#Delta V

[oldgamemags]

The new definition of speed 'Delta V' PC

[leonardo-dabepis]

Phil Dullea nailed to the Delta V logo, dying for the sins of the space station 14 community as Disco P. Elysium and his wife Ned Flanders look down from heaven and cry. We cannot control how other people perceive us.

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Delta V, 1970. A project by German rubber and plastics manufacturer Metzler to create a targa-roof kit-car based on the VW Beetle. The prototype was presented in the US where Beetle-based kit-cars were big business but the Delta V appears to have gone no further, perhaps because of the complexity of the kit which had an estimated 10-week build time

[sreegs]

I gotta say Delta V: Rings of Saturn is really fun. And it's on sale for $6.50 right now on Steam:

Hard-ish sci-fi about mining the rings of Saturn. Has The Expanse vibes. Great atmosphere and I love the graphical style. It's got a couple lame Elon Musk references ("Elon" branded equiment) but there's not that many.

[fallimentiquotidiani]

Lo stupore della notte spalancata sul mar

Ci sorprese che eravamo sconosciuti

Poi nel buio le tue mani d'improvviso sulle mie

È cresciuto troppo in fretta questo nostro amor

Se telefonando io potessi dirti addio, ti chiamerei

Se io rivedendoti fossi certa che non soffri, ti rivedrei

Se guardandoti già finito negli occhi sapessi dirti basta, ti guarderei

Ma non so spiegarti che il nostro amore appena nato è già finito

È già finito

Se telefonando io potessi dirti addio, ti chiamerei

Se io rivedendoti fossi certa che non soffri, ti rivedrei

Se guardandoti negli occhi sapessi dirti basta, ti guardere

Ma non so spiegarti che il nostro amore appena nato è già finito

È già finito

È già finito

[violetren]

Aether Chapter 4

I think I said it last time too, but fucking hell Maggie cannot catch a break.

Trapped in a quantum state experiencing time at a rate so slow that it's entirely theoretical. And without so much as a whiteboard.

EXTREMELY brain soupifiying but also extremely cool quantum physics related hijinks going on with her imagining how different life could have been, and wishing that all this could just not have happened and then suddenly waking up in bed, with the body she always dreamed she would have if nothing had gone wrong, AND YET still being in the same reality and timeline because the heroes are still busy loading her corpse into an ambulance and dealing with the explosion fall out. I suppose if you have had your soul burned into a quantum field and wish really hard a lot of things could potentially happen. but damn its wild.

Delta V is adorable and yes, that dad who filmed her eating protein bars like there was something wrong with that AFTER she had saved his whole damn family was an asshole. Every man and their dog who has ever interacted with any kind of superhero media knows that Super Speed=Super Appetite is a thing and these fuckers live in a world where comics AND real heroes exist. What do these fuck wits think is gonna come of trying to shame a meta-human superhero into an eating disorder? I hate them.

[alphamecha-mkii]

Star Wars: X-Wing (Second Ed.) - Jedi Knight—Delta-7 Aethersprite by Sergey Glushakov

[slcknasty]

i watched re-animator the other day and unfortunately this weird little freak has captivated me

[cyberkn1fe]

yea

[dinobeates]

Next set of Vivosaurs, from #021 to #030!

[prototypelq]

The Most Unreliable Narrator I Have Ever Seen

soooooo I had a Cyberpunk-obsessed phase pass recently, and this time Johhny Silverhand's character caught my eye. His story, more specifically, and how... inconsistent he seems, depending on each source.

In the game, Johhny acts like a bastard for most of the game. He panic-rages on his first meeting with V, throws many threats around, but is later beaten into the background with the blocker pills Misty gave to V. Even Johnny's friends' are well, they react Loudly to his return. Y'know, make it known his presence alone provokes a lot of anger from them.

Even during his first appearance, when V gets thrown into Silverhand's memories of his SAMURAI concert, the only real thing V recalls is the all-consuming rage that he felt, which he tried to shout out through the microphone, but it never felt like enough.

