Starsector 0.95 Nexerelin #15 - Story Time

hi there and welcome back to our star sexual pirate campaign so in the previous episode we invaded the hegemony capital of chickamau's talk and along the way we earned enough experience to get to level 15 which is the maximum level that can be achieved without mods and i decided to invest our last skill point into weapon drills from the leadership skill tree i don't have any particular love for this skill as the damage bonus it confers is not particularly large but it is a combat focus skill that improves our entire fleet which makes it superior to any of the other options available to us right now if you've been keeping up with the star sector blog you'll know that the developers are aiming to refresh many of the skills in the next update along with an improvement in the way that burn drive works on low-tech ships and if you're interested in that but haven't had a chance to read the blog yet i'll leave some links to the relevant posts in the description below but getting back to what we're doing at the moment i finally remembered to exchange the gladius fighters that we had in the odyssey with some broadswords which i think should do better in that role and i also reconfigured the asteroids so it now has two dagger one kopesh and three piranha bomber wings with that out of the way i've decided that the next thing we should do is to consolidate our position here in the iceland system by taking the hegemony colony of cowata as well it's currently only being defended by a tier 2 orbital station along with a small contingent of hegemony ships and since we use the odyssey against the star fortress i think we'll just fly the eagle this time in the last episode we use the eagle in our pursuit battle having already won the fight against the bulk of the defensive forces so that wasn't really a fair assessment of its capabilities i think this fight will give us a much better idea about whether its build is working however just in case the build isn't done i've brought in our three capital ships along with a handful of escorts just to be sure as with prior battles against hormonal stations i've created a line of ships that is far enough away from the station that my ship should be able to safely disengage by simply backing up to beyond the station's maximum weapon range the intention is to keep them close enough that they'll be able to provide support if i get into trouble while staying fresh enough to ensure that they survive the encounter as well and our heron has very bravely stepped up to eat the first wave of bombers that's not really its job but we might as well use this opportunity to get some damage in on the station while we take care of that some of you may remember from the last episode that my wife and i had been invited to a housewarming party well since then the party has taken place and i wouldn't say it was the unmitigated disaster that i was expecting for one there was a distinct lack of furniture as i had predicted but all of the adults in attendance quite happily reverted to the younger selves and like a clutch of primary school children attending a sleepover simply sat in a circle on the floor probably discovering that their backsides bolstered by some locked out induced weight gain had become marginally less uncomfortable to sit on the only rooms that were fully furnished were a room that was dedicated to the owner's three cats and the attic which featured a pool table and an air conditioning unit that was turned on but not connected to the outdoors for those of you who live in a more civilized part of the world pool is a bit like snooker but for peasants the table is smaller there are fewer balls and you're not required to dress in a vest and bow tie in order to play the other highlight was the children there were quite a few of them there and my son was the only boy in attendance in addition most of the girls were several years older than him so despite their best efforts to help him feel included there was definitely some friction in their interactions i particularly remember one instance in which the girls were partaking in some make-believe yoga meditation silently sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed and there was my son meandering between them happily clapping his hands and stomping his feet as he loudly proclaimed how good of a job they were doing and then there was the incident with the spores for those of you unfamiliar a s'more is basically a toasted marshmallow sandwich between two layers of crackers there's typically also some chocolate involved but the host had no chocolate available so we made do without anyway one of the men manning the grills on the patio had cleared away some space in order for the children to toast their marshmallows and at some point there must have been a mix-up because one of the girls ended up with two toasted marshmallows while another had none and this inevitably resulted in a fit of crying that somehow ended with the girl planting herself on top of the cooler that had all of the alcohol in it so there was the girl bowling her eyes out her mother trying to console her and a ring of adults quietly conferring with each other on their plan of attack on how best to extract their beverages from a cooler that had a crying girl on top of it the standoff was ultimately resolved by the guy the grill who was able to coast the girl off the cooler with the promise of newly toasted marshmallows so to the hero manning the grill that day i sub and chew okay so we've made some progress against the space station but as expected things are a bit slower going than with the odyssey however overall i'm pretty satisfied with the performance of the eagles so far the shields have been sufficiently sturdy for me to stay in the fight long enough to actually do some damage and the iron pulsers are doing an admirable job of keeping the enemy shields down and the iron pulser's charge cycle is short enough that i'm effectively able to maintain pressure without allowing the enemy to vent you may have noticed that any time i let up off the iron pulsers the enemy will actually try to put their shields back up and that's because the assault chain guns by themselves do so little damage