Editorial: Back From The Brink
There’s a real atmosphere of relief aboard RSS Avenger right now. We were right out at the fringe of uncharted space, in the aptly-named Edge system, and the captain got that look… the one that he gets just before we embark on something particularly stupid. But not this time, it seems. We turned back from our self-appointed mission to explore the vast unknown and instead headed into the relative civilization of the Terra/Sol system.
Of course, this is hardly the most settled region in all of known space, but at least it’s got regular interstellar communications and bars where you can get a decent glass of beer. Quite a lot of beer, as it happens. In fact, we’re just beginning to recover from our stopover the Ukraine Territories, an agricultural region that grows vast amounts of cereal crops, vegetables and assorted other things… and brews, ferments and distils them into all manner of wonderful products.
As usual we’ve poked our noses into things, visited places and sampled foods (and beverages) in order to provide an in-depth look at the great cosmos. We’ve also tried out a few guns and gizmos, and we present the usual reports on what we discovered. Standard disclaimer about the gear we test out and the reports that go with it follows:
We tend to call it as we see it. We may well have got a duff one, or failed to read the manual thoroughly enough, or somehow produced an unfair review for other reasons. It happens; deal with it. On the other hand, we thought that some of the gear we tested was pretty good. Again, we could possibly have been sent the only one in the batch that worked. The crew of RSS Avenger cannot be held responsible for the use, misuse, loss, accidental discharge or unexplained by-product of using the items we review. This way up. Handle with care. Keep out of the reach of children. And all that.
As a result of our visit to the Ukraine, RSS Avenger has developed a slight list to port and is answering the helm unsteadily. But we’re still flying and that’s the main thing, right? We’re headed out to a quieter orbit to sleep off the hangover, and then it’s onward and outward to, well, somewhere. Nobody’s in a fit state to decide yet.
So while we collect our shattered wits, let’s proceed with Starfarer’s Gazette #3. This time around we have a report on some aspects of Terra/Sol itself, reviews of some weaponry we found lying about, plus some other fascinating features you just can’t live without.
This issue of Starfarer’s Gazette contains the following sections:
Okay, let’s get down to business.
Ports of Call
The Terra/Sol System
This place is a bit of an oddity, to say the least. An almost exact duplicate of Earth (and her moon)… yup, that’s a bit strange. Well, don’t look at us for an explanation; we don’t have one/. All we can reliably offer is… we didn’t do it.
The rest of the system isn’t very earth-like at all. There’s a rather nasty not-quite-tidally-locked world called Prometheus located a bit too close to the star, an asteroid belt, a gas giant and a worthless lump of icy rock out halfway to deep space. Few people care about those… and why would they? There’s an actual copy of Earth and her moon in the system! That makes us (yes, we’re insanely paranoid like that) suspicious. What if the incredible Earth-copy was there purely to distract us from something else? No, that’s just silly.
But still…
We headed in towards Terra/Sol itself. After the rainy dump that is Edge, we were looking forward to somewhere a bit more amenable to human existence. But first we had to make a choice. To land or not to land? RSS Avenger is quite capable of putting down at a planetside port, but we normally leave her in orbit and use our shuttles. That wasn’t going to be an option in this system; orbital space is pretty cluttered and their traffic control centres made it very clear that they’d consider us a hazard to navigation if we entered orbit. That translates to an offer to blow us out of the sky if we messed up their traffic patterns.
Yes, that did say traffic control centres. Terra/Sol has several, and they don’t always cooperate very well. This is largely due to politics of course. The official world-spaceport is on the Isle of Wight in Britain, but the nation of New France has an official world-port of their own (or so they claim) and they’ve implemented their own traffic control system to prove it.
Thus we were bombarded with offers to land at either of the official world ports or their associated orbital facilities. Xanadu Station is the official receiving point for shipping into Terra/Sol. It’s an independent city-state registered as a sovereign territory by the Orion Confederation, with regular shuttle services to ports all over Terra/Sol and the rest of the system.
Olympus City is the official receiving point for all traffic into Terra/Sol, at least according to the government of New France. It has regular shuttle services to Porte de Terra in New France and a number of Francophile nations, but oddly enough it’s not possible to get a direct shuttle from Olympus City to much of Terra/Sol, i.e. anywhere that does not recognise Olympus as the main entry point for the system. We found that out after we didn’t go there… but we’re pretty sure that a lot of starfarers get to what they’ve been led to believe is Terra/Sol’s main port and THEN find out that they’ve been suckered.
As we were negotiating the schizophrenic traffic control system, the command crew argued about which port to land at. In the end they flipped a coin but it rolled behind an access panel so we decided on an alternative approach. In addition to the two big orbital stations and their associated ground ports, we had offers to land or dock all over the place. Some of the independent stations and ports looked interesting, especially the seedy Puerto Rico. Any station whose name means ‘rich port’ but is built out of old freighter hulls is a place you go well-armed and ready for trouble. We couldn’t wait.
But in the end the captain decided to put us down on Terra/Sol’s moon, Athena, at Serenity City. Serenity City is an independent city-state in the Sea of Serenity, with a very decent spaceport and low berthing fees. The port wasn’t especially busy, but there were various small in-system passenger and freight vessels on the pads as we approached and a couple of bigger vessels in specialist bays. They looked like grain ships or heavy freighters.
Disembarkation was via a flexible boarding tube into the cleanest starport bus we’ve ever seen, which then took us inside the port buildings. The city is located mostly underground, with just a few structures on the surface. The officials were polite and not too intrusive, though we were searched both physically and electronically for weapons and given a stern lecture about observing local laws and customs regulations.
After that we got into the city proper and decided what to do over a very decent and inexpensive lunch in a portside café. We decided to split up and get a broader picture. Some of us would head planetside, some would check out the other cities of Athena and some would look over Serenity City in some detail.
Me, I was rather liking the beer I had with my meal, so I decided to visit its nation of origin. I booked a shuttle ticket to the Ukraine Territories and discovered that for some reason it costs about half as much to travel between Serenity City and the Ukraine than anywhere else. Turns out there’s a ‘special relationship’ between them rather like that between Olympus Station and New France… only the Ukraine doesn’t actually own Serenity City.
A little more investigation enlightened me. The Ukraine Territories, like most Orion states, supposedly has a republican government. In practice voting is very restricted and the nation has skirted close to censure a few times. Serenity City is independent but closely tied to the Ukraine (though with a far less restrictive form of government) and acts as the ‘acceptable face’ of the Ukraine Territories at times, like a bait-and-switch scam only on an interstellar-politics scale.
Great. So I was headed into a pseudo-dictatorship. Well, at least they make good beer.
The Ukraine TerritoriesI boarded the shuttle with some trepidation, and fought the temptation to fret during the short trip planetside. Instead I looked out of the window, and I’m glad I did. I’ve never been to Earth but like everyone else in the universe, it’s familiar to me from endless images. No wonder we still think of Earth as our spiritual home.
So, as the shuttle rolled and the familiar continents came into view I had a lump in my throat. I was going home. Yes, that’s what it felt like, even though I was born and raised on a space habitat far from Earth and I’ve never been there before. The lump went away, to be replaced with a slightly uneasy feeling when I realised that pretty much every human who visits this place feels the same thing. Maybe we’re supposed to. Maybe someone, or something, wants us to see this place as home. Maybe…
Well, anyway. We came in from roughly northwards, over the North Pole and Baltica. I could see the British Isles and the open ocean beyond, then the patchwork of giant cities and green countryside that is Europe. The broad ribbon of the European Highway, curving south from GrossBerlin towards the Bosporous crossings and into Asia beyond. And then the vast green plains of eastern Europe were below.
As we descended, I realised it wasn’t all green, well, not uniformly. There was golden corn… enormous expanses of it… and a dark greeny-grey in swampy regions. And cities. Huge cities. Between them were towns and villages, huge industrial farms and the occasional little hamlet by a minor road. A goods train was just leaving Ukraine-Kiev as we approached. It was huge, hundreds of wagons long, pulled by an atomic-powered locomotive. And compared to the city, it was a tiny thing.
Ukraine-Kiev, or just Kiev. Capital of the Ukraine Territories. A city of neat road grids and huge city blocks containing vast towers. Some of them are linked by impossibly long road-tubes which have no visible means of support except at the ends. My brain knows there are contragrav units supporting them, but my gut just mewled in terror at the sheer length of unsupported roadway between the towers.
The port is huge, and clearly it serves mainly as a freight and industrial centre. There’s a rail yard at one end of the landing area. Heavy freighters of the sort I’d seen at Serenity City were unloading when I arrived. Huge tracked vehicles crawled about the port carrying maintenance crews and repair bots… and there were tanks on the landing apron. Apparently that’s normal in the Ukraine.
The tanks were unusual, in that they were tracked ground-crawlers rather than fast contragrav strike platforms. Some mounted guns, some missiles. Most were immobile much of the time, but now and then an engine would start up and a vehicle would reposition itself like a restless beast. My theory is that the Ukrainians do this as a broad hint about their national power, but it may be that they simply take spaceport security very, very seriously.
So, it was somewhat nervously that I presented my visitor’s permit and identity documents to a portside receptionist. Yes, a receptionist. A very attractive young woman who smiled a lot and didn’t make any fuss about my documents even though they’re as bogus as hell. I think there was a weapon scanner in the entry gate but it was unobtrusive, and there was no physical search. Of course, I was coming in through the ‘internal’ gate, which is used by local traffic and shuttles from Serenity City. No idea what it’s like coming in from outside the Ukrainian sphere of influence, but I did note that they don’t get much external traffic.
There were uniforms at Kiev Spaceport, of course. Lots of uniforms, all very smart and all very similar. Took me a while to learn to distinguish between port officials, port security, military personnel and the postal service. Seriously, these people suffer from a severe lack of imagination when it comes to designing clothes for their governmental representatives and workers to wear.
I was met in the entry lounge by a very tall man in a rather than a uniform, who spoke to all the passengers – not that there were many – and offered to help sort out any problems they might have. Other ports use greeter bots, but Ukraine-Kiev seems to prefer the personal touch. My new favourite uncle – that’s how this guy came across; he’d really maxed out his people skills – showed me how to use the information terminals and asked what I was wanting to do while I was there. I’d said I was there on ‘non-work related’ business at the gate, so presumably anyone arriving to take up a job in the salt mines or whatever doesn’t get this treatment.
Anyhow, Uncle Dimitri (I have no idea what his name was, but that’s the label I came up with for him) nodded sagely when I said I was writing a piece about the Ukrainian beer and spirits industry. He suggested various ways to sort out travel and a number of people I might contact to arrange visits. I got the impression that I was being nudged towards some more than others, but it was subtle and he didn’t push it. I don’t know if the reasoning was political or an attempt to sell more booze, but there was a definite attempt to manipulate my choices. That said, Uncle Dimitri did not object when I picked some places to visit at random.
And so it was that I ended up aboard a rented contragrav car, headed out from Ukraine-Kiev (that’s the proper name for the capital but everyone calls it just Kiev) and into the countryside. The spires of the city are visible for a long, long way but this land is just so big that the cities fall into it and vanish. I mean, you can see them but they seem somehow insignificant compared to the vast grainlands and forests that cover much of the country. There are many small towns, most of them the heart of an industrial-scale farming project, and these are typical of modern building practice.
Ukrainian towns are little different to those found elsewhere. Well-planned and tidily laid out, with open green spaces between functional but not unattractive buildings. Muted shades of brown and grey are favoured, and these blur into the landscape in a manner that’s really rather pleasing.
It’s not all lovely of course. There are industrial complexes located away from the cities, and at one point I got redirected around a live-fire military training area. But for the most part this Ukraine is much like what I’d heard most of Terra/Sol looks like; lots of open country with areas of massive population density here and there.
The town I visited, which I’ll refer to as Unpronouncableville-Ukraine, or just UVU, was a typical small town surrounded by a single huge grain farm. They grow some other stuff too, but their main output is grain, and I mean a LOT of grain. There’s a landing area for contragrav vehicles and a very good road which is mainly used by the grain trucks, housing and amenities for a few hundred people… and a distillery.
The distillery, as might be expected, makes whisky. That’s whisky, not whiskey – the Ukrainians consider their products to be part of the Scotch family, so no ‘e’ in Whisky for them. The distillery manager made that very clear. Repeatedly. He also explained the process of distillation and their different products.
Proper Scotch whisky uses barley, not grain, but most of the produce from this distillery is grain whisky. You can drink that, and it’ll make the floor hit you in the head, hard. But mainly it’s useful as a mixer. What these people produce is a blend of grain whisky which they make and a small amount of various single-malt whiskies brought in from elsewhere. The result is a pleasing middle-of-the-road blend, with a taste that’s not too complex but interesting enough to drink straight. It’s good as a mixer and also on its own, though Scotch aficionados will tell you that it’s nothing special.
The distillery also makes various special edition blends. We tried a few – by the way, I stayed over for a couple of days and I can remember most of it; this wasn’t a single epic bender – and they were pretty varied. Anyway, these people make a very credible entry-level ‘blended scotch’ product in huge quantities, and they’re proud of it. Rightly so, I think. For the price they charge, this stuff is hazardously drinkable.
Anyway, I took the time between benders to stumble around the town. That is, I did some detailed research into the local culture. First off, there are indeed a lot of rules, but they don’t seem to make people unhappy. There is also a lot of blatant propaganda in entertainment. Most of it is directed at neighbouring Russia, though the Volgograd Dominions and the Republic of the Crimea get their share too. The aim of the propaganda seems to be create suspicion about foreign motives rather than hate, and also to encourage people to be happy without large amounts of consumer goods.
Consumer goods are conspicuously sparse in the shops, though it is still possible to get useful devices like personal communicators and computers. Indeed, they are cheap and readily available if you buy the state-sponsored brands. These, unsurprisingly, are a bit utilitarian and run applications far better than games. Nobody seems to mind all that much however; the lack of consumer toys is compensated for by a real community spirit… and alcohol-based spirits too.
The ordinary folk of the Ukraine are not what you’d call wealthy in terms of goods and money, but their lifestyle isn’t especially hard and they seem to live a good life. Social gatherings are actively encouraged in less-than-subtle propaganda from the government, and they’re fun. These people know how to party, and they have a never-ending supply of excuses to do so.
While I was there, the current one was a farm worker from the town who’d just completed her period with the military reserve, and was now eligible to vote. She’d done six years with the colours as a tank mechanic, six more on active reserve and a final six on the reserve list, training a few times a year. These days she’s a senior agricultural vehicle technician and very well respected. Apparently it’s hard for the common man (or woman, I guess) to complete their full service satisfactorily. If you don’t (and they’re good at making it difficult, I’m told) then you don’t get the benefits package.
So our girl and her friends and family… and the rest of the town plus one starfaring journalist and his hired driver… were celebrating not just completing the tour but also beating the system and wringing a vote out of the upper echelons of society. The obstacles they put in the way of those looking likely to complete their service are clever and subtle, and very few people enter the voting class other than those with the right background. Funny, that.
Not that it mattered. We ate and drank and sang traditional Ukrainian drinking songs from Old Earth, and we were genuinely happy. Oh, and I didn’t get back to the ship on time, so they sent a search party. Who stayed over for a welcome party. And then there was a We-Helped-Fix-The-Grav-Tractor party. And then a farewell party. After that everything became a bit of a blur.
I’m not sure what to make of the Ukraine Territories. It has the makings of a rather nasty totalitarian state, and it’s certainly as undemocratic as you can be and not get kicked out of the Orion Confederation. Half the population are in uniform and there are dozens of armoured divisions posturing on the borders. Skirmishes with the neighbours are not uncommon. The people are fed propaganda and denied the right to vote for a better system unless they jump through eighteen years of government hoops. And they know it.