And doesn't this sound weird then, that the only thing Johnny does throughout the game after that first meeting is help V out? He learns about the Smasher guy hideout at the docks (he does that through dubious means but that's Johnny for you), he helps V out when the seizures become worse, he calmly agrees to Any decision V makes, despite V clearly Not being in any real state to oppose him in the finale of the game, he plans the whole thing with "Alt" so V can get his body back at Johnny's own expense, from the beginning, and he doubles down on that claim at the end of the game.

Do you see the dissonance? The egoist rockerboy that admitted to using his friends to getting what he wants, and the downright self-sacrificing hero and a friend that is Johnny at the end of the game? People change, sure, but this divide is very massive and too sudden, so I wanted to dig into that. And what I've stumbled upon, with the help of canon Cyberpunk materials like the Red sourcebook (or, more specifically, LayedBackGamers' reading of the canon books and his lore videos on different topics), is that

Johhny Silverhand from Cyberpunk 2077 is the Most Unreliable Narrator I've Ever Seen.

Count with me here:

Johhny's personality in general. No matter what your interpretation of him his, it's impossible to ignore that Johhny is very much a people person and he exploits that knowledge and charisma to suit his own goals. If you choose to trust him, then you might have already been played.

2) Johhny has been alone, only his lovely self for 50+ years inside the Arasaka chip. Don't ask me how he is still even remotely sane, I haven't got a clue (hopefully the time as a construct without outside stimulation flies differently and he hasn't felt those 50 years in real time). The thing to mention here, however, is that, being alone with your thoughts and emotions for a long time, having nothing else for entertainment, is a great opportunity to rewrite your own memory of events or emotions you've felt.

3) Lack of a body. The aforementioned constant rage, that was the dominant emotion is Johnny's life (before Alt, at least, if Never Fade Away is anything to go by, and I mean, that's literally a love ballad), is a symptom of his PTSD from his too-young years serving in the corpo war, same as his signature silver hand. I'm not a specialist here, but I do know PTSD, especially for war veterans, is a physiological illness just as much as it is a mental one. Johnny's body literally had trouble living normally after that experience, and knowing this bastard - he never managed to treat that. Existing as a personality construct frees him from the many bonuses of being corporeal, but it also free him from the physiological side of PTSD. His day-to-day existence is fundamentally different from that of the Johnny Silverhand that the world knew 50 years ago, so yes, as a 'time traveler' or a source of information and comparison about the 70's and 20's of cyberpunk world Johhny is not a good source.

4) The chip with Johnny is literary inside the head of another person. The characters in game question, multiple times, just which decisions is V making on his own, and which of them might be Johnny's doing. Not consciously, no, but V and Johnny are clearly not your simple neighbours. They are not your 'close friends that start subconsciously copying each other' too. It is quite possible that the chip with Johhny is adapting to the 'hardware' it is running on, so it is specifically implementing parts of V's personality into Johnny, to minimize the 'friction' between the personality and the body it is supposed to inhabit. Everyone say hi to existential horror)

5) How does Soulkiller ever work? Is there data on how much the resulting engram actually resembles the person it tried to copy? How did the process of copying Johnny go? I can answer the last one - very badly.

Death of Johnny is told in excruciating detail in the Cyberpunk sourcebooks. Johnny died on the floor of Arasaka tower, torn in two by a shotgun blast from Smasher. There is no information on how much time it takes Soulkiller to create the engram from the brain, but it better have finished doing that before Johnny's brain started dying from a lack of blood and oxygen, and he clearly didn't have much time either, considering bisection is not the best for bodily fluid preservation, so it's a wonder the engram even works properly. Plus, during the initial heist to steal the chip with Johnny, the chip was damaged further before the idiots decided to stick an unknown harddrive into their heads to preserve it. Basically, it's nothing short of a miracle, that engram-Johnny is actually a whole damn person, that he can function, think and feel properly (well, as much as Johnny can do those things)

It is very sad that V can't talk to Johnny about this, as the man does blame himself over things he hasn't even done, and he had done enough emotional damage to himself and people around him without that kind of burden on top of it.

