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

[sihnfahl]

I took it for enthusiasm. She was at least fixing the issues and (as far as I know) doing it without much pain. This was the first time it was obvious callous disregard.

Or she's just that clueless about humanoid interactions, being too used to 'bug' interaction.

No filter.

[HandofShadows]

Or she's just that clueless about humanoid interactions, being too used to 'bug' interaction.

No filter.

I think that this is it. She has an alien mindset. Which is logical as she is an alien.

[Xanyo]

Add that to the massive population sizes, reproduction speeds, and death rates of her species. And the fact that they're solar powered robo fairies.

I'm sad about Para's pet.

Edit: I'm liking blue kitty, though.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

My money's now on the pa'anuri being behind the shootings. It's weird that they shot a Tagon's Toughs vessel, that's almost too much of a coincidence, but for the rest the shootings are so random that it could have been done by someone firing mostly blind, based on gravimetric info only. They've had their own core generator for a while now, which "shouldn't be possible unless they still have baryonic allies in Andromeda". (Or, you know, prisoners, or constructs, or...) So they could have build a long gun as well. My question would be though: why stop at one? Why not first build so many they can just shoot all teraport users at once? Are these warning shots? A rogue scientist of baryonic prisoner trying to get people's attention? Is this a small fraction that can only afford one gun? Are they limiting themselves because shooting through hyperspace hurts them like teraporting does? Overall this raises more questions than it answers, but my money has to be somewhere, so pa'anuri it is.

[factotum]

It doesn't match the MO of the Pa'anuri, though, and why would they need to strike using long guns anyway? As we saw at Oisri, even the most powerful battleplates don't dare try to directly fight one of the things, they simply power down and try to hide instead--and if they get found, the Pa'anuri can destroy them with consummate ease. I don't think any development we've seen in the Schlock universe since will have made any difference to that.

[PraetorDragoon]

Maybe it's a potshot from our "friendly" goddess?

Though in all honestly I would suspect that its the same group as earlier. I don't think it's the Pa'anuri. So far, their actions have been more long-term and subtile, and aren't wormholes harmful to them?

[Xanyo]

Pa'anuri are a fair suspect. Last time they attacked the Milky Way in person, Petey and the F'sherlganni(probably misspelled) annhilated the entire invading force.
And indeed, they may wish to limit their usage of the long guns for two reasons. One, as it uses wormholes, it is likely to hurt them. Two, "hyperspace isn't shaped right for that." It would take "a generator the size of the galactic core" to teraport to another galaxy. The pa'anuri may have a larger core generator, but firing that thing takes a significant amount of energy, and their long gun may be somewhat of a crude imitation, seeing as nobody in Andromeda has experience with wormhole technology.

If the strip does indeed move on to a new story with a new cast, I hope to see a Uuplechan(probably misspelled that too) character. Seeing as we have this longevity stuff, maybe even Mister blue kitty(for lack of a name). I like him.
Hmm. Too bad this regeneration health care precludes the likelihood of a decent cyborg with robotic limbs and all.

[smuchmuch]

I was mentioned a while ago during a fleetmind 'internal meting' hat the Panuri have baryonic allies in Andromeda and of course they could manipulate the Gatekeeper in the first place so it's not impossible some baryonic agents of the Panurii are doing this.

I will say that this look like the modus operandi of the same peoples (Celesthul-ians ?) who were behind the atack on dom Parnasus (and before this on the mall cop command arc), arranging for major conficts to happen by causing enugh damage and then let war nreak out.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Speaking of this: didn't we have like a red maxi-schlock librarian running around who was concerned about the end of galactic civilization a while back? Didn't that thing join the fleetmind or something? Any chance it will have some input on the current situation?

It was an AI archive created by the Gatekeepers -- it went insane and killed everyone in a surviving Buthandi (sp) fragment because it thought that the next galactic cycle couldn't tick over as long as it existed, some nonsense about being the "observer" and the universe "quantum locked" by its existence.

Was it created by the Gatekeepers? They had "possession" of it, but their creation of it is a different question. It may be that it's a left over from an earlier time period. In fact it hints at being very old given the speed of observations. Maybe it's seen sentient life wipe itself out many times and that's one reason it's gone nuts.

