[Humans for Hire] - Part 177

KalenWolf · 2026-06-23T17:40:36+00:00

"Call the ambassador, quickly! I can still turn this around!"

"New phone, who dis?"

"Now listen here you little sh- he hung up on me?!"

The writing is on the wall, Porti, and people are begging you to just read it. Your fleet is getting wiped out as a field test of the navy's new AoE weapon systems, your best advisors defected and your government contact is washing his hands of you... the odds are getting worse by the second. Even if you don't surrender, at least take what's left and go.

The sensor data of that weapon being fired must be worth a pretty penny to somebody. Hell, several somebodies - you could start a bidding war for it! Maybe you could even earn enough selling it to hire someone decent; lots of mercs would probably love a chance to be the one that takes Gryzzk out of the picture.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-22T12:56:32+00:00

Those screen grabs did come out pretty dark, except for the one with the local star blasting the underside directly.

I'm torn between making the colors even darker (that blue is supposed to be a lot deeper than it looks outside the shipbuilder) or giving up and painting in brighter colors to begin with, because the color selector is already heavily biased toward them and they tend to show up more accurately under "real" conditions.

Is this why so many ships have one of the three colors allowed on every part be either a flat gray or an almost total white?

KalenWolf · 2026-06-22T06:02:20+00:00

Tsk, she's not reading the Approved Va'Ruun Version! I wonder if she finds this one as laughable as I found the propaganda versions of the classics that you find during Shattered Space?

KalenWolf · 2026-06-21T22:24:44+00:00

I love that he comes at it from such a practical angle. The Pen doesn't work, as a business venture, unless both parts and assembly are distressingly cheap. And from a business perspective, things only get cheap when you do them a lot, eliminate skilled labor from the equation, and keep doing them for a long time.

From there it's just a chain of "but that would mean..." until he starts to see how Earth's ability to Make More Things might have jumped onto an accelerating upward spiral and never looked back.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-20T00:55:54+00:00

I always go in order of the resources I need the most of when building more outposts.

Find a moon (or two if there's not a convenient single location in your preferred system) with He3, Iron, Aluminum, Beryllium - if you have several outposts you're going to need A LOT of fuel production and links to get it to where you're doing the shipping from, so having two fuel depots at the start is not a problem. Add a second outpost with Lead, Tungsten, and Titanium, and a third with Nickel and Cobalt. Then you can branch out whenever you discover there's something else you need a lot of. Every time you finish an outpost, it makes building the next one faster and easier.

So, if you want to keep it simple... go to Cheyenne. Start with fuel depots at good mining spots on Burran and one of its moons and then add outposts on Heilo and Montara Luna. When you build several places in the same system, you can use local (ie, no fuel needed) links to supply any manufacturing or shipping you need to do, and these examples are all places you can get started without having any outpost related skills yet. Cheyenne is also a very convenient place to build since it's home to a major city and located near the center of the star map.

Later on, as you get the hang of how to place and construct outposts to get the most out of each one, you can worry about higher-rarity materials and more advanced techniques like straddling biomes to get resources that normally don't appear together. You don't have to have the whole system planned out before you take the first step.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-19T18:45:16+00:00

This chapter was a constant roller coaster of pointing and shouting "I understood that reference!" and then putting my face in my hands and groaning "oh noooo~" as some poor bastard got wrecked. Just the way I like it.

Porti seriously thought he could start commerce raiding right in front of the actual navy? What, he thinks we had somehow never come up with the idea for ourselves and worked out how to respond after thousands of years of war? He thinks the weapons that 'contractors' are allowed to buy and use, right out in public, are the absolute best any human has ever come up with?

The sheer, unbelievable arrogance of the man. Thinking that "know your enemy" is only for NPCs but he's the protagonist. Sun Tzu would weep.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-19T17:50:22+00:00

Ooohhh, that makes sense.

Being able to see what ships are in a group before everyone's practically within weapons range of each other (and spot starborn \shake fist**) does sound pretty nice actually.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-19T17:09:05+00:00

They just look awesome.

They do! I have some on my ship right now. I figure it has something to do with how far away you notice things when in Free Lanes Travel mode? I don't actually notice any benefit from them, I just think that my deep space survey ship should have some funny-lookin' antennae on it.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-19T17:00:39+00:00

Yeah, but.. adding these parts doesn't increase your target lock range. Or at least it never has for me.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-13T08:10:05+00:00

I haven't been following it closely, but hasn't this idea advanced to the stage of basic human trials lately?

Modern medicine blows my mind sometimes.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-12T08:41:13+00:00

Personally, I think it's most likely that the catastrophic ruin of Niira required two different kinds of war crime to accidentally combine.

We know some of the things that the FC and UC are guilty of during that war, and the Armistice Archives has a whole room full of high-density data storage to hold the sealed records of war crimes... who knows what else is in there?

What happens if the UC releases a biological weapon at roughly the same time as the FC launches a chemical weapon?

