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wirewitchviolet · 1 year ago

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How a Computer Works - Part 1 (Components)

I am about to teach you on a real fundamental, connecting up electronic components level, how a computer actually works. Before I get into the meat of this though (you can just skip down below the fold if you don't care), here's the reasons I'm sitting doing so in this format:

Like a decade or two ago, companies Facebook pushed this whole "pivot to video" idea on the whole internet with some completely faked data, convincing everyone that everything had to be a video, and we need to start pushing back against that. Especially for stuff like complex explanations of things or instructions, it's much more efficient to just explain things clearly in text, maybe with some visual aids, so people can easily search, scan, and skip around between sections. It's also a hell of a lot easier to host things long term, and you can even print out a text based explainer and not need a computer to read it, keep it on a desk, highlight it, etc.

People are so clueless about how computers actually work that they start really thinking like it's all magical. Even programmers. Aside from how proper knowledge lets you get more out of them, this leads to people spouting off total nonsense about "teaching sand to think" or "everything is just 1s and 0s" or "this 'AI' a con artist who was trying to sell me NFTs a month ago probably really is an amazing creative thinking machine that can do everything he says!"

We used to have this cultural value going where it was expected that if you owned something and used it day to day, you'd have enough basic knowledge of how it worked that if it stopped working you could open it up, see what was wrong, and maybe fix it on your own, or maybe even put one together again from scratch, and that's obviously worth bringing back.

I'm personally working on a totally bonkers DIY project and I'd like to hype up like-minded people for when it gets farther along.

So all that said, have a standard reminder that I am completely reliant on Patreon donations to survive, keep updating this blog, and ideally start getting some PCBs and chips and a nice oscilloscope to get that mystery project off the ground.

Electricity probably doesn't work like how you were taught (and my explanation shouldn't be trusted too far either).

I remember, growing up, hearing all sorts of things about electricity having this sort of magical ability to always find the shortest possible path to where it needs to get, flowing like water, and a bunch of other things that are kind of useful for explaining how a Faraday cage or a lightning rod works, and not conflicting with how simple electronics will have a battery and then a single line of wire going through like a switch and a light bulb or whatever back to the other end of the battery.

If you had this idea drilled into your head hard enough, you might end up thinking that if we have a wire hooked to the negative end of a battery stretching off to the east, and another wire stretching off to the east from the positive end, and we bridge between the two in several places with an LED or something soldered to both ends, only the westernmost one is going to light up, because hey, the shortest path is the one that turns off as quickly as possible to connect to the other side, right? Well turns out no, all three are going to light up, because that "shortest path" thing is a total misunderstanding.

Here's how it actually works, roughly. If you took basic high school chemistry, you learned about how the periodic table is set up, right? A given atom, normally, has whatever number of protons in the core, and the same number of electrons, whipping all over around it, being attracted to those protons but repelled by each other, and there's particular counts of electrons which are super chill with that arrangement so we put those elements in the same column as each other, and then as you count up from those, you get the elements between those either have some electrons that don't fit all tight packed in the tight orbit and just kinda hang out all wide and lonely and "want to" buddy up with another atom that has more room, up to the half full column that can kinda go either way, then as we approach the next happy number they "want to" have a little more company to get right to that cozy tight packed number, and when you have "extra" electrons and "missing" electrons other atoms kinda cozy up and share so they hit those good noble gas counts.

I'm sure real experts want to scream at me for both that and this, but this is basically how electricity works. You have a big pile of something at the "positive" end that's "missing electrons" (for the above reason or maybe actually ionized so they really aren't there), and a "negative" end that's got spares. Then you make wires out of stuff from those middle of the road elements that have awkward electron counts and don't mind buddying up (and also high melting points and some other handy qualities) and you hook those in there. And the electron clouds on all the atoms in the wire get kinda pulled towards the positive side because there's more room over there, but if they full on leave their nucleus needs more electron pals, so yeah neighbors get pulled over, and the whole wire connected to the positive bit ends up with a positive charge to it, and the whole wire on the negative bit is negatively charged, and so yeah, anywhere you bridge the gap between the two, the electrons are pretty stoked about balancing out these two big awkward compromises and they'll start conga lining over to balance things out, and while they're at it they'll light up lights or shake speakers or spin motors or activate electromagnets or whatever other rad things you've worked out how to make happen with a live electric current.

