Hello, my name is Jack

by on September 23, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

People sometimes ask me how I decide what to do when time is tight. The simple answer is that I usually don’t. Decide at least. The complicated answer is a bit more…well…complicated. There is right and there is wrong. I know it’s not always popular to say that. There are so many people who want to say that everything is relative now, that no one has the standing to say someone else is wrong. I disagree. There is right and wrong. There is good and evil. And if we do not stand for good, we allow evil to flourish. I don’t want that happening on my watch, and so I act.

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Hello, my name is Betty

by on September 22, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Twilight season three started with a fade from black to a man walking back and forth in a small room, footsteps echoing off the walls. He spoke unintelligible words with pauses to show he was having a conversation. Finally he nodded, turned towards the camera, and stepped forward to open a door. The camera panned back to show Solo smiling at Twilight, Dixie, and the rest of the gang, all captives to the Rogue AI. All he said before the opening credits rolled was “Good news. My boss just told me to kill you quick. No time for torture or all that useless begging. So who wants to be our first volunteer?”

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Los Angeles-class Cruiser

by on September 21, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Jack's Defense Weekly

The Fleet 2300 Project’s goal was to distill a century of reverse engineering alien technologies into new designs built to incorporate those technologies from the hull nuts up. The Los Angeles-class cruiser instead spat those hull nuts out in every direction as the prototype nearly tore herself apart during testing. It was roundly considered a Pre-War lemon, a waste of good resources that should be scrapped before it got good people killed. But an influx of new talent ripped the troubling systems out and redesigned the entire prototype just before The War came upon us all. The class was renamed in memory of Los Angeles and every subsequent ship memorialized another city destroyed by Shang bombardments. And though it became the most common cruiser built during The War, we never ran out of cities to memorialize. But thanks in part to the Los Angeles-class cruisers, we did run out of Shang ships to kill.

Los Angeles on Deviantart

Los Angeles miniature on Shapeways

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Hello, my name is Charles

by on September 20, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Science fiction authors used to say we would use something better when we went into space, but three centuries later we still use rockets. Yes they are more advanced than what propelled our Apollo missions, but the German scientists that pioneered them knew what we still use. We dump fuel into a reaction chamber, make it explode, and use that push to send us flying in the way we want to go. But the Peloran gravtech changed everything. Now we use a gravitic generator to lower our effective mass so it only takes a very small push of the engines to send us flying far faster than we ever could in the old days. It is amazing how much just a single application of alien technologies can change all of our worlds.

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Hello, my name is Jack

by on September 19, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

HALO stands for High Altitude Low Orbit. Basically it means anything above the atmosphere but below the really stable orbitals. Of course there are disagreements on where space starts and the atmosphere ends. The United States Space Force still says space begins at 80 kilometers up. On Earth. The Navy took NASAs old definition of 100 kilometers, and other organizations claim other numbers. In practice against Earth-type planet most drops are in the 150 to 300 kilometer range. Though I’ve seen drops start anywhere between 60 and 1,000 kilometers above the surface. Life gets real interesting on the extremes.

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