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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Hello, my name is Betty

by on September 18, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Twilight season two ended with cameos of almost every Dixie character driving north to join in the real life Battle of Kansas City. It took place in the shattered remains of the computer grid, and was filmed on location in the city’s ruined streets. Rival gangs fought each other and the beleaguered police tried to restore order as Twilight’s people tried to track down Solo’s real world terrorist compatriots. It ended with the entire team falling into a trap and being confronted by Solo’s debonair smile and the realization that Solo was just the agent of a much larger organization.

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Hello, my name is Charles

by on September 17, 2015 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

For a hundred years we expanded into the void using rocket engines that an Apollo Astronaut would have recognized. Our ships and stations spun to generate gravity. We spent weeks accelerating up to interplanetary speeds and using planetary slingshots to send us out to the edges of our star systems. Fuel bunkerage was what held us back. No ship could carry enough fuel to keep accelerating for weeks or months at a time. Science fiction dreamed of drives that could run forever on different scientific theories, but it was old-fashioned rockets and our very good friend Newton that took us to the stars.

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