Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

High tech intrigue and Cold War
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Siege »

I think NATO was probably always ahead in terms of near-Earth space control, considering they had things like StarBase One (though I really feel we ought to come up with a new, better name for that place :)). Compounded with the loss of MIR that does indeed leave the Soviets lagging in that department. They still have a station in orbit around the moon though; they probably transferred Earth-Moon control there.

And yeah, the US is ahead of the USSR in terms of Monolith research, but still way behind the Europeans (although it's not like they'd know that before it hits them). But what I really think could tip the scales back in the US' favor is if they get some reverse-engineered crashed alien tech going. That'd be both a unique selling point and fitting with the whole Roswell conspiracy theme. There's already the Wendigo so there's precedent, and I can totally see things like that plasma gun thingie as a product of that research too.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Arkitek »

Malchus wrote:Now I get what's bugging me about that design (aside from the whole submersible carrier bit): I see no proper radar mast.

Every carrier I've ever seen always has a huge mass of those on the superstructure or it wouldn't be able to do the whole air traffic shtick. Perhaps they're retractable to avoid generating too much flow noise when submerged?
Maybe it launches some kind of AEW plane for that sort of thing. Wouldn't be able to get as much power as you could from the carrier though.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Hmmm... the US having overwhelming superiority in ridiculous strategic space-tech (and funky ass weird science) while the Russkies run circles around them in AI and cybernetics works. It's a bit like how in the intelligence world, the US historically also had extreme advantage as far as hardware was concerned with supersonic spyplanes and satellites and shit, the Russkies never had fleets of U-2s and Blackbirds photographing the fuck out of everything NATO, but on the other hand the Russkies' with all their decoys and fake sites and secret cities were a bitch to penetrate with HUMINT whereas the KGB had agents sleeping with and bribing out all sorts of folks in the USA. Oversimplification and probably inaccurate I know, but yeah.

Maybe the SICKLE thing and the rampant cybernetics was due to Russkie technologists realizing that they were getting seriously overmatched by the USA in terms of sheer strategic hardware put up in orbit and all that, and so their only hope of matching was pretty much by letting the genie out of the bottle - like how Bart Blade said that if the US actually went through with the XB-70, it would give them such a huge advantage that the Russkies would have had to do a first strike or risk being gimped forever. Instead of a nuclear genie though, it was instead them just taking insane risks in the field of AI and cybernetics (the latter I am sure involved lots and lots of questionable human experimentations ;) ) and hoping for the best.

I'm sure that Warpac still has a few ALMAZ sites out there though, so the destruction of MIR won't eradicate their space capability... just severely hamper it. Maybe they can gattai these smaller space stations and combine them mecha-style to a larger Soviet military ISS-thing with modules contributed by each Warpac member.

Would make for an interesting post-Soviet Civil War development where the rest of the Warsaw Pact comes in to help the Russkies with that. A multinational project of the peoples!
Arkitek wrote:
Malchus wrote:Now I get what's bugging me about that design (aside from the whole submersible carrier bit): I see no proper radar mast.

Every carrier I've ever seen always has a huge mass of those on the superstructure or it wouldn't be able to do the whole air traffic shtick. Perhaps they're retractable to avoid generating too much flow noise when submerged?
Maybe it launches some kind of AEW plane for that sort of thing. Wouldn't be able to get as much power as you could from the carrier though.
Maybe it's accompanied by a flotilla of support submarines, like a normal US aircraft carrier. So there can be this smaller submarine that's pretty much dedicated entirely to radar support and ECM, and perhaps a replenishment sub loaded with supplies, and a couple of Seawolfs or Jimmy Craters for protection.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Siege »

Here's a thing:

CAIN

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The Central Archives Information Network is the centralized digital info-management system of Saint Holding. It is simultaneously an ancient and blisteringly modern computer network.

Development of CAIN started as far back as 1970 as a project code-named ABLE, an experimental project proposed to the Department of Defense by a small high-tech firm called ARCHAM Research. This was the very beginning of the computer age, and ARCHAM said it could build the DoD a universal library of classified computerized information that could be accessed from dedicated terminals in military facilities. Because computers at the time were few and far between, and those that did exist were huge and slow, such a network was thought to be extremely secure. And because this was the heyday of the Westmoreland administration and its runaway defense budgets, funding was easy to come by -- particularly since ARCHAM was backed by a cabal of influential investors with close ties to the administration itself.