6) Johnny's memories are literally false. The attentive reader had to pick this up in my previous point - didn't Johnny die in the hands of Arasaka after they interrogated him? Nope. Nope, and I can say that confidently because,

(drumroll please)

Cyberpunk tabletop sourcebooks! Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk universe and the TTRP series of games, has worked closely with CDPR writers during the production of the 2077. He oversaw everything, and he says that 2077 is in the same cyberpunk universe too, it's not an 'alternate reality' or anything.

Johnny Silverhand died while trying to buy time for his friends to escape, from a shotgun shot from Adam Smasher. That's it, he died on that floor, there was noone to interrogate, no rooftop helicopter he ran for.

The sequence of 'memories' we see from Johnny's POV in the game is a mishmash of two different assaults on the Arasaka towers, yes towers there were two of them. There is a great video explaining all the small and Major details Johnny's version of events got wrong, because we have the sourcebooks and the text inside. You may accuse me of holding a 'holy canon' argument ... and well, yeah, this is kind of holy knowledge, as it was written for gamemasters.

Still, some of the things in Johnny's version are Major, and while the media certainly covered the whole story extensively with corpo propaganda (oh, btw, Johnny didn't bomb anything, he probably didn't even know there was a nuke involved, he is literally just a scapegoat), there are some holes that a citizen of this world might know and wish to poke. The aforementioned Two Arasaka towers, or the absence of the legendary solo Morgan Blackhand from Johnny's story. Interestingly enough, there is a radiostation of Maximum Mike in-game, who is actually just pretty much Mike Pondsmith, and he does propose a couple of questions the 'official' version of the attack doesn't cover (like, where would a rockerboy even get a nuke, he might have been popular, but that's not just something you find without military contracts, and that means corporations). Another thing is that since Arasaka owns Soulkiller and has had the engram for a couple of decades, it is quite possible they are the ones responsible for messing with Johnny's memories.

So uh, yeah, Johnny is the Most Unrealible Narrator I have ever seen. Johnny of 2077 is most certainly not the Johnny of 2020's, but this might be a good thing. Maybe the 'real' 2020's Silverhand could never have made the progress the engram did, or become such a good friend and companion for V, or maybe he could have done those things too. We'll never know. I really love this story anyway.

[sidoopa]

playing a new sesh of delta green this week, v excited... heres the new party

[elbiotipo]

Someone once said in the tags on one of my posts that "Asimov was the serious science fiction guy and Heinlein was the whee space opera guy" and I almost deleted my blog.

[kieuecaprie]

On a whim, I decided to play on a different fork of Space Station 14 after a particularly rough round on Salamander (It's been getting highpop lately so it's been pure chaos and it's hard to keep in character as Adalite, a skittish and sweet reptilian, when so many bad things are happening.).

After hearing a good first impression of it from a friend, I chose to play on the Delta-V server and ported Adalite over to get my hours in.

First shift was a latejoin as a janitor, pretty much was uneventful, I just wanted to hop on to get myself situated with the community. And because I could not play Janitor on WizDen, lmao, that role is about as hard to get into as AI is right now.

Second shift was extended and I wrote up a greentext-like story to explain what happened. Feel free to click the read more:

> Be me, Adalite Tosimizu, Janitor aboard the station Lighthouse in the Delta-V sector > Just an average shift, clean stuff up, pick stuff up, dump it > Recycler windows kept breaking. Adalite's knowledge of building comes in handy and a reinforced window is created > Befriend a clown who fell into disposals (They were later called out by CC for not being clown-y enough) > Head to Epi to deal with a spill that cannot be cleaned with water. > It's potassium 💀 > I use a cleanade after failing and everything is a-okay! 👍 > I crit 💀 > Get taken to medical by the Mystagogue > It was just radiation > Okay, everything is good again! 😄 > Take a break to play Vamo Alla Flamenco on the guitar that was left lying around. > Vibe for a moment until… > Be… me? Adalite? Huh? ❓❓❓ > Confusion abound as both Adalites check each other out. > Turns out the paradox anomaly is just as confused as I am. > We immediately hit it off! 😀 > Do an impromptu team-building exercise with the slime coming out of the vents. > Holy shit, my clone is so nice! > Continue as normal, just now there's another me, I guess. She seems chill, so… > An explosion happens in north-west maints... 💥 > Decide to foolishly go investigate. Bad idea. > Nearly crit myself again, scrambling to escape maints with an emergency crowbar. 😰 > Comms light up. It's Nukies. 😰😰😰 > Head to bar to hole up for a while, meet my clone again. > Explain to her what happened, break down crying from nearly dying again. She consoles Adalite. 🤗🤗 > Everything appears to be normal again, lone-op got got, so it's just a little messing around with the new speed boots Epi made for everyone! (They had 20) > It's evac time. Shuttle was not recalled. > Head to the shuttle with Adalite and sit down. > Shorkie got captured in the chaos 😭🦈 > Make it to CentComm with Adalite and head for the bar for some peace and quiet. > We chat for a little bit before I realize I lost my blue shork in the chaos. 😔 > She gives up her pink shork and we end the round hitting each other with our own Weh-Wehs. > tmw it was an admin who was playing Adalite's paradox anom this entire time.

