Boat Trolls planning thread! (full of spoilers, non-players enter at your own risk)

i'm fine with geometry, but can't keep very good mental hold of particulars, so the actual nuts-and-bolts of a lot of calculations totally elude me. i'm extremely great at pulling things out of my ass, though.

also intra- and meta-spaces are particular interesting to me, as is anything to do with time. like, the fourth and fifth dimensions, time, not history, time. i am bad at history time.

 

helen: great at string theory, ghost wrangling, and on-the-fly dog toy manufacture.

 

good luck!

 

heeey, silly question--would either of you feel up to doing space navy things at some point? (There's totally no rush, and I've felt like microwaved crap recently, so I haven't been pining away over here or anything, but all at once I want Lu and Pancho being adorable at each other, and also roach and I kind of wrote a tentative thing with Galley and Lu that happens a bit after current events that might be fun to post later X))

 

i wouldn't mind— i'm sleepy right now and i have work later, so i'll be in and out, but i'm generally up for anything. and lu and pancho are SO cute.

 

taking care of yourself mentally and physically is first priority! you can't RP if you're dead, you know.

 

yessss what roach said--and you're not a weak link! you are a link that has to go see a lot of doctors and it's sucky. sometimes links have to zone out and rock the self care dance.

 

I can't remember if I've talked about this earlier— I wish there was a way to search threads!— but I keep thinking about Jethro and Erskin and their FEELINGS and I am definitely looking forward to hurting them. In the feelings. Like a lot. Because I'm mean.

Specifically, I really like the idea of Erskin being all like, vulnerable and wondering when he first wakes up out of the slime and sees that Jethro is real, and they have a moment, and all the stuff Erskin went through in VR is hanging there between them, and then his quadrantmates come in and Jethro gets a close and personal view of the whole Captain Aspera persona slamming back in place. And like, after that Erskin is as cheerily self-contained with his intimate partners as he was with Jethro when they first met. There's probably a lot more in-jokes and teasing and there's obviously genuine fondness and love, but he's still got everything tightly bottled up and under control.

I just think that'd be a really interesting knife to stick in? Like, hey, this guy's got a moirail! This guy's all over his moirail! And yet he's nowhere near as honest with the dude as he is with you.

(That being said, I think Lainey and Arguus know how to translate his ridiculous 'I am totally fine at all times about everything forever' bluffs. "This does sting a bit," means "I think it cut into the bone." "I'm a little tired tonight is all," means "I am having a grand mal meltdown and won't come out from under this rock for the next thirty hours." "I shall be better directly" means "If you don't pretend something catastrophic didn't just happen to me I'm going to take your fucking face off".)

 

I was going back through the thread and I found some stuff.

I feel like I need to write this on a post-it note and stick it to my monitor! As I said in another part of the thread, when I'm stressed out, my characters get so much less resilient and fun, and everything turns into a grimdark pulp-novel tragedy. And I have been massively stressed out for like two months now over this comic... The RP is still really fun! But I need to remember to keep Erskin as a genuinely tough, positive, friendly guy, and not just someone who's terrified of rejection or attack. Though Erskin's life has been wildly different as a free-spirt werewolf than an exile-to-target space captain, I think he's just always going to be more guarded and insecure in the space navy au.

Did I ever say, I get really pleased when you analyze my characters, it's neat. It's like seeing a picture of the back of your head, it's really fun to see a different perspective. Anyway I think this bit should come into play with Jethro, definitely. Space navy erskin needs so much validation.

 

*WIBBLES*

eta: also yknow erskin would welcome jethro in and make him feel safe and part of things totally aside from any emotional attachment— actually, his emotional turmoil about jethro and his realness quotient and his feelings and stuff would make him privately want to push jethro very very far away. especially when jethro started in on the physical therapy. but it would just be something erskin saw as his duty to ensure... he probably still wants to catch up with the zero sum survivors and check on how they've integrated, too, as soon as he gets back on his feet.

 

does this jethro still have paw? because i was thinking erskin would really enjoy the challenge of working out how to rig up an arctic biome. like, probably trolls with cold-weather lusii settle for keeping them buzz-cut, maybe going for periodic walks in unheated hangars, always buying air conditioning units, freezing big tubs of water and putting them out for mom to lie on and huff. due the sunslammer's condition of being pretty big and sparsely populated, i bet there's always plenty of chilly unheated real-estate.

SHIP TALK: due to the difficulty of dissipating heat in a vacuum, bigsize ships are necessarily designed to be cold rather than warm. it's easy enough to heat up a room from the inside, but in space it's trickier to cool it from the outside. so the ship's air and water systems would also function as the coolant system, letting hot steam-saturated air 'rise' to the 'top' of the ship, get cooled however slowly against the space-facing hull plate, and sink back down into the core. if a big ship was insulated the way our tiny human tuna-can ISS is, i'm pretty sure a carrier at full capacity for ships and personnel and workspaces— forges, nuclear reactors, living bodies— could have an incredibly high core temperature, like a stuffy attic. a stuffy attic that is partway on fire. there's the adage that a breeze on a spaceship means a hull breach— i think i've actually parroted it myself a few times— but actually, once you get to a certain size, there would be a constant pattern of airflow. on ships measured in miles, you'd practically get weather.

anyway, upshot of this is no one's bothered to put together an actual cold-weather park or biome so far—it'd be a waste of dirt, plants wouldn't produce enough breathables or edibles to be worth the cultivation, the ship's mostly lowbloods who prefer warm recreation areas anyway— but erskin would be interested in trying one out, on a small scale, for science, and also for polar bear comfort. plus, i doubt he's tried any scaffolded pine varieties, he would also be excited to grow new kinds of woods for pancho now that there's someone around who wants to craft with them.

i think, in the regular universe, no one had better introduce erskin to minecraft. he will never be seen again.

 

okay please consider how cute it would be if, upon finding out that jethro has an ice bear, erskin arranges for one of the cafeteria-size thermal hulls to be delivered to jethro's quarters along with a selection of plastic bins, so jethro can freeze gigantic icecubes for him to lie on and play with.



this one has fish in it

 

yeah and erskin would just do it as a matter of course, not even because he wants to pamper jethro, just because. i was thinking, he's probably considered an especially soft touch about lusii, like, particularly accommodating about their care and comfort.

now that he's got (one or two) lusii again, the whole, 'i've been an orphan since my early adolescence' thing is going to get even more firmly buried as a discussion topic, even though he's so hesitant and estranged with itsy, and blatantly freaked out about whitey. i think a lot of the crew's just figured his lusus is simply so pampered it never leaves his quarters, they all know he's got a swank private tidepool... then again, i'm pretty sure gossip is the number one sport among humans and trolls, so there's probably a dozen juicy stories about every possible aspect of captain aspera's life.