ARCHAM set to work, and the Pentagon oversight committee tasked with overseeing the project soon discovered that the company had some very peculiar ideas about what its network should be capable of. The company started off with the primitive computers of its time, 5MHZ systems with 24kB of expandable core memory, but soon proved able to make those systems do things that made Pentagon project managers raise their eyebrows. Says the project overseer at the time:
"Einstein said, "you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother". These ARCHAM guys, they could never make it sound like they grasped what they were talking about. Details were glossed over, briefings got fluffed up to make you forget they never explained where they got this neurotronic hoodoo from. First I thought they were just bullshit artists peddling hot air, but then they delivered a prototype and the thing's like something out of this world. They're happy, we're happy... Hell, Treadaway is downright giddy about the thing.

Still though. Looked like those techies couldn't believe their eyes any more than we could. Sure they're wicked smart, but it felt like they never earned their ideas. I never could shake the impression their knowledge was cribbed from, well, somewhere. Call it a gut instinct, but if ten years with the Bureau and another twelve in the Pentagon taught me anything it's that when something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Something about this project was rotten. They knew something they weren't telling us. And I couldn't help think that if we were going dump our secrets on a system these guys built, that was a bad deal."
He wasn't wrong, although he would never quite know what went on behind the scenes at ARCHAM, because its success was short lived. In 1978 the Carnegie administration came into office, having vowed to the voting public amongst other things to bring the military budgets back under control. President Andrew Carnegie was a lot more skeptical about the DoD's many white elephant projects than Westmoreland had been and began an enormous cutback program whose managers soon judged ABLE to be superfluous, excessive and "an example of the fraudulent waste of public money that has come to typify the Westmoreland administration", with its "penchant for redundancy, obscene military projects, byzantine code-names and general inaccountability". It was amongst the first projects to get the axe, and with the sudden loss of military funds ARCHAM Research was declared bankrupt.

Oddly, when creditors attempted to seize the company assets, they found its Boston offices and research labs completely empty and deserted. It was as if a black hole had materialized inside the facilities and removed all evidence the company had ever existed. Its owner and all the people known to be associated with ARCHAM vanished so completely it actually made headlines in several national papers. After a swift investigation the DoD concluded it had most likely been scammed after all, and closed the book on ARCHAM Research and Project ABLE.

The reality was slightly more complicated. ARCHAM Research was one of many fronts for the conspiratorial cabal that calls itself the 'New World Order'. The conspiracy wanted to gain access to the Department of Defense's most sensitive information, a move its inner circle deemed necessary after the secretive conflict between elements of the US military and its intelligence community of '63-'64. ABLE was a Trojan horse, a network of supposedly secure military terminals that would have at its heart a secret master computer, built around an extraterrestrial data matrix retrieved from the Great Falls anomaly, the alien spaceship that crashed in the Montana badlands in 1894. It was a masterful plan... Foiled by the frugality of an idealistic President.

The conspiracy had no choice but to take its loss, and reacted with the ruthlessness of an organization well versed in the art of staying hidden inside an increasingly more sophisticated society: it dispatched cleaner teams to the ARCHAM facilities, packed up every scrap of paper and disappeared the three dozen personnel connected with the project, in the scope of a single night.

And that would have been the final end of project ABLE, had it not been for a young Anthony Saint making a surprise discovery nearly a decade later. In 1981 Saint was freshly returned to America after making his mark working for a succession of Japanese zaibatsu. He had established his own Saint Holding company, made his first billion selling missiles to Iraq, guns to Afghanistan, and APCs to Tanzania, and used some of it to buy the dilapidated remains of Rivet Point Manor in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains where he stumbled upon a sealed secret laboratiry containing blueprints, prototypes and the ABLE matrix itself, as well as the skeletal remains of over two dozen ARCHAM engineers.

