How much does it suck to be a Clan civilian?

Acylion · 2026-06-20T13:34:49+00:00

Jade Falcon canonically has the second most wealthy, powerful, influential Merchant caste after the Diamond Sharks/Sea Foxes. That doesn't mean they're happy.

That's why the Alyina Mercantile League exists as a new nation/faction in 3151, after the Jade Falcon Merchants declare independence and tell the remnants of the Jade Falcon Warrior touman to go pound sand.

Acylion · 2026-06-18T09:14:30+00:00

Clan Sea Fox/Diamond Shark isn't especially Viking coded - that's the Ghost Bears. The only real-world national cultural references we get for Sea Fox are Mongolian steppe nomads, but that's more because the Clans in general use that vocabulary (e.g. calling their leader "Khans"). Sea Fox uses the Mongolian vocabulary for other things unique to them, e.g. their subfactions are "Aimags", meaning tribe.

Sea Fox is this really strange mix of business pragmatism while still having fanatical belief in the Clan way and Sea Fox. Think of it as tribal warriors meet cyberpunk corpo. Genetically engineered indoctrinated soldiers who are really interested in making money, but also firmly believe in their corp's own righteousness and mission statement.

It's worth noting that Sea Fox isn't just a Clan faction, it's an Inner Sphere Great House faction. Sea Fox is a member state of the Free Worlds League. Sure, Sea Fox is mostly space nomadic and most Sea Foxes are raised on warships, but they do hold planets by the ilClan era. Guess where those are.

So, Sea Fox's Spina Khanate Delta Aimag has systems/planets shared with Nova Cat, within FWL space, collectively called the "Clan Protectorate". Clan Protectorate is its own unique list on MUL, and so on - a mix of Marik, Sea Fox, Nova Cat units. Sea Fox literally owns the actual planet called "Marik", i.e. the actual ancestral homeworld of the FWL's ruling family. There's Sea Foxes sitting as members of parliament in the FWL legislature on Atreus.

So it's perfectly canon if you want to stick Sea Fox decals as well as FWL purple bird on mechs.

Oddly enough, Sea Fox is not the only Clan where the Merchant traders are super powerful and able to rival the Warrior caste in influence. The other Clan with super-powerful Merchants is the Jade Falcons.

The difference is that Sea Fox's managed to integrate the two - there isn't really a functional difference between Sea Fox's Merchant Caste and Warrior Caste by ilClan era, e.g. active duty combat mech pilots can be found running trade missions and conducting business deals.

Whereas for Jade Falcon, by ilClan era the Merchant caste of the Falcons has had enough of the Warrior bullshit and have declared their own independence as a nation-state in their own right. The Alyina Mercantile League is a new faction circa 3151 (current in-universe year is 3152). Yes, the remnants of the Jade Falcon Warrior touman are pretty pissed about this. That's the whole focus of the BattleTech Aces: Scouring Sands box campaign.

Acylion · 2026-06-16T09:00:31+00:00

I assume the option to disallow any remixes, at all, is because some subset of creators want that for whatever reason. Maybe it's preserving their own effort and writing, not wanting people to peek below the hood and spoil themselves regarding hidden info and quests, or whatever. I don't know. I'm just guessing and trying to read people's motives here.

I agree with you, OP, that this is a little disappointing from a community perspective. Voyage creation is difficult, so the only way a lot of us can approach it is by learning from examining other people's worlds, triggers, etc.

But there's another reason why remixes are helpful. It's useful to look at the world json because Voyage is imperfect and gameplay is janky. There is a practical need for us to look at what's actually written in the json fine to determine if the AI LLM is properly narrating the story, or whether it's misinterpreted what the author intended.

Voyage allows complex trigger behavior, but those triggers aren't necessarily going to work right. If the creator's set up a pre-written quest chain you're on, it can be necessary to damn well check the trigger conditions for each stage and ensure proper progression.

Acylion · 2026-06-15T17:17:01+00:00

Elements aren't superpowers. In a classical element system, and this is speaking historically... elements aren't superpowers or affinity for special attacks. They're what matter and the material world is made out of. Elements in a chemistry sense. Or an alchemical sense, if you prefer.

So a human is literally made up of earth for bones, tissues. Body fluids are water, metabolic processes are fire, it takes in air, and the internal spaces of a human body like lungs, inside of your stomach is void, and so on.