And yet, somehow, it’s okay. The average family has a modest income and few consumer goods, but they live in a town full of similar people and they have a wealth of friends. They work hard and socialise rather than flaunt their wealth and goods at one another. They really don’t care which of this week’s media celebrities has had surgery or crashed a vehicle while drunk. The state doesn’t give its people much other than stability and protection, but for most people those are all they want; just a chance to live their lives without upheaval or disaster.
So… the Ukraine Territories; A pseudo-totalitarian state where the ignorant masses are kept happy and docile with cheap booze and propaganda… or a pretty decent place to live? I really don’t know.
I suspect the answer is: both.
Slices of Life
Prometheus PlanetsideI sensed a movement behind me and didn’t bother turning. I was in the last seconds of plotting an orbital insertion and I really couldn’t be bothered with gawkers at that point. Besides, it’d probably be Gideon. He likes to lean on my chair and watch me make calculations for some reason.
It was indeed Gideon. “Looks like a dump,” he said, leaning over my chair to peer at the Astrogation and Approach monitor. Gideon is our resident weirdo – beg pardon, Data Systems Specialist – and he’s a bit tiresome at times. “The other planet is all green and blue, except for the white bits at the top and bottom. So why are we landing on this giant desolate wasteland instead of going there?”
“Because it’s a dump, and we’re only fit to land at places like that. Nice green and blue planets don’t give landing permission to ships like ours,” I replied testily. “By the way we do have landing clearance, right?”
“Dump Central says we have permission to land,” Alexzandr said from the command chair. He pointed down-and-for’ard just in case I didn’t know where the planet was.
“Okay,” I replied, waving Gideon away with my left hand. “Descent course laid in, portside beacon tracking on automatic… my work here is done.” I threw up my hands for emphasis.
“Take us down, Petey,” Alexzandr ordered rather grandly. He has this huge rumbly voice which sounds just right coming from such a big guy. Alex really isn’t built for his hobby of rock climbing; you need a knotted-wire frame for that and he’s more the moves-mountains-with-his-hands sort, but there you go.
Petey – Peter Tranniker, former corporate shuttle jock and our pilot ever since we dug this old wreck out of the hillside and made her fly again – sucked his teeth and glanced around in that self-conscious (and not in any way nervous-making) way of his. He eventually nodded. “Okay. The doohickeys are in the green. Mostly. Going down.”
The deck compensators made their usual feeble attempt to keep up with Petey’s lazy manoeuvre, and the rocky desert around Dump Central – I forget what the region was actually called – rolled up to fill our front windows.
“This is Independent Freighter Winged Unicorn, inbound from Xanadu Station,” Alexzandr told Dump Central. “On our way down; see you very soon.”
“Ah… you people DO know we’re being tracked by aerospace defence radar, right? Several sets, one of them in targeting mode…” I reported it just in case. They weren’t really going to shoot at us just for visiting their appalling planet and calling it names. Were they?
“Dump Central – Sorry, they object to being called that – Penn Town Orbital Traffic Control, AKA some guy probably called Bob who works in the local burger bar on the three hundred and fifty-odd days a year when there’s no ships into this dump, says that’s normal. Half the cities on this part of the planet are independent, and they all have some kind of aerospace defences, mainly big missiles. They’ve not shot at anyone for years though, so we can assume they’re not too twitchy.” Alexzandr told us helpfully.
“But hey, let’s stay on our vector, okay?” I added. Petey just nodded.
I was by no means certain we would or even could stay on out vector. Petey is a decent enough kid and a fair pilot, but he’s not very experienced. He was orphaned from some frontier exploration project that got its budget yanked. He just never got any transfer orders. We sort of recruited him because Alex felt sorry for the poor kid hanging around the spaceport waiting to be told what to do. He’d be fine as part of a team but as chief pilot aboard an independent ship, well, let’s just say he’s a bit stretched by the job.
Especially being chief pilot on this ship. I mentioned how we dug her out of a hillside, yeah? Well, she got there because someone flew her into it. She wasn’t in good shape, as you might imagine. And she’d been modified – heavily modified – long before we got hold of her. Most of the cargo area is gone, taken up with extra fuel and drives, plus a mezzanine deck with additional living space.
The original drives are long gone. We have a cobbled-together Supraluminal drive that works well enough, though the way Karl wired it up scares the pants off me. Apparently he did it that way deliberately, which says a lot about his state of mind. We have an original thruster system that’s too damaged to lift us entirely and a backup system that’s erratic when it works at all.
With thruster systems running we’ve got about a g-and-a-half of manoeuvre thrust, and if you really want to be somewhere and don’t mind exploding, there’s a set of plasma-rocket boosters fitted on the top surfaces of the wings. Petey claims he’s seen 4g on the diagnostics but we’ve never pushed more than three. And that time we had a minor explosion, so full throttle is very much reserved for special occasions.
Especially since the deck grav plates are shot, so manoeuvring under high power is very exciting.
We hit the super-thin atmosphere of Prometheus and started picking up some heating. Nothing much, but we were coming in fairly fast for some reason best known to Alexzandr, so my job was to listen to Karl down in the drive suite – go in and take a look around and you’ll see why we call it that – counting off heat stress calculations. We don’t really need to pop that portside seal on the central fuel tank again, so we’re a bit more careful about hull heating than you’d normally expect.
The descent continued more or less according to my flight plan. We were running in on a spiral over Prometheus’ nightside, gradually descending towards one of the small cities of the northern twilight zone. North Greyside, they call it. Prometheus is not quite tidally locked, so most of it gets baked and frozen at regular intervals. This close to the star, it’s a bit unhealthy to be out in the sun, even for a spacecraft, so we used the planet’s shadow to protect us on the way in.
Of course, that makes a conventional approach orbit impossible, so we had to use a powered spiral to keep us on the nightside. And that requires reliable drives… which we don’t have. We had the usual fun with the backup thruster system pulsing in and out and Petey correcting while Alexzandr shouted at Karl over the intercom. After a while Gideon went and sat in the sensor blister and shut the hatch. He has a collection of detective novels in there for when he’s pretending to work or wants to hide from Alex.
Coffee – actually her name is Janet but she goes by ‘Coffee’, mainly because she drinks so much of the stuff – just hides when there’s something to be done. She’s really good at that. I’m not totally sure what Coffee does aboard ship, other than, well, drink coffee. She’s got this whole ‘gunslinger’ thing going on and she did provide a lot of spares and components when we were fixing the ship up – it’s probably best not to ask where they came from – but right at the moment she doesn’t really do anything if she can help it.
Coffee and Gideon disappear whenever there’s something to be done; Alex stomps about searching for them but never seems to figure out where they’ve gone, which leaves the rest of us to do the actual work. The rest being me; Astrogator and dogsbody-general-to-the-masses. Erich; gunner and hammer-man/damage control guy. And Jade; rich college kid. Jade would have been a Navy doctor like daddy wanted by now if she’d not decided to disappear and scrape a living out here on the fringes of civilization. Sort of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
We all have a stake in the ship. Alex is sort of the owner since he got her location and deeds in lieu of money for a job he did. Karl did the brain work in fixing her up and Erich hammered her straight again. Gideon and I reprogrammed the computers and made her fly in the direction her nose was pointing. Jade provided money and licenses and Coffee found us components. Petey makes her fly.
It was Karl who named her though. ‘Might as well find a unicorn and fit wings to it as try to make that thing fly’ he said, and so she got her name – Winged Unicorn. And she flies, more or less. Landing can be something of a problem, however. With that in mind, and with crossed fingers, I handed off the landing vector to Petey, who did his best with it. Flaring to scrub off airspeed on the superthin atmosphere, playing the thrusters and the boosters and God-knows-what, Petey put us down with a tooth-rattling crunch. Better than usual then.
We all sighed, snorted or muttered in relief as Petey locked the flight controls down. “Damage?” asked Alexzandr mildly.
“Yes,” I replied. Alex made a threatening noise so I went on, “Minor according to the board. Some structural, couple of popped connectors.”
“Can we still fly?” Alex demanded.
“Yes, straight-to-the-point guy,” I told him. Out of the windows I could see a huge armoured crawler moving towards us from the bunker that was the only part of Dump Central that protruded above the surface of this Godforsaken planet. The crawler and its trailer had a giant reflective hood supported on a frame, presumably to keep some solar heat and radiation way from the hull.
“Good, we need to get unloaded pronto,” Alex told us. “We need to be off again in nine hours or less.”
“So, no shore leave?” I asked. “I’m positively heartbroken. But what’s the rush? Did we upset someone again?”
“You’re the Astrogator,” Alex told me. “Work it out.”
I did, and pretty quick. Prometheus has two sort of habitable bits, near the poles. Everywhere else is exposed to the full glare of the sun for about a hundred and fifty standard days at a time, then plunged into darkness for the same period. Dawn was approaching, and while it wouldn’t harm us here in the perpetual twilight of the northern polar region, we’d take off straight into the full heat and radiation of the sun. Unhealthy.
We’d cut this pretty fine, which explained the very good fee we were getting for a routine delivery – and also why Alex hadn’t told us the details until we arrived. I considered shooting him, but instead settled for jumping out of my seat. “I’ll find Gideon and Coffee,” I declared. “We’ll need to start unloading pretty quick.”
Petey tapped a control, switching my display onto the main screen. It showed the dawn racing across the surface of Prometheus towards us, intense heat churning the superthin atmosphere up and melting the surface of a dust sea. Nobody fancied taking off through that.
“What if we just go planetside, wait out the day period in the city?” Petey asked. “The ship would be in shadow the whole time, it’d be fine.”
“Remember how we called this place Dump Central? It’s a mining settlement. Population eight thousand. Here, on this rock,” I replied. “The day period is a hundred and fifty standard days. Still want to stay?”
Petey turned to his console and began his pre-flight checks.
“Good call,” I said over my shoulder as I scuttled out the door. Nine hours to unload and get back into space and in the shadow of this horrible, crappy little planet. Not too difficult unless we ran into problems unloading or something on the ship broke again.
I wasn’t optimistic.
People, Places and Things
OffRoad Solutions
OffRoad Solutions (ORS) is a pretty big firm, with manufacturing facilities and outlets right across the Orion Confederation. Its specialist niche is, as the name suggests, offroad vehicles. This definition is taken fairly loosely, in that OffRoad also manufacture trailers, robots, maintenance packs and other things that are not, strictly speaking, vehicles but are either associated with them or are similar in function.
What all of OffRoad’s products have in common is that they run on wheels (or support something that runs on wheels) and are capable of genuine off-road use. ORS bases much of its marketing on the concept that many other ‘offroad’ vehicles are actually town cars for rich and pretentious people, and fall apart when they hit a kerb. ORS has built its brand identity around the fact that only people requiring serious offroad capability buy its vehicles.
Of course, this has made ORS products incredibly attractive to a certain kind of ‘town’ user, who just has to have the ‘real thing’ even though they will never drive it to anything more challenging than a barbeque in a grassed picnic area. However, if these people are willing to pay OffRoad’s prices for their pretensions, ORS will take their money whilst making fun of them in its ad campaigns.
Most of ORS’ offerings are fairly typical rough-terrain trucks and personal transports, though a range of heavier vehicles are also offered. These include specialist military or paramilitary vehicles, long-distance offroad transports for personnel or goods movement, and exploration vehicles. The ‘RoughTruck’ range is very popular in the new-colony marketplace, providing reliable transportation for a variety of tasks. RoughTrucks are used to carry equipment to set up new settlements or outposts, to bring produce in from farms, and pretty much every task in between.
ORS also has a subsidiary, OffRoad Combat Solutions (ORCS), which produces exclusively military vehicles. Where ORS products include a number of vehicles that may be useful to a military force, ORCS supplies combat and combat-support vehicles. Its wheeled armoured cars range from a fairly basic ‘scout car’ with a turreted 20mm cannon to an eight-wheel gun-carrier mounting a 100mm howitzer. Missile-armed tank-destroyers and air defence vehicles are also available, along with armoured recovery vehicles and armoured personnel carriers.
ORCS does not sell to private customers, but does a lot of business in the mercenary and corporate sectors. Sales are also strong to military forces of small states, where purchasing a family of vehicles off-the-shelf is usually more attractive than developing something similar at home.
ORS’ civilian and paramilitary vehicles are far more common than the military units of their subsidiary, and can be encountered almost anywhere. They are most frequently seen on relatively habitable ‘frontier’ worlds or outback regions of more settled planets, and in some cases every single vehicle in a young colony has come from the factories of ORS.
Engin Combat Support, RMF
Engin Combat Support (ECS) is a Registered Mercenary Force (RMF) with a good track record for reliability and efficiency. Rather than the more usual security or strike-force niche, ECS specialises in providing support to other units. These are usually indigenous forces.
The rationale behind the decision to operate in this role is that it is relatively easy to raise and equip a basic infantry force which can fight passably well, but creating a combat support framework takes time and requires skills that many commanders lack. Numerous conflicts have been lost through logistics failures or the inability to deal with a particular obstacle.
Engin Combat Support employs enough personnel to fill out about three battalions, though it is not organised in such a conventional manner. Instead, personnel are trained for a primary role and cross-trained to be able to cope with one or more others. They are grouped into administrative companies, which vary in size from just 20 or so personnel to a more typical 100 or so. Administrative companies are simply a pool from which field units are put together, however. They deal with training, pay, leave and the like but never undertake combat operations.
For deployment, Engin forms appropriate units. These are usually of platoon or company size, with a suitable command structure and whatever additional personnel are deemed necessary for the security of the experts fielded. Engin does not hire out a specific number of personnel but instead contracts to provide a suitable service, and will not send out specialists without an adequate force of combat troops to protect them. Guarantees by the client rarely carry any weight with Engin’s staff; their people are protected by their own or they do not deploy.
Similarly, Engin vigorously resists any attempt to push its personnel into a role they are not deployed for. Thus although ECS may have deployed a couple of armoured cars to protect an engineering detachment, its field commander will refuse any order to send those vehicles to the assistance of local forces nearby. He might make an attack if he feels that this will best protect his own command, but he will never allow his units to fall victim to ‘mission creep’.
This insistence on sticking to their jobs has annoyed some of Engin’s clients, but the firm maintains that if the client wanted combat troops they should have hired them instead. It would be cheaper, for one thing. This does not mean that Engin’s forces are non-combatants. Most personnel are recruited from among the veterans of national armed forces, with some promising recruits coming in via an outsourced training programme. These are usually college graduates who possess necessary skills and are amenable to training as mercs.
Engin’s services include (but are not limited to) electronic warfare and intelligence gathering, combat engineering, logistics, air defence, armoured vehicle recovery and maintenance, and operational planning. The latter is carried out by a small team of advisors who learned their trade in the armies of various nations or on the mercenary circuit.
Most of Engin’s manpower and vehicles are optimised for the logistics role, since this absorbs significant numbers and requires a lower level of specialism. Many specialists can be encountered riding shotgun aboard a logistics truck when not working in their usual role, and this is one reason why Engin insists on deploying adequate security for its operations – a truck driver is relatively easy to replace but an electronic warfare technician is not.
ECS uses a range of rugged paramilitary vehicles for support operations and the ‘Moray’ six-wheel armoured car for most of its security and weapons-carrier tasks. The Moray can be used as an armoured personnel carrier, air defence vehicle, electronic warfare platform or light engineering vehicle. It is also an effective combat vehicle when equipped for ground action, but most of ECS’ Morays are not. These that are, generally mount medium to heavy autocannon and are set up to deal with infantry and light-vehicle threats.