>Be me, KieueCaprie, sitting in lobby lamenting how scary and cool the paradox anom was. >See this in OOC:

😭

For the uninitiated, Paradox Anomaly is a midround ghost role exclusively on Delta-V which makes a complete clone of a random crew member. Your goal is simple: * Befriend yourself and make sure they get out alive * Kill and replace yourself from the universe you found yourself in. * Make it back to Central Command alive and unrestrained.

SIKE! It's not simple! You cannot greentext as a Paradox Anomaly! You basically get a choice of RP branches. It's pretty cool and to see it be used on me in my second shift on Delta V was both scary and cool, and heartwarming when it turned out the paradox anomaly was really sweet, just like Adalite.

Maybe I'll check out the other forks too someday but having a good first experience in Delta V is really something. Think there's RMC14 and Frontier I'd like to check out.

[gremoria411]

Mobile Suit Generations in the Universal Century

Alright, another lineage post, kinda (I will finish that 00 one eventually).

Now in my post about how the Zaku series changed over time, I mentioned briefly that I don’t really see the Universal Century Gundam series as being much of a lineage, primarily because it’s an absolute mess. However, I do want to do a post talking about the Gundam “line” in some more detail at some point. So I thought I’d make this post beforehand as a sort of preliminary excercise. Because it’s rather difficult to talk about Gundams in universal century without talking about Mobile Suit Generations themselves.

So, What are Mobile Suit Generations?

In brief; as mobile suit technology in Universal Century developed, there were a number of concepts that would revolutionise the entire field, and lead to mobile suit design being completely different as time went on. New technologies, new theories, new design ethos, that sort of thing. And because Gundam units were so often cutting-edge, these new ideas would typically be applied to them. A new generation represents a massive leap forward for the technology, meaning that development occurred very quickly. I’ve thrown around the terms before, typically when talking about fourth-generation mobile suits, but I figured I’d do a post outlining the different mobile suit generations, what their characteristics are, give some examples and talk about any noteworthy oddities.

Disclaimer: as it ever is with UC, there’s a lot that doesn’t divide cleanly here. Some mobile suits are easier to categorise than others, and there can be a lot of overlap between the generations, so I’ll be looking more at broad trends than categorising everything. I’m also gonna skip over a lot of detail here in the name of this post actually being of reasonable length.

First Generation Mobile Suits

Named retroactively and also the easiest to categorise. First-Generation mobile suits encompasses every mobile suit built prior to the Gryps War - Zaku’s, GM’s, RX-78’s, Pale Riders, the Gundam Development Project - all First-Gen mobile suits. First-Gen’s a broad category because it’s every suit on both sides of the OYW, and because mobile suits were still a very new technology there was an absolute range on design ethos and styles. First-Generation mobile suits really only share a timeframe of manufacture, there isn’t really much else to tie them together.

Second Generation Mobile Suits

The only (technically) Mobile Suit Generation to straight-up replace its predecessor and also one of only two generations to incorporate actual definitions (at least as far as I can tell). While the later generations tended to focus on one aspect of mobile suits, Second-Generation mobile suits were an all-around improvement over the second generation. They were characterised by three main features:

The movable frame - rather than just providing structure as was the case previous, the movable frame incorporates all the critical components required to actually move the unit, with the weapons armour and propellant tanks being externalised. This allows for easier maintenance, greater mobility and improved energy efficiency.

