[Luis Dias]

I like it. Or at least I like the tension that brings into play. Either you keep your humanity and you end up losing or you lose your humanity so that humanity wins. Except that wars are not humane ever, and the best players are the ruthless tacticians who are able to see everything as an asset towards victory.

[General Battuta]

You'll not get any complaints from me about having characters with weaknesses - as you say, no one is perfect and weaknesses make the characters believable   And I accept that Steele is human - that's good.  But he doesn't have to be a human I sympathise with, understand, or like and that's where my picking at him is coming from.  I can identify with Lopez, I can't identify with Steele. I hate his style of command and the inhumanity in his decision making (ditto for the Fedayeen obviously). The ends-justifies-the-means approach always rubs me up the wrong way and I guess it bothers me somewhat when it's being (maybe?) portrayed as the best solution on both sides.

I like it. Or at least I like the tension that brings into play. Either you keep your humanity and you end up losing or you lose your humanity so that humanity wins. Except that wars are not humane ever, and the best players are the ruthless tacticians who are able to see everything as an asset towards victory.

As I'm sure you've heard, Calder shares your concerns.

[Luis Dias]

He's clearly oh so drunk in there.

[crizza]

I like that voice

[redsniper]

I like that "dick around" is now canon dialogue.

[crizza]

There are some nice voices to be heard
Steele and Lopez...sweet^^

[AdmiralRalwood]

I like that "dick around" is now canon dialogue.

That was my favourite part of that casting.

[crizza]

I'm sure that has been explaine before, but how does crashjumping works?
Flash the jumpdrive and end up being pulled out of subspace by a grav-source? If so, would that mean in a system with a sun but not stellar bodies, ships would end up at said sun?

[The E]

Crash jumps are jumps where the jumping ship engages its drives without having fully calculated the entire jump. The risk here is that you may run into a gravity well and get pulled out on a vector that may be fatal; this happened to the Indus and could have happened to the Carthage.

[Soulrheever]

I've also always gotten the impression that a crash jump is extremely hard on the ship, seeing as how it tends to knock out reactors and other systems... throwing the ship into subspace as hard and fast as possible without spooling  up properly. Akin, perhaps, to starting up your car and flooring it immediately, rather than giving it a chance to warm up and accelerating at a reasonable pace.

[Aesaar]

I get the impression that it means your drive capacitors haven't recharged completely, so getting enough power to jump requires a dramatic increase in reactor output, which can overload power conduits and potentially even wreck the reactor itself.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I get the impression that it means your drive capacitors haven't recharged completely, so getting enough power to jump requires a dramatic increase in reactor output, which can overload power conduits and potentially even wreck the reactor itself.

Crash jumps are jumps where the jumping ship engages its drives without having fully calculated the entire jump. The risk here is that you may run into a gravity well and get pulled out on a vector that may be fatal; this happened to the Indus and could have happened to the Carthage.

I'm pretty sure a "crash jump" refers to both of these things, even though they're technically two separate types of jumps.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, I think it's easiest to think of as 'a jump that the ship is not fully prepared to make', with a diverse and dangerous array of hazards.

[Aardwolf]

Today I learned: "Cassandra" is a Greek mythology thing.

[Nikogori]

What was going on when Hydura station reported these?

"Hydura Station reports vampires, six by twenty. Knives out, spades out...vampires, five by twenty, ten seconds...foaming...vampires, five seconds. This is Hydura Station, signing off -"

I think there were incoming missiles, but I cannot find out the meanings of “six by twenty. Knives out, spades out”.

Sorry for the stupid question, I've been studying English for years and yet I'm still a learner...

[An4ximandros]

They were getting nuked to hell by swarms of TEV warheads at the end of "Darkest Hour."

[General Battuta]

Don't worry about your English skills - it's all military brevity code, and you're not meant to understand it so much as get a mood from it. Hydura's being attacked by SSMs and trying to defend itself, but failing.

It's a tribute to an obscure prose passage I like a lot, from the sequence in Greg Bear's Eon when a crew in orbit are listening to radio transmissions from US Navy warships as World War III breaks out:

A man's voice, sounding almost mechanical after the processing of the signal, said, "One K that is Kill Seven, One K that is Kill Seven, have smoked the circle; repeat, have smoked the circle. Vampires, fourteen count, range fifty klicks, source Turgenev small platform. Repeat, fourteen vampires. Six down. Sweep two commencing. Smoking circle, up with directed fry, nine down, up with knives, eleven down. Three vampires, twenty-klicks. Priests out. Priests and vampires engage. Advising salamander crews. Starfish launched. Sea Dragons alerted. Two vampires, six klicks. Sweep three commencing. Foaming now. Short eyes out, blades out, Guardians out, knives inboard."

A pause. "Two vampires, three klicks." Another pause, then, softly, "Good-bye, Shirley."

The voice seems almost machinelike until the final puncture of humanity, reciting a calmly coded series of defensive measures that obscure the desperation and horror of what's happening.

[crizza]

Reading this makes it fell more intense.
That "Good-bye, Shirley" is...somehow more suited...

[Luis Dias]

That's an awesome quote by all standards.

[Mars]

What are knives and spades?