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The New Eon

Gonna bump this once and see if anything happens.

A new dawn [NRP Science-Fiction]

Okay. My post is up.

The Wild Blue Yonder

@GodOfChaosI look forward to it!

A new dawn [NRP Science-Fiction]

It was your standard morning in Gaiafirma. It was a crazy scene, but Gaiafirma itself was nuts.

On the island of Cuba, now known as Motherroot, the small population that formed the remains of a small town rose and wandered out of their tiny shanties and dugouts and shacks. They looked upon the horizon, then all gathered around the tiny sapling that had been planted as the town's Hear Tree. There they fell to their knees, massaging the dirt and chanting some nonsense about their love and lust for the Earth and their desire to be fully one with the ecosystem and the animals around them, and finally they begged for forgiveness for what their race has done in a voice so loud it was nearly deafening.

A group of GDF rode past them on horses, carrying single and double barrel shotguns. They rode out of town towards a small mountain range, galloping along at full speed with their guns strapped to their backs. The eight men and women wore full suits woven from reeds and vines, and they rode bareback upon their horses. After many minutes of riding, they were within the Mountains.

The eight soldiers stopped their horses and dismounted, approaching the dugout that held what they knew was a rebel hideout. The leader, a tall, slender woman, shouted out, "In the name of the High Chief, come out and surrender! You are accused of betraying him, and our great Mother!" Then they stood. They waited for a reply. None came, so instead they raised their guns and emptied all 13 shotgun slugs into the corrugated metal front of the dugout. Several screams were heard from inside.

The eight soldiers were reloaded by the time the remains of the bandits came running out. Those who were not destroyed by 12 and 10 gauge shotgun fire were run down, trampled, and beaten to death. The soldiers didn't even bother to bury the dead. They simply said a quick prayer, set a fire in the dugout, and rode off.

Elswhere in the small Carribean nation, a group of researchers aboard a former scientific vessel were still grinding away at trying to figure out how to build a clean engine without any advanced building processes. Out of the portholes, the small city on the coast of Puerto Rico was starting to get some very primitive forges, but nothing better. Currently, a group of acolytes were building a furnace, which would hopefully allow some sort of iron casting to take place. That was going to take a while, though. All of the mining was being done manually with dynamite and pickaxes right now.

Gasoline and diesel engines existed in the bowels of all of the ships but the Gaians refused to use them. All of the supertankers, bulk carriers, research ships, and destroyers that made up the huge and rag-tag Gaian fleet had sails retrofitted to them. The scientists had tried extracting hydrogen from the water and using it in one of those engines, but that resulted in the tanker Herrman sinking. They never tried that again.

Some electricity was being restored. Slowly, windmills were spreading across the land, and some work had been done to make turbines to utilize the currents themselves. It was strictly for the government and for farmers to use right now, however.

In the Capital, on Motherroot, the High Chief was in the bridge of a huge cruiser, one of the largest warships the GDF had hijacked in the early days. He was looking out across the land, stripped of green and left as an ugly brown scar. The deck of his ship, once known as the USS Salem, was teeming with sailors and other staff. Many of them were from the team trying to make Gaiafirma a green country, spreading plantlife across the landscape and revitalizing the area. The cities and towns were not much better. They were huddles of peasants in ramshackle homes, with only his military policing them right now. They had only basic waste handling systems, no running water, and no power. He was doing his best for them, but sometimes it was not enough. High Chief Kirman turns around and leans over the map on the Salem's bridge, clicking his teeth as he examined the situation with the country's civil war.

At least that was getting better.

A new dawn [NRP Science-Fiction]

Should I go ahead and post now?

The Nations of Mawei

Stoludians never did sleep for long. Even before the sun had risen the Queen Annetan was already up and busying herself. She wanders out to the walls, padding quietly past the guards that were sleepily leaning on their muskets and then mounting the stone steps to one of the palace's towers. At the top, she stares out across the land, bathed in the dim pre-dawn glow of the Eastern skies. She could see the town with the smoke rising from it's many smokestacks, light from many lanterns, the various ships sailing from the nearby harbor... she could see the fleet assembling as she watched. Annetan smiles softly to herself, as she can recognize each ship simply from their appearance.

They were taking ambassadors and military trainers over to the Republic on the Northern Isles. She wouldn't be seeing these ships for a while, she knew, but she also knew that Stoludian sailors never minded a long journey. Four of Stoludi's best frigates of the Whispers of the Wind class, the Dance of the Lightning Harbinger of Snow, Benevolent Typhoon, and Song of the Storms, would be escorting three fat trading sloops across the Wide Sea. Each of these frigates was 115 feet long and outfitted with broadsides of 28 medium-sized cannons. The sloops had ten guns on each side but they were mainly empty, so they could carry cargo and the ambassadors in comfort.