Insulators, Resistors, Waves, and Capacitors

Oh and we typically surround these wires made of things that are super happy about sharing electrons around with materials that are very much "I'm good, thanks," but this isn't an all or nothing system and there's stuff you can connect between the positive and negative ends of things that still pass the current along, but only so much so fast. We use those to make resistors, and those are handy because sometimes you don't want to put all the juice you have through something because it would damage it, and having a resistor anywhere along a path you're putting current through puts a cap on that flow, and also sometimes you might want a wire connected to positive or negative with a really strong resistor so it'll have SOME sort of default charge, but if we get a free(r) flowing connection attached to that wire somewhere else that opens sometimes, screw that little trickle going one way, we're leaning everyone the other way for now.

The other thing with electricity is is that the flow here isn't a basic yes/no thing. How enthusiastically those electrons are getting pulled depends on the difference in charge at the positive and negative ends, and also if you're running super long wires then even if they conduct real good, having all that space to spread along is going to kinda slow things to a trickle, AND the whole thing is kinda going to have some inherent bounciness to it both because we're dealing with electrons whipping and spinning all over and because, since it's a property that's actually useful for a lot of things we do with electricity, the power coming out of the wall has this intentional wobbly nature because we've actually got this ridiculous spinny thing going on that's constantly flip flopping which prong of the socket is positive and which is negative and point is we get these sine waves of strength by default, and they kinda flop over if we're going really far.

Of course there's also a lot of times when you really want to not have your current flow flickering on and off all the time, but hey fortunately one of the first neat little electronic components we ever worked out are capacitors... and look, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't really get capacitors, but the basic idea is you've got two wires that go to big wide plates, and between those you have something that doesn't conduct the electricity normally, but they're so close the electromagnetic fields are like vibing, and then if you disconnect them from the flow they were almost conducting and/or they get charged to their limit, they just can't deal with being so charged up and they'll bridge their own gap and let it out. So basically you give them electricity to hold onto for a bit then pass along, and various sizes of them are super handy if you want to have a delay between throwing a switch and having things start doing their thing, or keeping stuff going after you break a connection, or you make a little branching path where one branch connects all regular and the other goes through a capacitor, and the electricity which is coming in in little pulses effectively comes out as a relatively steady stream because every time it'd cut out the capacity lets its charge go.

We don't just have switches, we have potentiometers.

OK, so... all of the above is just sort of about having a current and maybe worrying about how strong it is, but other than explaining how you can just kinda have main power rails running all over, and just hook stuff across them all willy-nilly rather than being forced to put everything in one big line, but still, all you can do with that is turn the whole thing on and off by breaking the circuit. Incidentally, switches, buttons, keys, and anything else you use to control the behavior of any electronic device really are just physically touching loose wires together or pulling them apart... well wait no, not all, this is a good bit to know.

None of this is actually pass/fail, really, there's wave amplitudes and how big a difference we have between the all. So when you have like, a volume knob, that's a potentiometer, which is a simple little thing where you've got your wire, it's going through a resistor, and then we have another wire we're scraping back and forth along the resistor, using a knob, usually, and the idea is the current only has to go through X percent of the resistor to get to the wire you're moving, which proportionately reduces the resistance. So you have like a 20 volt current, you've got a resistor that'll drop that down to 5 or so, but then you move this other wire down along and you've got this whole dynamic range and you can fine tune it to 15 or 10 or whatever coming down that wire. And what's nice about this again, what's actually coming down the wire is this wobbily wave of current, it's not really just "on" or "off, and as you add resistance, the wobble stays the same, it's just the peaks and valleys get closer to being just flat. Which is great if you're making, say, a knob to control volume, or brightness, or anything you want variable intensity in really.

Hey hey, it's a relay!

Again, a lot of the earliest stuff people did with electronics was really dependent on that analog wobbly waveform angle. Particularly for reproducing sound, and particularly the signals of a telegraph. Those had to travel down wires for absurd distances, and as previously stated, when you do that the signal is going to eventually decay to nothing. But then someone came up with this really basic idea where every so often along those super long wires, you set something up that takes the old signal and uses it to start a new one. They called them relays, because you know, it's like a relay race.