The only ECS units likely to engage the enemy directly are the combat engineers, who may be required to clear obstacles in the face of opposition. They are trained for the assault role, but very rarely take part in an actual attack. Instead their training is to enable them to clear the way for an assault by assessing the likely course of the operation and focussing their efforts on the optimal routes. More commonly, combat engineers are found behind the main combat zone clearing routes for supply convoys, replacing destroyed infrastructure and making sure that hazards such as unexploded ordnance are neutralised.
Engin Combat Support is a well-respected unit, which nevertheless receives an unfair amount of abuse from front-line mercs who feel that ECS has cornered all the soft jobs. These mercs are glad enough to see the armoured trucks of an ECS convoy approaching their positions however, even if they sometimes forget that the ‘soft job’ of logistics can mean fighting through ambushes along the way.
Captain Josjoa Kaminski
Captain Kaminski is a solo mercenary, who will join a force for a single mission or hire out as an advisor. He has spent a considerable amount of time on training contracts, teaching his skills to the personnel of his client army, but his greatest benefit to his employers is his ability in the field.
Josjoa Kaminski is an expert at infiltration and intelligence gathering. He is quite capable of fighting his way out of a situation but prefers to use stealth and guile to achieve his ends. He originally trained as a sniper, and retains his ability to shoot at great distances. However, on missions where he goes armed at all he tends to carry close-range weapons such as submachineguns, usually silenced. His philosophy is that most soldiers cannot hit a moving man-sized target beyond a few metres, at least not before someone as skilled as Kaminski can find cover and disappear into it. Close-range threats are eliminated, longer-range ones are eluded.
Josjoa Kaminski is credited with the ability to hide in a bare 3m square room. Whilst this is a gross exaggeration, he is a master of fading out of sight or, just as good, making himself unlikely to be noticed. He is capable of simply walking into an enemy installation and gathering whatever data he needs, providing he can obtain a basic disguise such as an enemy uniform or a forged visitor pass.
This is due to a phenomenal acting ability as much as stealth skills; Kaminski has learned to look like he’s supposed to be there of he cannot avoid detection altogether. He has at times eluded pursuit by obtaining an enemy uniform and joining in the chase, or allowing himself to be mistaken for a sentry or a frightened civilian caught up in the chaos.
Kaminski rarely takes destructive assignments, partly because he considers them beneath his dignity. Not only can anyone blow stuff up, but this tends to announce the presence of saboteurs. Kaminski’s pride is in getting his job done without the enemy realising anything ever happened. He has obtained operational plans, schematics of weapons, and communications codes from enemies who still thought they were secure weeks or months later.
Not surprisingly, few people know what Josjoa Kaminski looks like, or if he is a ‘he’ at all. He travels under a range of false identities, or else gets around by some mysterious means that has not yet been discovered. Perhaps he stows away aboard cargo ships, or has a ship of his own. All that is known is that he turns up wherever someone is offering enough money for his services, does the job, and vanishes again. Often his targets have no idea their security has been breached. Kaminski’s fee is, naturally, very high.
Stuff and Nonsense
People send us stuff. Actually, reputable manufacturers send us stuff. And that’s despite the horrible things we do to whatever they send us and the highly negative reports we put out about it. Anyway, this time around we have a cross-section of bits and pieces that we’ve been sent. These include the usual guns and a rather nifty engineering vehicle. There was some other stuff but we forgot about it when we discovered the case of samples from the Ukrainian fermentation & distillation industry…
OffRoad Solutions ‘Elmada’ Offroad Utility Vehicle
Type: All-terrain transport vehicle
OffRoad is a largish corporation that specializes in the wheeled all-terrain vehicle marketplace. Its clients range from private users to large corporations, with security firms sometimes placing custom orders for armoured offroad patrol vehicles.
The Elmada is OffRoad’s entry-level offering, at least in terms of capability. It’s not cheap; certainly you can buy yourself a much less expensive offroader for less than half the price. OffRoad justify the cost, probably rightly, by pointing out that even their basic vehicles can go places that many others simply can’t. Propulsion is electric, with long-range fuel cells giving a couple of days’ continuous operation. This is a big improvement over the typical internal combustion vehicle.
The Elmada is no exception. It’s a fairly typical pickup truck type vehicle, with the option for an enclosed or flatbed rear. The cab seats five in reasonable comfort, plus a few odds and ends in a set of clever storage compartments. There’s an enclosed cargo box (accessible from inside the cab) in the rear of the flatbed version. This is omitted in the enclosed version since you have the whole interior to fill with stuff.
The enclosed version is available with a range of options at no additional cost. Passenger seats, a sort of sleeping area/stretcher carrying capability, tool racks and assorted other configurations can be specified at the time of purchase or retrofitted afterward. The cab (and enclosed rear if that option is taken) is not gas-tight but has a reasonable air-conditioning system with good filters, and a very effective heater.
Top speed on a good road is about 150kph, though this eats up power pretty fast. Cruising speed is more efficient; at about 105-110kph you can literally drive all day and all night and have enough juice left to turn around and go home again. Offroad on level-ish terrain you can expect to make maybe 50kph, though lower speeds are advisable for very rough ground.
Stability and ground traction are both good, with computer-assisted driving systems to help with tricky manoeuvres. The main problem this vehicle has is that its huge wheels can only turn so far in their housings, which would limit turning circle unacceptably in some circumstances. However, at low speeds the rear wheels are also steered, which offsets the problem somewhat.
The big wheels reduce ground pressure and also allow the Elmada to ‘swim’ (though not very well). It sits low in the water and feels less stable than it actually is. Propulsion is by spinning the wheels, and steering also uses this method, with thrust directed by turning the wheels. This is not very efficient, and going backwards is virtually impossible. But supposing you’re idiotic enough to drive into a deep river, at least you can get out without a rescue vehicle.
The Elmada carries a self-rescue winch (for disasters not involving rivers maybe) which can also be used for towing and various utility tasks. Ingeniously, the winch mechanism can be dismounted from the front bumper and moved to the back, or left off to save weight. It can also be replaced with a sort of chainsaw device that fits across the front bumper. This allows you to drive slowly through thick brush and carve a path as you go. It also works on small wooden huts, the tents of colleagues and garden fences, but not on thick trees. Be warned… trying to cut down a mighty oak by driving your pickup-mounted chainsaw through it will not work, and may result in a stuck truck.
Overall: This is a useful and robust vehicle, ideal for routine tasks on an expedition or a new colony. It’s a decent cheap alternative to a full-scale all-terrain-vehicle that will do most of the same jobs. A fleet of these might make a good investment for a field team operating on a budget. But in the end, it’s a pickup truck with really big wheels. That may or may not float your boat.
OffRoad Solutions ‘Navvy’ Construction Vehicle
Type: All-terrain construction vehicle
Cost: Cr 420,000. TL: 11
Armour: 3
The ‘Navvies’ (short for Navigational Engineers) were hard-working labourers who dug canals and laid roadbeds, among other tasks, during the Industrial Revolution. This vehicle’s name is thus a proud one, and tough to live up to. It doesn’t sound all that impressive unless you know about what the original Navvies achieved, but if you do then they’re a tough act to follow.
The Navvy is a businesslike-looking vehicle, with eight big wheels on each side rather than the tracks that might be expected. This makes sense; wheels require less maintenance than tracks, and they rip up the ground less. Thus the Navvy is fit for civilized company at the end of the working day; it can drive back to base without destroying the roads there, or be used as a very expensive utility transport.
And expensive it its, but you do get a lot for your money. Power is supplied by a compact fusion reactor through a very robust drive train, with electrical and mechanical power takeoffs by cable and shaft respectively. The transmission and suspension are just plain excellent. We hit a very large rock hard enough to bend an axle (didn’t do us much good either) and the transmission absorbed the shock with no loss of function. An automated system raises damaged wheels off the ground and cuts power to them, so we were able to keep careering over the countryside with little disruption.
The vehicle is very livable. The two-seat cab is roomy and comfortable, which reduces fatigue, and there is a small galley/living space just behind it which converts to a sleeping area with two fold-down bunks. A tiny toilet/washroom forms part of a partition from the aft workspace, which has a small but well-equipped maintenance bay. You can use this area to fix your tools and machinery, or to store a vast quantity of Ukrainian beer.
Rear access is via a typical small airlock which allows operations in vacuum or unpleasant conditions. The cab doors open directly into the interior of the vehicle and are single; they will not open unless the vehicle’s automated systems detect habitable conditions outside, or they are overridden with the appropriate code.
Let’s talk tools. The Navvy comes with a very good set of manual and powered construction tools stored in a vast array of containers, bins and racks on the outside. It also has a clever two-part dozer blade on the front, which can be configured as a single angled blade or an inverted V shape. An arm on the top of the vehicle can be converted from a crane to a backhoe by swapping the head, a task that takes anything from 10 minutes to an hour depending on how much of the beer is left.
The vehicle has retractable stabilisers which must be deployed when using the arm. Really. Don’t try it without them. And if you do tip your Navvy over somehow, the arm is actually strong enough to push it upright again. Not that we ever had to… we’d not be that stupid, certainly not foolish to manage it three times.
In terms of operability and simply driving about, the Navvy is a really excellent offroad vehicle. The ride is smooth and stable on most terrain, and there are plenty of helpful automatic systems to tell you you’re doing something stupid. They don’t actually stop you from doing it though… control is 100% in the hands of the operator. We like that because we’re hands-on guys, and it does allow a skilled operator to wring the absolute most out of the vehicle’s capabilities. Unfortunately it also allows idiots to tip the damn thing over.
Overall: We liked it. It’s useable and tough, and it can do good work in a difficult environment such as setting up a new colony or building a scientific outpost with little support available. Not cheap, but you do get what you pay for,
OffRoad Solutions ‘Rhino’ Light Armoured Vehicle
Type: All-terrain patrol vehicle
Cost: Cr 37,000. TL: 11
Armour: 5
The Rhino is marketed to fit the needs of corporate and mercenary security units, and national armed forces needing a light, long-duration vehicle for patrolling the outback. It is lightly armoured to protect against smallarms fire (and presumably, enraged wildlife) but is not a true military vehicle and is thus manufactured by ORS and not its military subsidiary, OffRoad Combat Solutions.
The Rhino is air-conditioned and has a very good set of environmental filters, but it is not vacuum-tight. It is not meant for exploration so much as patrol missions around colonies on worlds that are, to some extent or other, habitable. It has mesh screens over the armoured-ceramic driver’s windows, and an additional metal plate can be added to cover the ceramic, leaving just a small slit to see out of. This does significantly restrict the driver’s field of view though.
In addition to the crew of two, the Rhino can carry eight troops (or passengers, serving as a kind of combat-capable taxi) in the rear compartment. Access is via a door each side, behind the driving compartment, and a rear ‘assault door’ the width of the vehicle. There are firing ports in the sides and rear, but these are about as useful as firing ports ever are on a vehicle designed to bounce across rough terrain.
There is also a roof hatch which can take a light support weapon on a ring mount, though one does not come as standard. The vehicle’s pointy nose, from which it gains its name, carries a remote controlled weapons mount. This will carry a machinegun, a grenade launcher or something of similar size, including a camera package should you want to photograph your enemies to death. The weapon rests just below the driver’s field of view and is controlled from the co-driver’s seat.
No weapons are fitted as standard, but most support weapons can be converted using the kit you get with the vehicle. The mounting or dismounting process does take a couple of hours though, so don’t fit something you might need in a hurry.
The Rhino can make 110kph on the road and averages maybe 40kph on typical open terrain. Keeping to moderate speeds and avoiding steep hill climbs stretches the advanced fuel-cell system’s endurance out to about 4 days of pretty much continuous driving, less if you use the air conditioning extensively.
Offroad performance is good but not exceptional. This is a high-sided vehicle; it can’t cope with side slopes all that well and skids alarmingly when descending a hill. However, it will scramble slowly over obstacles of up to about a metre in height and can take obstructions half that height in its stride with ease. The four big wheels are independently suspended, and the Rhino can drive reasonably well with a wheel blown off by a mine.
This vehicle is not amphibious, though it can wade quite well and can cross deeper water by using its front-mounted winch. Its systems are pretty watertight; we got across a river so deep that the driver had to stand up in the cab and the Rhino continued to function happily enough on the far side. The upholstery was ruined though… and it wasn’t that good to start with.
Overall: The Rhino is a paramilitary vehicle designed to operate in the outback. It’s not an exploration vehicle and doesn’t make a very good substitute. It also comes with a disappointingly limited range of tools and other toys. But then it’s a guntruck designed to get personnel where they need to be, not to amuse overgrown children like our review team. In that context, this is a good buy for a security outfit or maybe a badass wildlife photographer.
OffRoad Combat Solutions ‘Moray’ 6-Wheeled Armoured Combat Vehicle
Type: All-terrain light combat vehicle
The ‘Moray’ is actually a family of six-wheeled armoured cars rather than a single vehicle. All use a common hull, powerplant and transmission, plus identical driving and internal controls. Depending on what weapons and equipment fit is chosen, some changes are made to the internal layout but in most cases all that is necessary is to fit a different turret containing the hardware. Control is via a simple but effective ‘plug-and-fight’ interface which comes as standard.
The Moray uses a high-capacity fuel-cell system good for several days’ operation providing heavy loads such as high speeds and steep hill climbs – and especially, towing other vehicles – are avoided. All six big wheels are driven and steered. They are filled with self-sealing gel and are pretty robust to start with; bullets will make holes but generally will not deflate a tyre.
The Moray can be sealed against atmospheric contaminants and NBC weapons simply by closing its doors and hatches, and has a good internal environment system. It can self-decontaminate using a set of spray nozzles, but needs an external source of reasonably clean water to do so.
The vehicle is fully amphibious, using waterjet propulsion and small rudders for manoeuviring. On a good road it can top 100kph and can travel at much the same speed over level terrain. However this is inadvisable, since at high speeds a sudden obstacle can damage the vehicle or injure occupants. It will jump for a respectable distance from a steep slope, and the suspension and big bouncy tyres make landing less unpleasant than the unsuspecting rear-seat occupants had (briefly) anticipated. Control is an issue when bouncing along in this manner, however.
All Morays have a two-seat driving/control area, with the second seat used by the vehicle commander in most cases. Vision is via multispectral camera feed from outside the vehicle, though a set of very robust optical vision blocks can be used at need. These are normally kept covered by an armoured shutter. The driving and command seats can also be elevated to allow the crew to drive with their heads out of open roof hatches where this is desirable.
The crew/fighting area is fairly roomy, and is accessed via a set of assault doors at the rear or a roof hatch which has a rail for a light support weapon such as a machinegun or a grenade launcher. There are no crew firing ports in the flanks or rear; ORCS thinks (rightly in our opinion) that these are simply a waste of time and an unnecessary opening in the hull. The rear area contains a weapon or systems operator station and some storage bins for tools and ammunition. It can also carry six infantrymen in reasonable comfort.
The rear area can be reconfigured to serve as a command post or artillery observation vehicle, electronic warfare platform or a field ambulance. This eliminates the troop capacity of course, as does removing the personnel seats and replacing them with stores containers. Many Morays serve in this capacity, acting as fast, lightly armoured supply carriers.
A range of turrets are available, all of which carry a self-contained weapon system and its ammunition. The latter is autoloaded from a ‘bustle’ on the back of the turret. There is no room for a human operator in the turret; the weapon is remote controlled from within the vehicle. However, it is possible for a crewmember to stand up in the rear roof hatch position, acting as an observer or using a weapon mounted there.
More commonly, a remote weapon fitting is fixed over this hatch. This partially obstructs the rear doors and makes the roof hatch inaccessible in the event of an emergency evacuation. If the rear doors are disabled, the only other ways out are through the two driving-compartment roof hatches or an escape door in the left side of the hull. This is not normally used in combat as it compromises the vehicle’s armour protection, but that matters relatively little of the vehicle is already compromised to the point were, say, it is on fire.
