War Journal: Triglavian Collective

Enough to pop a couple bags of popcorn?

And their recipients?

I mean, seriously, that was a drone camera configured for literally staring into a star from <.1 AU without burning a hole in the sensor. What does it take to white that out?

(You saw that radial projection of solar mass, right? Enough force to toss a visible plasma wave clear of the photosphere? That was one serious blast.)

Lord have mercy…

The memories of that star still give me chills, more so seeing it preserved like this. When I heard a desperate call for help evacuating people, just barely recorded as I flitted through a system doing something I no longer remember, my gut told me to go and help. I didn’t have any warship, my best option was the speed of a simple shuttle. So I directly connected to the person on the other end of that call and made a dash, then another, and two more. I only saved ten people.

And that star, hanging in the void like the tombstone of a system.
This is when I joined the war.

Sister. I feel for you.
I call you sister because I too fought at Nonni. Many other forces had been taking losses but I still could not leave that system. I mustered a small group and kept fighting, hoping it would be enough, that reinforcements would come.
It was not enough. Nonni haunts me to this day.

I feel the same, that I have failed. And I too have questioned everything. And I have found answers through those questions, not esoteric philosophy that would bring peace to one but the wisdom and experience of other capsuleers from all routes of life, all Four Empires.
Do not be afraid to question. Do not shrink from the answers. Face them head on, learn the determination and the practical lessons, and join our brothers and sisters in saving everyone else we can.

With the greatest respect I can muster, I am glad that your belief gives you this strength, but this belief was not enough for many.

This is the kind of thinking that will win this war. No bullheaded favoritism for one Empire’s architecture over another’s.

Harva. I do not truly know if I failed here, or if I succeeded in a strategic sense. When CONCORD withdrew, a few capsuleers and I came back, in small frigates equipped for EWAR. The notional fleet we had intended to support in a direct assault on Kybernaut forces never coalesced. With no options and some losses, my small crew and I began broadcasting on local. Metaphors and anthropomorphization, humanizing the Sun itself so that the Kybernauts would perhaps sympathize. It seemed to work for a time. But eventually we were stretched too thin to continue as Harva fell to the Collective.
Failure? Strategic stalling? Looking back… I just don’t know.

1 Like

You can’t win the war you already lost. Six times.

EDENCOM is a farce. Empires would fare better without relying on them even if EDENCOM was not having its agenda misaligned with the Empire interests. And EDI only helps them complete their goals

The six systems that have fallen to liminality are tragic losses, but there have been systems we’ve saved, and others that we will save.
In truth, the capsuleers of EDI are only notionally aligned with EDENCOM. There has been no communication EDENCOM has not sent to all capsuleers.
Please, do not tarnish a sharing of grief with further taunting.

4 Likes

Been busying myself outside the rat race of capsuleer society. I’ve watched all of this from a research laboratory in the shadow of the Akat Mountains.

A thought strikes me, Aria: unsustainable systems end.

All of this. The Forever Wars, the Titanomachy, the Palatine Keepstar. Flash-deployed industrial infrastructure across ten thousand worlds. Customs offices to simplify the strip-mining of entire planets. Tearing entire continental plates off of moons to feed an insatiable engine. I think in our hearts we all knew it was going to come crashing down someday. We called ourselves Immortals but even the oldest of us have barely been “immortal” for twenty years.

Now the Triglavians have shown us we can eat the blood of stars. Don’t tell me you think Upwell and the Empires - Old and New - aren’t going to take dark inspiration from it.

I don’t see an end to this. Only The End.

I think it’s just that none of us saw it happening quite like this.

… has never been built. You know that, right?

Yeaaah, no. It’s a 70km radius chunk or so at max frack, which is roughly once every 2 months. Compared to the amount mined via normal mining techniques on planetary surfaces in that same amount of time, it’s just not that large.

Careful now, he gets upset if you contradict things he’s said. Especially if facts are involved.

