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[AoshimaMichio]

Sounds fun. Let's do this.

[Parisbre56]

The problem of this still being a game, and not wanting to choke out the silly fun and shenanigans too much?

The best way to ensure silly fun and shenanigans is to institute multiple layers of management!

Yes, exactly! The less time the GM has to spend organizing us, the more time he can spend screwing us. If we self organize (for example, the wiki), we save valuable screwing time. Same thing for the generals. The fact that the system is simple and only becomes meaningful at the higher levels, being mostly flavour in lower levels, means that newbies don't need to care about it while learning the game while generals don't have to spend 10 hours organizing people. It's perfect.

[syvarris]

Argh, there's so much interesting discussion going on, and I have opinions on all of it, but insufficient time.

My opinion on Ranks & whatnot is basically the same as Radio's.  Not quite identical, but fairly close.  He's basically saying what I said with some bits cut off.

I agree that Jim's always been a weird character to be a leader- he's really just a very high level grunt--the highest, really--who also has the most interesting personality.  His position as the hero general does make sense, but people seem to think it means more than 'He's just really cool and badass, so people are inspired by him'.

A semi-related thing that's been bugging me: Why is Feyri considered to be a good leader?  I mean no offense, but I'm pretty sure Tiruin has insufficient time to keep up with all the threads, and often is more confused about who's who and what's what than anyone else.  This results in Feyri coming across as an indecisive airhead (I really really mean no offense >.<); Even Auron, being commanding and decisive, would be a better leader.


@Swordsmith's weapon results in on-ship

Damn, what did Pyro put in those Sibilus rifles?  They've evolved to have explosives now!  And it seems that the Testament was so OP, that it's nerf spilled over and hurt the PSL too.

Ah, the wonders of trying to scientifically study an amorphous system.

Joking aside, thank you.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Sibilus is based on the rocket rifle. It's basically the WH40K Bolter.

[syvarris]

Yeah.  Based.  Pyro removed the explosives and replaced them with a magnetic penetrator, so that the gauss portion would actually work.  It trades anti-personnel lethality for anti-armor ability, plus more forgiving range bonuses.

[Parisbre56]

@Sean: If the sand works just as well and is as cheap, you might be better off going with the sand, since you could just save the excess sand for use later. You could even kill the sand to make solid objects to use in repairs.

[Sean Mirrsen]

We'll see about how effective sand actually is. As far as I can tell, it's not really laser-proof, it has a finite sort of "absorption rate" for light. It'll work quite well against small arms, but not so well against shipborne lasers, because you'd have to pile it on quite thick to make it defend you in any useful way. A thermo-evaporative diffusion coating would work only once on any struck surface, but could potentially shield against much greater incoming energy. Ultimately, a matter of development and testing.

Making a sort of a "barrier ship" in ER is something of a pipedream of mine.

[Parisbre56]

You could just start building a capital ship or a carrier, since those have automanipulators large enough to stop most attacks launched by smaller ships. You'd just need to go on a planet to start harvesting orphans and homeless so that you can steal their soul (or have them breed and then steal their soul).

Related, one of the things I wanted to try on Hephaestus was building an expensive but very stealthy ship, an evolution of the blackship that is practically undetectable, at least for short amounts of time. Automanipulator propulsion was a thought. And a larger one for carrying small amounts of equipment covertly. Would be perfect for covert missions, doing things like abductions.

[syvarris]

Back when there was a big argument over whether fighters ever made any sense in space battles, I had an idea that could be used for that.  Make an Avatar of War optimized for use as a spacecraft.  Basically, it'd just be an enormous sphere of synthflesh, coated entirely in stealth equipment instead of armor, using automanips to keep it from emitting any heat higher than background radiation... and a guy with a universal amp and a decomp in the cockpit.  He can provide his own propulsion, and literally nothing detectable has to be emitted from it, because you can use space magic for attacks, and quantum entanglement for communication.  Miyamoto proved that an Avatar has a massive amount of destructive capability with space magic, so it'd actually be an effective fighter craft.

It would be an awesome stealth craft, because it should be literally undetectable beyond blocking stuff that's behind it, and it's so small that that should almost never be an issue.  It would be less effective for large scale transport, because synthflesh is expensive, and as awesome as a stealth titan that can traverse space would be, I doubt that would be a very good idea.

[Parisbre56]

Yeah, but a pilot will get tired eventually. Automanipulators can work forever, since the largest ones are self sustaining. I guess you could use an amp specialist, but those are supposed to be hard to make.

And you can use that light bending paint to prevent detection via missing light. Add a material that emits almost no infrared radiation and directional heat fins so that you can radiate heat where you know there are no sensors and you're set. There would still be a chance you'll be detected, but it'll be so miniscule and require specialized equipment it would not matter.

EDIT: And price isn't really a problem for a transport, since it will be reserved to small operations, similar to what Milno's team does.

[syvarris]

True, but it's space; if the thing's slow it just means that it can't chase people effectively, which is probably going to be an issue for any stealth craft.  For planetary operations it'll just take a few more weeks over the years that you'll already be waiting, because of FTL lag.  Anyways, if it turns out to be an issue, you can attach automanips for movement just as easily as with any other craft.

That paint would probably be good, assuming it doesn't mess with any of the other stealth equipment.

...Why would you make directional heat fins if microwave automanips are the cheapest manips of all?  I can't imagine that simple cooling manips would be anywhere near the size of movement ones, and they wouldn't have to be anywhere near as strong.

EDIT: The synthflesh titan's price is less important than the simple fact that it's an invisible synthflesh titan that isn't trapped on a single planet.  The Avatar sphere is probably relatively simple to deal with, by comparison- it's strong, but a big warship will still kill it.  The titan?  That's...  Well, mounting amps on a titan is probably just stupid to begin with.

[Parisbre56]

Fins: I dunno, perhaps I'm imagining the size/power ratio of automanipulators differently than you. In my mind, putting more than one self sustaining automanipulator in a small ship would be a big problem. I guess it's just one of those things I'd need to test. If an automanipulator can do the same better, then I'd choose that.

Pilot: Yeah, but there's another problem. You'd need a dedicated pilot and be unable to use an autopilot, unless you use secondary propulsion systems. Again, it's one of those things that needs research and to take the materials available to you into consideration.

EDIT: And the situations. If stealth is critical only during limited amount of time, you could use normal propulsion the rest of the time.

[Pancaek]

Darn, too bad the sandbag is the only real non-amp exo thing in the armory. It just seems a tad expensive for what it is, what with the 5 token refills. I also don't really see how it can be used really effectively as a weapon, I just don't really get how it works. Guess I'll maybe have to hedge my bets with a nyars box.

[Parisbre56]

Well, you could use the tactic outlined here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=135884.msg5708317#msg5708317
Plus, sand is reusable and slowly regrows.
And remember, sand was strong enough to kill Lyra.

I should really state once more that this is gonna be weird. But... um... Could you grab my face and pull it really hard?

This is going to be fun. Especially for the guards watching.

[Hapah]

I should really state once more that this is gonna be weird. But... um... Could you grab my face and pull it really hard?

This is going to be fun. Especially for the guards watching.
[/quote]
Yeeeeeah. I'm less than thrilled.