Category: Ticonderoga

Mar 11 2024

WIP Update – 10 Mar 24

I continued to implement the edits to Tico1 up through Chapter 11. Once I’m done reconstructing the site (or whenever I need a break), I’ll continue the proofing work from Chapter 12. I also did a quick pass with the spellchecker through Tico2, 3 and 4 to add to the custom dictionary and see if I couldn’t catch anything that slipped past me all those years ago. One small thing which typifies how obsessive I can be over little details is the spellings of “civvy” vs. “civvie”. I favor the latter, but then I decided to change it to the former, only to finally decide that “civvy” is the singular noun form and “civvie” is the adjectival form, thus warranting another pass through all the manuscripts where citations of the word can be found. I’m sure no one else does this (the distinction between “civvy” and “civvie”, that is), but at least this way I’ll have internal consistency.

I mentioned before that I was adjusting the rendering of dialectic speech and that was the main thrust of the day’s efforts, but I was also making some adjustments to stage direction and such as I went. Small changes, but they add up. Once I’m done, I’ll have to compare how the wordcount has changed. Anyway, it’s back to the grunt work, so look for further updates in the Road to Reconstruction series. Stay tuned.

Mar 09 2024

WIP Update – 09 Mar 24

Since I saw fit that my earlier proofing work warranted one of these posts, I’ll do so here as well. As you may recall, before all this nonsense with the site began, my proofing work had extended to the Space Arc shorts and Tico1. Well, as I was reconstructing their pages, I was implementing the edits I had made two weeks ago. For the shorts, there wasn’t much to change, but with my reworking of the dialectic speech in Tico1 (which will of course extend to the other three books when I get to them), there’s a bit more elbow grease being applied. As you might imagine, I’m kinda thankful for character like Matt whose speech is stiffer and more formalized. Less work for me. Anyway, life needs rigor and so I’ll continue on my way. There’ll probably be one more post like this as I get caught up on the proofing work I’ve done so far on Tico1, but probably not another one for a while unless I take a wild hair to do some story writing as a change of pace. Stay tuned.

Mar 02 2024

WIP Update – 01 Mar 24

I did a little proofing on Tico1. Not much because there was something about a graduation ceremony that folks were making a big deal about. I would later go on to implement the edits to JJ2 and TWH. I’ll work on the Space Arc stuff I’ve done tomorrow. Not exactly thrilling content, I know, but maybe I’ll do a little actual writing as well. Stay tuned.

Mar 01 2024

WIP Update – 29 Feb 24

I continued to proof Tico1. I’m enjoying immersing myself in the story again. One thing I’m noticing, though, is that my writing for dialect has become more refined since I wrote this, so reworking that to make it more consistent is going to be a bit of work. (And I can remember going back over the manuscript a several years back as well, but such are the joys of the iterative process.)

In other news, it’s been brought to my attention that the version of PHP the site’s been using is well out of date. When I tried to update it, the site stopped loading, which means that I’m going to have to migrate to a new CMS. That’ll be quite the undertaking I’m sure. I knew support ended for my current CMS years back, but I figured so long as everything was functioning, why change? Well, we’re reaching the point where that’s no longer the case. Currently I’m looking into using Drupal. It’s supposed to have a bit of a steep learning curve to it, but apparently it has some built-in functionality for adapting to mobile browsers, and that’s something I’ve been meaning to do for the site for a while now. I know it won’t be as simple as plugging in my current database, so I’ll have to roll my sleeves up and have at it. This will go well with my intentions of modernizing my code and doing some other tweaks to design. Fun, fun, fun. Stay tuned.

Feb 29 2024

WIP Update – 28 Feb 24

I finished going over TWH and at least managed to work out a general game plan going forward (albeit with no actual story progress), then I went through proofing the Space Arc shorts and went on to Tico1. While story progress on TWH would be ideal, I am at least doing something productive. At the rate I’m going, we probably won’t have a story update this week and I’ll just move on to EM3 next week. I’d like to have something more interesting to report, but expect more of the same for the time being. Stay tuned.

Aug 21 2015

On Women in Combat and the Earth Union Military

The recent headlines being made about the two female officers passing Ranger School have inspired me to write on this subject. As someone who would be termed a ‘REMF’ who never served a combat tour, I realize that my perspective isn’t nearly as authoritative on the subject as an actual combat arms soldier. However, while you certainly can’t say integration has gone off without a hitch, I personally had no issue working with or working for females. I knew of females who could boast of 300ing their PT test (which, even accounting for the lower standards for females, scores like that could kick my tail even before I was crippled). The point that I’m getting at is that I’m tenuously willing to accept females in combat arms if and only if they meet the same physical standards as the males. I worry, and not without good reason, that political pressures will outweigh military good sense (rare as it may be). There have been historically and are currently forces with females fully integrated into combat roles (even if it was move done out of desperation), so I’m certainly not of the mind that it can’t work, but the last thing we need is to hamper combat readiness to be PC compliant.