to the shields that cycling their shields like that is actually an effective strategy for them fortunately i'm under no particular time pressure in this fight as all of our ships came in with full combat readiness and even if these proceedings dragged on for long enough that i had to send the omen away the lack of point defense wouldn't be so much of a concern because i don't have to worry about the station spewing out mines all of the time however i also don't want to be here all day so perhaps it would be a good idea to put an engage order on the station just to make sure that everyone is doing their part and i'm gonna clear away the rest of these waypoints so that our ships don't try to congregate at any of them well this big module is pretty high on flux so i'm gonna try and get some damage in but i don't expect to make a huge dent considering our lack of fire support at the moment well it seems we might be here for a while so i thought i'd discuss something that's been on my mind i already mentioned how the developers have released some blog posts detailing the sorts of changes they're planning to make in the next update but reading those recent posts actually brought to mind a much earlier post from several years ago that laid out the history of the persian sector again i'll provide a link in the description below but to summarize at some point in the distant past at least from the perspective of the game's timeline humanity started colonizing the stars slowly at first but then much faster once ftl faster than light travel was invented even though earth was ultimately destroyed or at least rendered uninhabitable a single unified empire arose with the legal and logistical framework to govern a large expanse of interstellar space supported by the ability to quickly travel across vast distances using networks of jump gates eventually this network of jump gates would spread out as far as the region of space that would come to be known as the persian sector and then quite unexpectedly the jump gates stopped working the luddites attribute this event to some sort of miracle that came about when the empire tried to transport a prisoner called lud the figurehead of their faith through the gate network for execution whatever the cause everyone in the persian sector at the time of the collapse was effectively cut off no means of contacting the central government or returning to a region of space where the gate network might still function and the game's date system is also synchronized with this event so when you start the game in cycle 206 that means presumably 206 standard earth years after the collapse of the gate network there was one large military fleet on route to the persian sector at the time and you can see the remnants of that scattered about as the derelict 14th battlegroup ships many of which had to be left behind in order for the survivors of that fleet to lift their way to the persian sector using standard hyperspace travel after the collapse the major factions separated out based on their chosen ideology and there have been a few major armed conflicts prior to the game's start date largely between hegemony church and tritakion around the use of ai technology and within the asconia system which resulted in the destruction of one of the sector's major population centers and the subsequent creation of the sindran dictat as an independent body oh that was a mouthful so there are things that i quite like about the game's story and lore but also some things that i take issue with when examining them in more detail the first is that the persian sector is framed as existing on the frontier so similar to a game like rimworld this helps to establish a technological baseline that is still relatable to us troglodytes in the distant past of the 21st century but it offers little glimpses of a glorious future where technology has really started to become indistinguishable from magic where you can have fleets of shining new vessels that can sail the void between the stars but there are still untold millions barely economic living in the dark on the holes of some vast groaning metropolis where weapons like cannons which have existed for centuries even in our time are still competitive against the best high-tech gadgetry that money can buy in addition limits have been imposed on technologies such as artificial intelligence that would completely trivialize certain problems in civilization and you see examples of this in many settings whether it's the butlerian jihad in dune or the cybernetic revolt during the dark age of technology in warhammer 40 and there are also other factors creating sort of technological inertia in battle tech the fall of the star league and subsequent succession wars leave little room for research and development similarly in star sector the faction's not overtly hostile to technology tritakion and the persian league are either held back by the other major powers or too embroiled in their own petty squabbles to get much done it seems that creators of fiction both old and new have on the whole sacrifice technology in order to maintain relatability and speaking of sacrifice it looks like the hegemony has sent in an invasion fleet to try and retake chickamau's dog that's unfortunate i had rather hope that i'd be able to get started on the next step in the glacier academy storyline but as i said previously i'd really prefer not to redo that star fortress fight so duty calls anyway back to the story so since i mentioned the galatia academy questline perhaps now would be a good time for me to air my biggest grievance with it so one day your daring space captain happens to stumble upon the galatia academy a small group operating outside the status quo achieving some sort of true progress on time scales that are incredibly short in the context of the setting and i must warn you that what's coming up may sound like a nitpick but if it is a nitpick then that's one that i have with a great many fictional settings including all the ones i already mentioned so to begin imagine for a moment you're trying to delete something from the internet something conspicuous something important say a fully functional artificial general intelligence or a device capable of