Post by apersonthatexists on Jan 31, 2022 13:04:13 GMT -8
I recently picked up MoA pretty much by accident, and while it has caused some mild irritation (read: I want to snap support mechs in half) it's also provided me with a story idea I want to explore.
The basis for this is a fairly traditional canon retelling with a Kayto that had some different life experiences in the driver's seat, along with several other edits to backstory and such, which will hopefully provide a nice and engaging story that - whether or not people want to read it - I will enjoy writing. The reason I'm here is because a friend of mine told me you lot needed some more content so I figured I'd pop over to your nesting grounds and see what you had to say about my ideas. Regardless, no more pontificating, here's our teaser. Hope you enjoy.
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My eyes were closed, but I did not sleep. Now wasn’t the time for that. The dream for me was a waking dream, of listening to my surroundings. The world rumbles about me - my world did. The first lesson of relativity, that - the distinction between your movement and the movement of everything is meaningless from your perspective. It was intuitive, of course - other things in my environment told me that the shuttle was the thing that was accelerating. I could feel the engines shudder in their housing, singing out their fusion song. I could listen to the buzzing static of military radio chatter, both by people and by machines, of clearance asked and received. I could spot the thoughts of the pilot and machine, both juggling their subconscious calculations. The fact was that the engines of this tiny craft could not move the universe. But in relativity, you are the centre of your own world. Without key observations, I would not be able to distinguish this from the world bending around me.
This was, of course, mostly just exercise. I was watching the ship and pilot for errors, but that wasn’t my job here. Really, I was cargo. Precious cargo, important enough that the brass would call me an asset instead of simply not mentioning me, but cargo yet. My new home was waiting, hanging above the sky like a steel jewel upon the orbital necklace, its loop strung by gravity, lacing between dozens of drydocks that flicker with all the colours out of space. In the grasp of one of these spindly cages, floating in the dim gravitic construction bonds, there was my command. I had spent thousands of hours on simulators, in testing and postulating new technologies in secret government labs, in pushing my own strange and unknowable limits, and all so that she would be the finest ship in the galaxy. The Unassigned or Esoteric Space Operations Vessel Type Seven, the only one of her kind. The Sunrider.
Even though I had never seen her in person, and she had never seen me, we knew each other. I might be a bit strange, but though established through esoteric means the bond we shared was hardly magical. I knew her from the simulators, the endless tuning of software and systems done by backend developers that needed to be hired to write a new kind of interface narrowing in on a ship AI that responds best to my form of interaction. As for her, she might be a ship in the fleet, bearing the Ceran coat of arms and speaking in their battle cant, but she was made from the ground up to respond to one person, a person whose mind is the access code. So of course we knew each other, and I for one was happy to finally meet the Sunrider. With that mind, I reached out, my unenhanced telepathy pushing to its limits to see the ship at my distance, and I felt the veins of electricity hum at my presence. Clearance was asked and received, and I heard the ship’s reports, feeling out the patterns in her construction. Internal structure, room patterns, the ways force are intended to flow through the ship and how the dampeners support it.
Listening to the world like this made me feel… massive. The size of a starship. Because in a way, I was. The Sunrider was made to be a piece of me, more akin to a ryder the size of a heavy frigate than a warship in how her captain was meant to interact with her. I was her captain, but also so much more. I was her CAG: supporting the ryder squadron was a wing of light trans-atmospheric strikecraft that could respond so cleanly because they were tied into an instantaneous and undetectable communications net - telepathy. They pushed out the Sunrider’s sensor net, augmented the flak arrays, and were perfect cannon fodder to protect more valuable ryders with. Of course, those wouldn’t arrive until later this week. I was her combat helm, capable of seizing engine command to evade enemy attacks and even bolstering the native drivetrain, making enemy technical scans of our capabilities useless. Command wanted us to drag this out as much as possible of course, but eventually the enemy is going to get used to what we can do. I was part of her arsenal, fully capable of filling in where conventional arms just don’t cut it. We still don’t know my upper limits on that front - simulations aren’t a good way of testing that - but we’re hoping to work it out somewhat during live fire exercises later. So yes, we belonged together, in a way that only truly works itself out when one person is an outlier and the other is a nonsapient starship built for her.