A range of weapon fits are available. Most are fairly light, ranging from a 20mm Vulcan cannon for air defence and light-vehicle engagements through various light guns (60mm is common) to a multipurpose missile system. ORCS does not favour energy weapons in vehicles that lack a fusion powerplant, as these systems drain too much power. However, the firm does like gauss weapons and light rail guns.
The Moray we were sent to test mounted a 45mm high-velocity gun in gun-over-hull configuration. I.e., there was no turret as such on our vehicle, just a remote-controlled gun. While unprotected by armour, the gun makes a very small target. It is fed from an ammunition pack inside the vehicle, reducing internal space somewhat, On the plus side, its powerful armour-piercing ammunition will put holes in light armoured vehicles with ease and will chop up lower-tech battle tanks should they be encountered.
With no turret, there is no room for a co-axial anti-infantry weapon which is a serious drawback. Most Morays mount a light weapon in the turret, but those that use the gun-over-hull configuration (i.e. those with heavier weapons) cannot. Instead, our example mounted a rapid-fire 5mm machinegun in a remote mount over the rear hatch. This allows self-defence against infantry at the expense of making access a bit more tricky. The mechanism doesn’t get in the way all that much, but you only have to run face-first into it once. The defensive gun is normally remote-operated by the vehicle commander but it is also possible to use a set of controls on the base of its mount to spread mayhem and destruction about the countryside.
Overall: It’s good. Fast, handles well, amphibious with no preparation other than a yell of ‘Yee-Haw!’ from the driver, and reasonably well protected. It’s not a tank and it can’t really fight tanks (except little, underfed ones maybe) but it can put holes in most other armoured vehicles, including pretty much anything a similarly equipped unit might field. So yeah, we liked it.
Accuracy Incorporated ‘Big 15’ 15mm Revolver
Type: Handgun, Projectile, Huge
Accuracy Incorporated are primarily known for their high-quality rifles, though they do produce a small range of extremely expensive handguns and submachineguns. Most are fairly mainstream in concept, though there are some exceptions. This weapon is one of those. It’s a colossal piece of engineering, loaded using a tip-down break-open action rather than the more common swing-out cylinder. Into the prodigious caverns of the cylinder, which rather resembles a fuel drum, are inserted four gigantic artillery shells masquerading as handgun rounds.
The ‘Big 15’ is, naturally, a beautifully made weapon with a smooth, crisp action and a delightfully even trigger pull. It’s also very heavy, which helps absorb some of the recoil from those ludicrously potent rounds it launches. The barrel is ported to allow some propellant gas to escape, which further reduces felt recoil. Or at least, it does so on merely gargantuan weapons. Firing the Big 15 is like clinging on to your very own private earthquake, combined with a muzzle flare of Biblical proportions. The weapon is single-action-only, and most users think carefully before cocking that hammer a second time.
The Big 15 has a longish (9”) barrel and can take a scope if you can find one over-engineered enough to withstand the recoil. We tried one intended for mere .44 Magnum weapons and it became visibly distorted after a few rounds. We wanted to see if we could actually break the scope by repeated firing, but our flesh gave out first. However, if you can somehow control this beast then accuracy is very good, with or without a scope. Stopping power is off the scale.
The stats listed above are for ball ammunition, but unusually, ball is difficult to obtain for it. The nearest you can get is a tracer round for training purposes. This is because the standard round for this weapon is a high-explosive projectile. Yes, you read that right. Accuracy Incorporated decided that their Big 15 was too puny with mere ball rounds and supply it as standard with far more manly explosive ammunition. Alternatively, you can buy HEAP rounds in case you find yourself fighting a dinosaur wearing a flak jacket or something.
Overall: It’s a handgun, but not as we know it. Realistically, this is a showpiece, not a fighting gun. Recoil is just too much to control, and after a few shots the ache in your hands and wrists becomes unbearable. That said, if you’ve shot someone with this thing a few times and they’re not down then you need specialist munitions. Made from Kryptonite maybe…
Tblisi Design Bureau ‘AWS-8’ Weapon System
Type: Personal Weapon System, Configurable, Projectile
The AWS-8 (Adaptable Weapon System, 8mm) is built around a custom-designed caseless 8x20mm handgun cartridge which Tblisi claim has superior ballistic characteristics to the more common 9mm or 10mm ammunition used in handguns and submachineguns. The weapon system uses a common receiver with a range of barrels and other accessories enabling it to be converted to a variety of roles.
The rather nice case that comes with this little toy contains a receiver (the trigger, grip and firing mechanism), a folding stock, a solid stock, an ammunition feed converter, a vertical foregrip and four barrels in various lengths. There are also four of each type of magazine.
If the standard stock is used (with any barrel) then ammunition feed is via a 100-round cassette inserted into the butt of the weapon from the back. The base of the cassette actually forms the weapon’s shoulder rest, which is a bit odd. So is the fact that ammunition feeds forward and down into the chamber. It’s caseless, i.e. the cartridge itself is formed of propellant which is used up in firing, so nothing is ejected. The mechanism still has to cycle the next round into the chamber however.
If you don’t want to use the solid stock, a small converter fits over the back of the weapon and allows a 22-round helical feed magazine to be fitted atop the weapon, running forward along the top of the receiver. This configuration can be used with or without the folding metal stock fitted.
If you’re going to use this weapon with the solid stock, you’ll probably want to fit the long or medium barrels. Both give reasonably similar results, creating a very decent mid-range assault weapon for urban combat or use by vehicle crews. Tblisi claim that the long barrel configuration is accurate out to 800m, but we don’t believe many people can shoot accurately half that far so it’s academic. However, you do need the long barrel to fit the grenade launcher. More about that in a moment.
For close-range combat, the ‘assault’ barrel is very handy. It can be used with a full stock but really comes into its own when used without any stock at all. The vertical foregrip can be fitted with any of the longer barrels (long, medium and assault), and is really a necessity if you’re not going to use a shoulder stock. Automatic fire is entirely controllable with a full stock and long barrel, or without a stock if you use the vertical foregrip.
Alternatively, you can set the weapon up with no stock and the short barrel, which makes it impossible to fit the foregrip. This creates a somewhat large and bulky ‘assault pistol’ capable of full-auto fire. The folding stock can be used with this configuration, and can be adjusted to become an elbow hook rather than a stock. This makes one-handed autofire a bit more controllable, but all the same a two-handed pistol-style combat grip is a good idea.
We found that 22 rounds is a bit low for an assault weapon, but the no-stock-foregrip-and-short-barrel (‘assault’) configuration was nevertheless excellent for close combat. The longer-barrel-and-full-stock (‘carbine’) configuration offers excellent high-volume firepower whilst remaining controllable. The ‘assault pistol’ setup is possibly useful as a glove-box grab-gun but it’s too big to carry comfortably as a handgun and too small for use as a serious combat weapon.
Now, about the grenade launcher. It’s a single-shot under-barrel mount that must be bought separately (for 300 credits) and cannot be used unless it is mounted under the long barrel that comes with this weapon. Reloading is by typical pump-action, and ammunition is a small 20mm grenade intended for close combat. There are no long-range sights; the launcher is really meant for urban or shipboard use, and would normally be fired in a slight arc or even direct.
The standard 20mm grenade is a high explosive/fragmentation round for room clearance. A shaped-charge anti-armour version is available for breaching doors and heavy armour, and there is a flechette round for direct fire against ‘soft’ targets. The characteristics of these rounds are detailed under the 20mm grenade launcher entry, below.
Overall: Nice. Not cheap, but a solid attempt at the configurable-weapon marketplace. We’re most likely to set ours up as an assault pistol for emergency use, or maybe in the full long-barrel-and-grenade-launcher configuration because it offers massive firepower and explosions in one weapon. We like massive firepower and explosions. We really do.
Tblisi Design Bureau ‘Granada-20’ Launcher
Type: Support Weapon, Light, Projectile
Using the same grenades as their underbarrel grenade launcher, Tblisi offer this bullpup-configuration, rifle-sized… something or other. It’s not really a support weapon in the usual sense, since its maximum range is only 250m and it’s virtually impossible hit something smaller than a barn at over 50m (we managed it, eventually. Best say nothing more about that incident). This is essentially a specialist support-of-close-assault weapon, and in that role it’s pretty good.
The 5-round magazines of 20mm grenades are fairly easy to carry and not all that heavy. The weapon itself is pretty light too, and it’s both short and handy. Feed is via the bottom of the shoulder stock, and the magazine sits securely enough not to make us nervous. Feed is also very reliable, and it’s hard to break the semi-automatic mechanism. We tried pretty hard, including immersing the launcher in mud for several hours. Might not have been that long but for the fact that we, well, kinda forgot what we did with it.
So it’s reliable and easy to use. Is it any good? Well, it shoots a very useable high-explosive round which can be preset for a variety of modes. Most commonly, it is fused for impact, but impact-plus-a-time-delay is doable; up to five seconds. It is also, for some reason, possible to fuse for ‘two bounces’, i.e. the projectile can be pinballed off two walls and will then detonate at the third impact or after an additional 1-5 second delay. We had some fun with the ‘trick shot’ setting, and it does seem useful should you need to fight a battle on a giant pinball table or perhaps bounce grenades down a corridor and round a corner at the end.
The HE round is what you’d expect from an advanced 20mm warhead. It makes a satisfyingly loud bang and will harm anyone within a metre or so. It’s officially rated as a ‘soft target’ weapon, i.e. it won’t penetrate armour very well. The concussion round is also pretty decent, and combined with the trick-shot fusing it allows you to bounce stun grenades into an inaccessible room. Handy for those noisy dorm-room parties next door maybe.
High Explosive Armour-Piercing is a straight impact-fused shaped-charge round for putting holes in light vehicles and personal armour. It’s not very exciting but it works well enough. The breacher round is almost identical but is designed to stick to the target and detonates a preset 1-5 seconds after impact. This allows several to be delivered, though clever tricks like shortening the fuse on each and attempting to time deliveries so that they all go off at once rarely work. It’s fun trying though.
The flechette round is basically a big shotgun shell which fills a cone-shaped area. It’s pretty ineffective against hard cover or body armour, but it does allow a group of targets within 1m of one another to be attacked. The stunbag round is a bit more personal. Its projectile is a bag full of loose lead shot, which stuns the victim by simple impact. Again it’s not great against armour but it’ll knock down most opponents quite nicely. It also causes significant dents in light vehicles.
The most interesting of these rounds is the focussed incendiary though. This is another ‘sticky’ round like the breachers, but instead of exploding it burns fiercely, creating a sort of cutting jet which burns away armour or whatever else it hits, and is pretty detrimental to flesh as well. It is somewhat erratic however; sometimes the sticky-seal fails and it drops off while still burning, and at other times it goes out quickly. Clever idea though.
Overall: Nice piece of kit, with several uses. The concussion and stunbag rounds can be used for less-lethal situations, and a quick magazine swap turns the weapon into a deadly implement. Give it to someone well trained and reliable though. Otherwise trick shots with explosive grenades can be a bit more interesting than you’d like
Orion Optics “L-81” Personal Beam Weapon
Type: Handgun, Laser
Orion Optics produces a range of optical scientific instruments such as rangefinders, telescopes, laser communicators and the like. They also market a small range of cutting-edge laser weapons based on extremely advanced optical and energy systems. This example is their idea of a handgun. It’s a large, bulky object with a very long barrel. The power unit fits atop the receiver, which not only looks odd but also makes the weapon strangely top-heavy and prone to tip from side to side.
If this weapon were fitted with a vertical foregrip and called itself a carbine, we’d probably praise its relatively small size and generally handy dimensions. As a handgun, however, it’s just too bloody huge. And heavy. It’s really, really heavy. It also suffers from being strangely balanced. The long barrel makes it nose-heavy, while the top-mounted power unit is so high above the user’s hand that causes an odd waggling movement if held even slightly off-centre.
These issues aside, the L-81 packs a fair amount of firepower into a relatively small package. Although it really wanted to be a carbine, Orion Optics have managed to keep the weapon’s size down to the point where it can be carried in a hip holster, yet still provides fairly potent combat capability.
We found firing it a bit strange, mainly because we’d try to compensate for a big-handgun kick that didn’t come, sending the muzzle downwards and starting that weird shimmy. This can delay the next shot or make it rather more random than most users would like. The answer is to take a more deliberate two-handed stance when firing; control is good when firing two-handed.
Weirdness aside, the most notable feature of this weapon is its ability to penetrate armour. Most laser weapons do not perform very well against armour, but Orion Optics have found a way to produce a highly concentrated beam that can punch though light armour as well as many projectile weapons.
Overall: This is almost, but not quite, a really excellent weapon. Its anti-armour performance is good, with very decent firepower for a laser weapon that does not use a belt power unit. Of course, this comes with a suitably ludicrous price tag. On balance, we’d have to say that you don’t quite get what you pay for, but what you do get is pretty good,
Orion Optics “ASL-84” Assault Beam Weapon
Type: Carbine, Laser
Orion’s Assault Beam Weapon is in many ways more conventional than their handgun offering. The receiver is in many ways what the Personal Beam Weapon should have been. We suspect it may actually be the same internal optics and beam generation hardware, with a slightly longer barrel, a foregrip and somewhat different external styling. The surprisingly robust telescopic stock is detachable, but it weighs so little that it might as well remain attached.
More importantly, that annoying top-mounted power unit is gone and has been replaced by one of the cleverest optical sights we’ve seen in a while. We’d expect little less from Orion Optics, but this really did impress us. It’s a simple optical red dot reflex sight for short-range point-and-shoot, but by pushing a slider forward through a series of three notches, the user can covert the sight into a 2X, 4X or 8X magnification telescopic sight.
Using the sight in this mode is a bit weird at first, since the whole sight picture is compressed into a 3D projection within the tiny flip-up reflex sight. That’s another clever feature; the sight flips down to protect it from being bashed and mangled whilst being carried.
The ASL-84 is intended primarily for use by assault troops fighting in low gravity or zero-g, and as such it has a fairly useful burst-fire capability. Firing from the hip is entirely controllable as there is no recoil, of course. One-handed firing is equally easy, though don’t expect great accuracy doing this. Burst-fire eats up a lot of power; using up five of what Orion Optics call ‘power units’ for each burst of autofire. A single shot uses one, meaning that profligate fire can leave the user, literally, powerless. This is a common flaw with belt-pack powered weapons; packs are bulky, which makes it awkward to carry spares. The Orion pack, while heavy, is reasonably small which allows a couple of additional units or a backup gun to be carried.
As with the L-81, the ASL-84 has good penetrative capability thanks to Orion’s excellent beam generation and collimation system. It will punch through light body armour pretty well, and has an amusing tendency to set the fringes of the hole it makes on fire. That’s less of a problem than the damage it does to the target, but it can be… interesting… if a stray shot hits something flammable.
Overall: This is a very nice weapon. Performance is little better than a standard laser carbine, but the penetration capability can be useful, as can autofire. The ability to switch to a telescopic sight is useful, though there is a limit to the range to which a typical user can shoot accurately. We liked, it, but the universal comment was ‘IT COSTS HOW MUCH???’
End Notes
We came, we saw, we… got distracted by shiny things. Terra/Sol, for all it was quite recently colonised, is a big and complex place. We only saw a very small fragment of what’s going on there, and that was from a limited perspective (i.e. ‘under a bar’). The place merits a great deal more exploration, especially its fermented-goods marketplace. We may get to do that, but right now we’re waiting to hear from a new client who may have an interesting mission for us. Or not. We’ll have to just wait and see.
RSS Avenger, signing off.
