I would have to say that Orguz is probably one of the characters who benefitted most from the Version 3 expansion of TTWC3. At very least, I had planned for him to be a sympathetic character ever since Version 2, but his story was given a lot more breadth and depth recently. Originally he was Urgill’s father, who was aggrieved by her defection to the Promethean Alliance and reluctant to see his people used as the Monarch Lich’s cannon fodder, but that was about it. For Version 3, I instead made him Urgill’s grandfather and drew up his family tree. I made him into a reluctant king compelled to wear the crown as a puppet ruler who had seen the folly of defying the Monarch Lich when his people were conquered. Everything he does as king is meant to limit the suffering as his people, a vain effort though it may be.

Goblins are often portrayed as always chaotic evil, but there are some people who try to avert that. Basically, my take is that they’re a largely primitive, violent race but many are more neutral and there are stand-outs like Orguz who are actually among the more moral and decent characters I’ve crafted. He’s definitely an oddity among his kind, something he himself rarely fails to make note of. You can also see his more broad-minded ways in his treatment of the scout Orgdith, valuing ability over appearance.

Despite his advanced age and a nature that was out of step with his people’s culture, Orguz was actually one of the longest reigning kings of Shade’s Forest, partially due to the Monarch Lich’s patronage. There wouldn’t have been another who could’ve led his people so long under the circumstances, but I don’t imagine most people respect a successful collaborateur.

I guess this’ll do it for him. I may do a supplemental post on Goblin society someday. We’ll be back here again in seven weeks once the next section is complete. Stay tuned.

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.

The origins of Sir Caligo are somewhat unusual. During my first playthrough of Ogre Battle 64, I didn’t know a thing about the Chaos Frame or how to act to set your alignment. (The fact that your Chaos Frame data is hidden from you until after the end of the game doesn’t help.) As a result, I simply stormed my way through the missions and was completely blindsided when everyone started turning on me in the end. The heroes from the original game fought me and the leader of the resistance who owed his position to my efforts denounced me. It was a complete and utter betrayal. Add that to the typical civilian grumbling you get in Japanese fiction and I became wrathful, wanting an add-on campaign where I would march my army from one corner of the land to the next and raze the villages of all those bloody ingrates. (I later learned that you have to march on villages with units of matching alignment to “liberate” rather than “conquer” territory and so my second run was a much happier one.) Anyway, I decided to use this scenario in one of my stories and so Sir Caligo was born.

Narkissos of Karas was a young soldier who served with distinction in the Herakles War, where a colony of the Herakles threatened to overrun Euros. Later, when King Euromakhos’ twin sons Castor and Pollux refused to rule jointly as per their father’s dying wishes, the Gemini War broke out. Narkissos served in the cause of King Pollux, who was favored by the aristocracy, and with his elite Companions at the core of his army, he handily crushed the plebeian forces supporting King Castor. When his victory was complete, Narkissos found himself bitterly hated by the people and in a bid to appease them, King Pollux stripped Narkissos of his honors and exiled him while his Companions were thrown into prison.

Stewing in his anger in exile in the Eurean colony of Thessalonica (whose short-lived bid for independence was ended by none other than Narkissos himself, so there were no friends to be found in the city), he saw an opportunity when the Thessalonians suffered the predations of an ancient vampire they called the Miastor Prince. As you know from Caligo’s prologue, Narkissos challenged the Miastor Prince, was defeated and turned into a vampire himself. However, he succeeded in killing the Miastor Prince shortly after being turned and by drinking the ancient vampire’s heart’s blood, he received a power boost much greater than any newborn vampire, even one sired by an ancient, should have. With this new power, he was able to return to Euros, free his Companions and exact his revenge on the people who betrayed him.