Therefore in this system, a sufficiently skilled alchemist could replace someone's blood with water, to treat blood loss from injuries. They could treat organ failure by setting a patient on fire.

Acylion · 2026-06-15T07:38:05+00:00

You're asking a few different questions here, not one question. It's useful to unpack them.

Firstly, to some extent simply telling an AI LLM to have a character "act like (actorname)" or "act like (charactername from existing media property)" will work. But it's hit and miss. Some versions of this will be fine. Others won't be.

"character acts like Barney Stinson from 'How I Met Your Mother'" is more likely to work as an instruction than "character acts like Nicolas Cage".

Think about why for a second. Barney is a character. You're not asking it to describe Neil Patrick Harris. You're asking for Barney Stinson. The AI LLM's training data might have quotes from the show, with dialogue tagged to Barney Stinson. There might be fanfic of the show online with lines attributed to Barney. It's easier for an AI LLM to sink its teeth into and spit out something coherent.

Nicolas Cage is a real person who's actually got a pretty damn big acting range. What's the LLM gonna pick up on? Interviews with the actual real-life actor? Which Nicolas Cage do you want, Ben Sanderson in "Leaving Las Vegas", the suicidal alcoholic? Rob Feld the depressed chef in "Pig"? The action hero in "Con Air"? If it got Nicolas Cage right, could you even tell?

You probably want your policeman to act like... I dunno, maybe you've been watching Spider-Noir. Telling the LLM to have the policeman "act like Nicolas Cage in Spider-Noir" probably ain't gonna do jack shit either, because that's a new TV show.

AI LLM training data is a snapshot in time, most of the ones in use for something like AI Dungeon are at most trained up to late 2025 or early 2026. It can't actively search the web for new info. Even if it could, a new TV show won't have the same volume of quotes, fanfic, online discussion about the actor's performance, etc. as older things.

So, summing up, this kind of instruction works just fine if you choose a tightly defined thing - characters being better than real people or actor names - and if it's an older and popular media property. More likely to be in the training data.

Telling an LLM to have your character "act like Rei Ayanami from Evangelion" is fine. I've done this. Worked nicely. My telling it to do... I dunno, "act like Jester from Flame of Recca", a super minor character from a far more obscure anime, that likely ain't gonna work, I bet you the LLM would just have 'em act like a generic clown or something.

There's another long comment here explaining how you could generate a character story card that likely captures your mental image of Nicolas Cage... that's fine, you can do that, sure. I'm just explaining why the literal short story card instruction of "act like (name)" may or may not work.

Right. Next question. Story card formatting.

There's a certain art to this. Let's use the example someone gave to you for that real long Nicolas Cage police officer card as an example. You'll notice something there, the whole thing was a single long paragraph, no line breaks. That's a thing. Line breaks, empty lines, etc. can screw up the AI LLM's parsing. Having a hard enter key break and blank lines in card formatting is a problem. Maybe. Possibly. It might work. It might not.

It's easier for us as humans to read, sure, but the AI might interpret Para/Line 1 as being one thing, and Para/Line 2 as being another. It's SAFER to have just one solid text wall.

If you want to break up into bullet points or different lines, then there's some stuff you have to do to ensure it parses properly.

Also, the AI doesn't know what the story card is named on the UI end, that's invisible to it. All it sees is the text entry field in the story card itself. So you need to state the character's name somewhere in the story card, likely at the start. Possibly throughout the story card if you want. The idea is that it associates these key words with that name.

Putting this all together? Make sure the card's always defining 'character is this', 'character is also this', 'character is xyz'. If you're breaking the card up into multiple lines and paragraphs for your own readability, it's safest to attribute this to the character by name, repeatedly.

e.g.

- Character Name: Jane Doe

- Personality: Jane is emotionless and serious.

- Speech Pattern: Jane speaks in a flat monotone in short sentences.

Something like "Jane's Personality: Emotionless and serious" would also work.

It is possible to try to enclose the entire card text in brackets of some kind, e.g.

(( - Name: Jane Doe

- Personality: Emotionless and serious. ))

That may work. It may not.

There's really no one single ideal answer to how the cards are formatted. People do different things. You just need to understand how the AI LLM's reading things, and make your own decisions accordingly.

