Sierra

The Last Laugh

I'll push a nomination in the direction of Willy Vereb. He's done this space NRP thing once or twice before. ;) Probably the worthiest candidate here, and did a fair amount of the heavy lifting these past couple days of your absence. I could probably take up that mantle too but I have a policy against self-nomination, usually being a self serving conflict of interest and all.

The Last Laugh

That's opening a can of worms that I've never once seen end well in all my years in RP. I'd make a sweeping generalization like "nothing except hyperdreads can be significantly larger than 6000 meters" and leave it at that.

EDIT: To better clarify my thoughts: design doctrines are going to be wildly different across military forces. On one hand, you're liable to create hurt feelings if someone ends up getting caught on the wrong side of arbitrary thresholds. On another, by creating upper bounds, you're inevitably going to have minmaxers going right up to the line to maximize their power.

Looking for an alliance of sorts

The Last Laugh

I'mma be blunt, that has about ten different powergaming red flags all over it and it's liable to get shot down.

The Last Laugh

@Nate1008@ClocktowerEchos So I'm not @Ozerath, but I do have an important question.

How will other players be interacting with those factions beyond just annihilating them? NRP games generally include strong political components on top of just waging war. There is more to a nation than just the military force, even if that's a component we'll see a lot of.

The Last Laugh

I finished the history up, though I elected to trim the bit about helping someone else because it just kind of flowed to omit it. I also got a blurb together for the dreadnought.

Expand:

History

The Alduuri people, particularly those who enlist in the armed forces, are proud and capable. To say that subjugation by the Ashtar went over poorly is an understatement. Much of the Imperial Navy was not about to bow to the mind meddling of those who imagine themselves superior. The Navy flew, readying its fleets to show the Ashtar just who the Alduuri were and remind them that they would never bow.

To call the resulting “battle” a massacre would be a disservice to massacres. A thousand Alduuri warships and hundreds of thousands of the Navy’s finest arrived at a meager fringe system of the Ashtar’s territorial holdings, orbiting opposite just twelve Ashtar cruisers. Warships quite literally evaporated under the incoming fire. Almost all of the Alduuri Imperial Navy was slaughtered to a man, wholly reduced to atoms, all to merely disable a single Ashtar cruiser.

The injury suffered on that fateful day was not soon forgotten. When the damned psychics released their deathgrip on the galaxy at large, the Alduuri people were split. There were a few whose fighting spirit had truly been crushed, abandoning the pride of the Alduuri for more peaceful, hedonistic ways. Many were ready for revenge. The sting of their loss had done nothing but fester in the century that had followed it. Just as many felt it was pointless to try. They were free now, and there was no point sending their infant naval forces back to the slaughterhouse.

The galaxy took mere months to explode around them. Those who desired for blood soon shifted their sights from an impossible adversary to many more very manageable targets. Manageable, at least, to the Navy at full strength. Almost no reconstruction had taken place during the subjugation of the Ashtar, and the number of war-ready, FTL-capable spacecraft in the whole of the Empire could be counted on two hands. So they bit their tongues, sat on their hands, and waited.

Biding their time gave an opportunity to rebuild a standing naval force. The Imperial Navy put together a technological marvel of a fighting force in just four years. Having thrown away their entire naval arm at the dawn of Ashtar subjugation, their newly constructed forces were bleeding edge military technology in stark contrast to the archaic fleets most nations were busily beating each other with. Though the Alduuri industrial complex was a powerhouse and the Empire was far from a minor player on the galactic stage, four years was grossly insufficient to construct a naval force that could rival the larger powers at war. Advanced as it was, the lack of training of officers and sheer lack of quantity would come to haunt it.

The military veterancy unanimously held that these new ship classes could face down two adversaries of equivalent classification and emerge decisively victorious. When the Alduuri Imperial Navy took to the battlespace for the first time in over a century, they were not so fortunate as to be faced with two to one odds. The fleets of <someone> outnumbered the reconstructed navy by nearly five to one.

