[Nico]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
Venom, a hint about characters; stay away from the steriotype It can kill a good story to have dull and uninteresting characters

Don't worry about that
One of the main reasons why I haven't written anything about them is mainly coz they keep evolving ( even the names change from times to times ), so there's little point in writting anything for now ( hell, for now... it's been like that for years )

[icespeed]

but it can be funny to have stereotypes stumbling around....
or effective to have stereotypes that turn out to be real people...

starting off with stereotypes is fine, i think; people need to know where you're starting. it's more confusing to launch straight into reality.

[Unknown Target]

I edited my post, look above

[icespeed]

no, have a daughter instead. edit- instead of a son, that is

[Nico]

Originally posted by Unknown Target

But PLEASE don't have the son be angry at the father for some sibling death that the son thinks the dad's responsible for SO overused, haha

Ok, I'll be nice:
It begins with a father ( I can hear you being frightened already, hehe ), his friend, and his daughter ( Meiya, a kid, 12 years old, she'll be the root for the story ). Daddy is killed at the very begining by some meany ( those who start the affair that leads to the independancy war ). That first part is centered around her father's friend. They're miners, btw, they refine asteroids for a larger martian company.
Voila.

Originally posted by icespeed
no, have a daughter instead.

lol, bingo

[Unknown Target]

icespeed brings up a good point about steriotypes: done correctly, they can be pretty funny

EDIT: OH NO! Please not a revenge-cause-you-killed-my-daddy story!

[icespeed]

please tell me the daughter is NOT going to get together with the father's friend.

[Nico]

UT: she's a bit young
Icespeed: he's a bit old

[icespeed]

nah, i mean later on, when she grows up. there have been countless idiotic stories where some girl gets with a guy twice her age and the writer makes out its supposed to be a good thing. i get really irritated at those.

[Unknown Target]

or 20 years later she finds her father's killer and hunts him down...bleh.

[Nico]

Ok, no, she doesn't go with him, and the story ends a few weeks after daddy's death.
And it's 5.10AM here, so I'm off to bed

[mikhael]

Originally posted by Nico
Energy weapons, on the other hand, melt metal like there's no tommorrow, so Terran ships are quite fragile to them.

This is the only problem I see, Venom. Otherwise it looks good.

Energy weapon against metal will melt very, very little of the metal, and will tend to seal any holes they create. One basic property of metal is its thermal conductivity: You can pump heat into metal and it gets spread through the rest of the mass pretty quickly. All the humans would have to do is build cooling systems into the hull armor and heatsinks somewhere on the vessel.

Before anyone mentions things like modern cutting lasers and laser welders: cutting lasers work on very small focused areas on small and/or thin masses of metal, while laser welders cauterize gaps in metal.

Venom, you're far better using something that causes the solid structure of metal to de-cohere or sublimate (change from solid to gas without become liquid).

[Stryke 9]

Plasma cutters, on the other hand, can cut through inch-thick steel like there was nothing there even in the most basic models, and in fact are better than basically anything out there for sliccing and dicing stuff. Lasers are for pussies, anyway.

[Nico]

Originally posted by mikhael

[...]
 

Bah, I use energy weapon as a general definitition.
Any weapon that doesn't throw a chunk of metal at you, I call it an energy weapon. Can be a plasma torch, a laser, hell, even a flamethrower.

[mikhael]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
Plasma cutters, on the other hand, can cut through inch-thick steel like there was nothing there even in the most basic models, and in fact are better than basically anything out there for sliccing and dicing stuff. Lasers are for pussies, anyway.

A plasma cutter is only effective over a vanishingly small range. Anything longer and your pasma is going to condense into a cooler, less useful gas.

[Flaser]

Particle Accelerators - using superconductive materials it's possible to build extremely efficient electro-magnetic coils.

Arrange them into a linear accelerator and you have a working ion canon.
Since it's too fast to do the kind of fragmentation damage solid projectiles do it won't be as effective in terms of sheer damage - however it will be maddeningly accurate and have an extreme penetration.

It will still wreak havoc on metal since when the first couple of ion pass through they charge the metal and create a temporary EM field that will trap the rest of the ions - creating a spread and fragmantation that even bullets won't achieve.

[mikhael]

Hey, you just described the guns from the Independence War games.

[Nico]

just a quick update:

[mikhael]

Lookin' good!

Which weapon pods are mounted this time? and why won't you let us see the belly of this thing?

[Nico]

Those are your standard machineguns, with just a stealth casing.
That's the standard armament for the Wraith.
As for the belly, well, there's nothing to see