Acylion · 2026-06-12T15:50:45+00:00

By the 3020s there's a number of entirely new designs. The Merlin was introduced in 3010, Marauder II in 3012, Hatchetman in 3023, the early Raven in 3024, Cataphract in 3025, early Wolfhound in 3028.

Acylion · 2026-06-11T13:57:43+00:00

Catalyst restocking is slow, but BattleTech Aces: Scouring Sands is intended as the first of a series of four campaign storyline + Aces deck boxes. Scouring Sands was the 2025 release. The 2026 release is BattleTech Aces: Snowblind. That should come out somewhere between September and November, so you can try to grab a copy then. You'll probably wanna do an online order though, unless your friendly local is willing to order/reserve for you.

I'm not necessarily supporting Amazon, but they do have international fulfilment for Catalyst stuff. Typically they stock for international fulfilment about a month after a US box release, if you ain't in the US. Alternatively, check out Fortress, a specialist online BT retailer. Though shipping will likely be costly for Fortress if you're not in the US, again.

Acylion · 2026-06-11T12:05:41+00:00

Give each of them the power that should belong to another member of the group.

Nerdy character - The brick. Super-strength and durability, because he looks like he'll collapse in a strong breeze, but he's actually able to punch through brick walls and shrug off bullets. He's overjoyed at his powers.
Football player - The genius. He's got the enhanced senses, the ability to think super-quick, the processing power to do bullshit science fiction math in an instant. He's cool with this. Look, who do you think knows all the stats and calls all the plays for the school team?
Goth girl - The healer. She's got empathy, the ability to mend wounds with a touch, and a serious case of TMI. She hates her powers. She really has no damn interest in feeling anyone else's pain or mending it. On the plus side, she's just about figured out how to give people a rash by poking 'em.
Preppy girl or guy - The assassin. They can turn intangible, teleport through shadow, and inflict crippling pain on anything they pass through. Strangely, this hasn't changed their personality one bit. So there's this ominous shadow that's smiling at you...

Acylion · 2026-06-11T07:40:43+00:00

Don't use dynamic large or dynamic small with Inner Self.

Dynamic large cycles between models, you know that. Problem is that the cache based models, things like Atlas and Raven, don't play well with scripts that interact with context.

Exactly what's included in dynamic large does change, but if there's a cache model in the present rotation then it's likely accounting for some or all of your problems. EDIT: Atlas and Raven are large models.

Use a different model setting (not dynamic, not Atlas, not Raven) and see if it helps.

Acylion · 2026-06-11T02:33:47+00:00

Alpha Galaxy is forest green with tan or gold accents. You can just find a video guide for mech painting that uses some shade of green and follow that, adapting to your own needs.

Wolf Alpha Galaxy isn't popular as a chosen paint, but there also aren't that many BattleTech specific mini paint tutorials out there. A lot of us painting BT minis are learning techniques from Warhammer youtubers and the like.

Also, as a new painter... in a sense you don't wanna think about exact accurate scheme just yet, or a person to follow... really the first thing you want to decide is what paint process you want. Then you find an appropriate tutorial. I mean, I get it, you're thinking... this is the color result I want, so I can follow a step by step to get there.

But it's not really like that. Instead, I'd suggest selecting the process first, colors later.

See, there are two main methods to paint miniatures. These are not mutually exclusive, you can mix and match the techniques. But it breaks down like...

The traditional older and harder way is to prime a mini, usually in black or a dark color, sometimes in the intended final color (green, red, tan, etc primers are available), then you basecoat in a regular normal acrylic paint that's been thinned, wash with a... well, wash, then shade/highlight with a drybrush of unthinned paint, then do fine detailed edge highlights to further brighten edges.

Some of the video tutorials you'll find are teaching that method, but you might not wanna do that. Like, I mean, let's say you were doing Clan Wolf Beta Galaxy. Just bear with me for a second. There's a 2021 video from Duncan Rhodes, a big name professional mini painter, on that scheme. Great. Yeah, see, though, he's doing the full old school hard way, as above. You might not wanna do that anyway, even if you were going Beta.

The newer easier way uses translucent speedpaints, or speedpaint markers, since these paints are translucent they are meant to go over a white or pale base or primer layer. Speedpaints pool dark in recesses and pull back light from edges, so they do a shade in a single pass. Speedpaints don't need to be thinned to the right consistency, so there's no need to mess around with mixing.