For the second time, the Imperial Navy would fight to the last ship. Despite attempting to fall back into Imperial territory after the harsh realization that they were simply not eliminating enemy ships fast enough, the fleet was pursued into the orbital defense layers of <planet>. The price to fully knock out the fleet was exceedingly high, massive casualties coming from both the technological prowess of the warships and the ruthless power of the orbital defenses. Nonetheless, The Empire of Alduur was once again stripped of its naval superiority. The mistake of rushing into battle half-cocked would not be repeated again.

Yet again, the Alduuri Empire bided their time. Yet again, there was political infighting. Their predisposition to conquest and conflict had brought them nothing but death and devastation. At first, the naval reconstruction effort was solely focused on ensuring the national defense. Even the perpetually-ongoing modernization of ground forces was halted for a time. It was the cessation of hostilities, ironically, that opened the eyes of the pacificists to the harsh reality. You clawed your way to the top of the food chain, or you bowed to those that did.

The people of Alduur do not bow. The emissaries’ information that the treaty being drafted would apply to them whether they came to the table or not solidified the spirit of the Alduuri just as the Great War had done before. No one was going to stand up for them. Either they fought for themselves or they would be at the mercy of others. Weary as the entire nation was from building a navy from scratch, they forged on, unwilling to be subservient to the whims of other powers.

While over half the fleet lost to <someone> was scuttled to avoid capture of their modern naval technology, the rest had gone down in the orbit of <planet> and was readily salvaged. Most ships were repaired and brought back to fighting strength in no time at all. These recovered ships were the early core of the national defense. Production continued at full burn, producing the latest iterations of already-modern ship classes. While it still does not rival the biggest powers in the galaxy for size, the Alduuri Imperial Navy has always, since the end of Ashtar subjugation, fielded bleeding edge warships. If their indomitable fighting spirit is their greatest weapon, then their military technology is its ammunition.

---

Dreadnoughts:
Leviathan-class dreadnought -- A modern navy requires modern dreadnoughts. The Leviathan series of dreadnought is not the most gargantuan ship in the galaxy, but was still the largest ship of the Alduuri Imperial Navy, 2,371 meters from engine cowls to prow, when the lead ship was laid down near the end of the Great War. Had it come into service in time, and the Navy waited for its completion to engage, their fate during the war could have been very different. The Leviathan series features a ship-length reciprocating ion accelerator to power its main weapon: a heavy ion beam. The weapon only existed as a paper concept during the Great War and its viability remained uncertain even partway through construction, requiring multiple design changes to accommodate. It slices through ships as if armor is nonexistent. Though older than most modern naval technology, it remains an engineering marvel today. A formidable array of typical Alduuri railgun batteries serve as a secondary armament for once. Despite its size, it is too densely packed to carry capital-class torpedoes and their multi-megaton payloads. The ship incorporates four fusion stellarators: two to feed the main drive engines, maneuvering systems, and power shielding, defense grid, and inertial stabilizers; and two more to supply power to the main offensive weapon systems.
In Service: AMS Leviathan, AMS Kraken, AMS Cthulu, AMS Jörmungandr
Laid Down: AMS Architeuthis, AMS Charybdis, AMS Gojira, AMS Hydra, AMS Unagi

While utterly annihilating the navy TWICE seems cruel and puts the Alduuri at a severe numerical disadvantage, it does give the benefit of the entire fleet being state of the art. All of their ships were designed from scratch in the last 30 years, rather than putting century-old designs back into production to facilitate a war effort.

The Last Laugh

Still working on this (it only goes up to the first few years of the Great War), but here's a preview of some history.

Expand:

The Empire of Alduur

Battered, Never Broken.

The Alduuri people, particularly those who enlist in the armed forces, are proud and capable. To say that subjugation by the Ashtar went over poorly is an understatement. Much of the Imperial Navy was not about to bow to the mind meddling of those who imagine themselves superior. The Navy flew, readying its fleets to show the Ashtar just who the Alduuri were and remind them that they would never bow.

