Project BIFROST - Pre-Brannigan - Printable Version +- Discovery Gaming Community (https://discoverygc.com/forums) +-- Forum: Role-Playing (https://discoverygc.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=9) +--- Forum: Unofficial Factions and Groups (https://discoverygc.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=67) +--- Thread: Project BIFROST - Pre-Brannigan (/showthread.php?tid=164146)

Project BIFROST - Pre-Brannigan - The Syndicate Leagues - 08-29-2018 “The fittings, you junker’s bastard. I can’t… I’m not going to send bloody adolescents into that coolant shaft to weld it up by hand if the fittings don’t do what they say on their sainted name and -Fit-! What?” The Vorarbeiter gabbled into the receiver, flecking the inner glaze of his helmet off-white. “What do you mean, make them fit you big Bretonian bastar…” “Swerve.” He gesticulated, arm out, over the railing. There was only enough room on the gangway for one body without a pressure suit on. Here, there was two – in full gravity, as well. The downside of working directly beneath the graviton emulator was that everything was pulled relative up against the relative orientation of the ship. Which put the vorarbeiter in the unenviable position of being in Vulkan’s way. The Vorarbeiter broke and choked, cutting himself off from the exchange, and legged it over the guard rail, burlily shunting himself out against all one point two three gree of Hamburg gravitation. Vulkan fisted out a stiff Unioner’s salute as the man sweated into his suit, wobbling against the railside as he thumped past. If he fell off, he’d fall forever. Realistically the microthrusters in his suit would slow him down before he ablated on the battleship’s shield bubble like a moth in a autoclave, but good job telling monkey subconscious he wasn’t a lean away from death. “Thank you, Comrade.” He grinned, curt to the teeth, clipping the stichlines into his suit against the cascade of elevator lines that whirred people and cargo across the Sirene’s underbelly. Teams of Arbeiters scurried below…. No, above him. Even Vulkan, whose experience with AG fields exceeded all but a handful of Sirians, occasionally had to reset himself. A cablevator zipped up beside him, and he arrested it under a suited fist, feeling the motors vibrate through his fingers as he hooked his feet through the stirrups. He was about to lower himself to the main deck, when he hesitated, keying up the commlink with a roll of the tongue. “Ensure he gets the right clamps.” Vulcan cut in, toneless as meteoric iron, into the ballistic cussing of the Vorarbeiter’s com link. “I will not have corpses in the hull.” The wall of sound stopped, halted, and to the harmonies of muffled apologies, Vulkan’s cable screamed itself down to the main hull. Eighty metres starboard, the sky flashed aurorae blue as the shield bubble made particulate fireworks out of a nailhead-sized chunk of detritus travelling at unthinkable velocities, before dissolving back into the black of open space. Vulkan dimmed his visor till the thunderflashes died out of his optic nerves. An enterprising team of Arbeiters had rigged projectors into the sky that read “Bolides may cause visual impairment, do not look at the lights”, which required gawping directly into the shield to view. Vulkan’s mag boots clanked the structural alloy as the wire spooled down and clipped him out, compressing the spools under his knees. “Sir.” A young Arbeiter saluted him, her voice trailing out of her face through the slight delay of the suit comms. He grinned wry – typical Unioner paranoia – the Admiral had mandated that all hullside comms traverse through the Sirene’s data-analysis suite, which presumably meant there was a very stimulated young Arbeiter in data analytics listening to engineers prate about their sexploits Pacificaside – no. Are we all but kindling for new ash? Vulkan pondered as a three billion year old cometary rock vaporised into a spreading shadow of molten embers in the void above his skull, lathing away. Is she? “Sir. The Plastics came in with the last five freighters. Team Oscar’s waiting your signal to clad the foundations.” “Thank you, Arbeiter. As you were.” She’s excited, as are you, if you’d admit it to yourself, you old fool. To walk into the unknown. He shook himself loose, indecipherable to see beyond the layers of pressurised fabric, polymer, and metal. The reports flashed in front of his face, treating him to a panorama of each shipment, each crateload of insulation, layer upon layer of symmetrical pre-moulded hoses, which, if tied end-to-end, would stretch across a mid-size ocean and still confuse the electric eels. Good. Upon