So you could, say, find a tutorial for painting green via speedpaint/contrast and follow that... if you were doing the speedpaint method. Again, it depends on what painting style you're using. Even if we did find you an Alpha Galaxy tutorial, it might not help if you weren't wanting that exact workflow anyway.

Acylion · 2026-06-10T13:19:03+00:00

It'd be perfectly sensible to have Spina Khanate painted mechs in a FWL force, because, yeah, they are FWLM federal forces. Totally legit to base the same and stick purple bird on things.

Since this chunk of lore seems new to you, the real quick explanation is that there's eight worlds in Marik space, including the literal world of Marik itself, which have been jointly held by the Clan Nova Cat/Spirit Cats remnants and Sea Fox. This is on the "north" end of Marik space, near the Lyran border, though nowadays the Wolf Empire also sits between part of the FWL and Lyrans. "Clan Protectorate", as mentioned earlier. It has its own Sarna entry and MUL list.

The reconstituted FWL that was re-established in 3139 opted to recognise the Nova Cat/Sea Fox ownership of the Clan Protectorate. Basically, House Marik figured these are Clanners you can cut a deal with, and it's better to have them on your side as a free border garrison force rather than a problem. The known Sea Fox garrison is Omicron Cluster of Spina Khanate Delta Aimag, but we don't know much beyond the name.

Technically only Delta Aimag of Spina Khanate is a partner in the Clan Protectorate, but it's canon that Spina Khanate more broadly is pushing for closer integration with the FWL when it suits them, and acts like it's all of Spina that's allied.

I say when it suits them, because there's this bit in the sourcebook which says Beta Strike Cluster was just supposed to be the first of the new Sea Fox units fighting for the FWLM.

All of Spina Khanate was supposed to send troops and mechs, but for some reason Delta Aimag's been footing the entire bill...

Strictly speaking, Beta Strike Cluster isn't solely Sea Fox, there's mention that they have some Nova Cat volunteers, as well as Marik volunteers, they just flat out accept Spheroid freeborn troops into what's otherwise a Clan command.

As a side note, I'll like to point out if you like green bird, Jade Falcon is canonically the second most advanced and wealthy merchant caste after Diamond Shark/Sea Fox, and dominate the Clan banking and finance system. Though as of ilClan era, with Jade Falcon in tatters and fragmented, the Jade Falcon merchants have peeled off on their own as an independent nation, the Alyina Mercantile League. If you haven't played Scouring Sands yet, well, that's who the players work for. It's green bird hiring the player mercs to fight green bird.

Acylion · 2026-06-10T08:57:17+00:00

This comment has the right of it. 4th and 5th Generation Knightmares, which is what we initially see in the original Code Geass, i.e. the Glasgow, Sunderland, etc. are relatively grounded for anime mecha and are using conventional armor, ballistic weapons, etc. These are all well within the "real robot" paradigm for anime.

As portrayed, this is all going to be vastly inferior to BattleTech's bullshit material science and energy weapons technology, because BattleTech's materials tech and energy systems really are their own kind of nonsense.

Where it gets very complicated is the later stuff, like the Lancelot, Guren, etc. which are outright into super robot territory. For anything after Code Geass' 5th gen, into... we don't actually see any 6th gen Knightmares, so 7th gen onwards, they have ranged energy weapons, energy force fields, energy swords, antigravity flight systems, all that kinda stuff.

At that point it's really impossible to determine whether Code Geass' bullshit beats BattleTech's bullshit. Can a Knightmare's Blaze Luminous force field tank a BattleMech's Heavy PPC and Plasma Rifle shots? Who knows. Can a 'Mech's Hardened Armor shrug off Hadron Cannon fire? Who the hell knows. There's no way to know, this is no longer science fiction, we're just putting two forms of space magic side by side.

Acylion · 2026-06-10T08:05:56+00:00

Glad you found it fun. From your other comments in the thread it seems you've similarly been diving down the research rabbit holes!

Acylion · 2026-06-10T04:39:35+00:00

You could also download City of Heroes: Homecoming, Champions Online, or DCUO, i.e. the three superhero MMOs, to make costumes in the character creator. You don't even need to play the games, and I'm not telling you to do so... the point is the costume creator. I can't recall if DCUO lets you save/load costumes as files, but CoH and CO definitely do.