To call the resulting “battle” a massacre would be a disservice to massacres. A thousand Alduuri warships and hundreds of thousands of the Navy’s finest arrived at a meager fringe system of the Ashtar’s territorial holdings, orbiting opposite just twelve Ashtar cruisers. Warships quite literally evaporated under the incoming fire. Almost all of the Alduuri Imperial Navy was slaughtered to a man, wholly reduced to atoms, all to merely disable a single Ashtar cruiser.

The injury suffered on that fateful day was not soon forgotten. When the damned psychics released their deathgrip on the galaxy at large, the Alduuri people were split. There were a few whose fighting spirit had truly been crushed, abandoning the pride of the Alduuri for more peaceful, hedonistic ways. Many were ready for revenge. The sting of their loss had done nothing but fester in the century that had followed it. Just as many felt it was pointless to try. They were free now, and there was no point sending their infant naval forces back to the slaughterhouse.

The galaxy took mere months to explode around them. Those who desired for blood soon shifted their sights from an impossible adversary to many more very manageable targets. Manageable, at least, to the Navy at full strength. Almost no reconstruction had taken place during the subjugation of the Ashtar, and the number of war-ready, FTL-capable spacecraft in the whole of the Empire could be counted on two hands. So they bit their tongues, sat on their hands, and waited.

Biding their time gave an opportunity to rebuild a standing naval force. The Imperial Navy put together a technological marvel of a fighting force in just four years. Having thrown away their entire naval arm at the dawn of Ashtar subjugation, their newly constructed forces were bleeding edge military technology in stark contrast to the archaic fleets most nations were busily beating each other with. Though the Alduuri industrial complex was a powerhouse and the Empire was far from a minor player on the galactic stage, four years was grossly insufficient to construct a naval force that could rival the larger powers at war. Advanced as it was, the lack of training of officers and sheer lack of quantity would come to haunt it.

The military veterancy unanimously held that these new ship classes could face down two adversaries of equivalent classification and emerge decisively victorious. When the Alduuri Imperial Navy took to the battlespace for the first time in over a century, they were not so fortunate as to be faced with two to one odds. The fleets of <someone> outnumbered the reconstructed navy by nearly five to one.

For the second time, the Imperial Navy would fight to the last ship. Despite attempting to fall back into Imperial territory after the harsh realization that they were simply not eliminating enemy ships fast enough, the fleet was pursued into the orbital defense layers of <planet>. The price to fully knock out the fleet was exceedingly high, massive casualties coming from both the technological prowess of the warships and the ruthless power of the orbital defenses. Nonetheless, The Empire of Alduur was once again stripped of its naval superiority. The mistake of rushing into battle half-cocked would not be repeated again.

I did totally decide to be sadistic to my poor empire (I still love them). I figure they'll spend the rest of the war using part of their military industrial complex to produce someone else's ships in support, while the rest of it steadily rebuilds their core navy force. The Treaty of Detente would widely be viewed as a suggestion and careful measures to continue construction of powerful capital class warships would be taken. I expect they'd be given a little bit of slack considering they were completely stripped of naval forces twice, but they'd still be very carefully walking on eggshells.

The Last Laugh (Sci-Fi NRP)

The Alduuri Imperial Navy bows to no man ... well, what's left of it that is. I haven't decided if I want to pulverize it during the Great War or during Ashtar subjugation ... or both if I'm feeling particularly sadistic towards my own creations.

✡ Welcome to Salem, Massachusetts ✡

Imma go ahead and keep an eye on this. It might be a worthwhile return to writing for me after many months out of practice.

Fumes of War: A Dieselpunk RP

Bold move to ping me considering how scarce on RPG I've been ... but I eventually saw it so I'd say that strategy panned out well.

Now remind me, which game archetype (or typically combination thereof) best describes this? Writing game, Stats game, or Dice game? Is it masterful prose, meticulously kept stat sheets, or Lord RNGesus who will be deciding the fates of nations?