While revenge sounds sweet, one of the themes I tend to reinforce in my stories is that however cathartic revenge might be at first, it’s ultimately empty or at very least it takes more than it gives. When Narkissos’ campaign of revenge was over, the rich nation of Euros was in ruins, its people all dead or fled, and there were no plans to build anything in the wake of this destruction. His Companions stuck faithfully by his side, desiring a share in his immortality to take on the world, but Narkissos didn’t share that ambition and quickly came to realize the true nature of his curse. He refused to grant his loyal followers their wish and so they grew old and died, then the ruined Kingdom of Euros was visited by the Black Dragon Xargos and cursed to become the Darklands.

Lacking ambition, Narkissos’ talents could only be used in service of a superior and so he became Sir Caligo the Knight of Chaos. He served Xargos and then the Dark Elf king Zanil who followed him. Were it not for a vampire’s inability to cross open water (without some trickery as demonstrated by Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel), the invasion of Notos would’ve likely gone quite differently, but being left in the Darklands, Caligo could do little as Zanil’s hubristic overreach led to his downfall and the collapse of the Chaos Dominion.

Caligo may well have spent the rest of eternity in hibernation were it not for the Dark Eternal raising him to serve the Monarch Lich. While there was some joy to be had in fighting once more, it was a fairly hollow thing conquering the various monsters and fell races of the Darklands. The prospect of fighting the Zephyrians stirred a little of the old passion, though, and while he found Duke Cronos to be a disappointing opponent, he was intrigued by Ionathas and started playing the game that ultimately ended in his self-engineered demise.

I definitely wanted to play up the parallels between Caligo and Ionathas. It wouldn’t have taken much of a push for Ionathas to go down the same path and there may well be an If Arc story in the future that explores that possibility. Anyway, even with Caligo seeking his own death, there’s no way an ordinary human could stand a chance against an ancient vampire of Caligo’s power, so I contrived the revival of Caligo’s Companions, their destruction at his hands and the Monarch Lich’s punishment for his disobedience. Being brought down to the level of a newborn vampire, Ionathas wasn’t quite so ridiculously outmatched but still didn’t stand much chance if Caligo wasn’t intent on dying by Ionathas’ hand. The one condition was that Ionathas could not surrender no matter how hopeless the fight seemed. Ionathas passed the test and so Caligo handed over Soul Drinker bring about his destruction.

As evidenced by the fact that his section is the longest, Caligo is my favorite character in TTWC2. I may well explore his past in greater depth in as of yet undeveloped stories. Next time we’ll be looking into the tragic figure of King Orguz. Stay tuned.

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.

We continue our look at the leads of TTWC2 with the Spider Queen Arachne. I know there are some people out there who don’t like raiders of the public domain, but that’s precisely what it exists for. Besides, I’ve had a passion for Greek mythology ever since I was 8, so it’s little wonder that I’d want to integrate a lot of Greek mythology into my own mythos, with a bit of my own spin, of course.

When I first added Arachne to the cast, she was little more than the giant spider boss with shades of Shelob, but with a little more working on her character, her personality started to come out. Her grudge against the Olympians, particularly Athena, was a given, but that didn’t have much play after the prologue, except as common ground for establishing her friendship with Medusa. I’ll talk about those two more in a moment, but first I want to cover her relationship with the Monarch Lich.

Although I set her up as the Monarch Lich’s consort from her first entry in the story, there really wasn’t much going on there until I added Basilissa into the story. The Monarch Lich and Arachne paired off in a simple bid for power. Arachne wanted a share of the Monarch Lich’s power for her own increase and however grudging the Monarch Lich was to sacrifice his power to perpetuate his line, she was the most powerful female in the Darklands and the most likely candidate to produce a stronger offspring. You may not think jealousy is a particularly interesting motivator, but the introduction of a rival helped rekindle Arachne’s more human emotions and gave something to drive her. Her rivalry with Basilissa and the detriment it caused to the overall war effort ties into one of the key themes of Volume II, that being the chaotic nature of the Dominion. (The name was no accident, after all.) For all the faults and failings you can find on the Zephyrian side, they’re much better at being united in a common purpose. Yes, the many allied factions in the Dominion fight against Zephyr, but there is no real bond connecting them and their competing individual interests largely serve to negate the great power they represent.

