Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

[rubs my dirty fly hands together] time to figure out what's going on with my soil then 8D
I really like the idea of there being parts of the planet where you don't need rails for maglev (and parts where you do), and combo propulsion-mode vehicles makes total sense, especially for perhaps the more geologically complex areas. Having a harder bedrock underneath might make it possible in the mountainous areas, especially in the central Tagan Heights. And then there's the Tagan Heights being extensively-tunneled anyway for the sake of ore extraction - could save some money on using rail-less lines lmao.
(I was thinking last night about dual-propulsion GEV+ regular jet frames in the smaller size classes - it might be interesting on a sort of 'evolutionary' level for the smaller jets to save power and fuel by using the ground effect to fly longer distances than they might otherwise, and then for someone to deliberately design altmode frames based around taking advantage of the ground effect. It would make sense to add hovercraft, hydrofoils, and perhaps rotaries into the mix, and maglev as a 'takeoff' and 'landing' auxiliary would be neat as well 8D)

 

Rotaries aren't a terribly good cargo option unless it's over terrain that not even roads can be built on, they lose a lot in speed and fuel consumption on flat ground over boats and GEVs. GEVs also don't win that much over boats and landcraft because their cargo limitations are quite steep. Of course none of that matters if you're working off the assumption that cargo haulers all are capable of displacing the cargo's mass, but I always thought it would be fun if one of the reasons Vos is so culturally dominant partially because they're capable of supporting fleets and fleets of heavy aircraft without requiring them all to have VTOL or orbital transit capability, meaning that despite having a fairly low population, the city itself is huge and sprawling to accommodate the aerial infrastructure.

 

I’ve got a new origfic story circulating in my brain and I gotta ramble about it for a bit, scuse the lack of robot xD

Spoiler

It’s about vampires? I guess? That was just a placeholder at first, but then I decided my main vampire really likes garlic even tho garlic will dustify vampires, but he’ll catch a sniff of like garlic bread and be like “fuckit, it’s worth it.” And I laugh every time, so I gotta keep the joke.

The vampires in the story are more or less immortal, things like garlic will just turn them into a neat pile of ash but they’ll reform if you give them blood. But the older they get, they almost always kinda stop caring about things and turn kinda... monstrous, and that tends to put them at odds with people so there’s a parallel group of vampire hunters I guess? who are keeping track of the vampires and they’ll leave you alone if you mind your own business but if you cause trouble with normal humans ur dead, m8. My young main characters are affiliated with the vampire hunters, but through a series of shenanigans they end up being adopted by this very old, very weird vampire who has managed to avoid going full monster by mainly just being very interested in the world and in people. (I’m gonna send him to university to study anthropology or something at some point lmao.) He’s so old that the MCs’ working theory is that he just forgot how to interact with humans and to be fair to him he’s been trapped in a mansion for like 50 years being a house elf for some other asshole vampires basically. They teach him how to use computers and the internet and then he ends up being better at it than either of them and they find that fuckin hilarious.

MC1 is a ‘normal’ kid who turns out to be the secret child of another very old, very powerful vampire. She finds that whole thing out by getting kidnapped by a group of asshole vampires who want to use her dad’s blood, which was very destructive, to destroy some shit. Unfortunately for them she has the destructive gift too, so eventually she frees herself and they don’t have a good time subsequently lol. She was my original focal character but then Mentor Vampire took over lmao.

MC2 is MC1’s best friend, purely by chance; they both went to the same schools. Despite this, MC2, whose parents are with the vampire hunters, is surprised to learn his best friend is half vampire. His priority however is rescuing her from the bad vampires, although his parents and their crew seem more interested in the vampire politics at play and only decide to rescue the half-vampire because the bad vampires kinda explode some humans one night and that’s Not Okay.

I should probably write all this down somewhere at some point xD

 

Oh ye, the rotaries are mostly military in my headcanon, they’re really not common in general terms. At the moment I have most freight being transported via rail and truck, with sea links over the sea of rust and shuttle links mainly to the moons and colony worlds. Subspace hasn’t really come into the question, but that’s a good point, that technology would have all sorts of potential applications outside of personal storage. Tbh I’m also toying with the idea of a kind of hyperloop type thing, but I’ve only vaguely looked that up so we shall see what happens lmao.

