In general, yes... I caught another pen yesterday and roared half the night
But before that, I tried to experiment with the line and then I just freaked out and drew, today I, the dead man, finished drawing and attached some short sketches, so that it would be.
Two more discharges from the Main Defense Railgun to make a final point, then, once the Vice Admiral Krastina's ship, Darting Juniper, jumped in a couple of minutes after the last of the pirate ships had engaged their hyperdrives for an emergency jump, Bertha's Bosom docked back to the Heart of Liquid Stone to resume loading cargo. The Vice Admiral hailed the mining station:
"We heard your distress call and arrived as quickly as able. Seems like the show's over though?"
"Yeah, after the call we did a more thorough scan of their ships and realized they were no more than tin cans. The freight transport ship, Bertha over here, took a few shots, to a bit of a shock honest - completely atomized them, you can still see the trail even. Then they all fled in random directions."
"Understood. I'll sound a general alarm for the entire system. It'll at least be good to have everyone put what we drill all the time into action, even if the threat is less than the fake "Not-a-drill" drills us military crews go through."
"Still, Darting Juniper, we know there are some dumb enough out there to try. Next ones might be flying aluminium cans!"
Joked the station manager, Garrison Bronhjaven. The Vice Admiral, while chuckling internally, gave an expected serious military response, then after a few hours of no new reports, resumed her regular patrol and monitoring duties.
This incident will be recalled unflatteringly as "That time Bertha smacked a pirate fleet with her Bosom out of Sol."
...
Big Thrasher was alone.
He punched in the coordinates himself, but forgot his physique was above standard console size and fat-thumbed a really random patch of completely empty space.
Navigation computers get scrambled after an emergency jump as they require precise input and reference data for both the start and end locations to maintain knowledge of where in space a ship is. Doing so takes time as the computers need to access and cross-reference their current location with that in the database, and then calculate for time, distance, and spatial distortion to know where each of the relevant landmark objects will be upon arrival.
With an emergency jump, you just punch in a direction and go for however long the current energy reserves in the drive will last. There is a minor delay to let the computer adjust enough to not head straight for any known celestial object, but other than that, seconds compared to the minutes you don't have in an emergency.
Another double-edged sword to this - emergency mode raises the power use limits of a hyperdrive to be above energy generation, allowing you to travel much faster at the cost of not being able to stop until the drive is completely empty. Then to get the drive working again takes anywhere between a few hours and several days as you need to charge it to full before you can turn it back on. And then even more time to integrate all the navigational data back into the hyperdrive so that it can actually go anywhere.
In short, Big Thrasher will have quite a lot of time to think about the choices he made in his life to get to where he is right now.
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I'm kinda averse to killing off characters in my writings, so I think I've accidentally created a recurring comedy villain here. Also, technology details, was not what I intended to write about, it just sort of happened, the words come out and I just go with it and use them however seems fitting. Don't mistake all these details and additions and explanations for a plan - I don't know what is going to happen or what I'm building towards, if anything. But when/if I do figure it out, I will make all of this connect and make enough sense. Hopefully.
I like to think that P3 gets beat up on the regular for leaving fuckin vodka bottles n empty cans of condensed milk everywhere but Guy in particular has it out for this mf