Ah yeah, found it on my current read through, we last (I think) see it working for Petey at the end of the previous book in a function similar to a probability manifold, as Petey puts it. He's still doomy gloomy, but also still alive, so it probably does have input on the current situation. Maybe it should not work with the toughs though, after "killing" Ebby.

[Onyavar]

Todays strip: Option 3 is basically making Gugro the leader of the company, as Tagon would carry out her orders.

And it looks like his favorite course of action.

[PraetorDragoon]

Todays strip: Option 3 is basically making Gugro the leader of the company, as Tagon would carry out her orders.

And it looks like his favorite course of action.

Option 3 has the highest chance of involving him shooting people, so obviously Tagon likes that.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Todays strip: Option 3 is basically making Gugro the leader of the company, as Tagon would carry out her orders.

Not if at the end of it, she gets court-martialed and punished (lightly or otherwise) for her disobedience. A commander risking a platoon to get a private out of trouble doesn't automatically lose their command - they might even be commended for it - but it can also be judged to be too great a risk for a single individual. Now, in stories that kind of gamble usually pays off, because it makes for a heroic story, precisely because in RL it often does not. Heck, Heinlein had to institute a general "we don't ever leave a man behind" policy in Starship Troopers, because the normal situation is that you can get in trouble for assisting a fellow soldier without orders.

Grey Wolf

[Rockphed]

[T]he normal situation is that you can get in trouble for assisting a fellow soldier without orders.

I imagine that sometimes soldiers are ordered in to situations that their commanders know are over their heads so that some other part of the mission can go off better. Okay, there is a Schlockmercenary strip about this. Let me find ti.

Here it is.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

OK, so once again, I'm confronted with having to give a damn about a character I don't remember ever seeing before. Who exactly is this Sashiko, when did Para adopt her, and how is it she got shot up and wasn't with Para?

Schlock could really use some kind of contextual link for characters, not unlike El Goonish's Shive commentary links or Dumbing of Age indexing by character. I tried to use the search feature to the right of the comic, but "There are no results for “sashiko”."

Grey Wolf

[Potato_Priest]

OK, so once again, I'm confronted with having to give a damn about a character I don't remember ever seeing before. Who exactly is this Sashiko, when did Para adopt her, and how is it she got shot up and wasn't with Para?

Schlock could really use some kind of contextual link for characters, not unlike El Goonish's Shive commentary links or Dumbing of Age indexing by character. I tried to use the search feature to the right of the comic, but "There are no results for “sashiko”."

Grey Wolf

Apparently the thing itself is called Silksilver, and is one of the Sashiko. Sashiko seem to be the Espee cavalry units, which are actually organisms that the Espees (and Para Ventura) can climb into to ride around.

Basically, it's just one of Para's murderbots, but a pseudo-organic one.

[tonberrian]

We see Silksilver introduced this book here.

[Xanyo]

Silksilver first appears in Big, Dumb Objects, here. The name is first used a couple strips later, here. I like that pet. 'm glad it's kinda alive.

[Narkis]

I don't get that last strip. Are they implying that the long gun shots are actually coming from the dark matter beasties who are actually trying to stop Petey's machinery in the galaxy's core from charging?

[NEO|Phyte]

I don't get that last strip. Are they implying that the long gun shots are actually coming from the dark matter beasties who are actually trying to stop Petey's machinery in the galaxy's core from charging?

I suspect you're overthinking it. Colonel guy I don't care to look up the name for is looking at the map like it's a shooting range target silhouette, where you get more 'points' for center-mass shots.

[Ibrinar]

Yeah I considered that for a moment but if you are trying to hit something in another galaxy and are so imprecise that the shoots are distributed randomly over the galaxy you are most likely hit nothing at all the chance that you will be hitting ship in a matter that seems planned is effectively zero.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah I considered that for a moment but if you are trying to hit something in another galaxy and are so imprecise that the shoots are distributed randomly over the galaxy you are most likely hit nothing at all the chance that you will be hitting ship in a matter that seems planned is effectively zero.

The odds of shots randomly hitting all those ships are... well, not literally zero, but effectively zero.