My Vos is the cultural center of the Tagan Heights, so it historically oversaw the lion’s share of the Tagan mining industry. It’s in a part of the Heights where the deep crust is exposed, so there are/we’re lots of useful and rare minerals there for the mining, but it was also an area that’s hard to get to on foot and virtually impossible to drive to, so for a long time stuff had to be airlifted in and out and most of the workforce was flighted in some way. Eventually the road/rail networks reached that deep into the Heights, allowing grounded mecha in, but by that time flightframes owned basically everything and a sort of flightframe culture had really entrenched itself. That said, it’s not the same culture as large flightframe centres anywhere else (there are a couple of those down on the plains); Vosians kinda took the whole landscape and made it their own. Idk how to describe it, it’s past my bedtime lol. It was one of the main defensive centres during the Quintesson Wars, but it was also very isolated throughout that period, which was a formative one for modern Cybertronian society.

...feel like I have more to say on that topic but the words are escaping me rn. I’ll try again in the morning xD

 

Apparently there's a tag on Ao3 for New Zealand and I've gotten thoroughly distracted tonight going through a bunch of these fics and... kiwi--picking them XD Ironically the two best so far were not written by kiwis - one was for Moby Dick, and the other for BTS, both fandoms I never thought I'd read anything for but apparently the lure of seeing my home country represented in fic is too great lmao. The BTS one was mainly a tourist's perspective of places - they made a couple of mistakes, but the sort of... background mistakes i guess? that i'd probably expect from anyone writing about a place they haven't lived in for ages (and have probably made myself lmao). The Moby Dick one had some really respectfully handled Maori cultural elements and Te Reo usage, and now I'm furiously looking through my dictionaries trying to figure out if we have the 'who' sound. 'Wh' together in Te Reo words makes a soft 'f' sound with air blown between the lips, and I know that 'wha', 'whe', and 'whi' sounds exist in the language, but I've never heard 'who' or 'whu'. Some cursory research seems to support this - but at the same time the way it was used in the fic was a pretty good balance balance between a canon name and Te Reo orthography, so I feel like it was probably deliberate. :D

 

Amusing pastime, trying to pick which writers are kiwi and which aren’t. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell, sometimes it’s not so hard, and it’s interesting seeing what things ping me as ‘kiwi author’ and what makes me think they’re very much not. Calling a diner a diner, for example. Tbh I’m not sure what we do call those... ‘tearooms’, possibly, but that might just be a south island thing and it’s rare these days anyway. ‘Diner’ miiiight be used but in my experience it would be for something that was deliberately American style. I think I’d prob just end up calling a regular kiwi thing a cafe lmao.

Also, for some reason people keep thinking we’re tropical??? Parts of northland are subtropical, technically, I guess, but the rest of us is solidly temperate. Maybe I’m biased as a mainlander here lmao but it definitely strikes me as Wrong xD

 

sdfgkjdfk I was almost fooled! but then a sheriff showed up and just started shooting. We don’t have sheriffs, and the cops barely have guns, they don’t just start shooting for any lil thing.

 

Spoiler

Ahaha a friend of mine’s had a 4000+ word callout written about them and I’m laughing for several reasons:

1. It has none of the ‘usual’ callout accusations of these days, nothing serious—it is 100% this idiot OC artist getting bent out of shape because their character shares a handful of similarities with my friend’s OC.
2. The writer has had it out for my friend since... January, February last year? They’ve periodically blown up in drama ever since. We’ve been anticipating this callout for like six months lmao
3. ...and because we have been anticipating it, we have been keeping Receipts.
4. Which is absolutely fucking hilarious, because the entire backbone of the callout is based on the accuser completely messing up the timeline to cast themself in the best possible light and my friend in the worst light.
5. And because we kept Receipts, we’re going to be able to refute pretty much the whole damn thing.

That said, we may not even need to bother. Very few people listen to this asshole anymore, she’s an old dramamonger with a bunch of her own callouts floating around the Internet and a pattern of this exact behaviour that’s years long. We’re just gonna... monitor the situation for now, and if it blows up anyway then we have the Receipts ready to deploy, but if no-one pays any attention to it then it’d be counterproductive to bring it to attention lmao.

On a lighter note, robots are coming along v v slowly bc uni has completely knocked me out. Gonna have to rely on the lecture recordings and livestreams more than I would like to, but I need to talk to the disability services anyway so I may as well spread my net a little wider. XD

 

Oh yikes about that thing with your friend, i hope it's not stressing them out too much.

