A Decider
Created Saturday 28 March 2020
Decider
Entry Decision: Ability to accurately attach Buzzkills at range.
Ship's Call: Joy, Shipmate, Joy
Weapon of Choice: 30 meter tri starred gamma array powered by a .8 ton sublimation core.
The door opener. Creates opportunities. Takes opportunities.
The crazy senior grad student who is pretty darned successful especially given the fucked up shit she took from her mentor and especially given the kinda weird issues she deals with herself. But she is not focused on her---and especially not other people's---problems. She knows what she wants to do, and that is what she does. The child of Lorie Goshin and Ira Bernstein. With Shiela patting Lorie's belly a little too often while she was pregnant.
Goes by Fey because--come on, really?!--people mispronounce it as "fee".
Scrappy special ops / demolitions who tries her hardest to dress nicely when she can.
Yeah, she's known for trying too hard in all the wrong ways to dress well. Her pilot cabin is full air, no vacc suits. (So, yes, she tries pretty hard not to take a direct shot that might peirce the pilot cabin. But, y'know, you probably want to do that anyway.) And, yes, wears
Would beat up an old lady. Any fight she gets in she's going to win, and by a lot. It's all old ladies to her.
Her ship cannot hold a system. It's too small to carry industry-building technology. But it jumps well. She has done over 500 jumps without even coming close to the edge.
Her main battery is γ-guns that she fires from light hours away. A raw energy beam maybe a centimeter thick from most facets. Fired to hit a certain part of a ship light hours after you last knew where it was. But, with her beam traveling at the speed of information, it can really hit the spot almost before the target even knows it.
That's one of the terrors of intrasystem combat. Be sitting there for maybe literally years doing nothing but monitors robots digging and then suddenly have maybe a few hours before a barrage of nukes and AM rockets give you a surprise visit. Imagine if it were instead just minutes. For her ship to jump in an fire in just minutes. Yeah, she'll have to be in that general area for a few months before she's collected enough mass energy for a jump back, but that first shot of heres is usually a doozy. And using a battery of γ-guns lets her respond with follow-up shots nearly at the speed of information, if she can stay on target and still following a trajectroy unexpected by most foes.^[Yeah, at first it seems it ought to be really easy: at point A at X time, then at point B at Y time, Newtonian physics puts it at point C at Z time. But it's in three dimensions with information being really just intensity and direction (and frequency). Fake or confusing either the intensity or direction and you confuse the location. And even little bits can matter when you're shooting that far away. With anything.
And there you go. I have finally (2022-11-06) figured out what the main weapon of Buzzkill battleships is. "Tachyon" beams. They're not tachyons, but they fit what Human think they would lok like, so the Human call them tachyone beams. Don't like it? I'll do that if you stop calling them buffalos. Buzzkills shoot back. Somehow they can shoot back in time. In inrasystem combat (i.e., on AU-scale battles), Buzzkills can reactd (like shoot) before information arrives. Their shots shoot back in time, knowing better where to hit than anyone should. Their missiles aren't great (things like dirty fusion bombs or even scrap-metal flaks volleys), but they are prescient on where to shoot.
For Fei Lung, this would prove to be quite a challenge. (For anyone, but a bigger ship can take more hits. If it's a big enough ship to land a Hagge, for example, it could take direct Buzzkill hits three or four times. As long as the
armor is built for the right attack. A light-enogh weight armor is more likely some sort of ablative/redirecting stuff than a layer of wall. So, the wrong type of armor wouldn't stop even weak versions of other types of armor. She woudl have only one type of armor, and so could take at most one hit before she's armorless.
Lancer
She can dive into a system, resolve her mark well enough down even with information light hours old, fire and usually hit. Sometimes she so sure she immediately builds a jumpminer on a rocky planet and be gone as soon as enough matter has been converted for a shot home. Hit and run. With the confidence in her accuracy to spend a whole jump-worth of mass out that far to hit some important target.
That as a jump story.
"If you can jump in here at this angle, you should be able to stay occluded by this, then this gas giant. They'll know you're behind there, but they won't be able to hit you with direct fire for at least five hours. You'll have plenty of time to size up, line up, and choose your distance as yo see fit."
