The Lockheed-Martin C-1 Starlifter was the first First Generation Gravtech military transport we built after the Peloran helped us understand the basics of twisting gravity to our will. We soon built better and larger transports that replaced them, but the Starlifters made it easy to transport ground pounders from orbit to surface and back again. The Rangers still flew them when The War began. They primarily performed search and rescue missions in Texas and the nearby States, and worked them hard in the aftermath of Yosemite. They soon upgraded to Shooting Stars and joined us in the Hyades when it was time to begin invading those worlds. They became an integral part of our operations and I place much of the credit for the outcome of that campaign on their courage and determination to brave the Chinese defense grids.
We need trees. And not just for the oxygen they produce. We need to walk between them on cool moonlit nights and sit in their shade on hot sunny days. We need flowers and bushes and grass. We need plants and places to enjoy them to remind us that we are alive. Gardens. Parks. That’s why all of our space stations have them. And the mobile cities too. The city and station cores almost always have some form of park or garden that people can walk through and just get in touch with the nature that humanity grew up with. And countless public corridors have bushes or flowerbeds designed to liven things up as well. We need plants to live, and we have brought them with us everywhere we go.
The failure of the Jane 2.0 voice systems to operate in prolonged combat situations was a heated topic in America. Politicians decried them as unstable systems indicative of a service full of unstable individuals that needed a firm hand to keep in check. Soldiers blamed politicians for rules of war so restrictive that the Jane 2.0s had nervous breakdowns. The techs scoffed at that idea. No computer system could have a nervous breakdown after all. But something was causing the systems to shut down and they did everything in their power to patch the systems. The only thing that worked was a complete reversion to factory presets though, and that defeated the purposes of a learning system.
Devil Dog squadron flew Blackhawks when The War started. They were old but serviceable fighters, weathered by a century of service to America. The Devil Dogs were centuries older, descended from the original Marine fighter demonstration squadron. The first one. The one that fought in the World Wars, the Jihad, and went to space with us. There is much history in that squadron. And for a retired unit there was much fire as well. They acquired Hellcats in time to fight at the Battle of Fort Wichita and the expanded Devil Dogs continued to fly upgraded versions of them until War’s End and beyond.

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