In one feature replacing some now-lost functionality, this is my new thread for random things I happen to have added to the 'verse that I haven’t found occasion to use yet, but which are, nonetheless, now part of it.
Today’s entry:
Chic and Awe, fashion consultants.
Specialists in fine clothing and spectacular - or quiet - entrances that nonetheless break the brains of everyone currently in the room.
Aquatic species don’t have submarines, obviously. But they do have surterrains.
The first contact team sent to with !trrrrr!ttríí (Lilium Drifts) was confused by the lack of response from the road trains crawling over the otherwise untouched surface of the planet, before they realized that these were missile surterrains, hiding in the thin air where the sonar webs of !trrrrr!ttríí’s great nations couldn’t reach them.
For those unprepared to suffer through the phonology, that’s pronounced click-trill-click-tr-whistle.
Darn it, now I kind of want to see what the respective reactions on both ends were…
Hey, that’s kind of odd
versus
!!trr!!ííítrrr!!trrrrrrrtrr
(who is that and why are they hailing us?!)
Having been a missile sub crewman, I would expect that their reaction was somewhere between WTF and “Oh, bugger, someone found us! Run away!”
In today’s did you know…
…that the N45 Garrex field combat armor, as used by light infantry legions throughout the Empire, actually has more specialized variants than any other type of armor out there? (Including variants used by the Exploratory Service, the Imperial Rangers, the Watch Marshalcy, and Constabulary tactical teams.)
These would include:
exclusion zone combat armor
hair on back of neck sufficiently stood
“We don’t always fight in steaming piles of NBCN hazmat, but when we do --”
oh, I was imagining perversion exclusion zones
Them, too. (Especially as most of them qualify under the second N.)
The official motto of the Imperial Diplomatic Corps (presented here in Latin for the benefit of Terran readers) is Aut Civilitam Aut Mortem (“Either [Civilization|Civility] Or Death”).
The IDC would like to emphasize that the intended meaning of this motto refers to their function of substituting courteous words for bloody warfare in interpolitan relations, rather than any possible alternate implications.
(The distinctly unofficial translation “Be nice or we’ll fuckin’ kill you.” is strongly deprecated.)
Consider the military consequences of the eldrae having a winged race among their numbers.
It may be worth noting that the 163rd Imperial Legion, Palar’s Winged Hussars, don’t just wear wings to charge.
Gives a whole new meaning to “Air Assault” or “Air Mobile”
One of the chief factors leading to the Empire’s ongoing leadership in the field of science and technology is that its private model of funding a lot of science actually provides rather more money to the area. Cynical Imperials generally attribute this to polities like, say, the League always being able to find some delicious pork to shovel money sliced away from the relatively anemic budget of the League Endowment for the Sciences at. After all, superconducting supercolliders don’t vote.
The second one is a steady brain-drain of ambitious scientists in its direction. Partly this is for the budget, as mentioned above; the rest of it is that - however their older and stodgier colleagues may feel about dependency on wealthy patrons to fund science - spending a few hours geeking out with an enthusiastic amateur about just how fucking cool their research is beats writing another gorramn grant application any day of the week, week of the year, or year of the millennium.
As someone who did geek out with an MD about his research for a few minutes, I think I made his day. Despite the good-natured ribbing about how his research funded a week vacation in Hawaii.
(Bone density study for submariners, in case anyone cares. Theory was that submariners, being folks who don’t see light for 6+ weeks at a stretch, may require some dietary supplements to make up for the lack of sunshine. Never did hear the results.)
Huh. Makes sense, and now I’m curious myself.
I suppose that I can guess the purposes of some of the variants, but what would the Intrusion Armor be for? Reconnaissance, Infiltration, or both?
Intruding, mostly.
It’s the Admiralty Intelligence/ISS specialized variant for covert operations and stealth ingress into secured sites. Basically, if you’re going a place you shouldn’t be, doing things you shouldn’t do, this is the set you want.
It is possible to use a tractor beam to club-haul a battleship or even a dreadnought, given a sufficiently large countermass.
It has been done several times, resulting in several court-martials. A narrow majority of those ended with someone walking away with a medal for unconventional tactics. The others… did not.