360-degree panoramic cockpit and linear seat - technically two improvements, but a “better cockpit” in a nutshell. The 360-degree panoramic cockpit allowed for a much greater field of view for the pilot, especially when compared to the old, cramped cockpits of the OYW, while the linear seat helped reduce the effect of g-forces on the pilot (and also made it easier to eject in the case of being shot down).

Gundarium y alloy - one of several refined versions of the original Gundarium used in the RX-78 series, Gundarium y was lightweight and durable, making it the armour of choice for second-generation mobile suits, allowing them to shrug off blows that would be lethal to earlier models, while remaining manoeuvrable enough that they could dodge such blows.

The most famous Second-Generation mobile suits would be the Gundam Mk-II and the Rick Dias, despite the fact that they each lacked one feature from the above list (the Mk-II had the older titanium alloy ceramic composite armour, whereas the Rick Dias lacked a movable frame). As previously mentioned, Second-generation mobile suits became the benchmark going forwards, and this wasn’t changed until the advent of miniaturised mobile suits in the U.C. 110’s. The Jegan, which would be the mainline mobile suit for the federation for over sixty years, was a Second-Generation mobile suit, typically likened to a mass-produced Gundam Mk-II.

Which brings us to our first oddity I want to talk about - the Dowas Custom. The original Dowas was the final production unit of the Zeon’s Dom line during the One Year War. The precise shakedown of their use and deployment is unclear - the Dowas is derived from the Rick Dom II, which was part of the latewar United Maintenance Plan, but there are reports of Dowas Desert types conducting operations in the wake of the Battle of Odessa - they could be early prototypes, or the Desert units came first and were later refined into the regular Dowas, or the Pezun Dowadge doesn’t count because it wasn’t a production unit…….

Anyway, at least one Dowas unit was brought to Axis by Zeon remnants fleeing A Baoa Qu, where it would be refined and upgraded with Axis’ latest technologies, and then supplied to the nascaent AEUG. That unit was the MS-09SS Dowas Custom, seen in Anaheim Laboratory Log. I won’t spoil the precise details of the hand-off, but you can probably guess from the colour scheme that it involves a certain individual who’s never heard of this Char Aznable fella, dear me no.

But the reason I’m talking about the Dowas Custom here is that it would be reverse-engineered in order to create the Rick Dias, one of the first Second-Generation Mobile suits. But where does that leave the Dowas Custom? Is it First-Gen, or Second-Gen? Well, it’s got Gundarium Alloy Armour (presumably y, since it’s the best one), however we know it doesn’t have a movable frame - neither the original Dom, nor its successor the Rick Dias incorporate one, so it’s very unlikely it has one. So then we come to the cockpit, and I’ve genuinely no idea what kind it employs. So I tend to consider it as an in-between, generation wise.

Third-Generation Mobile Suits

Transformable mobile suits, in a nutshell. Transformable mobile suits were considered an huge advantage during the gryps war, as they allowed for faster deployment, increased scouting range and, in many cases, were able to be transferred from Earth to space more easily than standard mobile suits. The latter half of the Gryps War and early stages of the First Neo Zeon War (Zeta Gundam to ZZ Gundam), are typically considered the golden age of Transformable mobile suits, with such luminaries such as the Zeta Gundam, Bawoo, Messala and Gabthley. Due to the aforementioned advantages, Third-Gen suits continued to develop after this period, giving rise to the Rezel and Delta Plus seen during Unicorn.

Interestingly, what is technically the first Third-Generation mobile suit, the Delta Gundam, was laid down during the early stages of the Gryps War but never built, simply because Anaheim couldn’t figure out how to make the frame work until Kamille Bidan managed to fix the problems with the Zeta, at which point Anaheim was so busy with other projects (like the Zeta Project) that they didn’t have time to review the Delta Gundam until after the war.

However, it is nice to have at least one generation with the relatively simple description of “if it transforms, it’s probably a third-generation suit”

Right?