I also recall an article written by a female Marine officer who was in the Female Engagement Teams if I recall who wrote of the unique health problems she faced as a woman in as close to the role of a regular infantryman as we’ve yet had in an active conflict. While I doubt there’s been any thorough scientific study on the health of FET members as a basis for the viability of females in combat arms and I grant that this particular Marine may not be a representative case, there is a concern–not unreasonable, in my view–that females who take on combat arms roles could be condemning themselves to a wrecked physical condition. Now, to be fair, these physically strenuous roles ruin the health of plenty of males. There may not be a paratrooper one who ends his service without having a bum knee or two. This all ties into a critical lack of data, at least for public consumption, which casts shadows over the entire movement.

That’s not even touching on the risk of sexual harassment and assault. It is a legitimate concern. Admittedly, the way some people talk about it, male-on-male assault may be a bigger problem. I remember in AIT, everyone without exception was effectively warned that if you went out on the PT field after hours, you could expect to get raped. Now, this could have been simple scare tactics, but I’d say it’s not unfair to compare the military to prison, so, you know, don’t take any stupid risks. The risk of the real thing is serious and severe, but then there’s the matter of scurrilous charges. It may well be that false charges are vastly dwarfed by the real thing, but the former can make it all the more difficult for the latter to be given the credence it deserves. Just look at the Tailhook scandal. I certainly have my doubts about the original accuser and NIS’s overreach and impropriety in its investigation still causes me to hold the agency in suspicion, name change or no. (From my experience, CID isn’t regarded much better, seen more as a monster under the bed than a reliable crime-buster.) A successful unit is built on trust. You may not like the man (or in this case woman) to your left or your right, but you know you can count on them in a pinch. If riven by threats and accusations, no unit is likely to hold together when it counts. And all this doesn’t even begin to touch on ordinary hanky-panky, which is rather rife and sure to cause problems in a combat arms unit. (Of course, with the legitimization of gays in the military, I suppose there’s an extra layer of entanglements to be concerned about, though of course that sort of thing has existed on the down low for a good long while.)

All these doubts and concerns I’ve aired aren’t intended to convince anyone of anything. I’m just putting all that out there to give some lucidity to my own perspective as we go into the solutions that were made in the fictional world of the Ticonderoga series. In the series, we have two primary examples of females in combat arms: Allison O’Connor as an Army sniper and Miranda Grisson as a powered armor operator. Both are rarities in their units, but it’s Ally who has to deal with the most crap for being a female. Her naturally shy and passive personality is as big a part of the problem as anything else. Without breaking it down by branch, females in combat arms account for only a small percentage, but this wasn’t always the case.

When the Union was first formed, there wasn’t a single across-the-board policy on females in combat arms. Units that had females were allowed to keep them and units that did not were not required to take them on. Bear in mind that we’re talking about a global military and not all cultures afford that many opportunities to women. Rather than trying to change the world from Day 1, the government opted to progress by degrees. And these were slow degrees. It wasn’t until 087 when Defense Minister Rawthani (during the Palenko Administration) instituted a policy of unrestricted service in combat arms for females. This, however, was done with a lowering of physical standards to boost numbers. Bear in mind that prior to the Sheol War, the only full-fledged combat operations occurred during the Lunar Revolt 60 years earlier. This lowering of standards wasn’t just a PC move, though. The military was going downhill on a number of fronts and so this was just a symptom of a larger disease. The meat-grinder early years of the Sheol War quickly changed all that.

In Tico4 there’s a mention of the revisions to the military justice code spearheaded by Defense Minister Jafaari. This same man was behind a revision to the policy on females in combat arms. This same policy is stated in the chapter where Ally is introduced, when Sergeant Rahim confronts Captain Robles about her inclusion in the unit. To reiterate, females can serve in any combat arms unit provided they meet the same physical standards as the males and do not disrupt unit cohesion. If this latter condition sounds open to abuse, that’s entirely by design. It takes a legitimate concern about combat effectiveness and uses it as an excuse to preserve the boys’ club mentality of a lot of combat units. It isn’t until after the war that we see a reversion to the pre-war policy with all the problems that came with it, only this time there isn’t a reversal when war breaks out again. As with many of the political tangles in the series, I don’t intend for the policy to be a clean-cut case of good or bad.

