Rise of the Star Nebulae

[Scott of Hyperborea]

"Today," said Nivani Kalirion, mentally noting that this was the eighteenth speech he had given in two weeks and being reasonably certain other monarchs got to do something besides stand tall and say platitudes in a deep voice, "you will be saving the world. It is a burden lain upon few people, and, the world remaining free and fair, they have all lived up to it. I trust you will do so as well."

The sixteen pilots didn't laugh. They were already dressed in their suits, with only the helmet to put on before they entered their planes. They hadn't known the prince was coming, and having learned he was, they seemed to want his speech over so they could get on with it already. It was tough, being the first prince of an island not accustomed to royalty.

Nivani didn't really have anything else to say. He could have thanked them, but they would have said they were just doing what they had to, and they would have been right. He could have said the gods were with them, but many people had fought for causes equally just, and lost anyway. He could have said he had faith in them, but that would have been redundant; no one the Latter Oracle trusted less than completely would ever have been allowed on this mission. So instead, he just said: "Shine."

The pilots bowed, and headed to their planes, leaving Nivani wondering if there was something else he could have done. He enjoyed no special virtue from his status as, as far as anyone could tell, one of the few direct living descendant of legendary hero and chieftain Authi Kalirion. The priests had just approached his father one day, told him that the island's new government needed a monarch as a figurehead, and that by the vagaries of bloodline his son was among the leading contenders.

Then again, it wasn't his fault, either. He did the best he could. One always did.

Strange where circumstances could lead one. His genes were ever so slightly correlated with the genes of a legendary king, so now he enjoyed the adulation of a whole island. And Sehari Irixion, a Niphiltiyyin pilot based off one of the ice carriers, his genes contained the mutation for a degenerative disease that would strike him in his thirties. He was twenty seven now. So he'd been approached, very carefully, by certain priests in the service of the Paladins, and asked whether, as long as he was going to die anyway, would he mind being placed on a suicide mission that might save millions of lives? He had agreed.

And now Nivani saw Sehari look back at him one more time. If the station was too well defended to approach, if the other fifteen planes didn't manage to destroy it with their dispersal projectiles, then it would be Sehari's job to kamikaze at a speed that would remove the threat from the Ouroboros superweapon once and for all.

- - - - -

From the airbase near Tala, sixteen Star Nebulae, two thirds of the entire production run of the craft, lifted off on a course toward Yardistan. They gathered altitude quickly, until they reached the level above which jet engines were no longer useful. Using a combination of JASO gravitronic technology with the occasional assist from their rocket engine, they climbed into low Micras orbit.

Sixteen Star Nebulae headed toward the pulse satellite of the Ouroboros. Most were armed with conventional warhead missiles. A few were armed with the dispersal canister projectiles, which when fired would separate into a cloud of tiny pellets too numerous to shoot down, traveling at a speed high enough to inflict kinetic damage without warheads. One, the one with Sehari Irixion, instead had extra fuel.

The planes would shoot down the pulse satellites, then attempt the destruction of the OASIS to eliminate ISI capacity to produce and control further superweapons once and for all.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Unless Leo objects within a day or two, I'm going to count Star Nebulae as normal fighters, pulse satellites as strength 1 cost 2 air units, OASIS as a strength 6 cost 10 air unit, and run it through QUARREL.

[Leo Fenrir]

(Well I'm not exactly opposed to this, I actually think it makes it interesting, I just want to point out that the OASIS or Minvera (interchangeable) are about 20 times further from the distance of the surface then the Ouroboros and I'm not sure how far out you can make it with those planes. Also you may want to consider focusing your aim on the KE platforms which will be bombing Amity soon. Final point, I promise, is that while I have no problem with this for now, the Railgun defenses will be coming online soon so tread/hover lightly.)

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Are the pulse satellites the same as the kinetic energy platforms?

[Leo Fenrir]

No. Pulse and Surge satellites are components of the Ouroboros (there are about 50 in orbit) where as the KE platforms are self contained units which make smaller things go boom. These are all in low orbit. The Minerva is in geosynchronous orbit.