Cold Rivet Point had always been owned by the Howes family, whose ancestor Tycho Howes was a founder of the New World Order, and many of whose members had been members of the conspiracy also. After the Howes line went extinct the conspiracy used the island and its warren of old mining tunnels to house the data matrix as the secret nerve center for ARCHAM Research. When they closed down the project, the cleaners simply collapsed the tunnels leading to the buried facility, entombing all remaining personnel inside. At the time it was believed to be an efficient solution: if the conspiracy ever needed to use the facility again, it could simply dig it up. And if anybody else had bought the mansion, that probably would have been true. After all, of all the bored rich men who could have bought Rivet Point, only one man was ever likely to be curious enough to wonder about its history enough to go exploring its hidden tunnels, find a collapsed end and wonder about what was behind it, and realize exactly what it was that he'd found after he excavated the remains.

In 1981, Anthony Saint founded a new subsidiary to his ever-expanding business empire. The start-up was called Cybertronics Systems, and it was tiny enough to go virtually unnoticed amongst the increasingly titanic money streams that Saint Holding was beginning to generate. Or at least it was, until out of the blue it began producing rather remarkably advanced electronics, electronics that were then fitted in the weapons that Saint was also designing, spawning a host of first-generation 'smart' weapons that turned Saint Holding from just another tertiary DoD contractor into one of its preferred suppliers virtually overnight. Anthony Saint became one of the celebrated 'new minds' in American business, an integral part of the electronic revolution of the 1990s, with the crucial difference that unlike Bill Gates and Steve Jobs he wasn't based out of Silicon Valley, and he didn't make computers for the mass civilian market. He made weapons, and he made lots of them.

Saint didn't fully know where the blueprints had come from, but he didn't need to. He had ARCHAM specifications, early supercomputers and, more importantly, the data matrix itself and enough wits to combine the three. He also was smart enough to know that somebody had deliberately buried the project and killed people in the process, that whoever that was had some serious clout - not to mention access to technology unlike anything on this planet - and that those people would probably be less than pleased once they realized he was onto them. So Saint took proactive measures: he sought out the conspiracy, told them he had taken measures to ensure that in the case of his sudden death or disappearance the original blueprints would turn up on the Internet (an evolution of ARPANET which, in an ironic turn of events, had been a competitor of ABLE that the Carnegie administration had allowed to exist), and used that threat plus a promise that he would probably be of more use alive than dead as leverage to negotiate a position in the organization.

CAIN is one of several end results of those negotiations. Its name is an expression of Anthony Saint's sense of morbid humor, a play on the original name of the project that spawned it. CAIN extends into every computer and all networked devices within Saint Holding, forming a fully secure, blisteringly fast network with a cutting-edge 'heuristic adaptive link', a smart interface capable of understanding and responding to complex queries, be they text, data or voice-based. According to Saint Holding it is not self-aware, because that would breach a 1999 law against sentient computers on American soil.

Then again, Saint also lies about the exact nature of its smart network. The Holding says its heart is the computer core at the heart of the Basilica, the building at the heart of the Saint Holding Campus at Cold Rivet Point. In reality that is only half-true, because those human supercomputers are fused through an optical trunk with the alien data matrix still located in the old ARCHAM facility buried deep underneath the Basilica. Only six people in the world know about that subterranean secret, and only three are aware of its true origins: Charlie Saint herself, right-hand man Jeff Cogburn, and senior systems manager Lyman Silver, former head of Cybertronics Systems and Saint's most skilled engineer.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Booted Vulture »

So the closest the americans can get to SICKLE is... greytech? :D
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Czernobog »

Maybe there can be a project called ABEL as well? :mrgreen:
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Ford Prefect »

There was an ABLE, it was replaced by CAIN.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Siege »

Halcyon Rhapsody

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The Halcyon Rhapsody, the 135m long private yacht of the Comte Le Feuvre, ca. 2020. Mystery surrounds the private ship of a man who stands accused of having once been one of Malcolm Kroner's top lieutenants. Built by a Turkish wharf in the early 2000s the massive yacht is known to have been fitted with magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, all-electric systems and shrouded screws; furthermore both the swimming pool and the helideck can be recessed within a main hull fashioned at fantastic expense out of dielectric composites. The result is a fast and extremely efficient yet low-observable and supremely quiet ship for something its size -- ideal for a man who makes a living out of secrets.