Late 2010
There’s a real atmosphere of relief aboard RSS Avenger right now. We were right out at the fringe of uncharted space, in the aptly-named Edge system, and the captain got that look… the one that he gets just before we embark on something particularly stupid. But not this time, it seems. We turned back from our self-appointed mission to explore the vast unknown and instead headed into the relative civilization of the Terra/Sol system.
Of course, this is hardly the most settled region in all of known space, but at least it’s got regular interstellar communications and bars where you can get a decent glass of beer. Quite a lot of beer, as it happens. In fact, we’re just beginning to recover from our stopover the Ukraine Territories, an agricultural region that grows vast amounts of cereal crops, vegetables and assorted other things… and brews, ferments and distils them into all manner of wonderful products.
As usual we’ve poked our noses into things, visited places and sampled foods (and beverages) in order to provide an in-depth look at the great cosmos. We’ve also tried out a few guns and gizmos, and we present the usual reports on what we discovered. Standard disclaimer about the gear we test out and the reports that go with it follows:
We tend to call it as we see it. We may well have got a duff one, or failed to read the manual thoroughly enough, or somehow produced an unfair review for other reasons. It happens; deal with it. On the other hand, we thought that some of the gear we tested was pretty good. Again, we could possibly have been sent the only one in the batch that worked. The crew of RSS Avenger cannot be held responsible for the use, misuse, loss, accidental discharge or unexplained by-product of using the items we review. This way up. Handle with care. Keep out of the reach of children. And all that.
As a result of our visit to the Ukraine, RSS Avenger has developed a slight list to port and is answering the helm unsteadily. But we’re still flying and that’s the main thing, right? We’re headed out to a quieter orbit to sleep off the hangover, and then it’s onward and outward to, well, somewhere. Nobody’s in a fit state to decide yet.
So while we collect our shattered wits, let’s proceed with Starfarer’s Gazette #3. This time around we have a report on some aspects of Terra/Sol itself, reviews of some weaponry we found lying about, plus some other fascinating features you just can’t live without.
This issue of Starfarer’s Gazette contains the following sections:
- Ports of Call – places we’ve been and things we’ve seen
- People, Places and Things – features about this and that
- Slices of Life – tales we’ve been told… some of them actually true
- Stuff and Nonsense – equipment, weaponry and stuff-in-general that we’ve been sent to review
Okay, let’s get down to business.
Ports of Call
The Terra/Sol System
This place is a bit of an oddity, to say the least. An almost exact duplicate of Earth (and her moon)… yup, that’s a bit strange. Well, don’t look at us for an explanation; we don’t have one/. All we can reliably offer is… we didn’t do it.
The rest of the system isn’t very earth-like at all. There’s a rather nasty not-quite-tidally-locked world called Prometheus located a bit too close to the star, an asteroid belt, a gas giant and a worthless lump of icy rock out halfway to deep space. Few people care about those… and why would they? There’s an actual copy of Earth and her moon in the system! That makes us (yes, we’re insanely paranoid like that) suspicious. What if the incredible Earth-copy was there purely to distract us from something else? No, that’s just silly.
But still…
We headed in towards Terra/Sol itself. After the rainy dump that is Edge, we were looking forward to somewhere a bit more amenable to human existence. But first we had to make a choice. To land or not to land? RSS Avenger is quite capable of putting down at a planetside port, but we normally leave her in orbit and use our shuttles. That wasn’t going to be an option in this system; orbital space is pretty cluttered and their traffic control centres made it very clear that they’d consider us a hazard to navigation if we entered orbit. That translates to an offer to blow us out of the sky if we messed up their traffic patterns.
Yes, that did say traffic control centres. Terra/Sol has several, and they don’t always cooperate very well. This is largely due to politics of course. The official world-spaceport is on the Isle of Wight in Britain, but the nation of New France has an official world-port of their own (or so they claim) and they’ve implemented their own traffic control system to prove it.
Thus we were bombarded with offers to land at either of the official world ports or their associated orbital facilities. Xanadu Station is the official receiving point for shipping into Terra/Sol. It’s an independent city-state registered as a sovereign territory by the Orion Confederation, with regular shuttle services to ports all over Terra/Sol and the rest of the system.
Olympus City is the official receiving point for all traffic into Terra/Sol, at least according to the government of New France. It has regular shuttle services to Porte de Terra in New France and a number of Francophile nations, but oddly enough it’s not possible to get a direct shuttle from Olympus City to much of Terra/Sol, i.e. anywhere that does not recognise Olympus as the main entry point for the system. We found that out after we didn’t go there… but we’re pretty sure that a lot of starfarers get to what they’ve been led to believe is Terra/Sol’s main port and THEN find out that they’ve been suckered.
As we were negotiating the schizophrenic traffic control system, the command crew argued about which port to land at. In the end they flipped a coin but it rolled behind an access panel so we decided on an alternative approach. In addition to the two big orbital stations and their associated ground ports, we had offers to land or dock all over the place. Some of the independent stations and ports looked interesting, especially the seedy Puerto Rico. Any station whose name means ‘rich port’ but is built out of old freighter hulls is a place you go well-armed and ready for trouble. We couldn’t wait.
But in the end the captain decided to put us down on Terra/Sol’s moon, Athena, at Serenity City. Serenity City is an independent city-state in the Sea of Serenity, with a very decent spaceport and low berthing fees. The port wasn’t especially busy, but there were various small in-system passenger and freight vessels on the pads as we approached and a couple of bigger vessels in specialist bays. They looked like grain ships or heavy freighters.
Disembarkation was via a flexible boarding tube into the cleanest starport bus we’ve ever seen, which then took us inside the port buildings. The city is located mostly underground, with just a few structures on the surface. The officials were polite and not too intrusive, though we were searched both physically and electronically for weapons and given a stern lecture about observing local laws and customs regulations.
After that we got into the city proper and decided what to do over a very decent and inexpensive lunch in a portside café. We decided to split up and get a broader picture. Some of us would head planetside, some would check out the other cities of Athena and some would look over Serenity City in some detail.
Me, I was rather liking the beer I had with my meal, so I decided to visit its nation of origin. I booked a shuttle ticket to the Ukraine Territories and discovered that for some reason it costs about half as much to travel between Serenity City and the Ukraine than anywhere else. Turns out there’s a ‘special relationship’ between them rather like that between Olympus Station and New France… only the Ukraine doesn’t actually own Serenity City.
A little more investigation enlightened me. The Ukraine Territories, like most Orion states, supposedly has a republican government. In practice voting is very restricted and the nation has skirted close to censure a few times. Serenity City is independent but closely tied to the Ukraine (though with a far less restrictive form of government) and acts as the ‘acceptable face’ of the Ukraine Territories at times, like a bait-and-switch scam only on an interstellar-politics scale.
Great. So I was headed into a pseudo-dictatorship. Well, at least they make good beer.
The Ukraine TerritoriesI boarded the shuttle with some trepidation, and fought the temptation to fret during the short trip planetside. Instead I looked out of the window, and I’m glad I did. I’ve never been to Earth but like everyone else in the universe, it’s familiar to me from endless images. No wonder we still think of Earth as our spiritual home.
So, as the shuttle rolled and the familiar continents came into view I had a lump in my throat. I was going home. Yes, that’s what it felt like, even though I was born and raised on a space habitat far from Earth and I’ve never been there before. The lump went away, to be replaced with a slightly uneasy feeling when I realised that pretty much every human who visits this place feels the same thing. Maybe we’re supposed to. Maybe someone, or something, wants us to see this place as home. Maybe…
Well, anyway. We came in from roughly northwards, over the North Pole and Baltica. I could see the British Isles and the open ocean beyond, then the patchwork of giant cities and green countryside that is Europe. The broad ribbon of the European Highway, curving south from GrossBerlin towards the Bosporous crossings and into Asia beyond. And then the vast green plains of eastern Europe were below.
As we descended, I realised it wasn’t all green, well, not uniformly. There was golden corn… enormous expanses of it… and a dark greeny-grey in swampy regions. And cities. Huge cities. Between them were towns and villages, huge industrial farms and the occasional little hamlet by a minor road. A goods train was just leaving Ukraine-Kiev as we approached. It was huge, hundreds of wagons long, pulled by an atomic-powered locomotive. And compared to the city, it was a tiny thing.
Ukraine-Kiev, or just Kiev. Capital of the Ukraine Territories. A city of neat road grids and huge city blocks containing vast towers. Some of them are linked by impossibly long road-tubes which have no visible means of support except at the ends. My brain knows there are contragrav units supporting them, but my gut just mewled in terror at the sheer length of unsupported roadway between the towers.
The port is huge, and clearly it serves mainly as a freight and industrial centre. There’s a rail yard at one end of the landing area. Heavy freighters of the sort I’d seen at Serenity City were unloading when I arrived. Huge tracked vehicles crawled about the port carrying maintenance crews and repair bots… and there were tanks on the landing apron. Apparently that’s normal in the Ukraine.
The tanks were unusual, in that they were tracked ground-crawlers rather than fast contragrav strike platforms. Some mounted guns, some missiles. Most were immobile much of the time, but now and then an engine would start up and a vehicle would reposition itself like a restless beast. My theory is that the Ukrainians do this as a broad hint about their national power, but it may be that they simply take spaceport security very, very seriously.
So, it was somewhat nervously that I presented my visitor’s permit and identity documents to a portside receptionist. Yes, a receptionist. A very attractive young woman who smiled a lot and didn’t make any fuss about my documents even though they’re as bogus as hell. I think there was a weapon scanner in the entry gate but it was unobtrusive, and there was no physical search. Of course, I was coming in through the ‘internal’ gate, which is used by local traffic and shuttles from Serenity City. No idea what it’s like coming in from outside the Ukrainian sphere of influence, but I did note that they don’t get much external traffic.
There were uniforms at Kiev Spaceport, of course. Lots of uniforms, all very smart and all very similar. Took me a while to learn to distinguish between port officials, port security, military personnel and the postal service. Seriously, these people suffer from a severe lack of imagination when it comes to designing clothes for their governmental representatives and workers to wear.
I was met in the entry lounge by a very tall man in a rather than a uniform, who spoke to all the passengers – not that there were many – and offered to help sort out any problems they might have. Other ports use greeter bots, but Ukraine-Kiev seems to prefer the personal touch. My new favourite uncle – that’s how this guy came across; he’d really maxed out his people skills – showed me how to use the information terminals and asked what I was wanting to do while I was there. I’d said I was there on ‘non-work related’ business at the gate, so presumably anyone arriving to take up a job in the salt mines or whatever doesn’t get this treatment.
Anyhow, Uncle Dimitri (I have no idea what his name was, but that’s the label I came up with for him) nodded sagely when I said I was writing a piece about the Ukrainian beer and spirits industry. He suggested various ways to sort out travel and a number of people I might contact to arrange visits. I got the impression that I was being nudged towards some more than others, but it was subtle and he didn’t push it. I don’t know if the reasoning was political or an attempt to sell more booze, but there was a definite attempt to manipulate my choices. That said, Uncle Dimitri did not object when I picked some places to visit at random.
And so it was that I ended up aboard a rented contragrav car, headed out from Ukraine-Kiev (that’s the proper name for the capital but everyone calls it just Kiev) and into the countryside. The spires of the city are visible for a long, long way but this land is just so big that the cities fall into it and vanish. I mean, you can see them but they seem somehow insignificant compared to the vast grainlands and forests that cover much of the country. There are many small towns, most of them the heart of an industrial-scale farming project, and these are typical of modern building practice.
Ukrainian towns are little different to those found elsewhere. Well-planned and tidily laid out, with open green spaces between functional but not unattractive buildings. Muted shades of brown and grey are favoured, and these blur into the landscape in a manner that’s really rather pleasing.
It’s not all lovely of course. There are industrial complexes located away from the cities, and at one point I got redirected around a live-fire military training area. But for the most part this Ukraine is much like what I’d heard most of Terra/Sol looks like; lots of open country with areas of massive population density here and there.
The town I visited, which I’ll refer to as Unpronouncableville-Ukraine, or just UVU, was a typical small town surrounded by a single huge grain farm. They grow some other stuff too, but their main output is grain, and I mean a LOT of grain. There’s a landing area for contragrav vehicles and a very good road which is mainly used by the grain trucks, housing and amenities for a few hundred people… and a distillery.
The distillery, as might be expected, makes whisky. That’s whisky, not whiskey – the Ukrainians consider their products to be part of the Scotch family, so no ‘e’ in Whisky for them. The distillery manager made that very clear. Repeatedly. He also explained the process of distillation and their different products.
Proper Scotch whisky uses barley, not grain, but most of the produce from this distillery is grain whisky. You can drink that, and it’ll make the floor hit you in the head, hard. But mainly it’s useful as a mixer. What these people produce is a blend of grain whisky which they make and a small amount of various single-malt whiskies brought in from elsewhere. The result is a pleasing middle-of-the-road blend, with a taste that’s not too complex but interesting enough to drink straight. It’s good as a mixer and also on its own, though Scotch aficionados will tell you that it’s nothing special.
The distillery also makes various special edition blends. We tried a few – by the way, I stayed over for a couple of days and I can remember most of it; this wasn’t a single epic bender – and they were pretty varied. Anyway, these people make a very credible entry-level ‘blended scotch’ product in huge quantities, and they’re proud of it. Rightly so, I think. For the price they charge, this stuff is hazardously drinkable.
Anyway, I took the time between benders to stumble around the town. That is, I did some detailed research into the local culture. First off, there are indeed a lot of rules, but they don’t seem to make people unhappy. There is also a lot of blatant propaganda in entertainment. Most of it is directed at neighbouring Russia, though the Volgograd Dominions and the Republic of the Crimea get their share too. The aim of the propaganda seems to be create suspicion about foreign motives rather than hate, and also to encourage people to be happy without large amounts of consumer goods.
Consumer goods are conspicuously sparse in the shops, though it is still possible to get useful devices like personal communicators and computers. Indeed, they are cheap and readily available if you buy the state-sponsored brands. These, unsurprisingly, are a bit utilitarian and run applications far better than games. Nobody seems to mind all that much however; the lack of consumer toys is compensated for by a real community spirit… and alcohol-based spirits too.
The ordinary folk of the Ukraine are not what you’d call wealthy in terms of goods and money, but their lifestyle isn’t especially hard and they seem to live a good life. Social gatherings are actively encouraged in less-than-subtle propaganda from the government, and they’re fun. These people know how to party, and they have a never-ending supply of excuses to do so.
While I was there, the current one was a farm worker from the town who’d just completed her period with the military reserve, and was now eligible to vote. She’d done six years with the colours as a tank mechanic, six more on active reserve and a final six on the reserve list, training a few times a year. These days she’s a senior agricultural vehicle technician and very well respected. Apparently it’s hard for the common man (or woman, I guess) to complete their full service satisfactorily. If you don’t (and they’re good at making it difficult, I’m told) then you don’t get the benefits package.
So our girl and her friends and family… and the rest of the town plus one starfaring journalist and his hired driver… were celebrating not just completing the tour but also beating the system and wringing a vote out of the upper echelons of society. The obstacles they put in the way of those looking likely to complete their service are clever and subtle, and very few people enter the voting class other than those with the right background. Funny, that.
Not that it mattered. We ate and drank and sang traditional Ukrainian drinking songs from Old Earth, and we were genuinely happy. Oh, and I didn’t get back to the ship on time, so they sent a search party. Who stayed over for a welcome party. And then there was a We-Helped-Fix-The-Grav-Tractor party. And then a farewell party. After that everything became a bit of a blur.
I’m not sure what to make of the Ukraine Territories. It has the makings of a rather nasty totalitarian state, and it’s certainly as undemocratic as you can be and not get kicked out of the Orion Confederation. Half the population are in uniform and there are dozens of armoured divisions posturing on the borders. Skirmishes with the neighbours are not uncommon. The people are fed propaganda and denied the right to vote for a better system unless they jump through eighteen years of government hoops. And they know it.