Sci-fi tends to veer toward either utopianism or dystopianism and in my more idealistic youth, I leaned toward the former, but now I strike somewhere in the middle, a grey morass that even if you pick a side, you do so with reservations. It’s possible that the setup you see in the Ticonderoga series will seem quaint in 20 years or so. I’ll leave the real world to sort itself out, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to take a current event and tie it into a commentary post. I may follow it up with further details or even discuss how the issue gets handled in the post-Union era, but that’s a story for another day.

Jun 22 2015

On Admiral Xenopoulos’ History with Admiral Mfume

Before I shipped out, the recruiters hosted an event where DEPers were taken to Fort Hood to get a bit of a glimpse of Army life. (Some of the soldiers on post urged us to reconsider our decision, but we’d already signed on the dotted line.) At the end of the day, we were taken to a sports bar on post where my recruiter happened to see an old battle buddy of his. After catching up a bit, he commented on how small a world the military is. That idea stuck in my head and I’ve applied it to the Tico series. I’ve got a rather long list different points of convergence with various characters (even if they never realized it). I allude to the long history between Admiral Mfume and Admiral Xenopoulos and thought I’d give you the details here as a commentary post.

It all began in 098 when a Lieutenant Xenopoulos was assigned to the cruiser Galahad as Assistant Operations Officer. Commander Mfume was XO and later captain. The met again when Xenopoulos was assigned to the Leonidas as First Lieutenant where Captain Mfume, fresh out of the College of Naval Staff and Command, was assigned as XO and later captain. Commander Xenopoulos moved on to the Memnon as Assistant Operations Officer and Mfume followed in 107 to take the billet of captain. After War College, Mfume became the Assistant Staff Operations Officer and later the full-fledged Staff Operations Officer of CVBG43 while Xenopoulos served as Operations Officer, XO and ultimately captain of the Lysander (the battle group’s flagship). (Mfume was with the battle group from 111 to 117 and Xenopoulos was with the Lysander from 113 to 118.) Captain Xenopoulos narrowly avoided the Lysander‘s destruction when he was transferred to CVBG28 to serve as Staff Operations Officer while Admiral Mfume was the battle group commander. In 120, Xenopoulos served as Chief of Staff for CVBG27 while Mfume was deputy commander of 6th Fleet and then you already know about Admiral Xenopoulos as commander of CVBG28 joining the Ticonderoga in Operation Orpheus and the Battle of Mars in 122. As you can see, that’s a good chunk of their respective careers that have overlapped. That’s a lot of history to have tied up when Marshal Van Daan gave Xenopoulos the order to hunt down the Tico.

These two are a rather extreme case of the small world effect, but it’s precisely why there’s a lot of emotion simmering beneath the surface. Hopefully you found this interesting. We’ll see what sort of commentary post I come up with next. Stay tuned.

Mar 30 2015

A Brief Overview of the History and Society of the Empyrean

I deliberately kept the Empyrean cloaked in mystery in Tico2, but now I can reveal a little more of the background. We start with Project New Moon, a program to build massive artificial moons as habitats for the Orbitals. Potentially, these units could be used as forward colonies when the Ringe-Wahl Act expired and the Union could legally expand beyond the bounds of the solar system. Five were planned initially, but only three of them were completed. (Lydia Han was born on one of these, Selene 04.) By some means, the AI calling itself the Shekinah was embedded in Selene 03’s central computer and seized control of all systems. Whether the Shekinah was seriously deluded into a genuine God complex or if it was all part of some experimental routine in its programming is uncertain. Nehema seemed to believe her sister was genuinely insane, but she isn’t the most honest broker of information. From the time the Shekinah took over Selene 03, the Age of Vilon began. The history of the Empyrean is divided into ages named after the levels of Heaven, which is also used as the name for Selene 03 itself.

The Age of Vilon lasted from 089 to 101. It was a period of violence and disorder as the Shekinah sought to impose Empyrean society on a largely unwilling populace. Obviously, the Shekinah won out in the end and the hold-outs against its authority were purged. This led into the Age of Rakia, which lasted from 101 to 109. During this time, there was a massive baby boom in a bid to raise the population to the desired standard of 144,000 people and the initial buildup of the Empyrean fleet. You might be asking how all this was accomplished. Artificial gestation accounted for a large number of births (and in the larger game, this was intended to replace old-fashioned methods of procreation), while a number of blacksites were appropriated to fuel the Empyrean war engine. As the Empyrean society began to settle, the Age of Rakia gave way to the Age of Shehakim. During this period, the Empyrean fleets started ranging and had their first encounters with the Union, which the Shekinah dubbed Amalek. Were it not for Nehema’s intervention in the Battle of Selene 03, the Union forces would have likely been defeated and the Empyrean would have entered the Age of Zebul, in which the the outer colonies would have been targeted for conquest and integrated into the Empyrean. The culmination of the Shekinah’s plan would be the Age of Arabot, in which all Union space would be under the Shekinah’s control. I’m actually considering an If Arc story with that very scenario.