One of the more redeeming aspects of Arachne is her friendship with Medusa. Yes, they’re both monsters, but theirs is the truest bond you’ll find in all the Darklands. Almost every other relationship you’ll find in Volume II is tainted in one way or another, but Arachne and Medusa’s friendship is the closest thing you’ll find to anything pure. Orguz is perhaps the most upright morally, but we’ll get into the failings of his relationships when the time comes. Back to Arachne and Medusa, it started as little more than kinship based on their shared hatred of the ones responsible for their cursed fate, but over the years, they developed an almost sororal bond. It really is quite sweet.

Giving Arachne a more humanoid form was a relatively new development. Besides serving as a way to gain an advantage over Basilissa for the Monarch Lich’s affections (or whatever passes for such with him), it also gave her a way try tempting Ionathas during their encounter (somewhat in parallel to Simona the Dark Elf’s attempt during the Battle of Kalonis). Unfortunately for her, Ionathas likes his girls scaly. ^o^

I think that’ll do it for now. I’m looking forward to the next entry, though it’ll be a few weeks yet. I’ve got quite a bit to say on the subject of Sir Caligo, so look forward to that. Stay tuned.

We kick off our coverage of the leads of TTWC2 with the big man himself. First, let me talk about Liches in my canon. I was initially inspired by the Dark Lich of Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2), but it wasn’t until years later that I came to understand the conventional concept of what a Lich is in fantasy fiction. For the uninitiated, conventionally a Lich is a powerful mage who becomes undead as a means of immortality (usually by means of a phylactery, much like Voldemort’s Horcruxes). I would later apply this concept to what I term Demi-Liches. In my canon, a Lich is a male-only race of generative undead with great magical power. They are so powerful, in fact, that their power eventually consumes their physical bodies, so before that happens, they much transfer that power to a new generation. Liches will mate with a number of different species in an effort to give rise to a hybrid offspring with a physical form strong enough to contain the Lich’s great and growing power. Occasionally you’ll get a Lich who has a stronger sense of himself as an individual rather than as part of a continuum, which leads to problems. For instance, the ancient Black Lich caused the Lich line to go extinct for nearly five thousand years because he thought himself to be the perfection of the Dark Race. He did, however, realize his folly at the end and managed to seal up his power so that his line could be revived at some point in the future. The Monarch Lich very nearly terminated the second line for much the same reason.

Originally, the Monarch Lich had little motivation, particularly after Solon’s death. Much like Magnus Lee in Vampire Hunter D, a bored villain is rather, well, boring and so I knew something had to change. As I established the idea of the Copy Golem (think along the lines of the revived Kikyou from Inuyasha), I realized that death was no obstacle at all to the Monarch Lich’s torment of Solon and so his obsession is preserved. I found myself moving farther and farther away from the aloof overlord concept to making him much more hot-blooded, even petulant. One of the key themes with him is the conflict between his Lich and human natures. His ego and ambition are his undoing, but ultimately he does sacrifice the greater part of himself to continue his line.

I’d actually consider doing a prequel chronicling his conquest of the Darklands. It might be interesting to see him when he was young and brash, with all this power but little control. Perhaps I could even show his rise and Solon’s in parallel. That could be interesting. Anyway, that does it for now. Next time, we’ll give Arachne the Spider Queen some attention. Stay tuned.

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.

In Tico3, there was a brief mention of Maximilian Nicodemus, the first World Council Chairman. In the (probably) mythological history of the New Earth Empire, the Lost Years (known as the Blackout in the Union era) were a time of global war, a devastating pandemic, famine, economic collapse, etc. During this time, the fractious nations of the world were united under the rule of Emperor Maximilian I. However, once his reign was secure, the Emperor chose to test humanity. Renouncing his crown, the Emperor restyled himself Maximilian Nicodemus, Chairman of the World Council of the newly established Earth Union. If humanity could remain united, there would be no further need of an Emperor. If not, a new Emperor would rise to bring humanity together again.