And yet, somehow, it’s okay. The average family has a modest income and few consumer goods, but they live in a town full of similar people and they have a wealth of friends. They work hard and socialise rather than flaunt their wealth and goods at one another. They really don’t care which of this week’s media celebrities has had surgery or crashed a vehicle while drunk. The state doesn’t give its people much other than stability and protection, but for most people those are all they want; just a chance to live their lives without upheaval or disaster.
So… the Ukraine Territories; A pseudo-totalitarian state where the ignorant masses are kept happy and docile with cheap booze and propaganda… or a pretty decent place to live? I really don’t know.
I suspect the answer is: both.
Slices of Life
Prometheus PlanetsideI sensed a movement behind me and didn’t bother turning. I was in the last seconds of plotting an orbital insertion and I really couldn’t be bothered with gawkers at that point. Besides, it’d probably be Gideon. He likes to lean on my chair and watch me make calculations for some reason.
It was indeed Gideon. “Looks like a dump,” he said, leaning over my chair to peer at the Astrogation and Approach monitor. Gideon is our resident weirdo – beg pardon, Data Systems Specialist – and he’s a bit tiresome at times. “The other planet is all green and blue, except for the white bits at the top and bottom. So why are we landing on this giant desolate wasteland instead of going there?”
“Because it’s a dump, and we’re only fit to land at places like that. Nice green and blue planets don’t give landing permission to ships like ours,” I replied testily. “By the way we do have landing clearance, right?”
“Dump Central says we have permission to land,” Alexzandr said from the command chair. He pointed down-and-for’ard just in case I didn’t know where the planet was.
“Okay,” I replied, waving Gideon away with my left hand. “Descent course laid in, portside beacon tracking on automatic… my work here is done.” I threw up my hands for emphasis.
“Take us down, Petey,” Alexzandr ordered rather grandly. He has this huge rumbly voice which sounds just right coming from such a big guy. Alex really isn’t built for his hobby of rock climbing; you need a knotted-wire frame for that and he’s more the moves-mountains-with-his-hands sort, but there you go.
Petey – Peter Tranniker, former corporate shuttle jock and our pilot ever since we dug this old wreck out of the hillside and made her fly again – sucked his teeth and glanced around in that self-conscious (and not in any way nervous-making) way of his. He eventually nodded. “Okay. The doohickeys are in the green. Mostly. Going down.”
The deck compensators made their usual feeble attempt to keep up with Petey’s lazy manoeuvre, and the rocky desert around Dump Central – I forget what the region was actually called – rolled up to fill our front windows.
“This is Independent Freighter Winged Unicorn, inbound from Xanadu Station,” Alexzandr told Dump Central. “On our way down; see you very soon.”
“Ah… you people DO know we’re being tracked by aerospace defence radar, right? Several sets, one of them in targeting mode…” I reported it just in case. They weren’t really going to shoot at us just for visiting their appalling planet and calling it names. Were they?
“Dump Central – Sorry, they object to being called that – Penn Town Orbital Traffic Control, AKA some guy probably called Bob who works in the local burger bar on the three hundred and fifty-odd days a year when there’s no ships into this dump, says that’s normal. Half the cities on this part of the planet are independent, and they all have some kind of aerospace defences, mainly big missiles. They’ve not shot at anyone for years though, so we can assume they’re not too twitchy.” Alexzandr told us helpfully.
“But hey, let’s stay on our vector, okay?” I added. Petey just nodded.
I was by no means certain we would or even could stay on out vector. Petey is a decent enough kid and a fair pilot, but he’s not very experienced. He was orphaned from some frontier exploration project that got its budget yanked. He just never got any transfer orders. We sort of recruited him because Alex felt sorry for the poor kid hanging around the spaceport waiting to be told what to do. He’d be fine as part of a team but as chief pilot aboard an independent ship, well, let’s just say he’s a bit stretched by the job.
Especially being chief pilot on this ship. I mentioned how we dug her out of a hillside, yeah? Well, she got there because someone flew her into it. She wasn’t in good shape, as you might imagine. And she’d been modified – heavily modified – long before we got hold of her. Most of the cargo area is gone, taken up with extra fuel and drives, plus a mezzanine deck with additional living space.
The original drives are long gone. We have a cobbled-together Supraluminal drive that works well enough, though the way Karl wired it up scares the pants off me. Apparently he did it that way deliberately, which says a lot about his state of mind. We have an original thruster system that’s too damaged to lift us entirely and a backup system that’s erratic when it works at all.
With thruster systems running we’ve got about a g-and-a-half of manoeuvre thrust, and if you really want to be somewhere and don’t mind exploding, there’s a set of plasma-rocket boosters fitted on the top surfaces of the wings. Petey claims he’s seen 4g on the diagnostics but we’ve never pushed more than three. And that time we had a minor explosion, so full throttle is very much reserved for special occasions.
Especially since the deck grav plates are shot, so manoeuvring under high power is very exciting.
We hit the super-thin atmosphere of Prometheus and started picking up some heating. Nothing much, but we were coming in fairly fast for some reason best known to Alexzandr, so my job was to listen to Karl down in the drive suite – go in and take a look around and you’ll see why we call it that – counting off heat stress calculations. We don’t really need to pop that portside seal on the central fuel tank again, so we’re a bit more careful about hull heating than you’d normally expect.
The descent continued more or less according to my flight plan. We were running in on a spiral over Prometheus’ nightside, gradually descending towards one of the small cities of the northern twilight zone. North Greyside, they call it. Prometheus is not quite tidally locked, so most of it gets baked and frozen at regular intervals. This close to the star, it’s a bit unhealthy to be out in the sun, even for a spacecraft, so we used the planet’s shadow to protect us on the way in.
Of course, that makes a conventional approach orbit impossible, so we had to use a powered spiral to keep us on the nightside. And that requires reliable drives… which we don’t have. We had the usual fun with the backup thruster system pulsing in and out and Petey correcting while Alexzandr shouted at Karl over the intercom. After a while Gideon went and sat in the sensor blister and shut the hatch. He has a collection of detective novels in there for when he’s pretending to work or wants to hide from Alex.
Coffee – actually her name is Janet but she goes by ‘Coffee’, mainly because she drinks so much of the stuff – just hides when there’s something to be done. She’s really good at that. I’m not totally sure what Coffee does aboard ship, other than, well, drink coffee. She’s got this whole ‘gunslinger’ thing going on and she did provide a lot of spares and components when we were fixing the ship up – it’s probably best not to ask where they came from – but right at the moment she doesn’t really do anything if she can help it.
Coffee and Gideon disappear whenever there’s something to be done; Alex stomps about searching for them but never seems to figure out where they’ve gone, which leaves the rest of us to do the actual work. The rest being me; Astrogator and dogsbody-general-to-the-masses. Erich; gunner and hammer-man/damage control guy. And Jade; rich college kid. Jade would have been a Navy doctor like daddy wanted by now if she’d not decided to disappear and scrape a living out here on the fringes of civilization. Sort of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
We all have a stake in the ship. Alex is sort of the owner since he got her location and deeds in lieu of money for a job he did. Karl did the brain work in fixing her up and Erich hammered her straight again. Gideon and I reprogrammed the computers and made her fly in the direction her nose was pointing. Jade provided money and licenses and Coffee found us components. Petey makes her fly.
It was Karl who named her though. ‘Might as well find a unicorn and fit wings to it as try to make that thing fly’ he said, and so she got her name – Winged Unicorn. And she flies, more or less. Landing can be something of a problem, however. With that in mind, and with crossed fingers, I handed off the landing vector to Petey, who did his best with it. Flaring to scrub off airspeed on the superthin atmosphere, playing the thrusters and the boosters and God-knows-what, Petey put us down with a tooth-rattling crunch. Better than usual then.
We all sighed, snorted or muttered in relief as Petey locked the flight controls down. “Damage?” asked Alexzandr mildly.
“Yes,” I replied. Alex made a threatening noise so I went on, “Minor according to the board. Some structural, couple of popped connectors.”
“Can we still fly?” Alex demanded.
“Yes, straight-to-the-point guy,” I told him. Out of the windows I could see a huge armoured crawler moving towards us from the bunker that was the only part of Dump Central that protruded above the surface of this Godforsaken planet. The crawler and its trailer had a giant reflective hood supported on a frame, presumably to keep some solar heat and radiation way from the hull.
“Good, we need to get unloaded pronto,” Alex told us. “We need to be off again in nine hours or less.”
“So, no shore leave?” I asked. “I’m positively heartbroken. But what’s the rush? Did we upset someone again?”
“You’re the Astrogator,” Alex told me. “Work it out.”
I did, and pretty quick. Prometheus has two sort of habitable bits, near the poles. Everywhere else is exposed to the full glare of the sun for about a hundred and fifty standard days at a time, then plunged into darkness for the same period. Dawn was approaching, and while it wouldn’t harm us here in the perpetual twilight of the northern polar region, we’d take off straight into the full heat and radiation of the sun. Unhealthy.
We’d cut this pretty fine, which explained the very good fee we were getting for a routine delivery – and also why Alex hadn’t told us the details until we arrived. I considered shooting him, but instead settled for jumping out of my seat. “I’ll find Gideon and Coffee,” I declared. “We’ll need to start unloading pretty quick.”
Petey tapped a control, switching my display onto the main screen. It showed the dawn racing across the surface of Prometheus towards us, intense heat churning the superthin atmosphere up and melting the surface of a dust sea. Nobody fancied taking off through that.
“What if we just go planetside, wait out the day period in the city?” Petey asked. “The ship would be in shadow the whole time, it’d be fine.”
“Remember how we called this place Dump Central? It’s a mining settlement. Population eight thousand. Here, on this rock,” I replied. “The day period is a hundred and fifty standard days. Still want to stay?”
Petey turned to his console and began his pre-flight checks.
“Good call,” I said over my shoulder as I scuttled out the door. Nine hours to unload and get back into space and in the shadow of this horrible, crappy little planet. Not too difficult unless we ran into problems unloading or something on the ship broke again.
I wasn’t optimistic.
People, Places and Things
OffRoad Solutions
OffRoad Solutions (ORS) is a pretty big firm, with manufacturing facilities and outlets right across the Orion Confederation. Its specialist niche is, as the name suggests, offroad vehicles. This definition is taken fairly loosely, in that OffRoad also manufacture trailers, robots, maintenance packs and other things that are not, strictly speaking, vehicles but are either associated with them or are similar in function.
What all of OffRoad’s products have in common is that they run on wheels (or support something that runs on wheels) and are capable of genuine off-road use. ORS bases much of its marketing on the concept that many other ‘offroad’ vehicles are actually town cars for rich and pretentious people, and fall apart when they hit a kerb. ORS has built its brand identity around the fact that only people requiring serious offroad capability buy its vehicles.
Of course, this has made ORS products incredibly attractive to a certain kind of ‘town’ user, who just has to have the ‘real thing’ even though they will never drive it to anything more challenging than a barbeque in a grassed picnic area. However, if these people are willing to pay OffRoad’s prices for their pretensions, ORS will take their money whilst making fun of them in its ad campaigns.
Most of ORS’ offerings are fairly typical rough-terrain trucks and personal transports, though a range of heavier vehicles are also offered. These include specialist military or paramilitary vehicles, long-distance offroad transports for personnel or goods movement, and exploration vehicles. The ‘RoughTruck’ range is very popular in the new-colony marketplace, providing reliable transportation for a variety of tasks. RoughTrucks are used to carry equipment to set up new settlements or outposts, to bring produce in from farms, and pretty much every task in between.
ORS also has a subsidiary, OffRoad Combat Solutions (ORCS), which produces exclusively military vehicles. Where ORS products include a number of vehicles that may be useful to a military force, ORCS supplies combat and combat-support vehicles. Its wheeled armoured cars range from a fairly basic ‘scout car’ with a turreted 20mm cannon to an eight-wheel gun-carrier mounting a 100mm howitzer. Missile-armed tank-destroyers and air defence vehicles are also available, along with armoured recovery vehicles and armoured personnel carriers.
ORCS does not sell to private customers, but does a lot of business in the mercenary and corporate sectors. Sales are also strong to military forces of small states, where purchasing a family of vehicles off-the-shelf is usually more attractive than developing something similar at home.
ORS’ civilian and paramilitary vehicles are far more common than the military units of their subsidiary, and can be encountered almost anywhere. They are most frequently seen on relatively habitable ‘frontier’ worlds or outback regions of more settled planets, and in some cases every single vehicle in a young colony has come from the factories of ORS.
Engin Combat Support, RMF
Engin Combat Support (ECS) is a Registered Mercenary Force (RMF) with a good track record for reliability and efficiency. Rather than the more usual security or strike-force niche, ECS specialises in providing support to other units. These are usually indigenous forces.
The rationale behind the decision to operate in this role is that it is relatively easy to raise and equip a basic infantry force which can fight passably well, but creating a combat support framework takes time and requires skills that many commanders lack. Numerous conflicts have been lost through logistics failures or the inability to deal with a particular obstacle.
Engin Combat Support employs enough personnel to fill out about three battalions, though it is not organised in such a conventional manner. Instead, personnel are trained for a primary role and cross-trained to be able to cope with one or more others. They are grouped into administrative companies, which vary in size from just 20 or so personnel to a more typical 100 or so. Administrative companies are simply a pool from which field units are put together, however. They deal with training, pay, leave and the like but never undertake combat operations.
For deployment, Engin forms appropriate units. These are usually of platoon or company size, with a suitable command structure and whatever additional personnel are deemed necessary for the security of the experts fielded. Engin does not hire out a specific number of personnel but instead contracts to provide a suitable service, and will not send out specialists without an adequate force of combat troops to protect them. Guarantees by the client rarely carry any weight with Engin’s staff; their people are protected by their own or they do not deploy.
Similarly, Engin vigorously resists any attempt to push its personnel into a role they are not deployed for. Thus although ECS may have deployed a couple of armoured cars to protect an engineering detachment, its field commander will refuse any order to send those vehicles to the assistance of local forces nearby. He might make an attack if he feels that this will best protect his own command, but he will never allow his units to fall victim to ‘mission creep’.
This insistence on sticking to their jobs has annoyed some of Engin’s clients, but the firm maintains that if the client wanted combat troops they should have hired them instead. It would be cheaper, for one thing. This does not mean that Engin’s forces are non-combatants. Most personnel are recruited from among the veterans of national armed forces, with some promising recruits coming in via an outsourced training programme. These are usually college graduates who possess necessary skills and are amenable to training as mercs.
Engin’s services include (but are not limited to) electronic warfare and intelligence gathering, combat engineering, logistics, air defence, armoured vehicle recovery and maintenance, and operational planning. The latter is carried out by a small team of advisors who learned their trade in the armies of various nations or on the mercenary circuit.
Most of Engin’s manpower and vehicles are optimised for the logistics role, since this absorbs significant numbers and requires a lower level of specialism. Many specialists can be encountered riding shotgun aboard a logistics truck when not working in their usual role, and this is one reason why Engin insists on deploying adequate security for its operations – a truck driver is relatively easy to replace but an electronic warfare technician is not.
ECS uses a range of rugged paramilitary vehicles for support operations and the ‘Moray’ six-wheel armoured car for most of its security and weapons-carrier tasks. The Moray can be used as an armoured personnel carrier, air defence vehicle, electronic warfare platform or light engineering vehicle. It is also an effective combat vehicle when equipped for ground action, but most of ECS’ Morays are not. These that are, generally mount medium to heavy autocannon and are set up to deal with infantry and light-vehicle threats.