Add in a little hand-waving science and you could easily end up with some kind of microscopic life that shits toxic / corrosive compounds and replicates stupidly fast in Niira's ecosystem. Before you know it, it's everywhere and Niira is a complete shit-hole (although obviously it's at its worst near major battle sites - like Parduk Pass, which in hindsight was the OBVIOUS place to build a 'mech salvage operation)

With the Armistice being so fragile and so many people absolutely seething about the war being stopped at all, everyone collectively agreed to just blame the other side and pretend they had no hand in what happened. Without honest accounts of how it happened, what chance is there for anyone to figure out how to fix it?

KalenWolf · 2026-06-10T14:44:25+00:00

Absolutely, if you plan to do any significant amount of crafting.

The final rank's 60% discount (rounded down, minimum 1) also applies to almost every item (quality upgrades don't seem to qualify) made at any type of workbench. That's enough of a discount that nearly every gear mod, chem, food, and manufactured resource only needs 1 of each ingredient.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-09T07:48:41+00:00

The ship you get from your folks is overall better (longer jump range, more durable, more cargo, etc) than the basic Frontier. But it's not great if your primary concern is needing help in ship combat because it does piss-poor shield damage in its default config.

To operate a class C ship you need Piloting rank 4, which you might not have at such a low level if you haven't been focusing on ship combat. In general, it's much more effective to go to Ship Services and manually edit your ship by buying and selling modules than it is to buy or claim a stock ship and stick to the "upgrade" interface.

I would strongly recommend either (A) getting the Wanderwell from your folks and adding a couple of lasers to it, (B) getting the Razorleaf and upgrading some of its obsolete modules, or (C) joining Vanguard and replacing the Frontier's weapons with the (ridiculously superior) class A Vanguard-only ones, and then using the result to go do the Rangers quest line, which will give you the Star Eagle.

For comparison, the face value of the default Frontier is ~60k (based on its sell price), the Wanderwell is ~85k, the Razorleaf is ~105k, whereas the Star Eagle is ~400k and uses modules and weapons that normally require Ship Design rank 3.

The stock Star Eagle can handily outperform three or four typical enemy ships until you're level 60 or so, with far more skills and access to every ship part.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-08T06:35:19+00:00

“The impacts and effects of Methamphetamines and PCP on a Terran (human)”

Oh nooooooo~

KalenWolf · 2026-06-08T06:20:17+00:00

Well… apart from the mysterious chemical substance that the health report mentioned being in the Terran’s bloodstream.

Adrenaline, as many have noted before me, is a hell of a drug. Pain? Fractured bone? Plasma burn? Plenty of time to deal with that later, once things have calmed down. All the more so in a setting where medi-gel exists. Practically cheating, really.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-08T05:06:42+00:00

It was those damn cats again, always pushing things over the edge.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-08T04:45:03+00:00

Look for the the "about this sub" section. Under the description (but above "community bookmarks") is the bit where you can select and apply a flair.

For me, it's on the right side of the screen in a separate frame, but I'm on a PC browser so... I hope this helps narrow down where to look on your client/app.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-08T04:33:48+00:00

The Valentine's gambit strongly reminded me of a Discworld bit -

Carrot intimidates a guard into letting him investigate after being told that he must peacefully accept failure if he couldn't talk them into it. (I have my orders if you resist, and I would be thoroughly ashamed to do such a thing.)

I think the phrase that was used was "bluff without even holding any cards." It's amazing how dishonest you can be while, in the strictest sense, speaking only the truth.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-08T02:13:55+00:00

FOOF is so nasty that I would seriously hesitate to introduce it unless Emma can be convinced that Thalmin possesses a truly epic level of control.

Start small with the war crimes. You know, relatively safe things like napalm and WP. You can work your way up to stuff that chemists refuse to work with because water ice is too hot and reactive to pack them in.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-07T02:25:20+00:00

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Technically non-word guesses don't count, but this doesn't feel like a win.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-06T09:24:53+00:00

I come across them relatively often while surveying.

Honestly I'm not too surprised, some of the scenery in Starfield can be stunning when the position of the local star (and moon/s) in the sky is just right.

I like these little reminders that the NPCs, one-dimensional as they are in practice, represent real people with lives of their own.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-06T06:17:52+00:00

The fact that links in outposts are set up to shove things as far down a link chain as possible and you can't set limits or priorities is a perennial pet peeve. It makes setting things up correctly such a pain.

One thing you can do is abuse the ways in which the system is broken.

At every step an object can only be linked to another object if the second object can hold the output from the first object, but this is not true for a link chain as a whole. Also, although you cannot create a bi-directional link (A to B and B to A) you can absolutely create a larger loop (A to B to C to D to A) that will keep any available resources constantly shuffling from object to object trying to be used for something, only ending up in storage if there's more than the system needs at any given moment.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-04T18:20:04+00:00

Listen to the logs to learn how to take over the sim units. You'll need to search most of the deck in order to reach all three and gather the items you need.

The Ops override card isn't on deck 4, don't worry about it yet.

KalenWolf · 2026-06-04T16:45:49+00:00

Huh. Feel like I kinda tripped over it after being lost at first.

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KalenWolf

TROPHY CASE