[Harvey Steffke]

QUARREL and recwars in general are based on the idea that any significant military forces have to be costed. Since none of this is mentioned in your QUARREL OrBat, it barely exists for the terms of the recwar. Scott payed points for his Star Nebulas and you haven't paid anything for a satelite. Generally speaking, OrBatted forces always beat non-Orbatted ones with next to no losses.

I see no compelling reason why we should just accept that there are 50 unpaid defense satellites, any more than you would be expected to just accept the fact that Scott could say he launched a million fighters. Things rapidly degrade in a hurry when people want to work outside the rules.

If you and Scott can agree upon a solution that's fine, but, as a judge for this war, I'm seeing someone try to defend a location with uncosted forces. That just doesn't work.

[Andreas the Wise]

Scott - I seem to recall having added at least 2 Jasonian craft to my system. And if I haven't added Star Nebulae, Harvey certainly did up the costs for them. You should be able to use them as Star Nebulae in the calculations.

[Leo Fenrir]

QUARREL and recwars in general are based on the idea that any significant military forces have to be costed. Since none of this is mentioned in your QUARREL OrBat, it barely exists for the terms of the recwar. Scott payed points for his Star Nebulas and you haven't paid anything for a satelite. Generally speaking, OrBatted forces always beat non-Orbatted ones with next to no losses.

I see no compelling reason why we should just accept that there are 50 unpaid defense satellites, any more than you would be expected to just accept the fact that Scott could say he launched a million fighters. Things rapidly degrade in a hurry when people want to work outside the rules.

If you and Scott can agree upon a solution that's fine, but, as a judge for this war, I'm seeing someone try to defend a location with uncosted forces. That just doesn't work.

I think you misunderstood me. There are no defenses attached to any of these systems yet. I was simply saying that there are 50 pulse satellites in orbit. I believe there are 34 KE satellites, but i'd have to check my previous posts. I'm not asking anyone to accept magically appearing, or unpaid defenses, but I do feel that non war related forces should not be able to have any influence whatsoever on each-other.

On that point, since none of the ISI stuff is payed for I only thought that it would be involved in stories, not actual fighting. If this is the direction the war will be taking then I will have to reconsider my orbates, otherwise its seems slightly unfair that the ISI is utterly decimated in space when it can offer no retaliation.

Not that it changes much since it only has RP influence, but I have explained that should Liberty Center be taken ISI weaponry would be rendered useless, so that may be considered as a point of interest for you rebels.

(I'm not quite sure if I have a point in all of this, so ya...)

[Andreas the Wise]

It's kind of an ambiguous area as to whether existing but non-orbatted armies can be affected by orbatted armies in recwar. Certainly civilian cities and structures can be decimated. But I found it annoying* in the Jasonian War when Extreme just ignored all the orbatted armies and said he 'stole' various bits of advanced weaponry from Toketi, on the understanding that they (and you know, all the highly secure but non-orbatted facilities they were in) couldn't fight back. I thought it would have made more sense that you just ignore armies that are non-orbatted - you can neither attack them nor steal them nor be hurt by them - but the judge let him do it. (Of course, in international recwars Gralus has the fallback that if people blatantly break the spirit of the war like that, once the war is over we can recover those non-orbatted items using magic etc, but anyway ...)

All that said, if you didn't think the ISI was going to be attacked, given the whole "Preparing to destroy Amity" and Harvey/Scott's "We've got to stop the ISI before it goes too far, even if we are on opposite sides" speech ... (it's your fault for threatening to destroy Amity with it in the first place ). And in QUARREL, at least, there are fair ways to determine casualties - so as you can see above, Scott's proposal is that he'll actually treat the satellites as if they have some defence and can damage his units; even though they aren't orbatted. At the very least, he has to treat them as if they have some health, and it might thus take him several days of attacking to destroy them all.



*Read that as highly, extremely annoying. So much so I can't even bare to read that part of the war anymore.