Annetan turns away from the sight of the loading and prepping of the ships as a squire ran up to her. He informed her of things she was already aware of... it did not surprise her that Admiral Virnam cancelled the search for the survivors of the Eastern Wind. Annetan simply nodded her approval and told him to come back in a while after she had planned the funeral.

The Queen, still dressed in her nightrobe, wandered down to the stableyard and sneaked past the sleeping stableboy to find her mare. Rubania was just as much an early riser as her rider was. Annetan smiles sleepily and reaches up to gently pet across her blocky muzzle, staring into her eyes and sharing breaths with the mare for a moment. This would look very odd to a foreigner, but a Stoludian took the bond between them and their mount very seriously. After a moment or two, Annetan finally went through the ritual of equipping Rubania with the ornate tack and seating herself into the dark leather saddle upon the horse's back.

She was about to the gates when a squire stepped into her way. The big white mare obediently wheeled to a halt before Annetan even did anything. He tossed her the gigantic queen's arquebus, then delivered a message: A tower in Geitumo had collapsed. Five soldiers dead, ten peasants dead.

She acknowledged him and rode out of the gates with barely a pause to let the guards open it for her. Unarmored and looking like a peasant, the Queen of Stoludi rode into the forest with nary a purpose. It was all to clear her mind. There had been one disaster after another since she had opened the borders, it was starting to nag at her. Maybe it hadn't been the right thing? Stoludi was by no means prospering under isolation but now it seems that something bad was always happening. Maybe she had angered the gods...

...and there was a group of bandits ahead. They grinned at her and made Rubania stop with a nervous whicker. Annetan simply rolls her eyes and pulls the arquebus off of the saddle and points it right at the head of the bandit leader. Needless to say, a handcannon big enough around to comfortably fit your thumb into it was enough to dispel them. The Queen chuckles softly to herself and stows the gun, starting her mare on her way again.

She'd have to ask her High Priest about it. Maybe this was the wrong thing. Perhaps she did need to close the borders again... but there was also so much prosperity. Katiraka had blossomed and grown into a proud, clean city, compared to the shanty town it once was. Aurorasaki had positively exploded. New technology and people were pouring in, and Stoludi as a whole was growing and modernizing.

Annetan was still troubled when she rode back into the palace yard, but at least she had calmed and reassured herself somewhat. For now, she had a funeral to plan, one with full honors, and a fleet to bless before they were sent on their journey.

The Wild Blue Yonder

OOC is live.

@KoL@GodOfChaos@Kacey Scott

The Wild Blue Yonder

The Wild Blue Yonder

The Africa Project was started by an obscure scientist by the name of Alfred Tormano. You wouldn't think much once you looked upon him. He is a skinny man, a tanned man, with a runaway tangle of black hair upon his head and brown eyes that never seem to focus. His mind doesn't have much of a better time with it. However, for years, he had been fascinated with the idea of airplanes that did not need pilots, or operators, or anyone but maintenance personnel. He knew it would be the best path. No human error, no black and white computerized tables, just raw emotion and instinct. Tormano never got permission to go ahead with this project, however. He bid his time, until an incident with the USAF took the headlines and opened the door for him.

The Syrian Airlines Incident

A General Atomics Avenger was running a reconnaissance mission over Syria in 2016. There wasn't a lot going on. The drone hadn't encountered any AAA fire, it hadn't seen anything, and the operators were about to turn it around and tell it to go home when they suddenly found that their joystick commands were ignored. They assumed it was just a computer crash and sent a self-destruct message. No response. Then the drone turned and sped up, burning up it's own engine and running a beeline for a civilian airliner that was passing through the area. This bizarre tale unfolded before their eyes. Many attempts were made to destroy the drone, but Syria refused to allow USAF fighter jets into the area. They were upset enough at the drone being there.

MiGs from a nearby Syrian airbase tried to destroy the drone. They were older jets, as the newer jets were farther away and would not make it in time. They couldn't kill it. Several missiles were fired, but the nimble stealth drone either dodged them or simply threw off the lock with it's lack of a radar signature. Then they tried cannons. Again, all misses. Both sides had to sit back and watch. They warned the A340 about the approaching danger, of course. It was an airliner, though. It just was not capable of dodging a determined drone.

Whoever took over the drone decided to simply fly it into one of the A340's four engines. That engine was totally destroyed, and the resulting blast from both the Avenger's fuel tank and a high RPM turbofan disintegrating tore into the wing. Despite a valiant fight, the A340 went into an out of control high G maneuver and broke apart mid air. All two hundred and twenty five souls aboard were lost. The hacker was never found.

A couple of months later, a Global Hawk tried to fly itself into the cockpit of a KC-10 tanker. Thankfully, there was a flight of F-15s nearby, and they managed to down the rogue drone, with only minor shrapnel damage to the tanker. This all led to the great bureaucracy in the sky to ask for solutions. Tormano jumped at the opportunity, and presented one of the more radical solutions to the problem; have the planes fly themselves. Enter Project Africa.

