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

Hmmmm. She bullies Erskin into sitting on a table or something and has his bandages and prosthetic off to have a proper, close look at it, pokes around with some diagnostic tools and sensors, and is like 'well ok this sucks and you're dumb' ? Then proposes to bring Sigmah in?

 

I would also have thought Pancho would have known Sigmah professionally, if he specializes in weird biology and biotech stuff, and she has to at least know enough about wiring prosthetics for battlefield medicine.

 

i'll get back to the RP in a second but pancho's comment about drywall sent me on a wiki-walk, or like, i guess a wiki-scurry. check this out:

drywall is, more or less, a sturdy aerated plaster set between two thick sheets of paper, and is a common wall material because it's decently sturdy, waterproof, and insulating. plaster's main component is gypsum, which is derived from a calcium carbonate. you find the same thing in limestone, which is the main component of cement, but limestone's calcium carbonate is in the majority from shells, and later turns into sandstone, unless i missed something. as a weird side note, unless trolls managed to synthesize lime easily and cheaply from somewhere other than limestone— and they don't really seem to dick around with stuff on a molecular level, that i noticed— concrete would be a pretty exotic building material for them. their planet is so fucking old i would expect all their limestone, organically derived or not, to have been quarried out a bazillion years ago.

so, what do you set the carpentry drones to prefab for you on alien planets you're invading? drywall. calcium carbonate is the sort of mineral formation you'd get on any reasonably alternian planet, even when limestone wasn't a sure bet, but you should be able to hunt up gypsum, and then you've got plaster, and then you've got drywall slabs to throw your base together with. unless of course you want to drill the whole thing out of rock. then just go for that i guess.

meanwhile, on ships, every building surface might as well be made of iron, since there's no weather and nickle-iron is such a common component of asteroids. plus, keeping heat in isn't the problem with spacecraft, it's conducting it out. which i still haven't sussed out completely how trolls manage but in the case of the sunslammer i think heat gets aggregated somewhere, water is boiled in it for steam electricity, then the steam is condensed in pipes webbed around the outer hull. hence the plumbing being such a preoccupation: it doesn't just need to be kept clean and moving so trolls can brush their teeth, but also so that head stroke doesn't kill everyone off before dysentary strikes.

space: it is trying to kill you very hard.

ANYWAY, it just struck me as cool, that a throwaway line from pancho about drywall turned out to be so apt. she would be used to drywall as the default housing material, while erskin would be used to steel plate.

 

p.s sorry i kind of wordsplode about building things in space sometimes :P

 

It would be kind of funny if he and the maker guys went around in a loop about that, since, on a big carrier like the sunslammer, iron and heat are as close to free as anything gets, plus of course the ship's fabrication area is going to contain, specifically, the kind of refinery to spit out reams and reams of hull plating to patch up carried ships' booboos. so the sunslammer probably produces steel, as needed, at a scale and rate that would be kind of nuts to a guy used to ground maneuvers.

so, like:

"Give me whatever's cheapest, so it doesn't matter if it breaks."

"Steel. It won't break."

"Yeah, but I don't care. I want whatever's cheapest. So it's okay if it breaks."

"Steel doesn't break."

"YEAH OK, BUT WHAT'S CHEAPEST?"

"STEEL. USE. STEEL."

 

thank you space.com

also please consider the irony of silicon being one of the most abundant materials, but trolls get their computing power from neural networks, and hence need to run raw minerals and metals through a lot of tedious biological processes before they can get the meat and goop and slime and chitin for their computers. so they take any silicon they're not gonna make into glass and they pitch it right back out into space.

 

you know how like in princess mononoke that guy got the worms in his arm? probably kind of like that only in barbie pink. his leg is actively growing helmscolumn tentacles. it'd be pretty obvious.

 

My internet died, and i dont wanna retype on my frickin phone. Have nice sleeps! Ill post at SOME point.

 

erskin would definitely start whimpering and then trying to get free and then begging for lainey after like ten minutes, btw. it probably looks completely pathetic, and also probably a lot like how helmsmen behave when being calibrated and installed, if pancho or murfey had ever seen that. i think it is just hard to have self control when your nervous system is getting electrocuted a lot.

 

shit wrong account WHOOPS

 

wah! sigmah is too darn cute.