The Officer Lady

Created Saturday 28 March 2020

Old English mentor of Fei Lung. Has been fighting in the field befeore anyone even knew there was a war on.* Sweet, proper lady who seems always sweetly ineffective when she actually knows just how to work people to get where she wants to go.

Or something like that
Old door opener herself, but for her it was through people.

*This is hilarious. (And, of course, a piece I totally forgot about) I just came here from search for the name of Fei Lung's ship. After re-realizing this as a character---this being the page I jump back to. A good shot. Because I may never muster the energy to remember where I would jump back to. To that be a direction I may never go back to. So I better survive here on my own or die here alone.
And the next thing I write is:

Hm, trhis character definitely needs work. No center, nothing interesting around it, and no direction.
But I guess if I go off of Fei Lung, sure.

[Ha! Much later into the night that I wrote that, I then noticed I had indeed already included Fei Lung into the Character list*[This is funny, too: Lung does always persist. She remains relevant throughout. Yeah, she deserves to a Decider here. She has staying power.]. Done, if it matters, when creating AI characters. And trying to think of where to put them---how to organize that back into my thoughts so that I might find it again.]

Why not. There is an instance of me. A place where I wasn't ineffective (I was still learning how to fight, but was darned good at maneuvering.
So, like:

Anyway, she having a big bookshelf in her captain's quarters.

(Yeah, even the smallest ships have that. They learned the hard way that every long-distance ship has to have a nice spot for respite by the captain; no matter what happens out there, there must be a safe place to stay sane out there.)

and she'll stop in the middle of a conversation with a visitor to her quarters by scanning the shelves for a particular book, pulling that book out, and reaching behind it to get some really good contriband to share.

So, yeah, that Dragon Lady. A strong, mobile extra-orbital force. She has only one ship (and strong supporting industrial resources), but in wars over such grand distances, getting enough ships to a place for it to need a multship commander was alrady a momentous feet.

Knowing where you're going before you leave has a very high stragetic advantage over, well, not being able to get there in time. And even slightly above-average hunches about what's going on millions of lightyears away can give you a slight long-term advantage; in the long war that space wars must be, you can't not fight the long war.

So, a lot of the combat is figuring out faint signals in long-distance recon. And knowing the difference between a faint backgreound noise that's just noise and a signal that's a well-camougflaged movement of an alien ship.
And that period in Man's Final Expansion

(Yeah, why not? With all its laden embarrassing male clumsy erotica. They use in whatever version of langauge they speak in a set of terms that perpetuates sexual stereotypes of their age while making sexual innuendos to no one who cares.)

where he ① realizes there is intelligent life out there ② that that life seems to be acting in ways that make us think they may not exactly getting ready to roll out the welcome mat, and ③ seem to be trying to hide their locations. So, yeah, ④ there may be a lot more out there than we realized at a lot more locations. They seem to be doing a preaty decent job at figuring out exit jump points: Places worth the price of a jump to. Both stragetically and industrially.

So, she's kinda like Lucky Jack from Master and Commander (which took place in 1812, by the way---it wasn't really the French he was fighting, but they couldn't show that in a movie). She seems lucky in her picks of destinations (well, better than chance at least---rather consistently better than most). So, she's put in charge of long-term strategy. She's given a budget, a deck¹, a charter [which, in addition to stuff meant to give her some immunity to the outcomes of her actions, is where they lay out---as best they can---what they'd like her to find and do with her "prospecting"], a report [a person she reports to---not sure what that's called], a damned-good Ai mentee to try to figurte out why she's so good so it can also recommend how she could get better to make their teaming better, and a few contingencies under which she is authorized to ask for military support.
And off she flies to far-flung destinations.
And so spends a lot of time getting a floater's body in the middles of lots of noweheres.
And an occasional somewhere!

Which is usually jsut a rock, But a pretty nifty rock.

Remember, by definition, if we can fly through space, we're going to always need to be able to see where we're going. Or we might bump onto things (or---more likely---get more than a little too much of absolutely nothing). In any case, if jumps take energy, then they who expands out faster to better places has whole worlds of resources to add to their side. We jump as far as we can see. And somtimes too far---that if something goes wrong,there's no one coming to save you. Like probably ever, becuase if they don't get a fast report back, then they're going to assume you died and to wait until they get more informaiton about what happened through the incoming radiation (i.e., if you jumped a thousand lightsyears out, then it'll be 1000 years before they get more intel on why you died. And yeah, they might---just might----kinda stop really caring about you by then.

So the Dragon Lady mostly spends her time in nothingness with nothing to do. But

A "workspace" an environment that allows her to interface with a lot of resources and advanced applications. And it still involes moving your fingers precisely and rhthmyically, while you watch and listen to something. But their workspaces have a hardware architecture that does work better with a few elements installed. Retinas, inner ears, stuff like that. Anyway, this "terminal" is called one's deck.