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

edited in a few xtra notes.

 

ALSO my 'hey what if bel is miserable and sick for once' suggestion has backfired in that i'm like NOOOO MY BABYYYYY about it all.

 

okay i'll edit it!

 

troll tech couldn't possibly have evolved in the same order as human technology, due to a lot of things like their focus on biotech but also due to a steady source of telekenetic slaves. their age of sail would certainly have had helmsmen around to back up wind power, as well as secure difficult-to-reach lines, hold rudders steady in storms, etc. the sophistication of biowire rigs in directing and amplifying power would probably have been the main thing that changed over the millennia, not the source of the power itself.

 

btw re: eagle dad, i'm pretty sure erskin's appointed someone to get all the lusii taken care of, and dropped off with friends or assigned to a volunteer. he's thoughtful about custodians, even if he doesn't much like being around them personally. and you said eagledad was making friends, so i'm pretty sure eagle dad is getting fat off sympathy meals brought by the trolls of his lusus friends when they come over to play. if he's friendly towards trolls, too, he's getting upgraded from 'My Parent's Friend' to 'Really Cool Uncle' status.

 

Erskin should go bring Bel a feather. The idea of a downy feather the size of a big umbrella is really cute to me.

 

also, Galley: open mouth, insert foot, threaten and/or insult everyone in hearing range.

 

okay, i'll edit! that makes sense.

 

okay will this work? erskin is going on the assumption that quiet looking-at-numbers-and-items time will help his hulking nerd boyfriend from fixating on unreal nonsense. he and lainey probably do this kind of thing with arguus when he's having a social anxiety meltdown.

 

ok good luck! things are set up for bel to start getting paranoid about the machines now, it's late on day 3. so he'd have this blood filter session on day three, then another early on night four, then a while to brood and fret, then maybe Defensive Maneuvers on day 4's filter session. does that schedule make sense?

 

also uh, i struggled with whether or not it would be obnoxious and/or pedantic to correct this, since maybe you already know but just weren't thinking about this then. BUT, here is time for sci-fi nerd lectures anyway.

by necessity, a galactic empire is going to have to consist of transport units that are going faster than light pretty much constantly, as well as ansibles: messaging devices that operate independent of any spacetime constraints. otherwise the alternian empire would, you know, have long since over-extended itself and collapsed due to response-time problems. (fictional) trolls already interact with matter in a pretty different way from (real life) humans, considering the insane scope of their various psionic talents, and thus seem to have built ansibles out of casual homestucky handwavium. i could go into the way the Game spans at least five dimensions here and turns all player-obtained communications devices into ansibles, but that would make this take REALLY long so haha whoops, i won't.

still, ok, to sum up, if trolls get their weird powers via an intersection with either SUPERNATURAL MAGIC WOO-WOO or HOLLYWOOD QUANTUM MULTIDIMENSIONAL INTERSECTIONS, they're zipping around the galaxy at high multiples of the speed of light and talking to one another regardless of the attendant space-time distortions you get as you approach and then break the lightspeed barrier, let alone each others' super weird relative velocities. i have to sit down and deliberately work through relativity issues bit by bit to be able to talk about them, which is sort of embarrassing sometimes, and also means the lecture on that is postponed indefinitely. alllllsssso trolls might not even have the relativity problems that humans expect to be facing at the dawn of our own space age, because this is a bunch of magical bugs that have been spacefaring for thousands and thousands of years.

god, i love science fiction.

TO SUM UP AGAIN, no matter how fast whitey's going, it wouldn't affect ship-to-ship communication, as there's already a phenomenal difference between erskin and pretty much anyone else he'd call up, especially planetside trolls like that indigo he chatted up.

pancho and whitey would be out of contact due to maintaining radio silence and/or psychic shielding. they want to get there without incident, so they're running very quietly.