equations we have at best are just good guesswork and our field theory and implementation involves a stabilising constant which accounts for gravitational effects.  When spatial curvature is present and thus gravitons curtail the nascent tendency of subspace to flip a weakly applied subspace field gradient, subspace fields behave predictably and a direct A to B path is easy to apply.  These calculations take time even for modern computers, which must simulate and account for graviton probing in higher order dimensions.  To simplify further, the actual co-ordinates entered into a computer are merely a reference point.  The computer then has to calculate the actual path of the field between those two points, find a stable, none collapsing solution and then finally generate the field geometry required.

That we can do this at all is a miracle of modern engineering!  With that said, it still takes time.  Ships can jump without pre-calculated field geometries using a best guess approach but the results are often catastrophic.  The PVD Damascus incident from the Great War indicates the risk of crash jumping when they jumped twenty kilometers over a Vasudan desert trying to escape from the SD Lucifer.  The automatically ejected black box indicates they dumped a full drive charge into an unstable jump configuration.  The jump was less than four hundred thousand kilometers and it dumped the ship out with an opposite orbital velocity to Vasudan Prime itself, meaning it slammed into the desert at nearly 40 million ms.  Crash jumps are an emergency measure.  The tendency for poorly managed subspace field geometries to invert and slam you into a sun or a planet is not one to be trifled with.

Further, subspace travel is safer and faster if you are able to compute those geometries and do so in the presence of a gravitational field.  There is no actual difference between the distance travelled, but if you care enough to look the coupled equations themselves up, it becomes obvious that the fields grow more unstable the deeper into subspace they propagate.  Larger ships can counteract this with sheer drive power and improved computation, but there are limits even to this.  A local gravity well - even a large asteroid or a small moon - can mean a great deal of time and energy can be saved on relatively short jumps.  Use this to your advantage in the module war games.  Controlling the gravity well around any population centre can mean you have a tremendous amount of mobility the enemy cannot match - unless they are Shivans in which case, I wish you the best of luck.

As a rule of thumb.  Your fighters will be limited to short jumps.  Your destroyers, a military risk worth taking, move slowly but purposefully over large distances.  Use your cruisers and corvettes to hem in opposition and make deep strikes with the support of your fighters.  Subspace windows remain open for several moments and synced drive configurations can open the same window multiple times.  Use this to move fleets as units or sentry or strike fighters with a larger unit.  Keep to that and remember that Shivans don't follow those rules and you should have enough to pass this module.

Thirdly and finally:  subspace control is everything.  We have always had an understanding of subspace tracking built into our drive technologies, but subspace drive technology towards the end of the Great War was beginning to surpass the ability of all but the most dedicated arrays to track superluminal movement in a solar system.  Drives got bigger and more powerful with each passing year and we simply did not have the condensed space research on either side to advance it.  The discovery of the Precursor tracking artifacts changed all of this.  Now, a properly equipped fleet dispersed effectively can institute at least a two jump net around their forces and prevent all but the most dedicated of surprise attacks.  As a result, attacks on sensor facilities, comms buoys and even the modern AWACs are the key to allowing an entirely new dimension of warfare.  Protect your eyes, ladies and gentlemen.  They are your best weapon in modern war.

That concludes my primer.  I hand you back to the Captain, who will take you through the capabilities of the Chary-"

[AdmiralRalwood]

Mmm, those are some delicious words.

[General Battuta]

Super good.

[perihelion]

So... not pregnant, then?