------------
Feel free to tell me what you think, or ask questions about what I have planned!
The basis for this is a fairly traditional canon retelling with a Kayto that had some different life experiences in the driver's seat, along with several other edits to backstory and such, which will hopefully provide a nice and engaging story that - whether or not people want to read it - I will enjoy writing. The reason I'm here is because a friend of mine told me you lot needed some more content so I figured I'd pop over to your nesting grounds and see what you had to say about my ideas. Regardless, no more pontificating, here's our teaser. Hope you enjoy.
------------
My eyes were closed, but I did not sleep. Now wasn’t the time for that. The dream for me was a waking dream, of listening to my surroundings. The world rumbles about me - my world did. The first lesson of relativity, that - the distinction between your movement and the movement of everything is meaningless from your perspective. It was intuitive, of course - other things in my environment told me that the shuttle was the thing that was accelerating. I could feel the engines shudder in their housing, singing out their fusion song. I could listen to the buzzing static of military radio chatter, both by people and by machines, of clearance asked and received. I could spot the thoughts of the pilot and machine, both juggling their subconscious calculations. The fact was that the engines of this tiny craft could not move the universe. But in relativity, you are the centre of your own world. Without key observations, I would not be able to distinguish this from the world bending around me.
This was, of course, mostly just exercise. I was watching the ship and pilot for errors, but that wasn’t my job here. Really, I was cargo. Precious cargo, important enough that the brass would call me an asset instead of simply not mentioning me, but cargo yet. My new home was waiting, hanging above the sky like a steel jewel upon the orbital necklace, its loop strung by gravity, lacing between dozens of drydocks that flicker with all the colours out of space. In the grasp of one of these spindly cages, floating in the dim gravitic construction bonds, there was my command. I had spent thousands of hours on simulators, in testing and postulating new technologies in secret government labs, in pushing my own strange and unknowable limits, and all so that she would be the finest ship in the galaxy. The Unassigned or Esoteric Space Operations Vessel Type Seven, the only one of her kind. The Sunrider.
Even though I had never seen her in person, and she had never seen me, we knew each other. I might be a bit strange, but though established through esoteric means the bond we shared was hardly magical. I knew her from the simulators, the endless tuning of software and systems done by backend developers that needed to be hired to write a new kind of interface narrowing in on a ship AI that responds best to my form of interaction. As for her, she might be a ship in the fleet, bearing the Ceran coat of arms and speaking in their battle cant, but she was made from the ground up to respond to one person, a person whose mind is the access code. So of course we knew each other, and I for one was happy to finally meet the Sunrider. With that mind, I reached out, my unenhanced telepathy pushing to its limits to see the ship at my distance, and I felt the veins of electricity hum at my presence. Clearance was asked and received, and I heard the ship’s reports, feeling out the patterns in her construction. Internal structure, room patterns, the ways force are intended to flow through the ship and how the dampeners support it.
Listening to the world like this made me feel… massive. The size of a starship. Because in a way, I was. The Sunrider was made to be a piece of me, more akin to a ryder the size of a heavy frigate than a warship in how her captain was meant to interact with her. I was her captain, but also so much more. I was her CAG: supporting the ryder squadron was a wing of light trans-atmospheric strikecraft that could respond so cleanly because they were tied into an instantaneous and undetectable communications net - telepathy. They pushed out the Sunrider’s sensor net, augmented the flak arrays, and were perfect cannon fodder to protect more valuable ryders with. Of course, those wouldn’t arrive until later this week. I was her combat helm, capable of seizing engine command to evade enemy attacks and even bolstering the native drivetrain, making enemy technical scans of our capabilities useless. Command wanted us to drag this out as much as possible of course, but eventually the enemy is going to get used to what we can do. I was part of her arsenal, fully capable of filling in where conventional arms just don’t cut it. We still don’t know my upper limits on that front - simulations aren’t a good way of testing that - but we’re hoping to work it out somewhat during live fire exercises later. So yes, we belonged together, in a way that only truly works itself out when one person is an outlier and the other is a nonsapient starship built for her.
------------
Feel free to tell me what you think, or ask questions about what I have planned!
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