Usually though, he just disagrees with, and takes the opposite position to whatever I might say, regardless of how silly that would be.

Intaki pygmy water buffalo milk is traditionally added to tea in Intaki.
Predestination is bunk.

That’s bleak. :frowning:

Hi Mr. Ixiris, welcome back by the way.

Hi, Mr. Ixiris! Good to see you again.

Hm. Well … actually that’s something that’s been theorized for a long time. I mean, sipping solar plasma-- talk about an abundant resource, right? Our societies just haven’t historically figured out how.

Also, I don’t think anybody had the idea of taking enough to actually, visibly dim the stars. The Triglavians’ techniques are probably as wasteful as they are dramatic (seriously, how much energy is expended just in snapping “final liminality” into place?).

The whole thing reminds me of the suggestion that life occurs as a method for accelerating entropy, I guess sort of like electricity will seek the most efficient channel to flow through. The idea is that living things process reality from higher-energy states into lower-energy states more efficiently than just, like, wear and tear from nonliving processes; the music of life is, “Nom, nom, nom.”

This form of stellar harvesting seems like pretty much the pinnacle of that idea. I wonder how long a star tapped in such a way will last. A billion years more? A hundred thousand years? A thousand? A single human lifetime? … less? (Surely not?)

Entropy. . . .

In fairness it’s not like they, or we, will run out of stars, soon. But I’ve never thought that “swarm of locusts” was a model humanity should aspire to?

Maybe it’s just how we are. If so, the Triglavians are … very human indeed.

3 Likes

Ironically, it’s one we’ve already conformed to for millennia.

Additional irony: It’ll probably last longer. The more massive the star, the shorter the lifespan. If they’re taking out enough mass to make singularities, that will likely end up extending the amount of time before the star’s fuel runs out (most stars don’t use all of their fuel, because of the mechanics of their internal structure). The longest-lived stars will be the red dwarves, which should last a few trillion years or so. So the stars being impacted won’t give off as much energy over any given span of time, but it’ll last longer overall.

2 Likes

Glad to see I can still rely on you to make everything I say look more mature by comparison, Valete.

Surely He believes they are better off at His side. I pray their families can find solace in that fact.

I mean, technically, if you siphon the right gasses off a star, it could actually last longer. Heck, if you can pull enough mass away, it doesn’t really matter if you were particularly precise with what you were taking - the decreased gravitational pressure would result in a lower reaction rate. Hells, if you want to get really ambitious, there are actually ways you could turn the siphoned gas into a thrust jet. Ever feel like Jita was too far away from Luminaire? Couple of hundred thousand years of work - a million maybe - and you could just nudge it right on over.

But even for a civilization like ours that can build cities in the sky, stellar engineering is the stuff of fantasy. Or it was supposed to be. If there’s one thing the Triglavians have proven themselves the masters of, it’s proving us wrong.

You think something like this caused the Seylinn Incident? Or Caroline’s Star?

The main issue is that changing the state of stars in such a manner will absolutely devastate existing ecosystems. Any path of evolution will be unable to adapt to such a drastic change.

2 Likes

Have you ever thought that for every building there may be a new hole or one less mountain of equal or bigger size somewhere in that planet? For every Keepstar and every Titan, something less in space?

There is a difference between getting mad for this happening and getting mad for this happening and not beign by our own hands.

“swarm of locusts”

That is not how natural selection works, plus, life tends to find a way.

I find myself in agreement with Ms. Tsukiyo. On both fronts. I’m sure we would harvest the stars ourselves if we were capable. And on any old temperate world you can head into a deep cave and find a host of creatures who do not need any light to survive because they developed in the darkness.

And yet you persist in purposefully misspelling my name, like a petulant child. Even when it’s right there on every one of my posts.

Ms. Tsukiyo has a habit of speaking as though she were a star herself, pilot: indifferent to suffering.

Life’s found ways to survive even in the Abyss. That doesn’t mean Vale, for example, doesn’t face ecological collapse.

1 Like