Schlock Mercenary VII: A T.A.D. Too Much Dialogue These Days

[eschmenk]

Something just occurred to me about that. Why couldn't Kaff have ordered Broken Wind to teraport that warhead as near to the Esspies as possible and then set it off? Why did he have to run it manually in there? Did I miss something saying the Esspies had set up their own TAD?

Nothing said that the Esspies set up their own TAD, but I just assumed that they boarders brought portable TADs with them. Obviously they wouldn't want Toughs teraporting into their rear or just teraporting in a weapon. We saw the damage Captain Landon's (name?) group did when it used the teraport cage to get into the Esspies' rear on Cindercone.

That said, I wonder why Broken Wind couldn't have used gravity to move the warhead. If some ship (I can't remember which) had the fine control to move bullets [EDIT: paintballs(?)], why couldn't Broken Wind move warheads? And if it couldn't use gravity, why wouldn't it have some bots like the ones that moved the baffles on board Cindercone? I guess we're just not supposed to think of things like that?

Of course, the biggest question would be why didn't Broken Wind have some missiles already assembled and ready to fire given that it was in a battle where it might have needed to fire them quickly?

As for today's strip. I think I've mentioned before how silly it is that everyone apparently knows where Uli-Oa is and have decided to come after it now Oisri has been snatched away from them. Do none of these galactic powers have enough ships to send them after two targets at once? The UNS were perfectly willing to trade away a *battleplate* for the sake of an 8km-wide ball of PTUs, yet they can't be bothered to send one after a planet-sized chunk of the same material?

Yes, it does seem pretty silly, although some civilizations may have heard about Uli-Oa later than others and it can take large bureaucratic organizations a long time to make decisions. OTOH, dictatorial governments can make decisions quickly. HT is making it look as if all governments thought, "We can't get ORSI! What do we do now?", then they all took about the same amount of time to decide to try to capture Uli-Oa, then arrived at about the same time. The UNS just happened to beat them thanks to Petey.

In the UNS's defense, though, part of the reason it was at ORSI was because the wreckage of Morqueng (sp?) was there. But given that Morqueng crashed there, it's surprising that they didn't arrive first and have that area secure before everyone else arrived. That wold have been well before they could have heard of Uli-Oa. Maybe the DME caused problems? But if they brought enough forces to deal with the DME, unless they took huge losses, they should have been able to dominate anyone else who arrived. (I'm sure this is far beyond anything we are supposed to think of.)

Such fine tuned tereports are something the ship didn't have proper equipment for.

Why would you say that? We saw Ebbie being teraported into medical, which I think was aboard Cindercone or Broken Wind. Do you have a link that shows that they have only crude teraport equipment? If they do, that's just one more inexcusable failure on the part of the Toughs. They are super rich. Why wouldn't they buy and install decent equipment on their ships?