The only ECS units likely to engage the enemy directly are the combat engineers, who may be required to clear obstacles in the face of opposition. They are trained for the assault role, but very rarely take part in an actual attack. Instead their training is to enable them to clear the way for an assault by assessing the likely course of the operation and focussing their efforts on the optimal routes. More commonly, combat engineers are found behind the main combat zone clearing routes for supply convoys, replacing destroyed infrastructure and making sure that hazards such as unexploded ordnance are neutralised.
Engin Combat Support is a well-respected unit, which nevertheless receives an unfair amount of abuse from front-line mercs who feel that ECS has cornered all the soft jobs. These mercs are glad enough to see the armoured trucks of an ECS convoy approaching their positions however, even if they sometimes forget that the ‘soft job’ of logistics can mean fighting through ambushes along the way.
Captain Josjoa Kaminski
Captain Kaminski is a solo mercenary, who will join a force for a single mission or hire out as an advisor. He has spent a considerable amount of time on training contracts, teaching his skills to the personnel of his client army, but his greatest benefit to his employers is his ability in the field.
Josjoa Kaminski is an expert at infiltration and intelligence gathering. He is quite capable of fighting his way out of a situation but prefers to use stealth and guile to achieve his ends. He originally trained as a sniper, and retains his ability to shoot at great distances. However, on missions where he goes armed at all he tends to carry close-range weapons such as submachineguns, usually silenced. His philosophy is that most soldiers cannot hit a moving man-sized target beyond a few metres, at least not before someone as skilled as Kaminski can find cover and disappear into it. Close-range threats are eliminated, longer-range ones are eluded.
Josjoa Kaminski is credited with the ability to hide in a bare 3m square room. Whilst this is a gross exaggeration, he is a master of fading out of sight or, just as good, making himself unlikely to be noticed. He is capable of simply walking into an enemy installation and gathering whatever data he needs, providing he can obtain a basic disguise such as an enemy uniform or a forged visitor pass.
This is due to a phenomenal acting ability as much as stealth skills; Kaminski has learned to look like he’s supposed to be there of he cannot avoid detection altogether. He has at times eluded pursuit by obtaining an enemy uniform and joining in the chase, or allowing himself to be mistaken for a sentry or a frightened civilian caught up in the chaos.
Kaminski rarely takes destructive assignments, partly because he considers them beneath his dignity. Not only can anyone blow stuff up, but this tends to announce the presence of saboteurs. Kaminski’s pride is in getting his job done without the enemy realising anything ever happened. He has obtained operational plans, schematics of weapons, and communications codes from enemies who still thought they were secure weeks or months later.
Not surprisingly, few people know what Josjoa Kaminski looks like, or if he is a ‘he’ at all. He travels under a range of false identities, or else gets around by some mysterious means that has not yet been discovered. Perhaps he stows away aboard cargo ships, or has a ship of his own. All that is known is that he turns up wherever someone is offering enough money for his services, does the job, and vanishes again. Often his targets have no idea their security has been breached. Kaminski’s fee is, naturally, very high.
Stuff and Nonsense
People send us stuff. Actually, reputable manufacturers send us stuff. And that’s despite the horrible things we do to whatever they send us and the highly negative reports we put out about it. Anyway, this time around we have a cross-section of bits and pieces that we’ve been sent. These include the usual guns and a rather nifty engineering vehicle. There was some other stuff but we forgot about it when we discovered the case of samples from the Ukrainian fermentation & distillation industry…
OffRoad Solutions ‘Elmada’ Offroad Utility Vehicle
Type: All-terrain transport vehicle
OffRoad is a largish corporation that specializes in the wheeled all-terrain vehicle marketplace. Its clients range from private users to large corporations, with security firms sometimes placing custom orders for armoured offroad patrol vehicles.
The Elmada is OffRoad’s entry-level offering, at least in terms of capability. It’s not cheap; certainly you can buy yourself a much less expensive offroader for less than half the price. OffRoad justify the cost, probably rightly, by pointing out that even their basic vehicles can go places that many others simply can’t. Propulsion is electric, with long-range fuel cells giving a couple of days’ continuous operation. This is a big improvement over the typical internal combustion vehicle.
The Elmada is no exception. It’s a fairly typical pickup truck type vehicle, with the option for an enclosed or flatbed rear. The cab seats five in reasonable comfort, plus a few odds and ends in a set of clever storage compartments. There’s an enclosed cargo box (accessible from inside the cab) in the rear of the flatbed version. This is omitted in the enclosed version since you have the whole interior to fill with stuff.
The enclosed version is available with a range of options at no additional cost. Passenger seats, a sort of sleeping area/stretcher carrying capability, tool racks and assorted other configurations can be specified at the time of purchase or retrofitted afterward. The cab (and enclosed rear if that option is taken) is not gas-tight but has a reasonable air-conditioning system with good filters, and a very effective heater.
Top speed on a good road is about 150kph, though this eats up power pretty fast. Cruising speed is more efficient; at about 105-110kph you can literally drive all day and all night and have enough juice left to turn around and go home again. Offroad on level-ish terrain you can expect to make maybe 50kph, though lower speeds are advisable for very rough ground.
Stability and ground traction are both good, with computer-assisted driving systems to help with tricky manoeuvres. The main problem this vehicle has is that its huge wheels can only turn so far in their housings, which would limit turning circle unacceptably in some circumstances. However, at low speeds the rear wheels are also steered, which offsets the problem somewhat.
The big wheels reduce ground pressure and also allow the Elmada to ‘swim’ (though not very well). It sits low in the water and feels less stable than it actually is. Propulsion is by spinning the wheels, and steering also uses this method, with thrust directed by turning the wheels. This is not very efficient, and going backwards is virtually impossible. But supposing you’re idiotic enough to drive into a deep river, at least you can get out without a rescue vehicle.
The Elmada carries a self-rescue winch (for disasters not involving rivers maybe) which can also be used for towing and various utility tasks. Ingeniously, the winch mechanism can be dismounted from the front bumper and moved to the back, or left off to save weight. It can also be replaced with a sort of chainsaw device that fits across the front bumper. This allows you to drive slowly through thick brush and carve a path as you go. It also works on small wooden huts, the tents of colleagues and garden fences, but not on thick trees. Be warned… trying to cut down a mighty oak by driving your pickup-mounted chainsaw through it will not work, and may result in a stuck truck.
Overall: This is a useful and robust vehicle, ideal for routine tasks on an expedition or a new colony. It’s a decent cheap alternative to a full-scale all-terrain-vehicle that will do most of the same jobs. A fleet of these might make a good investment for a field team operating on a budget. But in the end, it’s a pickup truck with really big wheels. That may or may not float your boat.
OffRoad Solutions ‘Navvy’ Construction Vehicle
Type: All-terrain construction vehicle
Cost: Cr 420,000. TL: 11
Armour: 3
The ‘Navvies’ (short for Navigational Engineers) were hard-working labourers who dug canals and laid roadbeds, among other tasks, during the Industrial Revolution. This vehicle’s name is thus a proud one, and tough to live up to. It doesn’t sound all that impressive unless you know about what the original Navvies achieved, but if you do then they’re a tough act to follow.
The Navvy is a businesslike-looking vehicle, with eight big wheels on each side rather than the tracks that might be expected. This makes sense; wheels require less maintenance than tracks, and they rip up the ground less. Thus the Navvy is fit for civilized company at the end of the working day; it can drive back to base without destroying the roads there, or be used as a very expensive utility transport.
And expensive it its, but you do get a lot for your money. Power is supplied by a compact fusion reactor through a very robust drive train, with electrical and mechanical power takeoffs by cable and shaft respectively. The transmission and suspension are just plain excellent. We hit a very large rock hard enough to bend an axle (didn’t do us much good either) and the transmission absorbed the shock with no loss of function. An automated system raises damaged wheels off the ground and cuts power to them, so we were able to keep careering over the countryside with little disruption.
The vehicle is very livable. The two-seat cab is roomy and comfortable, which reduces fatigue, and there is a small galley/living space just behind it which converts to a sleeping area with two fold-down bunks. A tiny toilet/washroom forms part of a partition from the aft workspace, which has a small but well-equipped maintenance bay. You can use this area to fix your tools and machinery, or to store a vast quantity of Ukrainian beer.
Rear access is via a typical small airlock which allows operations in vacuum or unpleasant conditions. The cab doors open directly into the interior of the vehicle and are single; they will not open unless the vehicle’s automated systems detect habitable conditions outside, or they are overridden with the appropriate code.
Let’s talk tools. The Navvy comes with a very good set of manual and powered construction tools stored in a vast array of containers, bins and racks on the outside. It also has a clever two-part dozer blade on the front, which can be configured as a single angled blade or an inverted V shape. An arm on the top of the vehicle can be converted from a crane to a backhoe by swapping the head, a task that takes anything from 10 minutes to an hour depending on how much of the beer is left.
The vehicle has retractable stabilisers which must be deployed when using the arm. Really. Don’t try it without them. And if you do tip your Navvy over somehow, the arm is actually strong enough to push it upright again. Not that we ever had to… we’d not be that stupid, certainly not foolish to manage it three times.
In terms of operability and simply driving about, the Navvy is a really excellent offroad vehicle. The ride is smooth and stable on most terrain, and there are plenty of helpful automatic systems to tell you you’re doing something stupid. They don’t actually stop you from doing it though… control is 100% in the hands of the operator. We like that because we’re hands-on guys, and it does allow a skilled operator to wring the absolute most out of the vehicle’s capabilities. Unfortunately it also allows idiots to tip the damn thing over.
Overall: We liked it. It’s useable and tough, and it can do good work in a difficult environment such as setting up a new colony or building a scientific outpost with little support available. Not cheap, but you do get what you pay for,
OffRoad Solutions ‘Rhino’ Light Armoured Vehicle
Type: All-terrain patrol vehicle
Cost: Cr 37,000. TL: 11
Armour: 5
The Rhino is marketed to fit the needs of corporate and mercenary security units, and national armed forces needing a light, long-duration vehicle for patrolling the outback. It is lightly armoured to protect against smallarms fire (and presumably, enraged wildlife) but is not a true military vehicle and is thus manufactured by ORS and not its military subsidiary, OffRoad Combat Solutions.
The Rhino is air-conditioned and has a very good set of environmental filters, but it is not vacuum-tight. It is not meant for exploration so much as patrol missions around colonies on worlds that are, to some extent or other, habitable. It has mesh screens over the armoured-ceramic driver’s windows, and an additional metal plate can be added to cover the ceramic, leaving just a small slit to see out of. This does significantly restrict the driver’s field of view though.
In addition to the crew of two, the Rhino can carry eight troops (or passengers, serving as a kind of combat-capable taxi) in the rear compartment. Access is via a door each side, behind the driving compartment, and a rear ‘assault door’ the width of the vehicle. There are firing ports in the sides and rear, but these are about as useful as firing ports ever are on a vehicle designed to bounce across rough terrain.
There is also a roof hatch which can take a light support weapon on a ring mount, though one does not come as standard. The vehicle’s pointy nose, from which it gains its name, carries a remote controlled weapons mount. This will carry a machinegun, a grenade launcher or something of similar size, including a camera package should you want to photograph your enemies to death. The weapon rests just below the driver’s field of view and is controlled from the co-driver’s seat.
No weapons are fitted as standard, but most support weapons can be converted using the kit you get with the vehicle. The mounting or dismounting process does take a couple of hours though, so don’t fit something you might need in a hurry.
The Rhino can make 110kph on the road and averages maybe 40kph on typical open terrain. Keeping to moderate speeds and avoiding steep hill climbs stretches the advanced fuel-cell system’s endurance out to about 4 days of pretty much continuous driving, less if you use the air conditioning extensively.
Offroad performance is good but not exceptional. This is a high-sided vehicle; it can’t cope with side slopes all that well and skids alarmingly when descending a hill. However, it will scramble slowly over obstacles of up to about a metre in height and can take obstructions half that height in its stride with ease. The four big wheels are independently suspended, and the Rhino can drive reasonably well with a wheel blown off by a mine.
This vehicle is not amphibious, though it can wade quite well and can cross deeper water by using its front-mounted winch. Its systems are pretty watertight; we got across a river so deep that the driver had to stand up in the cab and the Rhino continued to function happily enough on the far side. The upholstery was ruined though… and it wasn’t that good to start with.
Overall: The Rhino is a paramilitary vehicle designed to operate in the outback. It’s not an exploration vehicle and doesn’t make a very good substitute. It also comes with a disappointingly limited range of tools and other toys. But then it’s a guntruck designed to get personnel where they need to be, not to amuse overgrown children like our review team. In that context, this is a good buy for a security outfit or maybe a badass wildlife photographer.
OffRoad Combat Solutions ‘Moray’ 6-Wheeled Armoured Combat Vehicle
Type: All-terrain light combat vehicle
The ‘Moray’ is actually a family of six-wheeled armoured cars rather than a single vehicle. All use a common hull, powerplant and transmission, plus identical driving and internal controls. Depending on what weapons and equipment fit is chosen, some changes are made to the internal layout but in most cases all that is necessary is to fit a different turret containing the hardware. Control is via a simple but effective ‘plug-and-fight’ interface which comes as standard.
The Moray uses a high-capacity fuel-cell system good for several days’ operation providing heavy loads such as high speeds and steep hill climbs – and especially, towing other vehicles – are avoided. All six big wheels are driven and steered. They are filled with self-sealing gel and are pretty robust to start with; bullets will make holes but generally will not deflate a tyre.
The Moray can be sealed against atmospheric contaminants and NBC weapons simply by closing its doors and hatches, and has a good internal environment system. It can self-decontaminate using a set of spray nozzles, but needs an external source of reasonably clean water to do so.
The vehicle is fully amphibious, using waterjet propulsion and small rudders for manoeuviring. On a good road it can top 100kph and can travel at much the same speed over level terrain. However this is inadvisable, since at high speeds a sudden obstacle can damage the vehicle or injure occupants. It will jump for a respectable distance from a steep slope, and the suspension and big bouncy tyres make landing less unpleasant than the unsuspecting rear-seat occupants had (briefly) anticipated. Control is an issue when bouncing along in this manner, however.
All Morays have a two-seat driving/control area, with the second seat used by the vehicle commander in most cases. Vision is via multispectral camera feed from outside the vehicle, though a set of very robust optical vision blocks can be used at need. These are normally kept covered by an armoured shutter. The driving and command seats can also be elevated to allow the crew to drive with their heads out of open roof hatches where this is desirable.
The crew/fighting area is fairly roomy, and is accessed via a set of assault doors at the rear or a roof hatch which has a rail for a light support weapon such as a machinegun or a grenade launcher. There are no crew firing ports in the flanks or rear; ORCS thinks (rightly in our opinion) that these are simply a waste of time and an unnecessary opening in the hull. The rear area contains a weapon or systems operator station and some storage bins for tools and ammunition. It can also carry six infantrymen in reasonable comfort.
The rear area can be reconfigured to serve as a command post or artillery observation vehicle, electronic warfare platform or a field ambulance. This eliminates the troop capacity of course, as does removing the personnel seats and replacing them with stores containers. Many Morays serve in this capacity, acting as fast, lightly armoured supply carriers.
A range of turrets are available, all of which carry a self-contained weapon system and its ammunition. The latter is autoloaded from a ‘bustle’ on the back of the turret. There is no room for a human operator in the turret; the weapon is remote controlled from within the vehicle. However, it is possible for a crewmember to stand up in the rear roof hatch position, acting as an observer or using a weapon mounted there.
More commonly, a remote weapon fitting is fixed over this hatch. This partially obstructs the rear doors and makes the roof hatch inaccessible in the event of an emergency evacuation. If the rear doors are disabled, the only other ways out are through the two driving-compartment roof hatches or an escape door in the left side of the hull. This is not normally used in combat as it compromises the vehicle’s armour protection, but that matters relatively little of the vehicle is already compromised to the point were, say, it is on fire.