 

She'll be fine I think, it tentatively looks like the callout crashed and burned as hard as we hoped it would, lol. I spent most of last night fact-checking all the claims and it turns out I could correct and debunk probably 90% of them. It was kinda fascinating tbh - there are similarities between their characters and respective stories, but those are mainly because, y'know, they're working with the same canon character and his story, and working fairly closely to what's already in canon, and it seems they both have fairly similar tastes when it comes to the emotional beats of a story. Oh, and they both like stars. That's... basically it.

The funniest part is the canon character at the centre of all this tbh. It's fucking All Might. XD Not really the sort of character you'd expect to cause an OCxCanon rivalshipping slapfight.

 

S H R I E KS

That person I was talking about above? Second person I've ever had drama with directly in fandom. They do not hold a single candle to the first person. They were a shallow, incompetent imitation at best.

The first person is back.

(linking the twitter discussion just in case -- there are no names mentioned afaik but shit got serious enough, on multiple occasions, that i feel like it's something ppl oughta be aware of? it's been a few years so maybe she's changed in the meantime, but she'd had like five, six years to grow the fuck up before then and she never did. i have no idea what she was like before the TF fandom but i feel like it's not likely the level of behaviour she exhibited would have come from nowhere. she'd be like... maybe 40 years old by now? and half the people she fucked with were teenagers at least when they met her. I was 18 or 19, and I'm one of the older ones. there were enough of us that... idk. maybe we just looked like easy targets.

 

mlle's making noises about wanting to write extremely cursed overlord/ultra magnus stuff again and honestly with any other overlord thing of hers I'd be screeching in appropriate horror while she goes all mr burns in the background, but i can no longer react to overmags specifically with anything but laughter since the time she was talking about it and I accidentally sent magnus' spike to kansas.

i need to dig up that chatlog again, i need some laughter in my life rn XD

 

I have been sick and nothing's been getting done except the schoolwork that absolutely Must Be Done so aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. I miss my robots.

Also another minor vent: When an author makes it clear that a) their writing policy is "I'm doing this for me but yall can read this if you want" and b) that their favored topics of fic very often veers into Incredibly Dark, with appropriate tags on the fics concerned... and people comment saying "This is too dark"... did u not read the writing on the wall?
That is a vague i guess but the writer i'm talking about has been in the fandom for the best part of ten years now and is pretty prolific, AND i'm pretty sure i've seen the commenter's username hanging around for a while soooo i kinda just wanna... reply comment and go "Duh." I won't, because don't have the energy, but ugh. This author's stuff not infrequently gets too dark for me too, but I click the goddamn back button instead of leaving pointless comments.

 

I finally got my brain back onto Transformers and almost immediately got caught up in trying to make my orbit headcanons work lmao. Saw a diagram earlier that suggests an orbital path that's elliptical enough to have two orbital 'winters' miiiiight be possible if there's another satellite closer in causing interference, but now i'm not sure how to google that and there's... a lot of scary math on most of the pages that do come up lmao. I might have to add another planet or two to the inner system to drag Cybertron out of whack.

EDIT: aha, i want a barycenter that isn't inside the sun. In fact it needs to be outside of it by quite a lot. Which I think means Cybertron needs to have a pretty distant orbital path even at perihelion, and probably the inner-system satellites need to be rather large and also fairly eccentric. And i definitely need to recalculate my calendar because the winter that's closest to the barycenter is going to be quite different to the aphelion winter. And the fuckin sun is gonna need to be pretty intense too if i want liquid water lmfao. How much can I get away with blaming on Primus Bullshit?? XDD

 

Day 6... or 7??? Of coronavirus lockdown and I have finally been productive lmao. Made a load of chocolate cake this morning, and I have stew in the slowcooker that is smelling delicious. It tastes better than usual too... maybe I put in more garlic than usual, or the kiwi* seasoning I browned the meat with is having an effect? I’m looking forward to dinnertime lmao.

*I forgot kiwi = fruit also so let me clarify: it's a seasoning featuring a native NZ plant that up until last year I had no idea could be used as spices: Horopito.

Things are possibly looking good on the virus front too? I’ve been watching the health ministry updates every day and the number of new cases has gone down in the last couple of days. The ministry are saying not to take it for granted, and they’ve broadened the testing criteria today, so we’ll see if that has an effect or if the numbers keep going down. As of today we have 708 cases, counting probable but unconfirmed, with 14 people in hospital, 2 in intensive care, and one death to date. Still three weeks of lockdown to go... I’m tentatively optimistic. :D

 

Every single diagram i've tried to draw has come out like shit, so let's try describing the Cybertron system in words instead:

+ the Sun is a main-sequence star, about 4 billion years old, spectral class F -- which means it's very likely near the end of its time on the main sequence and maybe Cybertron needs to start looking for a new orbit lmao. It's called Hadeen B in the Council of Galactic States register, which the Cybertronians hate because Hadeen is a Quintesson name, but alas the Quints got to the council first.