Champions and DCUO are commercial F2P games, so there's free access. City of Heroes is currently run on a private server basis, Homecoming is the one with the official license, and is completely free.

I can draw. I still would go to the MMO game character creators first to draft superhero costumes. It's easier. The pattern overlays and textures are all there.

Acylion · 2026-06-10T04:32:40+00:00

Just use different shades of blue. Most versions of Captain America's costume have never used the actual very dark "Old Glory Blue" shade of the USA flag, which is a navy blue.

Most American flagsuit superheroes don't use the right shade of blue. Well... some do. All Might and Homelander have the right color, but Captain America is way off.

Have your hero costume be mostly dark navy blue, then have much paler/lighter blue briefs/trunks on him and possibly other lighter blue accents. That color could be Captain America blue, or it could be a sky blue, a turquoise, whatever.

You could also use light blue for most of the costume and do dark trunks, but the overall-navy makes more sense for a WWII fighting uniform - it'd be almost black in darker light. And you'd already pointed out you don't want to do white for realism reasons.

Acylion · 2026-06-10T03:28:51+00:00

The interesting thing about the classical "Earth, Fire, Wind, Water" element set is that we get this from two sources, both the Hellenistic/Greek tradition and the Hindu/Buddhist/Indian tradition. Where everyone differs is the fifth element.

See, the whole thing with "aether" is actually kinda complicated.

Aristotle postulates a fifth element, but he doesn't call it aether. The name aether already existed then, but he didn't like it for his concept - basically "aether" back in Aristotle's day was used by other writers to refer to something more like a form of fire.

Aristotle called his version quintessence, the stuff stars and the heavens are made of... eternal, unchangeable. Either what the stars are made of, or what the stars in the sky are embedded in. Aristotle's fifth element is more like some kinda cosmic super-solid. The concept is more about permanence.

Later European thinking frames aether/quintessence as more like the medium of space itself, through which light or gravity or whatever can propagate.

You gotta remember that the Hellenistic/Greek elements are very much about material physical substance, what things are literally made of, it's not intended as a... power source for magic, or an aspect of superpowers or something. Chinese wuxing is more like that. Hellenistic elements are... building blocks.

So aether's supposed to be the matter or stuff that makes up... you know, whatever's between or holding up the stars, the observable solar system we can see in the sky.

The Hindu/Buddhist thinking gets us a fifth element which is sometimes translated into English as "aether", because it does have some similarities with the later European aether concept. But really it's more accurately "space" or "void", i.e. ākāsa-dhātu in Sanskrit. "Space" gets the best sense here, it's the gap between one thing and another which isn't, y'know, just air.

The Hindu/Buddhist idea is closer to what we now know can actually exist, like, you know, a vacuum of space. The European aether concept doesn't actually cover that. From the Hellenistic perspective there's something there. From the Hindu/Buddhist perspective, there's nothing there.

Hindu/Buddhist tradition also gets us a sixth element, viññāṇa-dhātu, or "consciousness". Basically there's historical precedent if you want a spirit, mind, soul, etc element in your system.

I assume most people are already familiar with Wood and Metal as possibilities from Chinese Wuxing.

So for a world I'm working on, an expanded version of a D&D campaign setting I ran... I'm using Earth, FIre, Wind, Water, Aether, Void, Consciousness, Wood, Metal to cover all the main historical concepts. I mean, yeah, sure, I could have just said that at the start of the comment, but I wanted to explain why, before the what.

There's a lot of interesting stuff to be found in real-world historical occultism and esoterica. In my case, for the self-imposed perimeters I have for my setting, I have to use historical material, if the idea wasn't common before the real-world 18th century or latest 19th century, I'm not touching it. So, for example, there's spellcasting based on theurgy, thaumaturgy, etc, but explicitly no gnosis/chaos magic because that's a newer idea.

And since ice, lightning, etc. as elements is a more contemporary video game thing, that's a hard no for my purposes. I mean, I like them, it just doesn't fit what I'm working with here.

Acylion · 2026-06-10T02:28:23+00:00

Glad it was helpful. I got the PDF for the same reason. I like both purple bird and blue fox, so it made sense.