A range of weapon fits are available. Most are fairly light, ranging from a 20mm Vulcan cannon for air defence and light-vehicle engagements through various light guns (60mm is common) to a multipurpose missile system. ORCS does not favour energy weapons in vehicles that lack a fusion powerplant, as these systems drain too much power. However, the firm does like gauss weapons and light rail guns.
The Moray we were sent to test mounted a 45mm high-velocity gun in gun-over-hull configuration. I.e., there was no turret as such on our vehicle, just a remote-controlled gun. While unprotected by armour, the gun makes a very small target. It is fed from an ammunition pack inside the vehicle, reducing internal space somewhat, On the plus side, its powerful armour-piercing ammunition will put holes in light armoured vehicles with ease and will chop up lower-tech battle tanks should they be encountered.
With no turret, there is no room for a co-axial anti-infantry weapon which is a serious drawback. Most Morays mount a light weapon in the turret, but those that use the gun-over-hull configuration (i.e. those with heavier weapons) cannot. Instead, our example mounted a rapid-fire 5mm machinegun in a remote mount over the rear hatch. This allows self-defence against infantry at the expense of making access a bit more tricky. The mechanism doesn’t get in the way all that much, but you only have to run face-first into it once. The defensive gun is normally remote-operated by the vehicle commander but it is also possible to use a set of controls on the base of its mount to spread mayhem and destruction about the countryside.
Overall: It’s good. Fast, handles well, amphibious with no preparation other than a yell of ‘Yee-Haw!’ from the driver, and reasonably well protected. It’s not a tank and it can’t really fight tanks (except little, underfed ones maybe) but it can put holes in most other armoured vehicles, including pretty much anything a similarly equipped unit might field. So yeah, we liked it.
Accuracy Incorporated ‘Big 15’ 15mm Revolver
Type: Handgun, Projectile, Huge
Accuracy Incorporated are primarily known for their high-quality rifles, though they do produce a small range of extremely expensive handguns and submachineguns. Most are fairly mainstream in concept, though there are some exceptions. This weapon is one of those. It’s a colossal piece of engineering, loaded using a tip-down break-open action rather than the more common swing-out cylinder. Into the prodigious caverns of the cylinder, which rather resembles a fuel drum, are inserted four gigantic artillery shells masquerading as handgun rounds.
The ‘Big 15’ is, naturally, a beautifully made weapon with a smooth, crisp action and a delightfully even trigger pull. It’s also very heavy, which helps absorb some of the recoil from those ludicrously potent rounds it launches. The barrel is ported to allow some propellant gas to escape, which further reduces felt recoil. Or at least, it does so on merely gargantuan weapons. Firing the Big 15 is like clinging on to your very own private earthquake, combined with a muzzle flare of Biblical proportions. The weapon is single-action-only, and most users think carefully before cocking that hammer a second time.
The Big 15 has a longish (9”) barrel and can take a scope if you can find one over-engineered enough to withstand the recoil. We tried one intended for mere .44 Magnum weapons and it became visibly distorted after a few rounds. We wanted to see if we could actually break the scope by repeated firing, but our flesh gave out first. However, if you can somehow control this beast then accuracy is very good, with or without a scope. Stopping power is off the scale.
The stats listed above are for ball ammunition, but unusually, ball is difficult to obtain for it. The nearest you can get is a tracer round for training purposes. This is because the standard round for this weapon is a high-explosive projectile. Yes, you read that right. Accuracy Incorporated decided that their Big 15 was too puny with mere ball rounds and supply it as standard with far more manly explosive ammunition. Alternatively, you can buy HEAP rounds in case you find yourself fighting a dinosaur wearing a flak jacket or something.
Overall: It’s a handgun, but not as we know it. Realistically, this is a showpiece, not a fighting gun. Recoil is just too much to control, and after a few shots the ache in your hands and wrists becomes unbearable. That said, if you’ve shot someone with this thing a few times and they’re not down then you need specialist munitions. Made from Kryptonite maybe…
Tblisi Design Bureau ‘AWS-8’ Weapon System
Type: Personal Weapon System, Configurable, Projectile
The AWS-8 (Adaptable Weapon System, 8mm) is built around a custom-designed caseless 8x20mm handgun cartridge which Tblisi claim has superior ballistic characteristics to the more common 9mm or 10mm ammunition used in handguns and submachineguns. The weapon system uses a common receiver with a range of barrels and other accessories enabling it to be converted to a variety of roles.
The rather nice case that comes with this little toy contains a receiver (the trigger, grip and firing mechanism), a folding stock, a solid stock, an ammunition feed converter, a vertical foregrip and four barrels in various lengths. There are also four of each type of magazine.
If the standard stock is used (with any barrel) then ammunition feed is via a 100-round cassette inserted into the butt of the weapon from the back. The base of the cassette actually forms the weapon’s shoulder rest, which is a bit odd. So is the fact that ammunition feeds forward and down into the chamber. It’s caseless, i.e. the cartridge itself is formed of propellant which is used up in firing, so nothing is ejected. The mechanism still has to cycle the next round into the chamber however.
If you don’t want to use the solid stock, a small converter fits over the back of the weapon and allows a 22-round helical feed magazine to be fitted atop the weapon, running forward along the top of the receiver. This configuration can be used with or without the folding metal stock fitted.
If you’re going to use this weapon with the solid stock, you’ll probably want to fit the long or medium barrels. Both give reasonably similar results, creating a very decent mid-range assault weapon for urban combat or use by vehicle crews. Tblisi claim that the long barrel configuration is accurate out to 800m, but we don’t believe many people can shoot accurately half that far so it’s academic. However, you do need the long barrel to fit the grenade launcher. More about that in a moment.
For close-range combat, the ‘assault’ barrel is very handy. It can be used with a full stock but really comes into its own when used without any stock at all. The vertical foregrip can be fitted with any of the longer barrels (long, medium and assault), and is really a necessity if you’re not going to use a shoulder stock. Automatic fire is entirely controllable with a full stock and long barrel, or without a stock if you use the vertical foregrip.
Alternatively, you can set the weapon up with no stock and the short barrel, which makes it impossible to fit the foregrip. This creates a somewhat large and bulky ‘assault pistol’ capable of full-auto fire. The folding stock can be used with this configuration, and can be adjusted to become an elbow hook rather than a stock. This makes one-handed autofire a bit more controllable, but all the same a two-handed pistol-style combat grip is a good idea.
We found that 22 rounds is a bit low for an assault weapon, but the no-stock-foregrip-and-short-barrel (‘assault’) configuration was nevertheless excellent for close combat. The longer-barrel-and-full-stock (‘carbine’) configuration offers excellent high-volume firepower whilst remaining controllable. The ‘assault pistol’ setup is possibly useful as a glove-box grab-gun but it’s too big to carry comfortably as a handgun and too small for use as a serious combat weapon.
Now, about the grenade launcher. It’s a single-shot under-barrel mount that must be bought separately (for 300 credits) and cannot be used unless it is mounted under the long barrel that comes with this weapon. Reloading is by typical pump-action, and ammunition is a small 20mm grenade intended for close combat. There are no long-range sights; the launcher is really meant for urban or shipboard use, and would normally be fired in a slight arc or even direct.
The standard 20mm grenade is a high explosive/fragmentation round for room clearance. A shaped-charge anti-armour version is available for breaching doors and heavy armour, and there is a flechette round for direct fire against ‘soft’ targets. The characteristics of these rounds are detailed under the 20mm grenade launcher entry, below.
Overall: Nice. Not cheap, but a solid attempt at the configurable-weapon marketplace. We’re most likely to set ours up as an assault pistol for emergency use, or maybe in the full long-barrel-and-grenade-launcher configuration because it offers massive firepower and explosions in one weapon. We like massive firepower and explosions. We really do.
Tblisi Design Bureau ‘Granada-20’ Launcher
Type: Support Weapon, Light, Projectile
Using the same grenades as their underbarrel grenade launcher, Tblisi offer this bullpup-configuration, rifle-sized… something or other. It’s not really a support weapon in the usual sense, since its maximum range is only 250m and it’s virtually impossible hit something smaller than a barn at over 50m (we managed it, eventually. Best say nothing more about that incident). This is essentially a specialist support-of-close-assault weapon, and in that role it’s pretty good.
The 5-round magazines of 20mm grenades are fairly easy to carry and not all that heavy. The weapon itself is pretty light too, and it’s both short and handy. Feed is via the bottom of the shoulder stock, and the magazine sits securely enough not to make us nervous. Feed is also very reliable, and it’s hard to break the semi-automatic mechanism. We tried pretty hard, including immersing the launcher in mud for several hours. Might not have been that long but for the fact that we, well, kinda forgot what we did with it.
So it’s reliable and easy to use. Is it any good? Well, it shoots a very useable high-explosive round which can be preset for a variety of modes. Most commonly, it is fused for impact, but impact-plus-a-time-delay is doable; up to five seconds. It is also, for some reason, possible to fuse for ‘two bounces’, i.e. the projectile can be pinballed off two walls and will then detonate at the third impact or after an additional 1-5 second delay. We had some fun with the ‘trick shot’ setting, and it does seem useful should you need to fight a battle on a giant pinball table or perhaps bounce grenades down a corridor and round a corner at the end.
The HE round is what you’d expect from an advanced 20mm warhead. It makes a satisfyingly loud bang and will harm anyone within a metre or so. It’s officially rated as a ‘soft target’ weapon, i.e. it won’t penetrate armour very well. The concussion round is also pretty decent, and combined with the trick-shot fusing it allows you to bounce stun grenades into an inaccessible room. Handy for those noisy dorm-room parties next door maybe.
High Explosive Armour-Piercing is a straight impact-fused shaped-charge round for putting holes in light vehicles and personal armour. It’s not very exciting but it works well enough. The breacher round is almost identical but is designed to stick to the target and detonates a preset 1-5 seconds after impact. This allows several to be delivered, though clever tricks like shortening the fuse on each and attempting to time deliveries so that they all go off at once rarely work. It’s fun trying though.
The flechette round is basically a big shotgun shell which fills a cone-shaped area. It’s pretty ineffective against hard cover or body armour, but it does allow a group of targets within 1m of one another to be attacked. The stunbag round is a bit more personal. Its projectile is a bag full of loose lead shot, which stuns the victim by simple impact. Again it’s not great against armour but it’ll knock down most opponents quite nicely. It also causes significant dents in light vehicles.
The most interesting of these rounds is the focussed incendiary though. This is another ‘sticky’ round like the breachers, but instead of exploding it burns fiercely, creating a sort of cutting jet which burns away armour or whatever else it hits, and is pretty detrimental to flesh as well. It is somewhat erratic however; sometimes the sticky-seal fails and it drops off while still burning, and at other times it goes out quickly. Clever idea though.
Overall: Nice piece of kit, with several uses. The concussion and stunbag rounds can be used for less-lethal situations, and a quick magazine swap turns the weapon into a deadly implement. Give it to someone well trained and reliable though. Otherwise trick shots with explosive grenades can be a bit more interesting than you’d like
Orion Optics “L-81” Personal Beam Weapon
Type: Handgun, Laser
Orion Optics produces a range of optical scientific instruments such as rangefinders, telescopes, laser communicators and the like. They also market a small range of cutting-edge laser weapons based on extremely advanced optical and energy systems. This example is their idea of a handgun. It’s a large, bulky object with a very long barrel. The power unit fits atop the receiver, which not only looks odd but also makes the weapon strangely top-heavy and prone to tip from side to side.
If this weapon were fitted with a vertical foregrip and called itself a carbine, we’d probably praise its relatively small size and generally handy dimensions. As a handgun, however, it’s just too bloody huge. And heavy. It’s really, really heavy. It also suffers from being strangely balanced. The long barrel makes it nose-heavy, while the top-mounted power unit is so high above the user’s hand that causes an odd waggling movement if held even slightly off-centre.
These issues aside, the L-81 packs a fair amount of firepower into a relatively small package. Although it really wanted to be a carbine, Orion Optics have managed to keep the weapon’s size down to the point where it can be carried in a hip holster, yet still provides fairly potent combat capability.
We found firing it a bit strange, mainly because we’d try to compensate for a big-handgun kick that didn’t come, sending the muzzle downwards and starting that weird shimmy. This can delay the next shot or make it rather more random than most users would like. The answer is to take a more deliberate two-handed stance when firing; control is good when firing two-handed.
Weirdness aside, the most notable feature of this weapon is its ability to penetrate armour. Most laser weapons do not perform very well against armour, but Orion Optics have found a way to produce a highly concentrated beam that can punch though light armour as well as many projectile weapons.
Overall: This is almost, but not quite, a really excellent weapon. Its anti-armour performance is good, with very decent firepower for a laser weapon that does not use a belt power unit. Of course, this comes with a suitably ludicrous price tag. On balance, we’d have to say that you don’t quite get what you pay for, but what you do get is pretty good,
Orion Optics “ASL-84” Assault Beam Weapon
Type: Carbine, Laser
Orion’s Assault Beam Weapon is in many ways more conventional than their handgun offering. The receiver is in many ways what the Personal Beam Weapon should have been. We suspect it may actually be the same internal optics and beam generation hardware, with a slightly longer barrel, a foregrip and somewhat different external styling. The surprisingly robust telescopic stock is detachable, but it weighs so little that it might as well remain attached.
More importantly, that annoying top-mounted power unit is gone and has been replaced by one of the cleverest optical sights we’ve seen in a while. We’d expect little less from Orion Optics, but this really did impress us. It’s a simple optical red dot reflex sight for short-range point-and-shoot, but by pushing a slider forward through a series of three notches, the user can covert the sight into a 2X, 4X or 8X magnification telescopic sight.
Using the sight in this mode is a bit weird at first, since the whole sight picture is compressed into a 3D projection within the tiny flip-up reflex sight. That’s another clever feature; the sight flips down to protect it from being bashed and mangled whilst being carried.
The ASL-84 is intended primarily for use by assault troops fighting in low gravity or zero-g, and as such it has a fairly useful burst-fire capability. Firing from the hip is entirely controllable as there is no recoil, of course. One-handed firing is equally easy, though don’t expect great accuracy doing this. Burst-fire eats up a lot of power; using up five of what Orion Optics call ‘power units’ for each burst of autofire. A single shot uses one, meaning that profligate fire can leave the user, literally, powerless. This is a common flaw with belt-pack powered weapons; packs are bulky, which makes it awkward to carry spares. The Orion pack, while heavy, is reasonably small which allows a couple of additional units or a backup gun to be carried.
As with the L-81, the ASL-84 has good penetrative capability thanks to Orion’s excellent beam generation and collimation system. It will punch through light body armour pretty well, and has an amusing tendency to set the fringes of the hole it makes on fire. That’s less of a problem than the damage it does to the target, but it can be… interesting… if a stray shot hits something flammable.
Overall: This is a very nice weapon. Performance is little better than a standard laser carbine, but the penetration capability can be useful, as can autofire. The ability to switch to a telescopic sight is useful, though there is a limit to the range to which a typical user can shoot accurately. We liked, it, but the universal comment was ‘IT COSTS HOW MUCH???’
End Notes
We came, we saw, we… got distracted by shiny things. Terra/Sol, for all it was quite recently colonised, is a big and complex place. We only saw a very small fragment of what’s going on there, and that was from a limited perspective (i.e. ‘under a bar’). The place merits a great deal more exploration, especially its fermented-goods marketplace. We may get to do that, but right now we’re waiting to hear from a new client who may have an interesting mission for us. Or not. We’ll have to just wait and see.
RSS Avenger, signing off.
Late 2010
