https://slushe.com/galleries/pirates-of-the-coal-sack-11-75747.html

"I’ve come to appreciate the value of styrofoam rocks in set design. The surface of Iota Crucis III went through several drafts, and I kept running into the problem of needing high ground for Athena to spot from and a desert environment to match the conditions I had in mind for the planet. Where it kept failing was the middle distance, between the mesas and the characters. Finally I remembered the Star Trek staple of styrofoam rocks for planet sets, and things came together.

While we don’t get up close with them, we do get an example of what Terran ground forces are like. The signature of the Legionnaires and the Star Fleet commandos is their power armor, which really is just a support system for a personal deflector shield. The only thing that will really stop a pulser is mass (density isn’t relevant) or a force field. The armor carries the smallest deflector shield Terran technology knows how to make, and it’s still over a hundred pounds and has a diameter of almost seven feet. And when activated, the soldier is locked to the ground. But it’s the difference between acting more like a tank than an infantryman; they’re no longer a one-hit kill. That effect is augmented by their Autonomous Strike Probe (ASP) drones, which function like an infantry screen. Terran policy treats fully autonomous weapons systems as weapons of mass destruction, so ASPs require a Legionnaire in the loop to approve targets. With two ASPs per Legionnaire, a Legion company has as many eyeballs and guns as an infantry battalion.

The other bit of world building I had to sort out behind the scenes was the actual yield of starship weapons. The main pulse cannon are around 5 terajoules each, which if they hit a planet results in a kiloton-level explosion. (That’s not the main way they do damage in ship to ship combat.) The plasma torpedoes are much more powerful in terms of explosive yield; in ship to ship combat, they aren’t expected to actually transfer more than a thousandth or so of their energy to the target, but in an atmosphere they’re a bigger boom than any weapon deployed in the Cold War. All this is ultimately based on the Phoenix having a pair of 1.4 terawatt reactors (and about 400 gigawatts of auxiliary power). To conduct the planetary bombardment, Chief Fukao had to modify a weapon designed to fire a 5 terajoule pulse every minute to fire pulse one one thousandth as powerful somewhat more rapidly. That still hits like a ton of TNT, with a lethal diameter close to 100m, and drills a kilometer deep into the planet. Not an indoor toy. It raises the question of why Phoenix doesn’t have a weapon system better suited to ground support–for which I have an answer I’m not sharing yet.

So there you go, lore geeks. Styrofoam rocks, sulfurous air, and planetary attack weaponry. And also, you know, tension and drama between the civilian and military derived factions of Phoenix’s crew, plus some racial tension. How’s Song doing as captain? Is Harding a total asshole? Do I need to give Athena more camera time, and what do you want to see her doing? Let me know in the comments."

Thanks for sharing your saga here, too! And yes, Song is starting to get that sinking feeling that one isn't just "voted" captain, but takes tons of training and experience to sit in the centre seat. ;) Though, I was puzzled for a second when I saw that we went from running away on page 20, to a victory cheer on page 21 here on e-hentai. But all the rest of the firefight pages are available over at your slushe web site. Take care!

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Coocooforhentaipuffs, thanks for noticing. Fixed. Only I'm not DangerousLines, just a guy that thinks his work needs to be shared with people here.

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I gotta say, I do like this series. One part porn, one part Pirates of the Carribean, Three parts Star Trek...surprisingly good recipe for enjoyment. Though I do hope you are planning on coming back to your Alexander series - I kinda miss that one.

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