The ultimate fate of the Rhapsody, much like that of the Comte himself, is uncertain: interrogation of a ranking member of Korovin's cartel by MI-6 personnel in 2021 initially indicated it had been destroyed off the Malaysian coast in a pirate attack ordered by Korovin herself. But soon thereafter agents of Cuban intelligence temporarily working with WRAITH HUNTER confirmed that the ship had been seen off Barbados no two months earlier, and a UNATO report filed by the DGSE station chief in Freetown suggests the Comte was briefly in Sierra Leone in June of 2022.

It seems eminently reasonable then to assume Korovin fell victim to one of the Comte's many elaborate ruses and that he and indeed the Halcyon Rhapsody survive to this day. If it does, then it is most likely in the service of EXCHANGE EAST, the international underworld auction house purportedly run by the Comte. Indeed some in international intelligence suggest the final demise of WRAITH and the destruction of the first Exchange were to at least some extent orchestrated by the Comte himself, in order to rid himself of business associates he had come to consider useless and unsavory.

Most of the construction schematics of the Rhapsody were wiped by the Comte's operatives shortly after its launch; what little UNATO has been able to reconstitute indicates the yacht serves as a mobile datacenter with radio, microwave and laser transceivers that connect it to every network, database and info-stockade on the planet. It can accomodate at least one medium-size helicopter or VTOL craft, carries up to four motor-launches as standard, and its living quarters are characterized by a postmodern semi-organic style that apparently incorporates geometrical and optical illusions of some kind.

Uniquely amongst the survivors of WRAITH's top echelons the Comte is known to have an aversion to direct violence and it is unlikely the Rhapsody boasts much in the way of offensive weaponry, but if it is ever encountered then it is nontheless wise to be very wary of dealing with it; it may look like a rich man's plaything, but much like is the case with its owner looks can be deceiving. A man like the Comte is unlikely to ever be truly defenseless, and he rates amongst the most unpredictable and deceptive men in the world. If he surfaces anywhere it's because there's something there that he wants -- and he most likely will not only be insistent on getting it, but also prepared for most any contingency...
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Heretic »

FUUUUC..I had a whole review down, but my internet told me to sod off and it's now lost. Well, I'll give the cliffnote versions of what I wanted to say; much more concise that way anywho.

MVQ-66 Lima maser cannon

How common are directed-energy weapons and how ubiquitous are they in CSW? I know Lenin's Statue freely hands out death rays to capitalist invaders, but do the average NATO/WARSAW soldier get some nifty tripod-mounted beam weapon?

T-100 Autonomous Battle Tank

My favorite gadget, being orange robo-tanks. Too bad they aren't mass-produced and fragmented SICKLE isn't ambitious, as AI warlords with roving T-100s blasting each other in various parts of the Russian expanse would have been amazing. I'm probably gonna take that premise for a story or tabletop RP adventure.

M1A3 Abrams Main Battle Tank

Would be interesting to learn what type of weapons and equipment the average NATO/WARSAW soldier has that could cause the M1A3 to develop. Kudos for underside armor to fend off IEDs.

How big are the paylods of most orbital weapons, and would the active protection systems in the M1A3s be enough to fend off a good portion of whatever's being thrown at them from space?

Europa class light carrier

The little carrier that could. I'm seeing it as a sort of naval workhorse for the Europeans.

I'm getting the feeling that Europe is a faction in itself (from the last paragraph and Shroom's following post). Is it, and does NATO still exist?


That's all for now. I'll pick up on SICKLE tomorrow. This is fun!

Damn, I'm so far behind in my reviews.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Mobius 1 »

Heretic wrote: MVQ-66 Lima maser cannon

How common are directed-energy weapons and how ubiquitous are they in CSW? I know Lenin's Statue freely hands out death rays to capitalist invaders, but do the average NATO/WARSAW soldier get some nifty tripod-mounted beam weapon?
Well, the US has had LIGHTSABER laser systems for their Super Raptors/helicopters/Shadow Tempests since the mid to late nineties. As for squad-level stuff, I'm faiy sure an early chapter of Unforseen Consequences had Baylor's team taking a Hot Eagle down into the nuclear wasteland of a strike zone in Chad and putting down Monolith-mutants with one guy's laser/particle beam. But since PALE HORSE at the time would be on the absolute bleeding edge, I don't think those sort of small arms would really proliferate for a couple of years.