If it wasn’t for this fucking thing.

Cards on the table, I really like the Gundam Mk-V. It’s nice. But, maddeningly, it’s also one of the only suits that we have an actual, in-universe definition for which mobile suit generation it falls into - “A third-generation mobile suit with the firepower of a fourth”. So it’s a third-generation mobile suit that doesn’t transform. What. Also, It’s the only thing that’s like this - The Gaza-C is a third-gen, because it can transform - The Jegan is a second-gen, because it doesn’t fit into third or fourth-gen categories. Why is a non-transforming suit a third-gen? Very annoying. Based on this, I’m led to conclude that what qualifies a suit as a member of the Third-Generation *has* to be something to do with frame structure, not necessarily transformation, given that the Mark-V doesn’t transform (Or it’s an error on the part of whoever wrote the description).

Fourth Generation Mobile Suits

Speaking of, I should really define fourth generation mobile suits, shouldn’t I? In one word: firepower. Fourth-Generation mobile suits were a product of greatly improved generator output, plus several noteworthy developments in Newtype tech. Any Newtype-specialist mobile suit after the gryps war is most likely part of the Fourth-Generation. The best-known fourth-generation mobile suits would be the ZZ Gundam, S Gundam and Döven Wolf. Axis was a major leader in Fourth-Gen tech, with such units as the Hamma-Hamma and, of course, the Qubeley. Several of these mobile suits were also combiners, such as the aforementioned Gundam’s, though this was later dropped as it led to compatibility and maintenance issues. Fourth-Generation mobile suits were also comparatively rare compared to those of earlier generations - likely due to the rarity of the newtypes that were typically their favoured pilots. The Döven Wolf has the distinction of being one of the few mass-produced Fourth-Generation mobile suits, likely because Axis had the resources to devote to it. Fourth-Generation mobile suits are also unique in that we (arguably) see an upper limit to the technology - the Gundam Unicorn, which is pretty goddamn scary.

Fifth-Generation Mobile Suits

A very easy one here, a) there’s only two mobile suits classed as fifth-generation at present - the Xi Gundam and the Penelope; and b) it’s got a nice, simple definition - fifth-generation mobile suits are equipped with a Minovsky craft system, allowing for unrestricted flight within the atmosphere.

The Minovsky Craft system is essentially how Gundam deals with all those horribly un-aerodynamic flying mobile armours - they incorporate minovsky craft systems, allowing for flight within the atmosphere (like the Psycho Gundam and the Adzam). The Xi Gundam and Penelope however, are actually light and aerodynamic, meaning that they can function more as mobile interceptors as opposed to flying city blocks. Honestly, I don’t have much more to say on this one.

Miniaturised Mobile Suits

Not really a generation per se, but I figured I’d cover my bases here. Miniaturised mobile suits were pioneered by SNRI, the Earth Federation’s in-house weapon development team, in around the UC 90’s to UC 100’s (such as the Loto and Heavygun). It eventually became standard practice after SNRI development data was stolen in UC 116, allowing other manufacturers to develop miniaturised mobile suits.

The main distinctions between miniaturised mobile suits and their forebears is, well, they were smaller. The Gundam F90 stood at only 14.8 meters tall compared to the original RX-78’s 18 meter height. This was due to a miniaturisation of the thermonuclear reactor used in mobile suits, and the development on new armour materials that allowed the armour and mobile frame to be made lighter without compromising its structural strength. Miniaturised mobile suits also used less resources than traditional ones to construct, allowing militaries to get more bang-for-their-buck, as it were (though given the prevalence of large mobile armours in late UC, being able to spend those resources elsewhere may also have something to do with it).

[uselessdevice]

@hvbris // & SAMANTHA

There wasn't much that made Rufus apprehensive. But after the things he'd witnessed, everything he'd seen and done...the thought of talking about it made his skin crawl. His mind felt empty and overflowing at the same time.

How did you even begin to describe it? His report had been written mechanically, doing his best to shut down from the emotions attached to the mission. But that was easy with nothing but a screen in front of him.

Rufus knocked the office door before poking his head into the room.

"Agent Jacobs? Mornin'. I got your letter."