Sci-fi Writers Guild Forum

Well, I mean we'd blow up with such an instant pressure drop. Humans can survive some crazy pressures, but such a sudden and absolute drop is sure to do something more than just suck air out of your lungs. (Unless I'm not giving skin enough credit. xD)

I use three different Laser family weapons mainly because of my intense love of weaponry, and my love of mixing and matching different things together. As well, I think it was here that I detailed elite Laser Cannon operators being able to swat down Crafts. All three sets, even the Turbolaser family, are all capable of engaging any and all targets. Some are just more suited for different aspects of combat, but vessels like the SwarmCarrier prove that Laser Guns can made Battleships drop like flies, and anyone who has served any post onboard a Longarm-Class Juggernaut is so entwined with this 'anything works' that they rarely even consider the intended use of their weapons- for something upwards of fifty kilometers armed so heavily that its guns provide most of its armour, it doesn't matter if you're shooting a Cannon or a handgun, there's every other person on the ship shooting something too.

Ahh Gauss weaponry. While I don't use it under the label of 'Gauss', or likely even how Gauss weaponry is traditionally seen, I use something much like it. A hybrid between Gauss and Rail-Driven weaponry (aka railguns) called Impact Cannons. In very simple terms, they are like a very small version of Plasma Artillery, and in fact was the precursor to Plasma Artillery weaponry. Fired in an almost identical fashion to a Rail-Driven weapon, their projectiles are designed to contain numerous hollow points which gather energy as they travel down the barrel. The projectile itself is coated with materials that further attracts energy. This external energy is used to further accelerate the projectile down the barrel, until it achieves near light-speed velocities. In a sense, and in practice, Impact Cannons are like deep space snipers. This is reflected both in the doctrine of use and physical capabilities of the weapon: IC-equipped units are usually stationed very far behind allied lines, not needing to be anywhere near combat, and the weapon itself has point-and-shoot accuracy. The closer it is to the enemy, the easier it is to miss. Why? Because at combat speeds you may only have a split second where you can fire and hit before the other guy is gone, and the more accurate a very high-velocity weapon is, the more the accuracy falls as range shrinks, largely due to operator error. (Much in the same way you'd choose a shotgun over an assault rifle when traveling in short hallways. The shotgun is not designed for accuracy, and is designed to cover a wide area. The rifle is designed to be as accurate as possible, and at the same range as a shotgun, you have to move the gun fast and far compared to at range. Most people aren't used to doing that, so inaccuracy is operator failure. (As well, for an accurate weapon, reactionary spraying becomes less effective. Your bullet goes where you point, and if the hammer does not strike a bullet when the gun is pointing directly at someone, it is useless. You can''t predict if that will happen. Now try to do that with a big fat railgun in close quarters, where everyone including you is tearing around the place in a blur. Yeah, hard...)


I think I passed on weapon versatility largely aside from tactical reasons, because of the running side theme of Project One Man War Saga: humans. The human race is extremely adaptable: we live in climates that range to the extreme, and we can survive things you would think would kill a person. The human race is tenacious and stubborn, and takes all sorts of punishments in stride. The human body is also a thing to behold in how remarkable it is. Despite how fragile we are built, humans have survived taking 20mm rounds to the chest (good examples include Canadian medics in recent wars; apparently, we actually go out and care for our badly injured opponents, and there's some crazy stories of our medics saving people from Apache hits that should have killed them.) When you look at athletics, you should be surprised: the human body is one of the most terribly designed bodies on Earth for rapid movement. A tall, upright body pales to a four-legged one. We are a giant airbrake with legs. (That's not to say we can't run fast, but saying that we could run faster if we were optimized for such things.) Our fragility comes from our extreme cellular complexity (we're so fragile, that the term 'non-lethal shot' is a complete and total lie. There is no point on the human body where you can shoot and the person will not die without medical attention. (Through blood loss or other issues stemming from location, blood loss, wounds sustained while falling or through bullet shrapnel) which also provides us with our greatest asset. Although I refer to humans as an animal just like a monkey is an animal, humans do not really belong in the food chain because of their complexity. We belong above, beyond, and surrounding the food chain, in a practical sense, not an arrogant one: we are not build to run extremely fast, we are not build to do excessive heavy lifting by nature, we are build to survive. Survive in a sense of avoiding danger, although we are well equipped to eat just about anything, animal or plant. Stories float around of ordinary people lifting boulders off of themselves. Our complexity and ten thousand year rapid evolution- much of which was survival adaptation- has equipped us all with superpowers in a sense. The average human has no need to rely on survival senses, so the system is one which lies dormant most of time, if not always. However, in times of extreme stress the human body is capable of practical muscular strength and endurance that nobody could ever hope to attain. From several places I have come to view this system as one with multiple levels. The first of which is your 'general' level, with removes all of pain and limitational sense, so any average human could just go straight at lifting that boulder off of themselves without thinking. Had they tried to do so otherwise, they would have given up, they would have felt the strain in their arms. The next level is a more advanced version of this, and is not nessessarily after the general level. it's more focused on the fight-or-flight response, specifically flight. No matter how little you run, if you have a flight response, you could watch the replay and be shocked with how fast you were going. I'd think that you would be blocking out all thoughts except ones related to moving your legs, and your raw senses so you don't trip over anything. (Alas, it is here I find out why so many people run straight when they should really run sideways. Why spend ten minutes running on the same track as a raging boulder when you can spend two seconds diving out of the way in the first place? Because that doesn't occur, as it seems.)

