The Republic of Texas

by on January 26, 2021 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Like many Republic of Texas designs, the F-101 Fury and its F-2 Star Fury upgrade carried a large number of missile launchers. They made space-superiority fighters, and wanted to unload the maximum amount of anti-fighter ordnance into space as possible. This limited their anti-ship capability, but that is what bombers and attack craft were built for. The Texas Rangers upgraded those launchers to multipurpose arrays that could fire far more diverse munitions and greatly increased their electronic warfare capabilities. Successive upgrades due to technological advancement in the decades since have kept these capabilities at the absolute tip of the technological spear. A Ranger does not need to kill you to win the engagement. They can simply make a fool of you, a fate many have considered worse than death many times over the decades.

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Faith Manages

by on January 25, 2021 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

We lost a beautiful actress in the last week. She played the alien Delenn on Babylon 5, and humanized the alien race that had nearly wiped us out ten years before the show began. And as the series went by, we found out more and more how involved in that conflict Delenn had been. It was one of the central themes of the entire show, and Mira Furlan played the part perfectly. She could be kind and fierce in equal measure, and her own experiences became a significant part of that story.

Mira was an emigrant from Yugoslavia, a nation devastated first by a Communist government, and then by the civil war that followed the fall of that government. She came to America, looking for a better life, and she found it. She built it. And she gave us one of the best characters in science fiction history, in my opinion. A character who saw civil war so closely heartbreakingly, that Mira once walked up to the writer and asked him how long he had lived in Yugoslavia, because of how well he had written what her character was going through.

Delenn’s smile was contagious, her wrath was spine-shaking, her kindness was spellbinding, and her curiosity was poignant. She once said, “We are star stuff. We are the universe made manifest trying to figure itself out.” I think that sums her character up, well.

I mourn the death of the actress who gave that character life. I celebrate that she lived, and we got to see a brighter world because of it.

She is proof that “Faith manages.”

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The Republic of Texas

by on January 24, 2021 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The F-101 Fury used an innovative laser system that many thought would revolutionize the weapons industry. Instead of installing multiple laser arrays like other fighters, they deployed a ring of laser emitters around the nose of the craft using a single power source. That gave them a wide firing arc, and the ability to fire multiple low-powered shots at once. This could generate an impressive light show that was effective for point defense purposes, but it was of little use when dealing damage to enemy starfighters. Later designs simply installed multiple laser arrays, but the F-2 Star Fury kept the ring-array lasers through their upgrade plans and into retirement. When the Texas Rangers eventually pulled the Star Furies out of retirement, they installed far more powerful modern generators and a capacitor system capable of powering a focused maximum firepower attack from the entire array at once. Their targets found that quiet impressive, for a few seconds…

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The Republic of Texas

by on January 23, 2021 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

One of the more fundamental changes the Texas Rangers made to the F-2 Star Fury was a reduction in the massive series of fuel tanks that fed the rocket engines of the old F-101 Fury. Pre-War fusion torch drives were far more fuel efficient than those Pre-Contact rockets, so the Rangers could remove multiple tanks while still receiving fighters with longer legs than their older cousins. The Rangers then created a small living and storage space behind the cockpit, allowing the Rangers to step back from the controls and relax during long interplanetary patrols. The storage locker was large enough to store the Ranger’s personal arms and armor, and a separate bay in the Star Fury’s belly housed a small jeep for planetary patrolling. Yes, the Ranger Star Fury could fight well, but the Rangers wanted a patrol craft, and many consider it one of the best patrol craft ever fielded by the Republic of Texas.

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The Republic of Texas

by on January 22, 2021 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The F-101 Fury was one of the most advanced fighters of its day. Then the Peloran made Contact and it became obsolete overnight. Texas upgraded it with gravtech, and it became the F-2 Star Fury, the first of America’s newest generation of starfighters. It retired in time, as newer technologies made their way into new starfighter designs. The Texas Rangers eventually found those abandoned fighters and scooped them up for their own use with a refit program that would carry them into the next century. Most of the updates were fairly minor, including newer scanners and improvements to the ring laser surrounding the nose. Others were more fundamental, like the complete replacement of the old missile systems with brand new racks and expanded ammunition bunkerage that allowed for far more versatility. The Rangers gave a new lease on life to an aging design.

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