Now, as for Empyrean society itself, it is based around a corrupted version Judaism with elements of the Kabbalah and any pragmatic adaptations to suit the Shekinah’s purposes. The people are divided into Twelve Tribes of 12,000 each and ranked according to the angelic hierarchy found in the Zohar. The common citizens are the Ishim and then there are the military ranks: the Bene Elohim, the Elohim, the Elim, the Hashmalim, and the Ophanim. The Hayyoth are priest-magistrates, 30 per tribe. There are seven Seraphim heading up each of the seven fleets and then the three supreme commanders of the military, the Erelim, and finally the twelve princes heading each of the Twelve Tribes, the Malachim. Among the Ishim, certain men of their numbers are named rulers of tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands. Similarly, in the military, among the Bene Elohim are rulers of tens, but it’s Elohim that act as rulers of fifties, Elim as rulers of hundred, and Hashmalim as rulers of thousands. (The military being the military, ranks are more explicit.) This means that life is strictly regimented for civilians as it is for the military, with all duties and responsibilities given religious significance. By the Age of Shehakim, Empyrean society was pretty well settled and anyone who dissented with official doctrine and policy either kept it to themselves or were quickly dispatched as heretics.

I think we’ll leave things here and save any more in-depth treatment for future posts. Hopefully this has shed a little light on the mysterious Empyrean. We’ll see what inspiration strikes me for the next commentary post. Stay tuned.

Mar 16 2015

The Shameful Story of Galactic Strife

Since I’m winding things down with the Tico series, let’s spend a little time talking about its embarrassing origins. I made a reference to my painfully derivative era when I was a middle schooler in my post about the utility of creative larceny. After the completion of Mesozoic World, my Jurassic Park rip-off, I started in on a sci-fi that would rip off not only Star Wars but Star Trek as well. (How’s that for resolving the fandom rivalry? A malformed amalgamation birthed in the mind of 12-year-old.) The name of this creation was Galactic Strife. (It was some time before I came to realize that raiding the thesaurus did not in fact constitute originality.) I don’t actually have the original documentation, so trying to remember the details is difficult over 20 years later. I know at very least Matt Harold and Ibrahim Mfume got their origins here. (Mfume was originally a white guy named Abner Sanford, believe it or not.)

I remember the next project better, a supernatural thriller borrowing a lot of from the vibe of Aliens called The Phantom Tower. While I never actually wrote anything for Galactic Strife, I did write The Phantom Tower, though there is no extant copy and the preliminary sketches and notes were all destroyed. In this story, a joint task force of Green Berets, Navy SEALs and Marines were tasked with investigating this skyscraper subject to bizarre occurrences. (I think the supernatural angle ended up being a fake-out to act as a distraction while a coup was launched to overthrow the US government. It was just a touch convoluted.) Jack Grisson and Ally O’Connor got their origins here as Marines in the task force and I believe Jeff Wallace was part of the technical support crew as a reworking of the Dennis Nedry expy Dennis Johnson from Mesozoic World. Miranda showed up as a Space Marine in the sequel, which tried to rehabilitate some ideas from Mesozoic World in space, blending elements of DOOM and the lesser known FPS Blake Stone (which happened to be on the shareware CD I made so much use of). No actual writing was done on the sequel, I don’t think, and though I think I wanted to have a third book, I’m pretty sure no major work went into it.

Though all the materials related to Galactic Strife and the Phantom Tower series were destroyed beforehand, I wound up recycling some of the characters when I began work on what would grow into the Ticonderoga series after completing the initial conceptual work for Knight of Gladius (or Warriors of Swordtree as it was known back then, circa ’95, I believe). However, I think I’ll save a discussion of Version 1 of the series for another time. You know, unlike the KoG series, which is now in its seventh version, there are only four versions of the Tico series, possibly because I’ve only been through the thing once. Will it see ten years of changes like KoG has? Who knows? Stay tuned.

Mar 13 2015

WIP Update – 12 Mar 15

I wrapped up the one Space Arc short I hadn’t quite finished the day before, but that didn’t amount to much, so I then found myself working on Everyday Magic. Perhaps if I could get at least a ten-chapter headstart, I might alternate between EM and Junker Jorg. Then again, it may be better to focus on finishing one serial run rather than having two Cross Arc stories running at the same time. I’ll think about it. Stay tuned.