The last level is the all out, pure instinct level. I've only seen one reference to this sort of thing (not in levels per se, that's my own train of thought) where a policeman was herding a family into their pool when it was clear there was no way they could outrun the natural disaster looming forward, which I believe was a volcanic eruption. He was making a last-second check to ensure everyone was accounted for when all hell broke loose, and he booked it faster than he could have on any given day towards the pool. Either he consciously realized it or instinctively guessed that he might not make it, and was able to run even faster using a reserve of energy the human body keeps ready for just such a no drama, pure life-or-death situation such as that.

Actually, before the 'general' level would be run-of-the-mill adrenalin pumps. Than comes the serious increase in physical ability when danger is apparent, and finally the last burst of energy that I think would be '100% use of human muscle' sort of in the way people swoon over what we could do if 'we used 100% of our brain power'.

Back to the technical aspect, I chose to favor operator versatility- human versatility- for just such a reason. Humans are so adaptable, and as such could use something completely unsuited to a task for that same task with great success.

As a little note, the side-theme of human abilities has been around since the original plot. Snpr, System Nanobot Persona R.A.G.E. is the one and only arguably successful Project RAGE test subject, a system that used the First Generation's experimental emotion suite to generate some crazy power, and harness it into a weapon like no other. This made Snpr's emotional suite to fry, which flicked his natural emotions back to life (all BA's have whole biological brains, but it is used more for rational thinking than anything else.) causing him to doubt the IBAE's intentions. Fast forward quite a while into the future, and the R.A.G.E. system still embedded in his body (part of the reason he made it work was because of the new design, which ironically made it impossible to extract without killing him, after he simply stopped testing it and walked out of the test field.) is seen for the first time in a while- but it is as it never had been before. It fired with a force exponentially higher than it ever did in practice, or even was theoretically capable of firing at. Snpr later learned this was because the battlefield he was fighting on was recently overturned by glacial movements, exposing the last traces of the Second Human Ascension- Pure Planet 14 Humans. The R.A.G.E. system reacted with the powerful emotions still given off by the trace amount of material in perfect harmony. Consequently, this also marked the very first event where someone traveled into Void Space: the force of the detonation was powerful enough to hurl Snpr into the Void, where he would remain immobile, listening to the silence of the Void and learning its secrets for almost seventy billion years. (70 Billion years measured in Universal Accepted Time units inside the Void; the Third Dimension, aka 'the Universe' , did not even realize he had departed, such was the speed at which he vanished and returned. A speed so far that he did not even technically vanish from the Universe, so much as he sort of largely faded out and than came together again. This also marked the point at which the Spirit of the Universe noticed him when Logic detected the anomaly of his fading, which went against all of its own laws. A long, behind-the-scenes plot development.)

This event also marked the day when the IBAE finally realized why the Human Ascension was so powerful. A civilization bound by a collectively known common purpose into almost one single entity, with no other concerns other than that single purpose. And not a mindless purpose for them, as it was their choice to follow that single purpose, a much more efficient means of existing than worrying about everyday life and governing. The Ascension was as much a power ascension as it was an ascension from the grips of government. The sole focus erased the need for governments, and society ascended, rather than descended, into a form of anarchy. (In the sense that there is no government. Everyone simply know exactly how to live life and do everything, making laws and regulations entirely obsolete. I would choose True Communism as the smartest form of government, but this sort of Anarchy is the highest point a society can ever attain, a point where government is moot and simply shed. Hard to explain, but I suppose it's sort of like saying humanity is a collective bunch of idiots who do not yet know how to live properly. What exactly constitutes 'proper' nobody can hope to know at this point, and in my opinion, if someone believes this or that is 'proper', it isn't. proper as in instinctive, but an instinctive that goes beyond raw survival. A point where everyone just does rather than having to think first, in a way where no error can occur, so that the lack of thinking is not from uncaring but because it is unnecessary.)


Woah, that got horribly out of hand. xD

Well, let's make that sort of relevant, by saying that that is a preview of how horribly written the ninety-some-odd page SSBP-1 Guideline was written. Now, if you got through all of that without major issues, holy crap you're some kind of machine. (The issue is that I hate to be unclear, so I clarify. However, the clarification becomes very confusing because I usually write on momentum so it tents to seem like I'm leaping from subtopic to subtopic. Long story short, when I clarify things, they snowball into even bigger messes. At that point I don't have the will to start over again because I kid you not I can read what I just wrote and have no clue that I was thinking about that just two minutes ago, so I usually go for broke with the whole thing. So, if you understood most of it, holy crap you're good. If you're heavily confused, sorry, and if your brain is sitting all over your wall, oh crap, sorry.)