If you know how an electromagnet works (something about the field generated when you coil a bunch of copper wire around an iron core and run an electric current through it), a relay is super simple. You've got an electromagnet in the first circuit you're running, presumably right by where it's going to hit the big charged endpoint, and that magnetically pulls a tab of metal that's acting as a switch on a new circuit. As long as you've got enough juice left to activate the magnet, you slam that switch and voom you've got all the voltage you can generate on the new line.

Relays don't get used too much in other stuff, being unpopular at the time for not being all analog and wobbily (slamming that switch back and forth IS going to be a very binary on or off sorta thing), and they make this loud clacking noise that's actually just super cool to hear in devices that do use them (pinball machines are one of the main surviving use cases I believe) but could be annoying in some cases. What's also neat is that they're a logical AND gate. That is, if you have current flowing into the magnet, AND you have current flowing into the new wire up to the switch, you have it flowing out through the far side of the switch, but if either of those isn't true, nothing happens. Logic gates, to get ahead of myself a bit, are kinda the whole thing with computers, but we still need the rest of them. So for these purposes, relays re only neat if it's the most power and space efficient AND gate you have access to.

Oh and come to think of it, there's no reason we need to have that magnet closing the circuit when it's doing its thing. We could have it closed by default and yank it open by the magnet. Hey, now we're inverting whatever we're getting on the first wire! Neat!

Relay computers clack too loud! Gimme vacuum tubes!

So... let's take a look at the other main thing people used electricity for before coming up with the whole computer thing, our old friend the light bulb! Now I already touched a bit on the whole wacky alternating current thing, and I think this is actually one of the cases that eventually lead to it being adopted so widely, but the earliest light bulbs tended to just use normal direct current, where again, you've got the positive end and the negative end, and we just take a little filament of whatever we have handy that glows when you run enough of a current through it, and we put that in a big glass bulb and pump out all the air we can, because if we don't, the oxygen in there is probably going to change that from glowing a bit to straight up catching on fire and burning immediately.

But, we have a new weird little problem, because of the physics behind that glowing. Making something hot, on a molecular level, is just kinda adding energy to the system so everything jitters around more violently, and if you get something hot enough that it glows, you're getting it all twitchy enough for tinier particles to just fly the hell off it. Specifically photons, that's the light bit, but also hey, remember, electrons are just kinda free moving and whipping all over looking for their naked proton pals... and hey, inside this big glass bulb, we've got that other end of the wire with the more positive charge to it. Why bother wandering up this whole coily filament when we're in a vacuum and there's nothing to get in the way if we just leap straight over that gap? So... they do that, and they're coming in fast and on elliptical approaches and all, so a bunch of electrons overshoot and smack into the glass on the far side, and now one side of every light bulb is getting all gross and burnt from that and turning all brown and we can't have that.

So again, part of the fix is we switched to alternating current so it's at least splitting those wild jumps up to either side, but before that, someone tried to solve this by just... kinda putting a backboard in there. Stick a big metal plate on the end of another wire in the bulb connected to a positive charge, and now OK, all those maverick electrons smack into here and aren't messing up the glass, but also hey, this is a neat little thing. Those electrons are making that hop because they're all hot and bothered. If we're not heating up the plate they're jumping to, and there's no real reason we'd want to, then if we had a negative signal over on that side... nothing would happen. Electrons aren't getting all antsy and jumping back.

So now we have a diode! The name comes because we have two (di-) electrodes (-ode) we care about in the bulb (we're just kind of ignoring the negative one), and it's a one way street for our circuit. That's useful for a lot of stuff, like not having electricity flow backwards through complex systems and mess things up, converting AC to DC (when it flips, current won't flow through the diode so we lop off the bottom of the wave, and hey, we can do that thing with capacitors to release their current during those cutoffs, and if we're clever we can get a pretty steady high).

More electrodes! More electrodes!

So a bit after someone worked out this whole vacuum tube diode thing, someone went hey, what if it was a triode? So, let's stick another electrode in there, and this one just kinda curves around in the middle, just kinda making a grate or a mesh grid, between our hot always flowing filament and that catch plate we're keeping positively charged when it's doing stuff. Well this works in a neat way. If there's a negative charge on it, it's going to be pushing back on those electrons jumping over, and if there's a positive charge on it, it's going to help pull those electrons over (it's all thin, so they're going to shoot right past it, especially if there's way more of a positive charge over on the plate... and here's the super cool part- This is an analog thing. If we have a relatively big negative charge, it's going to repel everything, if it's a relatively big positive, it's going to pull a ton across, if it's right in the middle, it's like it wasn't even in there, and you can have tiny charges for all the gradients in between.