[sihnfahl]

Yeah I considered that for a moment but if you are trying to hit something in another galaxy and are so imprecise that the shoots are distributed randomly over the galaxy you are most likely hit nothing at all the chance that you will be hitting ship in a matter that seems planned is effectively zero.

As I recall, 'targeting' a Long Gun is just 'can you connect to them through hyperspace? If so, you can shoot them.'

Can't say much for the other species that have been hit, but we do know the Teddies got slapped ... and the Uuples.

Both seem a bit ... xenophobic. And paranoiac. Just the sort of folks you'd target if you were trying to instigate a war...

[Xanyo]

Good point.

Note on if the Andromedans are the shooters: they likely don't have a ton of targeting info. Enough to hit a ship in a region, but not enough to identify what ship you're hitting.

[factotum]

Note on if the Andromedans are the shooters: they likely don't have a ton of targeting info. Enough to hit a ship in a region, but not enough to identify what ship you're hitting.

That really applies to anyone in the Milky Way as well--you have to assume that there are "spotter" ships within scanner range of the targets, I'd say.

[Kantaki]

Yeah I considered that for a moment but if you are trying to hit something in another galaxy and are so imprecise that the shoots are distributed randomly over the galaxy you are most likely hit nothing at all the chance that you will be hitting ship in a matter that seems planned is effectively zero.

The odds of shots randomly hitting all those ships are... well, not literally zero, but effectively zero.

Well, of course we only saw the shots that hit something interesting.
Not shown were countless shots that only hit asteroids.
Or nothing at all.

[Ibrinar]

By effectively zero I don't mean something just slightly unlikely like one in a million where with enough shoots you might hit something. Even before taking into account that the shoots look like they have a pattern (remember they thought the battlefield was a trap) just hitting something significant is very unlikely. The galaxy is really really empty (can't be bothered to look up the numbers but if you add together the volume of all suns it is an insignificant fraction of the space in the galaxy) randomly hitting even a star isn't very likely. Hitting multiple ships? The number of shots fired would have to be ridiculously high and it would certainly not have a pattern. Also with enough shots to make hitting ship likely you will hit many suns and I think someone would notice.

[Grim Portent]

If it were the Pa'anuri I expect they wouldn't bother shooting ships, they'd just start blasting planets with enough shots to wipe out all life on them until they destroyed all major power centers in the galaxy. The things make stars go supernova as a weapon and they don't value baryonic life, pot shotting ships seems small scale for them when they could go for a total extermination plan by just firing huge long guns at planets.

[Max_Killjoy]

Well, of course we only saw the shots that hit something interesting.
Not shown were countless shots that only hit asteroids.
Or nothing at all.

In order to hit that many ships randomly in a galaxy, you'd need to fire trillions of shots.

Someone would have noticed the misses by now.

E: or orders of magnitude more shots that trillions... I don't have time to do the math right now.

[factotum]

By effectively zero I don't mean something just slightly unlikely like one in a million where with enough shoots you might hit something. Even before taking into account that the shoots look like they have a pattern (remember they thought the battlefield was a trap) just hitting something significant is very unlikely.

Even if you were just looking at one Solar System the actual amount of significant material is tiny. For instance, take our own system--if you consider everything out to the orbit of Neptune to be part of the system (ignoring the vast amounts of stuff that's outside that), then started randomly firing within those boundaries, your chance of hitting the Sun (which is far and away the largest object around) would be about 41 million to 1 against. Even if you fired once a second for a year you'd have about a fifty-fifty chance of actually hitting the target. In reality, of course, the volume we're talking about is *way* bigger than a single solar system!

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Even if you were just looking at one Solar System the actual amount of significant material is tiny. For instance, take our own system--if you consider everything out to the orbit of Neptune to be part of the system (ignoring the vast amounts of stuff that's outside that), then started randomly firing within those boundaries, your chance of hitting the Sun (which is far and away the largest object around) would be about 41 million to 1 against. Even if you fired once a second for a year you'd have about a fifty-fifty chance of actually hitting the target. In reality, of course, the volume we're talking about is *way* bigger than a single solar system!

Indeed. It seems (based on a quick google) that the density of the milky way is roughly about 1 kg for every 5 billion cubic km. In the words of Pratchett, "the universe, composed almost entirely of nothing with a trace of hydrogen".

GW