+ Planet 1 is a borderline hot jupiter orbiting very close to the star. Its orbit is quite elliptical, hence the 'borderline' part; it is known as kind of a curiosity among astronomers because it doesn't seem like it should be stable, but it is. Its name is the Torch, and it is associated with Liege Maximo ("the Burning Torch") in Mythic symbology. It has 28 moons of various sizes, the three largest of which are named Pyr, Tethys, and Pan, after the mythological children of Liege Maximo.

+ Planet 2 is another, larger gas giant further out on a similarly elliptical orbit, offset slightly from the Torch. Its name is the Guardian, and it is associated with the Eleventh Prime, the Guardian Wall. It has 43 moons, the largest of which is named Pax, after the mythological only child of the Guardian Wall. The theory is that both the Guardian and the Torch originally had less elliptical orbits, but that Cybertron's appearance in the system dragged them out of alignment (along with other hypothesized ancestral planets in the system) and these two were the only survivors.

+ Cybertron is an invader from galaxies unknown, and is known to be one based on its completely different structure and composition (though nobody knows much about the specifics because the Primacy won't let anyone study it too closely). It is covered in a skin of rocky material that resembles the upper lithosphere of a terrestrial planet and has a similar chemical composition to the one remaining terrestrial planet in the system, the Pilot, but it behaves in a very different way and beneath about 20-50km of rock, shit gets completely weird. The dominant theory therefore is that the system may have previously had two or more planets, probably rocky ones, which were knocked out of their orbits by Cybertron's arrival and either were ejected from the system entirely or ate shit against their moons/each other, and some of the debris was subsequently scooped up by Cybertron and became that rocky exterior.

Cybertron also has quite a few moons, but only two are large enough to be noticed from Cybertron itself without some patient stargazing. Their formal names are Luna Sophos and Luna Phothoe, but mostly everyone calls them Luna One and Luna Two these days because those were the names of the first Moonbases. Moonbase One has now grown large enough to have swallowed up Moonbases Three, Seven, Nine, Thirteen, and Fifteen; same deal with Moonbase Two and Four, Six, Eight, and Twelve. You can see both settlements from Cybertron, and they're utterly infamous for being mostly run on slave labour. "No stop you can't do that," says the Imperial government, periodically, but the companies that run the bases reply, essentially, "Yes I can, suck my dick," and unfortunately the government obliges.

+ Planet 3 is a smallish terrestrial planet orbiting well beyond Cybertron. It is called the Pilot, and it is associated with the Ninth Prime, the Guiding Hand. It has a handful of moons, but they're not much more than pet asteroids. It is also host to the first Cybertronian colony, which settled on the planet after it was found to have rich deposits of metals rare on Cybertron.

 

*gently shoves my face in this*

 

Mlle’s suckered me into watching (youtube clips of) Star Wars Rebels and I’m like [eyes emoji] at Zeb rn, this guy is ticking A Lot of my Instant Emotional Investment buttons.

Spoiler

and i kinda made an OC already skhdhj



His name is Ghamsin Betatulo, he's about 3 metres/9 feet tall if he stands up straight cause he has a form of gigantism, and he's also got chronic pain and progressive deafness because of the disorder that's causing the gigantism. He is a Good Boy who's full of energy and likes to make people happy but also doesn't really have that brain widget for feeling guilt or remorse, so he's done some kinda questionable shit in the past. Speaks with a v e r y pronounced accent too - most of his vowels sound like 'uh', a lot of consonants get slurred or skipped, and there's rising intonation where it probably shouldn't be lmao. I'm imagining a really pronounced, slightly drunk kiwi accent lmao. I think his parents were explorers or some shit and that's where it comes from. He has his own cool spaceship too, because yes.

 

Spoiler

MY NEW SON



hehe butt

 

A neat little covid-19 thing: today the number of new recoveries in New Zealand outstripped the number of new confirmed/probable cases. Nobody wants to tempt fate with two weeks of lockdown to go, but it’s pretty neat to see, even if it goes back to an increase tomorrow. Makes it seem like we might actually beat this thing :D