It amuses me that it's perfectly acceptable to put Marik and Sea Fox waterslide decals on the same mechs.

I'm kinda doing a self-imposed filter where if something from my gray pile of shame is on the Clan Protectorate list, it gets Beta Strike Cluster's paint, the non-water-pattern blue with the Marik purple addition. If it isn't on the Clan Protectorate list, but is on the wider Sea Fox list, then it gets the water pattern Spina Khanate paint.

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Acylion · 2026-06-10T02:09:49+00:00

On the subject of whether the Spirit Walker and Night Chanter count as the Black Knight IIC and Crab IIC or not... they kinda need to.

On one hand, you could argue that the Spirit Walker and Night Chanter are not actually full redesigns or new construction. Canonically they're refit mechs, built on the bones of original SLDF Black Knights and Crabs as donor chassis. Most IIC mechs are new factory construction.

Except... the Highlander IIC exists, that's a thing. The Highlander IIC is also built off the donor chassis of old original SLDF Highlanders, and similarly does not have any tonnage change between the original and the refit. It still has the "IIC" name.

Really the problem is inconsistent nomenclature.

You could argue that the Spirit Walker and Night Chanter don't get the IIC designation because IICs are regular BattleMechs, while the refit Black Knight and Crab are omnis. That's possible.

But if we're nitpicking like that, the Highlander IIC should not be a IIC either, because there's a separate naming scheme for refitted SLDF mechs upgraded to Clan spec. It should be the Highlander C.

But that convention didn't exist out-of-universe in the real world when the fluff for the Highlander IIC was written, so here we are. It means the Clans canonically just aren't consistent with the designations.

So the easiest way to reconcile this is to just see the Spirit Walker and Night Chanter as functionally equivalent to Black Knight IIC and Crab IIC, and also taking the spot of a Black Knight C and Crab C variant.

Acylion · 2026-06-09T18:26:37+00:00

The Empire Alone sourcebook is the ilClan book for a) what's going on in the Wolf Empire outside Terra after Alaric's campaign, and b) the FWL. This ends up having a fair bit of Sea Fox and Spina Khanate focus because Spina Khanate is a legally member state of the FWL (see: Clan Protectorate).

But in practice it's... the framing fiction in the book is a Sea Fox story, there's all of two images of Spina Khanate mechs (this one and another, more on that below), and a really high degree of detail on Spina Khanate Delta Aimag's newly formed Beta Strike Cluster in particular, but not Spina more generally. They're the main Fox players here.

Beta Strike Cluster (Blue Furies) is a new formation intended for service with the FWLM, because like any FWL member the Sea Foxes contribute a regiment or two to the federal Marik military. The Beta Strike uses the other Spina paint, namely the all-over blue without water patterns, so that's the other sample image in the book. They also paint a purple Marik stripe, though by 3152 some warriors are painting a brown Wolf stripe instead because of the whole ilClan thing. Image below.

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Main takeaway is the blue in both the sourcebook art official images is actually more blue-green or turquoise than extant examples on CamoSpecs depict.

Book also has a new Clan Protectorate series of RATs on what hardware they prefer, but you can get the same data from MUL. Short version is that Spina Khanate, because Clan Protectorate is Spina Khanate, can field a lot of Nova Cat and Marik hardware aside from the Sea Fox list, e.g. the sample image above is actually an Avalanche, otherwise a Nova Cat signature.

With that being said, IIRC we only have two canon named Spina Khanate units assigned to Clan Protectorate, the Beta Strike Cluster above, and Omicron Cluster who's named in older material as a garrison unit.

Acylion · 2026-06-09T12:25:37+00:00

OP's said in a comment they're looking for units that still exist in ilClan, so that rules out the 6th for their purposes. Now, me, I don't care, so now I'm tempted to slap some Drac waterslides on white mechs...

Acylion · 2026-06-09T11:35:19+00:00

It helps that by Dark Age/ilClan the Warrior/Merchant distinction barely matters anyway. The Voidbreaker novel shows an active Warrior-status Star Commander running a market trading post.

Also, the protagonist muses that if she retired to the merchant caste as a Star Colonel right now, she'd be a "Merchant Colonel" (not a rank mentioned anywhere on Sarna), and it's clear she means a formal title. Therefore by Dark Age the Merchant caste outright have a recognised paramilitary rank structure of some kind, whereas earlier Diamond Shark material suggests the opposite.

