#[ very much 'peace activist has to admit .50 caliber sniper rifle is pretty cool' ]

[askammoknights]

Don't tell anyone this. I mean ANYONE. I may have used illegal weaponry in Turf Wars... And I got away with it. What is the weapon you may ask? Simple. It's a gun that shoots molten ink. Did I hurt anyone in the process? Yes, but did they recover mentally? Well... maybe. Short story, I am one to be feared on the battlefield. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Sheldon sighs, putting a hand to his forehead.

"I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of my philosophy on weapons, especially if you think I'd be impressed by something like this. Technically, sure, it's great! Probably good for an actual war! But...there's a reason I specifically only deal weapons for the Turf War sport."

"I love everything that goes into weaponsmithing. The craftsmanship, the engineering, all the science behind getting ink and other stuff moving as fast as possible, or making as big a boom as you can manage! But my grandpappy always said a weapon is how you use it. I'm well aware anything I sell could potentially be used for evil. To really hurt people. And it might seem ridiculous, but...that's actually the last thing I want. And it's the last thing he would've wanted, either."

"This? You didn't do this to win a competition, you did this because you wanted to scare and hurt people, and you're proud of it. What you did was a disgrace to the sport, to myself, and any other reputable Turf War vendor and participant. I'm disappointed. You should be banned."

"I'm not going to tell the TWA what you did. But I will be telling them to put you under review. I'm giving you one chance to realize what you did, why that was wrong, and to move on from it, do things better."

[booksandchainmail]

re: your tags because I'm curious and google is only providing a history book about WW1 naval battles - what's castles of steel?

My apologies for this belated response, but here it is:

Castles of Steel (tagline: Lesbians Good, Imperialism Bad) is a quest hosted on SufficientVelocity. Set in alt-history Japan starting in the year 1909, it chronicles the adventures of Princess Arisukawa Haruna as she makes history as the first woman to join the imperial navy. Based on the fact I tagged it on a post about how war is never clean, you can get a sense of how that goes.

It's mostly concerned with sea battles, which do tend to be cleaner than land ones (the one land battle Haruna gets involved in, she's given a not-particularly good map, and the ground is torn up and communications are bad, so she winds up defending a hill that may or may not be the one she was assigned to). But the story is still very aware that this is a war being fought over and on colonial possessions, that neither side particularly cares about treatment of civilians, and that wartime pressure is sliding alt!Japan into facism.

To give an example of how bad it gets, early on Haruna fails a roll to convince a superior officer that trotting out an imperial princess for a PR shoot in an unhappy occupied city is a bad idea, and when this predictably sparks a riot, well, when all you have is a troop of soldiers, everything looks like a combat scenario. The option the thread picked was Fix Bayonets (as opposed to just opening fire), but still:

Once the first blood was drawn, once the screaming started, order broke down almost completely. To the men on either side of the incident, it looked like their formation had been breached, that a brawl had broken out. You tried to call a halt, but nobody could hear you. A cobblestone struck a soldier, and the one next to him thrust his rifle forward to cover the gap, catching a man through the gut with his blade. His comrades reversed their weapons as well, convinced the fighting had turned deadly, and simply pressed into the crowd blades-first. The screaming got louder as people tried to scramble away and others fell to the ground to be trampled in the panic. It worked. They were moving, now. The trucks were almost in reach. You stepped over a body as you moved, a student holding a sign in a death grip. You realized he wasn't dead yet when his hand closed on your boot. You managed not to shriek in surprise and hurriedly tried to shake him off only to stumble over another body on the cobbles. A woman clutching her belly and groaning as she tried to staunch the blood pooling on the cobblestones around her. The blood that was staining the pretty dress in Akitsukuni white and blue that she wore. She looked up at you for a moment, and you wondered what she thought of you.

and afterwards:

You remembered when you had finally gotten into the Army outpost and you had gone to the washroom, there had been blood on your boots. You'd been sick there, alone, where no one could see your weakness. This wasn't what it was supposed to be like. You were supposed to stand on the bridge of a steel castle and exchange blows with an equal opponent seeking to do harm to your nation, not tell scared young men to stab angry students.

And then there pretty much aren't consequences for this, she gets comforted for being in such a scary situation and praised for how she handled it, the whole incident gets blown over because no one really cares about the deaths of protestors in an occupied city. She just has to keep

This story is a companion to an earlier one called Aircraft Design Company, which is maybe the purest example of "Peace Activist Has To Admit Barrett .50 Caliber Sniper Rifle Is Pretty Cool" I've read. The story was initially started to playtest the author's TTRPG system for early aviation design, then grew a plot that goes increasingly into "war is hell". The protagonist's boyfriend is a pilot who becomes a flying ace over the course of the story, and we get periodic interludes from his perspective as things get bloodier in the air and on the ground, as the other soldiers around him get more desperate and dangerous to the civilian "servants" of their occupied territory, and as he develops PTSD.

There's one great scene where he gets into a dogfight, and is just utterly done with violence and killing, and so he non-fatally shoots out the other guy's engine, and then signals frantically to him to surrender and land. And there's a moment of tension, and then the other pilot agrees, and it's this rare uplifting moment of camaraderie of the skies, even on opposing sides. And then the other pilot lands and promptly gets shot by Japanese ground forces who don't notice or care that he's trying to surrender.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, at one point the protagonist gets a letter back from him reading:

This war has eroded everything I have. I'm a machine no different from the ones you build for me. I wake up in the early morning and sit on a chair behind the lines with binoculars until nightfall. When I see an enemy machine, I climb into my Dragonfly and go to kill him.​ They don't make me fly regular missions anymore. I am just a killer now, an assassin. I fly five, six times a day sometimes.​ ​ It is hard for me to say this, but I have come to resent you, and to resent the weapons you have built me. I have come to hate how easy it is to line my guns up on an aircraft. How easy it is to kill the stupid young boys they send against me. I hate how the Dragonfly will nimbly pull me from the enemy's sights and keep me flying another day.​ ​ I have found myself thinking I would rather have died quickly, six months ago.​

and then it's time for another vote on aircraft mechanics!