The post-Union era was brought to an end with the foundation of the New Earth Empire under Emperor Maximilian II Nicodemus, who claimed to be the direct descendant of Maximilian Nicodemus. Critical historians give no credence to the story of the First Emperor and consider it to be nothing more than a convenient fiction to give the Empire a claim to a longer lineage than what it truly possessed. Questioning the official history eventually became a prosecutable offense, so any critics who wanted to avoid a lengthy stay in prison published their work outside Imperial territory.

The Nicodeman Dynasty reigned only briefly. The order of succession wasn’t firmly established and it mostly fell to which of the eligible princes had the strongest faction of supporting nobles. For instance, after the death of Emperor Alexander I, it was the Emperor’s brother Philip rather than his son Alexander. This resulted in the first major line of pretenders, the Xue Line (named after the family of Prince Alexander’s mother). The powerful Sun Faction formed around these pretenders, but they could not stand directly against the ruling coalition. The Nicodeman Dynasty ended with the childless Emperor Alexander II and a new split was formed between the lines of the two daughters Emperor Maximilian II. From the elder daughter Princess Olympia came the new Augustan Dynasty, while the younger daughter Princess Athena’s grandson styled himself Alexander III of the so-called “True Nicodeman” Dynasty, though they had so little support that the Augustans never even bothered to actively hunt them down.

Now, it’s no great spoiler to say that the Empire suffers a bit of a bad turn at the end of the Aether War. The warrior-statesman Emperor John Charles was lost and his foppish playboy of a son John Frederick took the throne instead and was forced to negotiation a rather ignominious end to the war. The Emperor was then driven to abdicate, after which he fell into the hands of the ever-patient Sun Faction. At this point, there were four branches vying for the throne. Besides the previous Xue and “True Nicodeman” Lines, there was the Santana Line descended from Princess Olympia’s daughter Andrea and Lord Juan Felipe Santana and the Andropov Line of the deposed Emperor’s father-in-law Lord Ivan Andropov. Surprisingly, none of these claimants won the throne in the end. Rather, the Augustan Dynasty was restored with the great-nephew of Emperor John Charles being crowned Charles III. This was all thanks to the shrewd machinations of Lord Neander Cruz, who soon married the Emperor’s sister and claimed the throne for himself. (Whether he was in fact responsible for the death of the young Emperor is an open question.) So began the Neandrian Dynasty.

Before he even rose to the throne, Emperor Alexis III (the regnal name of Lord Neander) had engineered the extinction of both the “True Nicodeman” and the Santana Lines, though the Xue and Andropov Lines were not so easily terminated. After Emperor Alexis’ death, the Neandrian Dynasty was dominated by the Empress Dowager Victoria Augusta, whose influence did not wane until well into the reign of her grandson, Emperor Carolus IV. The dynasty did not outlive Emperor Carolus, though, and after his assassination, it was the Andropov Line that claimed the throne. The Andropov Dynasty managed to defeat the Sun Faction, fulfilling a long-held blood feud, and the Xue Line went extinct, bringing an end to the last of the pretenders. The Andropovs were unstable, though. At its worst, there were three emperors in a span of four years. With the assassination of Emperor Ivan V, yet another dynasty rose, the Neologos Dynasty, descended from the Emperor Victor Alexis I Neander. It was by this point that life extension technology was much improved and Emperor Michael I Neologos reigned for over 70 years. And this is as far as the history needs to go at present.

This was a very broad gloss of Imperial history, but it gives you some idea of all the twists and turns I’ve been plotting out recently. Maybe I’ll explore more details of the culture next time. Stay tuned.

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.