the port and starboard hull hangar feet, two great holes had been drilled into the armour, exposing the guts of the great breathing vessel beyond - keyhole surgery on a giant, from the perspective of a microbe - the great arch of the soon-to-be-constructed heat exchanger curving into a horizon of green holographic trickery, soon to be synthetic fact. Vulkan, staring into the future, disabled his comms, took the lightest of laughs. RE: Project BIFROST - Pre-Brannigan - The Syndicate Leagues - 09-05-2018 The ship bounded forward on her way as a four in hand chariot flies over the course when the horses feel the whip. Her prow curvetted as it were the neck of a stallion, and a great wave of dark blue water seethed in her wake. She held steadily on her course, and even a falcon, swiftest of all birds, could not have kept pace with her. Thus, then, she cut her way through the water, carrying one who was as cunning as the gods, but who was now sleeping peacefully, forgetful of all that he had suffered both on the field of battle and by the waves of the weary sea. - Homer RE: Project BIFROST - Pre-Brannigan - The Syndicate Leagues - 09-05-2018 "Spool the drive." Beat one beat two beat left foot right foot both feet exhale widen stance watch the wind flood the sails. "Spooling." Vulkan felt the delay thrum through the deckplates as the steel vibrated into life. Vibrations were rare in spacecraft - inertial compensation had reduced the impact of the most minor of movements. Yet this was not the ship buffeting itself around under its own agency or the newtonian impact of another. This was the ship becoming uncertain of itself. If it should exist or not. Uncertain on its footing, on where it stood in time. A glottle pause. Eight seconds within the hull. Eight minutes in realspace. The drive was charged. What bonesaws of this great star monster remained within its flesh would be wriggling through its many tubes and corridors towards the relative insulation of the bow – putting a half kilometre of steel and machinery between themselves and the pressure of the drive. On the bridge, Vulkan’s gloved hand lifted the anti-tamper hatch from the drive control console, scrolling his fingers over the two great levers that would drive the ship out of existence and tear it back in through the far side. Human biology hadn’t evolved sensors for the eldrich. A great groan passed over the ship as the structure flexed - the expansive cassions under the hull swelling to take the pressure of the new drive. The ship had been built to take forces end-to-end and now it was suffering leverage from bow to stern, as if wedged into a gigantic cosmic press. RE: Project BIFROST - Pre-Brannigan - The Syndicate Leagues - 09-11-2018 The great molydenium arch crawled its way out over the hull. In shipyards, vessels would be jigsawed together, plate by plate, section by section, like an action figure, with each limb individually joined to the torso. The staring head. To Vulkan, the scurry of activity around the base of the BIFROST device was far more pure than such constructions. A gaian would approve of it, he thought, though the baby was metal, and already adult. The shape of the unit lead comparisons to a wart, or a tumour - some of the Sirene’s more purist officers had already lent to derisively terming the Multi Mission Jump Module as ‘The Mole’. The Union wasn’t an armed services – there was no camaderie to be found in colloloquialisms, nor means to quash them if they arrived. Freedom of speech was widly assumed, yet there remained a certain specificity for technical detail that defined the Union’s arbeiters. A lack of detail would only feed the rumours of impotence – Unioners only named devices according to any name other than their technical designation unless it failed to perform – failed, in other words, to meet the framework of the designation it had originally been afforded. Vulkan knew that these aspersions would be quashed when the mole, seething with steam and surrounded by shield bursts, saved the wounded and the maimed of Pacifica Base. Engineering that preserved blood – or took blood, depending upon if you were a beneficiary of the raiders or not – remained close to the Union’s collective heart. Machines were their hearts – kept their hearts throbbing against the vacuum of space that would gut them utterly otherwise. The arch loomed above the hull, the cooling elements secured into the hull by field tensors and plain, old fashioned structural bolts and welds. The material formed a black sheen of conical nodules, too fine to see from the hull itself. Within the disk, superheated water compressed water vapour would run