Earth Broadcasts Its Location To The Greater Universe. Almost Immediately, First Contact Is Initiated

I've slowly been chipping away at drawing scenes from that imaginary Muppet retelling of the Princess Bride, figured it was about time to share what I've drawn on Tumblr!

The duality of man is thinking “children cannot help themselves and we all need to be patient with them as they explore what it means to be human in public” and also “damn, I wish this crying baby was not on the plane rn :/“

Even corporate paramilitaries need warships in TTT -- this express freighter has been refit with a much more power-dense reactor and AShMs (lasers weren't in the budget) -- it's actually substantially better than the typical patrol craft fielded by first rate naval powers (and that's the point). It's the sort of vessel that is mean enough to ignore anything short of an actual warship without causing undue concern to the people who do have actual warships. It's also vastly superior to most craft fielded by pirates and criminal organizations.

The reactor refit would've been a no expenses spared item bought off a great power's navy with a lot of concessions and begging. Very humiliating for a huge organization but the results are undeniable.

That was ambiguous. Like, they mostly aren't shipping stuff. It's more like a '''fun''' combination of agribusiness and extractive colonial projects. The East India company was bad enough without a nuclear arsenal as large as USA's [on this vessel alone 24x 500 kiloton warheads and 40x 2 kiloton defensive warheads (dialable down to >.1 kiloton but rated to carry as many as 3x that number]

I am still settling on the exact details but the engines are high end PIT or MPD so there's enough thrust for a decent amount of operational maneuverability to set up favorable fights or run down targets with empty tanks. The missiles themselves are fairly impressive post-revolution designs -- bigger than the standard MBE-pattern AShM and capable of doing between 15-17km/s depending on payload and a sensor suite that supports a long chase. The sort of people this ship is meant to fight are mostly not capable of reaching out and touching somebody from that distance and don't have the tools to engage (moderately) sophisticated submunitions from long distance. People who want to do something about a ship like this will either bring a destroyer, suck up to a bigger friend who can bring one, or try to jump it well inside its reach (probably suicidal but undeniably effective). It's not really viable as a mainline warship but conventional patrol craft fielded by actual states are often NTR/NEP hybrids for similar reasons. They are not very capable warships but are designed to cruise efficiently and (like this ship) meet their targets when they have mostly empty tanks. You don't really use ships like that in a peer war but the space traffic environment in TTT is hellishly complicated so you need to be able to efficiently cover a lot of ground to ensure customs, biosecurity, and access to strategic resources.

“i’m a fearsome indestructible monster of lore whose one shocking weakness is fire” buddy everyone’s weakness is fire

“Sir, World of Warcraft subscriptions just jumped by 2.3 billion” “Billion with a ‘B’? Where did they come from?” “Well, all the new traffic is routed through the Deep Space Array. It appears we’ve made first contact. Or, at least Thrall has…”

Great addition

Earth broadcasts its location to the greater universe. Almost immediately, first contact is initiated - not by benevolent beings or warmongering conquerors, but by alien salesmen, telemarketers, and scam artists.

You’ve been trapped in this time loop for centuries, and an attempted “perfect run” decades in the making has failed to break the loop. Frustrated, you decide to go scorched earth on everyone and everything around you. The next day, to your horror, you wake up to find the loop has been broken.

Lol

It’s always exciting to add to the manual.

Talking to a customer about classic children’s lit and how many of them firmly believe that fresh air and sunshine will cure any number of unspecified Victorian illnesses. I mentioned The Secret Garden and how much I like that the protagonists are basically just feral gremlin children who are very unpleasant to be around until they somehow manage to socialize each other.

Then I said, out loud, “on a scale of Sarah Crewe to Mary Lennox, how well did you handle being raised by a nanny in Edwardian India,” and realized that tumblr really has ruined my speech patterns for all time.

“What do you mean you don’t put a miniature explosion spell in your gun?” “What do you mean you don’t use gunpowder-based propellant for your gun?”