To speak on a meta level, one of the key reasons space fighters feature so prominently in the Ticonderoga series is due to the strong influence of the Wing Commander series on the story. Also, the stakes don’t feel quite as high for remote drone operators as for pilots physically in the cockpit. Also, the deep impression in the popular consciousness of the heroic dogfighting of the two world wars have been perpetuated through major works of science fiction and will continue to be a staple even as technology seems to be bringing the classic concept of dogfighting more and more into obsolescence. However, rather than simply handwave all this, I do try to make some in-universe justification for it all, which I will explain below.

Before the start of the Sheol War, superlight spacecraft (under 50m in length and 300t in weight) were mostly limited to unmanned drones and the occasional custom curiosity. A large part of the reason for this was because the Schauer Fusion Propulsion System, which was the cornerstone of all space travel, could not safely be downscaled any further. At that time, space operations mostly fell under the Navy’s jurisdiction and the prevailing notion was that in any combat situation, the typical patrol escort was the smallest type spacecraft that would be needed. However, even before the Sheolites were identified as such, their small maneuverable craft were proving quite effective. While some in the Navy advocated warships with denser weapons arrays to deliver an impenetrable wall of interlocking fire, the risk of collateral damage was seen as too great, though the fifth generation warships developed during the war were much more heavily armed than their predecessors. Both the Air Force and Naval Aviation saw an opportunity to seize a larger role in the coming conflict and argued in favor of fighting fire with fire with superlight spacecraft.

The superlights would not have been possible without the development of the of the SFPS Mk.VId, a downscaled version of the SFPS previously thought impossible. Though much improved over previous attempts to downscale the SFPS design, the VId was nevertheless unstable and the containment could easily be broke with relatively little damage. Safety systems were put in place to shut down the reactor upon taking damage, but this did not always work and when it did, the superlight was left dead in the water and easy prey for the enemy.

While G-diffuser systems were installed to make the cockpit survivable for a human pilot, the theoretical limits of human reaction time were strained even at the reduced engagement velocity of 100kps. Given these and other concerns, there were many voices who argued against manned superlights, instead advocating either fully independent combat AIs or at least remote operators. The use of independent AI was always politically untenable in the Earth Union. For whatever flaws a human being may have, there is at least clearer accountability in the event something goes wrong. (A discussion on the complex debate on the role of AI in Earth Union society is best saved for another time.) While remote operators at least kept a human in the loop, there were concerns that the connection could be severed or even hijacked by the enemy. (Later review would confirm that the detractors overestimated the Sheolites’ electronic warfare capabilities.) In the end, the advocates of manned superlights won out.

Now that the plan to go forward with manned superlights was going forward, both the crafts themselves and the warships to carry them were being developed alongside the training of the pilots who would fly them. For instance, both Leia Han and Stalinslav Zhukov (who you would better know as Pride of the Seven Deadly Sins) were among the first midshipmen to be trained as pilots for spaceborne carrier operations. In addition, pilots from the terrestrial aviation communities and the pilots of light spacecraft adapted their skills to operate the new superlights. Casualty rates in training were high and even higher in combat, but those who survived helped refine the warfighting doctrine for superlights. Combined with technological advancement, the second generation of pilots (represented by people like Matt and Lydia) were able to gain an advantage over the Sheolites and by the third generation that emerged by the war’s end, clear superiority on the Union side was established.

Following the postwar drawdown of forces, the expense of manned superlights became harder to justify in the changing political climate and worsening economic situation. By the time of the War of the Colonies, the Union had almost completely shifted to remote operators and only when rebel forces succeeded in realizing the concerns of the opponents of remote operators did manned superlights make a resurgence, but by that point it was a race against time to relearn what had already been well-established forty years earlier.

And that should do it for now. There are a number of technological brawls in Union military history and perhaps I’ll get into another in the near future. For my next commentary post, I may talk a little on the embarrassing origins of the Ticonderoga series and some of the early weirdness that was cut before the story saw the light of day. Stay tuned.