Project Africa

Project Africa was, at first, laughed at. The DoD tossed Tormano the scraps of the military (an ancient T-37 trainer jet), gave him an old, run-down airbase in the middle of nowhere, and told him to have at it while they went off to do better and bigger things. Of course, Tormano wouldn't let opportunity pass him that easily. He managed to get a hold of the Sequoia super computer, and built an AI that was unprecedented in it's power and capability. Then he managed to cram a new supercomputer into the Tweet (now named Paradigm and designated a female), replace her cockpit with a thin metal shell, and send her off into the sky. The demonstration flight went remarkably well. A newer T-38 Talon jet trainer was beaten in a mock dogfight by Paradigm, despite Paradigm being an otherwise unupgraded Tweet.

The DoD got a lot more interested, considering what Tormano managed to do with Paradigm on a shoe string budget. Over the next few years, Tormano got a lot more money, resources, manpower, and freedom. He began to construct a wing of sentient aircraft with a new superpowerful computer that spanned a city block and required a cooling system that would be able to deal with a nuclear reactor. Dozens of people worked alongside him, recovering old aircraft or retrofitting new ones. Soon, he was also given an airbase, a small but new facility out in the middle of New Mexico hidden as an aircraft boneyard.

Now, in 2021, the 153rd squadron is ready to make it's first demonstration flight.

The Airbase

Very Crude Map

The Shifting Sands Airbase is impressively built. All of the buildings are fully equipped and rather luxurious by Air Force standards. The hangars, which are many in number, are huge, blast-resistant buildings that are clean and fully climate controlled. They are big enough to comfortably hold a single C-5, or a few planes the size of smaller fighters or trainers. Two long, wide, smooth tarmac runways with advanced ILS and radar systems stretch out in the middle of the airbase. A series of taxiways and wide aprons ensure smooth aircraft traffic, and a system of roads that run underneath the runways in tunnels help personnel get around the base via golf carts, ATVs, trucks, or even bicycles if they so choose. The odd design of placing the aircraft and their crew so far apart might be odd to outside view, but, since most combat planes don't need pilots here, it was not deemed necessary to put them nearby. A towering control tower made of concrete overlooks the entire flightline.

The Aircraft

This is where you come in! Submit a character using the following sheet. I will then organize the squadron and it's mission based on what types of planes we get. A lot of fighters, means a lot of escort and hunting missions, a lot of bombers means a lot of bombing, etc... if no one wants to play aircraft, I can do it myself. You can be human if you wish!

The airplanes have both a flight body and a humanoid body. They use their flight bodies on missions, which are just the normal airplanes outfitted with optical sensors, upgrades, and the required computer to hold the AI. The humanoid bodies allow the AIs to explore the outside world. These are like anthropomorphic versions of the original airframes, with small wings like their nonanthropomorphic forms attached to their backs, their noses and cockpits as their heads (with eyes on the canopy/cockpit and mouth on the nosecone),torsos and legs (in the aircraft's livery colors, of course) carved to look like human legs and torsos, and with a long, thin tail with a small empennage like their nonanthropomorphic form attached at the end. In their humanoid form, they are powered by a human-like digestive system. If you were to touch their skin, it would be hard, warm metal. Their cockpits are just for show. The joints on their bodies are complex, interlinking mechanisms. Although they are physically young, their randomly generated personalities reflect any age ranging from eighteen up to fifty five.

To go between this flight and humanoid body, they must use a special cable. This cable is very thick, and requires a special ground crew. As such the computer in the flight bodies is in an armored shell which can be ejected and parachuted to the ground in case of an emergency.

CS:
Name:
Sex:
Date of Birth - Age (Airplanes must be no more than four years old):
Model (NO aircraft dating from before 1955)[just put human if you are playing a human]:
Appearance (pictures, text, or both):
Upgrades/Retrofits (optional and if applicable):
Personality:
Bio (humans only):
Country of Origin:
Other Info:

Roles

If you want to be a human, then you can play as a mechanic, test pilot, medic, air traffic controller, or one of the emergency responders on the base. I will be playing as the commanding officers of the base, and will be handing down missions and other briefings. Also, Paradigm will make a few appearances.

Wrap-Up

I will happily listen and respond to any questions or criticisms you have. I am an inexperienced GM, and I do not claim to be good at this. Anyways... have at it guys. Post CSes in the OOC, I want to approve them before I accept them.

The Nations of Mawei

@6slyboy6

Last week was just apeshit with work. I will have much more time this week. I promise an IC post tomorrow or the day after.

The New Eon

This sounds badass! I'm interested.

@Drakeonis

I'm hoping it will be!