Utari's Puppies (Formerly Off-Topic Thread)

Hey, you did it too! But that doesn’t make my doing it any better, does it?

Okay, fair enough.

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And Sami pointed it out, so I’ve stopped. Which is why we’re here, in Not-his-thread. :wink:

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Get. The baby. Or we’ll never hear the end of it. And have him give the structure to Miz. Then PIE can even keep shooting at it!

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Well, like me you had one final thing to post in the thread. After the fact. :grinning:

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What the hell would I want with a damned circus tent? I’d have to self destruct it on bloody principle. No thank you.

If PIE wants a stationary target I can erect some myself. A slave liberation and treatment Fortizar in orbit over Sarum Prime perhaps?

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So they have to choose between allowing you a safe haven or shooting a hospital? Nice touch.

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I believe the baby is still inside the mother. I think Naup was saying some BS earlier about a tube to try and throw people off.

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Ms. Jenneth, what happened?

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Well … we knew it was likely a slave transport. When you blow up a ship there’s about a 50/50 rate of survival for cargo … living or not. Usually that’s maybe a questionable set of odds for recovering someone, but. …

Basically, in the long run, slaves in Mr. Nauplius’s hands are typically as good as dead, and in really awful ways. Unless he can be persuaded to give them up, he’ll literally do his flat best to make their lives Hell, and then try to send them there for real as horribly as possible-- “glorifying God.”

If we shoot, either we get people away from him and get a chance to save their lives (it’s more complicated than just getting them to a station, because of vitoc dependency and other issues), or they die relatively fast.

If we don’t, he keeps them.

Awful as it is, this one’s not even close, at least for me, Ms. Ambrye.

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That’s a very difficult choice to have to make, Ms. Jenneth. I don’t think you’ve explained to me what was involved before. Somehow I just imagined that you and your team boarded the station, fought your way to the slaves, dragged them backed to your ship while providing cover fire, and disembarked. Instead you’re forced to shoot at ships and containers and hope for the best, or at least not the worst.

You and your team truly have my sympathies.

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What’s involved varies, time to time, opportunity to opportunity, Ms. Ambrye. It’s not like we bring down one of his Sigils every week.

Sometimes it takes the form of a challenge, like the recent time he abandoned a few hundred people in a mobile depot with not-enough supplies and a few deadly predators (slaver hounds). We managed to track it down within a couple hours of its launch; the problem was the 48-hour reinforcement timer. … We came away with I think a little less than half the original group.

Sometimes it’s something negotiated. Ms. Raske and I have both managed to get him to free whole populations of his prisoners from time to time. Those usually have the best odds, but they often require situations we’re not likely to be able to create twice.

Sometimes it’s a ship. … He usually has at least a couple unlucky people on board, even if he doesn’t need any crew, like on a frigate.

The “team” this time was just some allies who happened to be around. I’m grateful for their help. … I wish it had ended better, but, I don’t regret trying.

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It’s unfortunate, but considering how often he states his intention to sacrifice people, it’s safe to assume they were as good as dead anyway. This was certainly a lot faster.

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I guess death by asphyxiation, within a couple of minutes, is better by far than some of things I hear he has done to his victims.

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Well … those that make it that far, yeah.

Sigil power plants, like most or maybe even all of those on Amarrian ships, are antimatter-driven. When containment fails, they go up kind of big. Really it’s a little amazing anything ever survives at all.

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It’s highly unlikely any of them survived long enough to asphyxiate. An antimatter reactor containment failure, plus the explosion of the missiles that caused it(Not to mention the other weapons systems firing on it), is very destructive.

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It makes the 50% survival rate sound less probable too. Again, I’m sure that this isn’t easy in any case for any of you.

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Well … on one hand, a reactor driven by sort of the king of volatile substances (and capacitors that use folded space as a storage medium, which seems like it would do really scary stuff when it fails).

On the other, a not-exactly-first-generation ship designed to preserve crew and cargo where possible.

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You think he waited until afterwards?

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He was doing it in local for hours leading up to it.

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I don’t think being exotic is the thing, Khanid are plenty themselves.

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