Oh yeah, and remember the Soviets totally have laser rifles/pistols for space combat come the Siege of MIR.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Heretic »

Hunh, it's been a while since I read STB, and the biggest thing I could remember concerning lasers was Statue Lenin shooting lasers. I guess I should've remembered that the soldiers in the space station had something; I was probably thinking gauss or something.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Mobius 1 »

The concept I had probably had nothing to do with reality, but I liked the way in worked out in-story: the laser gas and stuff was all in a self-contained cartridge, effectively making the weapons bulky revolvers and pump-action shotguns. The range was terrible in atmosphere, and combat cyborgs could effectively time blocks by 'bleeding' the containment on their 'thermal' lances to creates a sheet of gases in the air to diffuse the laser.

It's all pulpy sci-fi stuff, but it also allowed me to get away with phrases like 'gatling laser submachine gun in space,' so it couldn't be all bad.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Siege »

Bullet point time!
Heretic wrote:MVQ-66 Lima maser cannon

How common are directed-energy weapons and how ubiquitous are they in CSW? I know Lenin's Statue freely hands out death rays to capitalist invaders, but do the average NATO/WARSAW soldier get some nifty tripod-mounted beam weapon?
Directed-energy starts popping up in the late eighties with Soviet space lasers and such; things like the Lima show up in the nineties just like the lasers on the Raptors. Broadly speaking the Soviets are laser-heavy, the Americans use particle cannons and/or rail guns, and the Europeans start rolling out focused microwave weapons in the mid-nineties), but it's not a hard split by any means.

There are 'personal' beam weapons; a weapon Moby mentioned was the Universal Atomics Type-7 particle gun (one of many gadgets produced by Saint Industries' subsidiaries), as well as Soviet laser snipers and such. Deployment is limited though because generally speaking it's easier and cheaper to use more conventional weapons than to tote around volatile energy weapons with scary dense energy packs that have to be specially manufactured in zero-g and could have all sorts of things go wrong with them.

T-100 Autonomous Battle Tank

My favorite gadget, being orange robo-tanks. Too bad they aren't mass-produced and fragmented SICKLE isn't ambitious, as AI warlords with roving T-100s blasting each other in various parts of the Russian expanse would have been amazing. I'm probably gonna take that premise for a story or tabletop RP adventure.
Haha, AI warlords. Now there's a cool thought we ought to fit into CSW: Next somehow. I should point out that the T-100 article as it stands now was written when I was in one of my sadder 'must be realistics' phases, so the actual T-100 might be considerable more awesome if and when it shows up. Basically, just imagine there's a big ol' mountain in Russia somewhere that has a primary brain core beneath it and a division of fully automated armor guarding it.

M1A3 Abrams Main Battle Tank

Would be interesting to learn what type of weapons and equipment the average NATO/WARSAW soldier has that could cause the M1A3 to develop. Kudos for underside armor to fend off IEDs.

How big are the paylods of most orbital weapons, and would the active protection systems in the M1A3s be enough to fend off a good portion of whatever's being thrown at them from space?
Not a chance. Come the turn of the century Soviet space lasers run the gamut from stealthy tactical fire-and-deorbit sats that can take out a bunker to strategic models powered by multiple nuclear reactors that can rapid-burn pretty vast areas. A tank can't stand up to that.

At the same time laser satellites are mostly intended for defensive purposes, i.e. to burn down incoming ICBMs or bombers, so most of them are probably in highly eccentric orbits intended to keep them over the pole and Mother Russia most of the time. I don't think Soviet leaders would've wanted her crazy satellites to go sweeping over Washington D.C. all the time. So like the American rods-from-god systems, they don't get used all that much.

Europa class light carrier

The little carrier that could. I'm seeing it as a sort of naval workhorse for the Europeans.

I'm getting the feeling that Europe is a faction in itself (from the last paragraph and Shroom's following post). Is it, and does NATO still exist?
The WEU very much is a faction of its own; it's basically Western Europe plus Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Militarily the WEU is behind the Soviets and Americans in terms of raw manpower, but technologically it's on par and it focuses more on indirect, stealthy stuff, be it in terms of their warship design, their preference for using sneaky commandos to do jobs the USSR or USA would just send a bunch of airborne hoo-ah's to do, or just by acting through proxies to get what they want.