faster than light travel do you think you would succeed probably not as isaac asimov said there is a single light of science and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere that's especially true in an age when our ability to transfer our knowledge to anyone anywhere has made extinguishing that light almost impossible most of us today carry a device in our pocket that can hold as much information as an entire library of books and in the event of a catastrophe it only takes one surviving copy redistributed online or by word of mouth or carrier vision whatever means of communication still exists to bring all of that knowledge back to the masses in the case of star sector why have the jump gates been offline for 200 years just think of how long of a time that is 200 years 200 years ago if we were not both dead of smallpox or polio i'd be communicating to you on a piece of paper carried by horse or sailing ship for weeks and months and it would probably only be in the form of crude drawings because neither of us had ever learned to read and those drawings would probably have been made from the dirt caked on the bottom of my foot because i would not have been able to afford a pen or shoes my point is 200 years is a long time to me it's unthinkable that nobody in the persian sector would have solved the problem that jump gates in over 200 years i mean we're not talking about some sort of fringe science in universe the jump gates were instrumental to maintaining a cohesive interstellar empire the jump gates were used by everyone everywhere of course i'm not suggesting that everyone who used a jump gate knew how they functioned i mean i drive a car but i've only ever seen pictures of the inside of an internal combustion engine but i definitely live within driving distance of someone who does know how my car works probably hundreds of people even if the science behind the jump gates were a closely guarded secret i can't see how a functioning interstellar empire could neglect to station people with knowledge of how to repair and maintain them at each gate in case of a failure i mean we're not talking about some enormously bloated kafka ask nightmare like 40k's imperium of man this was an empire that could build megastructures on the scale of the coronal hypershunts in a frontier backwater like the persian sector putting all that aside even if we accept that the knowledge of how the gates worked was lost there's still the question of why now the very fact that the glacier academy exists and despite some setbacks is ultimately able to achieve many of its research goals shows that an independent group can operate outside the watchful gaze of the major factions and possesses the motivation to actually get the gates back online where was this motivation 200 years ago when the gate network first collapsed when people were cut off from their homes and families when the people who had some tangible connections beyond the persian sector was still alive surely they would have wanted to get back to where they came from to be reunited with their friends and loved ones within their own lifetimes where was this motivation 100 years ago during the first ai war when a rapid transit system as powerful as the gate network would surely have tipped the scales of power in favor of whichever faction was able to harness it first just imagine the strategic importance of being able to open a back door into your opponent's star system and being able to move around fleets personnel and supplies at a pace that your enemy simply can't match surely the military mines on chicken moss dog would have salivated at those possibilities and where was the motivation just a few decades ago when a planet killer destroyed opus displacing millions who would surely have wanted to escape a persian sector that was slowly tearing itself apart if necessity truly is the mother of invention then the dire need of all those refugees would surely have been directed towards a great deal of invention so that's my biggest gripe at the moment having 200 years of backstory makes for an environment that is ripe with good tales to tell but it also begets questions about what people have been doing all that time as the glacier questline itself demonstrates it doesn't take a lot just a renegade school teacher a few bright students and one drunk motivationally impaired space captain to erase two centuries of stagnation alright well i've been chugging along on this runaway train of thought for long enough so what do you think does the game's lore and backstory interest you or have i wasted many hours of my life laboring over a throwaway detail in an otherwise stellar game feel free to let me know down in the comments to be fair i'm not calling out star sectors specifically these sorts of things plague fictional universes everywhere and i completely understand that sometimes things are the way they are because that's what the plot requires it's just not a very satisfying answer by the way if you're interested in space travel and other sorts of futuristic technologies i would recommend a channel called sfia science and futurism with isaac arthur i've been keeping up with isaac's videos for some time now and he's usually got a lot of interesting things to say about the topics that he covers overall he tends to view humanity's future a little bit more optimistically than i do but i suppose that comes with the territory if you're going to spend a lot of time considering the future of the species with anything other than existential dread however i do find myself agreeing with him more often than not in any case his channel is linked in the description for those of you who are interested great now that i've spent almost an entire episode talking about the game's lore and story i've worked up quite the appetite to get the main quest line moving again so i think in the next episode we'll start by trying to find that renegade scientist silla carouse so until then thank you so much for watching take care of yourselves and i'll see you out there in the sector [Music] you

Channel: blazeroth

Views: 2,695

Keywords: lets play, gameplay, starsector, nexerelin, pirate

Id: vGEkejvq8x8

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021