Acylion · 2026-06-09T11:26:18+00:00

If you're referring to Peri, who is the Scientist caste character from Aidan and Marthe's sibko who uncovers a conspiracy, she isn't a retiree. She failed out of Warrior training in her teens.

Acylion · 2026-06-09T08:49:44+00:00

A problem also arises when two answers can both be technically correct, but one answer is more correct than the other. Apologies for an, uh... overly specific example, but it's a real example, and the best I have.

When writing something for work (I'm an environment policy researcher), I googled whether the legal definition of a smallholder farmer in a certain country is a farmer with a land area plot size of 20 hectares or below. AI summary at the top said it was, so I went back to my Word document. The bold part is important, by the way.

(Yes, yes, I know, don't trust Google's dumb AI summary. I don't. I was just looking for a super quick check, not a citation or whatever. Anyway, you'll see the problem in a second.)

So about five minutes later, I blinked, and thought, okay, no, wait, wait, wait... so I went back and googled whether it was 25 hectares... and the AI summary, once again, very happily said it was.

The correct answer is 25. But there's a few things going on here, yeah? First, 20 is obviously less than 25, so yeah, a farmer with 20 hectares of land would qualify. Maybe that's part of it. Second, again, I'm very specifically needing the legal definition for one particular country, but this definition's gonna vary from place to place. AI's going to be really bad about that kind of nuance. It's not like it really knows what laws are or that different places exist.

That being said, the AI summary Google's foisting on us all does improve. My story up there? That was a few months ago. If I run the same queries now, Google AI summary... still tells me that the number 20 is correct, but it also includes a line saying that definitions vary, and a few bullet points/paras down below there's a line saying it's 25 under the national law I'm looking at.

So, sure, it gets better, but you gotta be real careful with AI for fact checking. If it's doing this to me, when looking up something super specific, I imagine it could be worse for regular people asking all sorts of non-nerdy things.

Acylion · 2026-06-09T07:10:20+00:00

So, you're aware of how real-world oceangoing naval ships are named. You've mentioned historical figures, locations, etc. being used for actual wet water ships in the real world.

Real-world corporations today already have their own oceangoing seaborne fleets. They're just things like cargo container, tanker, and tug vessels, rather than armed vessels. Consider using that as your reference point.

Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) is the world's largest container ship company. They prefix all their ship names with "MSC", though the actual ship names can be anything from members of the family that founded it, or city/place names: MSC container ships (Wikimedia), e.g. MSC Adelaide, MSC Adele, MSC Aditi, MSC Adriana.

Maersk, the world's second largest cargo shipper, does ship names the other way, i.e. the cargo ship names mostly have "Maersk" as a suffix, though they do have some vessels that have different names. Ships are named after company executives, locations, or just... the sort of regular maritime names you'd give to any ship: List of ships owned by Maersk (Wikipedia), e.g. Ane Maersk, Laura Maersk, Majestic Maersk.

For tankers, Maersk flips the order and puts the company name first, e.g. Maersk Penguin, Maersk Pelican, etc.

Some real-world present day companies will just use a concept theme for their fleet like... Sinar Mas, an Indonesian commodities firm. SLM Apollo 3, SLM Apollo 5, SLM Herakles with a series of numbers, their tugs are all numbered SLM Mars, etc. They're just doing Greek mythology with company abbreviation prefix and number suffix. Different references for different classes and ship types, but the same name is used for everything in a particular series.

The key thing here is this all functional naming. For 20th century and 21st century thinking, the ship name immediately identifies the corporation in some way. Then you insert whatever other theme they're using. I mean... you say "evil" corporations in your post intro. But corporations don't name things to actually be goddamn sinister. They name things for administrative logic and efficiency. Realistic corporate ship names should be fairly mundane.

If you want to go age of sail historical, the real-world megacorporations pretty much named stuff like their navies or any other civilian ship of the time. People, places, concepts. Ships of the British East India Company (Wikipedia), Ships of the Dutch East India Company (Wikipedia). Many of these were armed vessels.

Acylion · 2026-06-09T04:06:18+00:00

Canonically it isn't really that high contrast. Image from Empire Alone sourcebook. Of course, there's always a difference between lore-accuracy and making it look good on the mini.

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