NATO is still a thing though. It has big honkin space stations and everything.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Heretic »

SICKLE
What does SMSF mean? All I got was Self-Managing Super Funds and that's silly since SICKLE almost broke the Soviet Treasury. And if SICKLE is self-repairing, how come it fragmented?

I also like the symbol. Very Technocratic.

YU-13 Wendigo
I'm getting the feeling that this thing is like Gumby: it has a basic shape but can stretch and be manipulated in various ways. What's its armor like? Is it alien tech or something more homebrew?

Also, would aliens possibly be expanded more in CSW: Next?

AZR-1 "Creepy" Aeroscraft Gunship

My airship boner is coming right now. And the fact that you managed to realistically explain the purpose for such things in the 21st century makes me weep with joy. I remember some folks from Iraq and Afghanistan talking about how small teams of special forces and helicopters can do much more damage to the terrorists than big A1s and hordes of marines sitting in Forward Outposts taking potshots at some goat herder who might have an AK. This gunship is like a big helicopter that can win the War on Terror. A fucking blimp, created by the Swiss, could possibly do a better job at winning the war on terror than billion dollar tanks and drones. Great.

I'm going to cry now.


INTEGRAL TEMPEST experimental powered exoskeleton

Holy shit, nanotubes! I'm a little scared how powerful things will get in CSW: Next. Exoskeletons like these might become a norm for the average trooper. Say. weren't these suits or some variation of it in Shadow Tempest Black?

LIM-69 Minotaur Orbital Defense Missile System

You know, with all these orbital weapon systems and cosmonauts and the fact that in STB the heroes went into a space station, do most developed countries have a sort of orbital presence? Also, it may pop up in another article, but what's the situation on the moon and Mars (as in, who controls the moon and has any leeway been made on manned exploration on mars?)

lol, Kingdom of Iraq.

Final part of this commentary coming soon (LOL). Gotta stop slacking like an ass or I shalt dread what horrors my beloved 01 community has in store for my account.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Mobius 1 »

The INTEGRAL TEMPESTs started off in a STB as essentially a bigger, bulkier version of the Crysis Nanosuit (to use a comparison - or the a very low-end flightless Ironmang suit). They're pretty expensive, and around Second Secret War era (2010s), most pilots have to be augmented to be able to handle the suit. Considering they work as a potential counterbalance to Soviet Augments and as shock troopers, I don't really see them coming into their own until CSWNext (if at all). But if they do, they'd probably be advanced enough that a normal human - or a light augment with the appropriate mental cybernetics - could handle it.

They obviously suffer nerfing around the heroes and have exploitable weaknesses - the eyes, some joints, etc. Combined with the price, and you'd most likely only see them in mercenary and PMC hands along with various esoteric blops groups. So, while practically everyone the characters would be most likely to run into, they be a dying breed - but that doesn't mean they're taken likely.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Invictus »

My mental image of INTEGRAL TEMPESTs had always been these guys, except with squishy people inside.
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I too imagined them as pseudo 40k Terminator-geared Hurt Locker types of armors.
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Siege
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Re: Gizmos, Gadgets & Gunnery

Post by Siege »

Coldstar Aerospace Dawndancer

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The Dawndancer is a single-stage-to-orbit aerospike-powered spaceplane described simultaneously as 'a shockingly vulgar display of affluence' and 'a Rolls Royce for the space age'. The Dawndancer is an expression of enormous technological prowess and of obscene wealth, the only bespoke spaceplane in the world, built to exacting specifications for Charlie Saint herself. The interior and furniture aboard the Dawndancer is fashioned by designers associated with catwalks more than spaceflight. The ship features an expressionist office, an passenger area decorated with paintings from several famous New York artists, as well as a California King-size bedroom done up in Saint's favorite shade of white. Dawndancer has its own hangar at Newark International, where Saint keeps a number of pilots on round the clock standby just in case. Once in orbit it can circle the globe in just under an hour. The ship does not have any offensive capabilities, but as one of the USA's premier weapons manufacturers Saint did have it fitted with the very latest and greatest in active and passive defense technology. As long as it isn't boosting to orbit or performing re-entry manoeuvers the Dawndancer has full data connectivity through Saint Holding's CAIN network, and passengers aboard can therefore enjoy pretty much every form of audiovisual entertainment streamed directly to them from earthside stations... Assuming of course Saint doesn't have other pleasures in store for them.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
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