over the exchanger elements, ducting beams of infrared that would light the residual nitrogen blue as the gasses incinerated, thermally demposing into the base atoms of the universe. Vulkan grinned under his opaque helmet that armoured him from eternity; the BIFROST was appropriately named – in an atmosphere, the device would have shone rainbows around the curve of the horizon. The exchanger remained thermally expensive, and heavy water remained the only workable method for storing the exchange fluid in sufficient quantities to uptake the resultant flash thermal states experienced during the egregiously inefficient conversion of energy into antimass, only to then initiate a spacetime tear. Batteries remained chemically irreversible – the reactions would destroy the host batteries to the salvation of the ship. Water – chemically unsophisticated and materially unsophisticated – that thinks nothing of state changes without decay – inert, unreactive, and endemic to the young universe – water, in sufficient densities, with a cooling plant of massive capacities – could save the ship. Yet the procurement of vast quantities of water, and then storing it, with sufficiently powerful pumps within over a kilometre of circuitry and insolubility, water, a material incompressible as a liquid, unworkable as a solid, remained only compressible as a gas. Yet for the cooling system to maximise its efficiency, water must be cold. Moreover, water must be massive. The creation of deuterium from fusion reactions remained a staple of Sirian engineering. Nothing remained sophisticated about the design – the Sirene’s massive cargobays simply had to be hollowed out – expanded through superfluous decks and lined with insulative polymer. The vast tanks would substantially increase the vessel’s mass and would necessitate the allocation of additional propulsive thrust. Even the pumps were a matter of ease – Planetform and Synth Foods had pioneered draining entire natural in a matter of minutes an ecologically apocalyptic common practice – now, the same pumps would drain an artificial lake, suspended within the vaccum of space. RE: Project BIFROST - Pre-Brannigan - The Syndicate Leagues - 09-11-2018 The Hamburg Police Authority had taken a habit of monitoring all outlying signals within the system that they reasonably could. The primary trouble was that the system is rife with outlying, unidentifiable signal traffic. It’s Rheinland, after all – for nearly a third of the citizenry, grey market connections were the only market for connections. As every police officer knew, grey was only several shades away from black. Not that police particularly cared – dead Unioners earned the federals commissions – if a few more bodies padded the pile, up too went the possibility for pensions and a retirement on Baden Baden with the well-to-do and the extortionate. Yet not every signal could be tracked, nor would its origin be worthy of investigating. So-called ‘round-up’ ops framed the majority of federal gruntwork for such unidentifiables. In a large system such as Hamburg, peripheral noise usually meant some freelance prospector with a suicide wish was scooping out himself a cargo hold full of water that would almost certainly not fetch a good price in a system containing wet-surface worlds. Yet it might within Bering, especially in a self-immolating warzone where even basic materials constituted backing one leg or another in a paramilitary muscle-match. Whilst the federal Republic remained in debate with the Separatists, openly entertaining them with provisions remained work for the intelligence services, not any scumbag with a salvage arm and leaky aluminium box. Whilst massive cometary objects such as those found within the Omega Three system provided the neuralnet record (and interspace commerce’s investment priorities) ample incentive to chart their existence, relatively barren iceballs such as desolate Kuiper objects escape international cartography. Only comets that exhibit an unusually involved level of underworld interest are even added to the lottery of potential targets for raid-and-detain ops. Comet KA-7501Spruce-Echo-Bliss was one of said targets. It had been buzzing with contact reports from June through September, yet had escaped oversight. Recently however, the reports went dark, as had a significant component of the cometary trail. Closer analysis by observation probes report that near two miles of the cometary body had been slaked away from the structure by a mixture of improvised excavation and brute nuclear explosives. Someone was very eager to obtain their cargo hold full of water. A lot of water. Enough to flood a lake.