EDIT: It's something to look at for later QUARREL drafts - the appropriate targeting of non-combatants; and the calculation of damage thereof.

[Harvey Steffke]

For the record, when Extreme attacked mainland Toketi in that war, it wasn't because mainland Toketi was developing superweapons that could strike anywhere on the planet with impunity. ISI is hardly a neutral civilian organization - it's already shown that it has significant power in this war from its scary tests around Amity.

If Leo wanted to use the power of the ISI in the recwar, he should have worked out a way to spend OrBat on it to fight fair. But he didn't. It's already a stretch to allow him to use it PERIOD - it's definitely too far to allow him to have any sort of free defenses for his already free highly unbalanced space station thingies that just sort of appeared one day.

Ride on, Star Nebulae. Blow it all to bits.

[Leo Fenrir]

Oh fine, in that case lets spice things up

[Aurangzeb Khan]

The whole thing about Amity was meant to make the backstory interesting - not actually happen, so no one is going to be using ISI against costed units. Uncosted cities on the other hand... no, bad Khan, stop it, okay, just backstory folks. Play on.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Incidentally - knocking out ISI won't save the planet. Somebody next door is day dreaming about a 170 megaton hydrogen bomb.

[Aster]

pfft. It won't be daydreaming if I manage to convince the boss of PSI to manufacture one...

[Scott of Hyperborea]

All right. I'm running the battle with four fighters (=4 squadrons of Star Nebulae) vs. 4 strength 1 cost 2 satellites (=various parts of the Ouroborus Array).

QUARREL tells me that I lost one fighter, and Leo lost all four satellites. It's in the logs under Battle of Low Micras Orbit. I will refrain from attacking OASIS because it's uncosted and I wouldn't know how to represent it; however, if ISI interferes in this war any further I will take it down.

My three remaining planes limp back to Hyperborea triumphantly.

[Erik Mortis]

I'm surprised you even lost one.

[Santelran Rottsaa]

I've very upset with the old folks trying to squash the creativity and spirit of the young'uns...

[Scott of Hyperborea]

...you mean accepting his uncosted city-destroying superweapon he dreamt up one day as existing, acknowledging it destroyed large parts of Yardistan, sacrificing to it a squadron of my costed and lovingly rendered fighters created by an international consortium specifically created to respond to him, giving him about a week to respond to my post in any way he wanted, and doing it all via an objective system that impassionately tabulates exactly who won or lost what? As part of a gradual movement to completely recenter the course of the war around Leo's space program?

...yeah, I'm totally squashing his creativity here.

[Erik Mortis]

Down Scott..

[Leo Fenrir]

Its about time that someone knocked some sense into the Leo guy actually. He was getting a bit carried away.

But seriously, I appreciate it Scott.

[Aster]

...look what I've got



TRIPLE DESTINY = 630 MEGATONS

I'm not going to stop until I detonate a 10 Gigaton device...

[Leo Fenrir]

Hehehe. I've been one up-ed it would seem. Nice.

[Aster]

Want one Leo ? Just peddling my filth...

[Leo Fenrir]

Hmmm... Stick one of those in a heat resistant casing (that would be detached prior to detonation), stick in in orbit, and smack a triangulation system on it.... I like.

[Aster]

Yeah - These can't really be deployed by means of a tactical bomber in actual combat for obvious reasons. I will need to design a launch system.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP USING JPEG!!!

Hilarious in every particular otherwise...

[Santelran Rottsaa]

...you mean accepting his uncosted city-destroying superweapon he dreamt up one day as existing, acknowledging it destroyed large parts of Yardistan, sacrificing to it a squadron of my costed and lovingly rendered fighters created by an international consortium specifically created to respond to him, giving him about a week to respond to my post in any way he wanted, and doing it all via an objective system that impassionately tabulates exactly who won or lost what? As part of a gradual movement to completely recenter the course of the war around Leo's space program?

...yeah, I'm totally squashing his creativity here.

That's not what I meant and you know it. >:C

[Erik Mortis]

Doubt it.. Cause I thought that what you meant too...