We don't need a huge charge for any of this though, because we're just helping or hindering the big jump from the high voltage stuff, and huh, weren't we doing this whole weak current controlling a strong current thing before with the relay? We were! And this is doing the same thing! Except now we're doing it all analog style, not slapping switch with a magnet, and we can make those wavy currents peak higher or lower and cool, now we can have phone lines boost over long distances too, and make volume knobs, and all that good stuff.

The relay version of this had that cool trick though where you could flip the output. Can we still flip the output? We sure can, we just need some other toys in the mix. See we keep talking about positive charges and negative charges at the ends of our circuits, but these are relative things. I mentioned way back when how you can use resistors to throttle how much of a current we've got, so you can run two wires to that grid in the triode. One connects to a negative charge and the other positive, with resistors on both those lines, and a switch that can break the connection on the positive end. If the positive is disconnected, we've got a negative charge on the grid, since it's all we've got, but if we connect it, and the resistor to the negative end really limits flow, we're positive in the section the grid's in. And over on the side with the collecting plate, we branch off with another resistor setup so the negative charge on that side is normally the only viable connection for a positive, but when we flip the grid to positive, we're jumping across the gap in the vacuum tube, and that's a big open flow so we'll just take those electrons instead of the ones that have to squeeze through a tight resistor to get there.

That explanation is probably a bit hard to follow because I'm over here trying to explain it based on how the electrons are actually getting pulled around. In the world of electronics everyone decided to just pretend the flow is going the other way because it makes stuff easier to follow. So pretend we have magical positrons that go the other way and if they have nothing better to do they go down the path where we have all the fun stuff further down the circuit lighting lights and all that even though it's a tight squeeze through a resistor, because there's a yucky double negative in the triode and that's worse, but we have the switch rigged up to make that a nice positive go signal to the resistance free promised land with a bonus booster to cut across, so we're just gonna go that way when the grid signal's connected.

Oh and you can make other sorts of logic circuits or double up on them in a single tube if you add more grids and such, which we did for a while, but not really relevant these days.

Cool history lesson but I know there's no relays or vacuum tubes in my computer.

Right, so the above things are how we used to make computers, but they were super bulky, and you'd have to deal with how relays are super loud and kinda slow, and vacuum tubes need a big power draw and get hot. What we use instead of either of those these days are transistors. See after spending a good number of years working out all this circuit flow stuff with vacuum tubes we eventually focused on how the real important thing in all of this is how with the right materials you can make a little juncture where current flows between a positive and negative charge if a third wire going in there is also positively charged, but if it's negatively charged we're pulling over. And turns out there is a WAY more efficient way of doing that if you take a chunk of good ol' middle of the electron road silicon, and just kinda lightly paint the side of it with just the tiniest amount of positive leaning and negative leaning elements on the sides.

Really transistors don't require understanding anything new past the large number of topics already covered here, they're just more compact about it. Positive leaning bit, negative leaning bit, wildcard in the middle, like a vacuum tube. Based on the concepts of pulling electrons around from chemistry, like a circuit in general. The control wire in the middle kinda works in just a pass-fail sort of way, like a relay. They're just really nice compared to the older alternatives because they don't make noise or have moving parts to wear down, you don't have to run enough current through them for metal to start glowing and the whole room to heat up, and you can make them small. Absurdly small. Like... need an electron microscope to see them small.

And of course you can also make an inverter super tiny like that, and a diode (while you're at it you can use special materials or phosphors to make them light emitting, go LEDs!) and resistors can get pretty damn small if you just use less of a more resistant material, capacitors I think have a limit to how tiny you can get, practically, but yeah, you now know enough of the basic fundamentals of how computers work to throw some logic gates together. We've covered how a relay, triode, or transistor function as an AND gate. An OR gate is super easy, you just stick diodes on two wires so you don't have messy backflow then connect them together and lead off there. If you can get your head around wiring up an inverter (AKA NOT), hey, stick one after an AND to get a NAND, or an OR to get a NOR. You can work out XOR and XNOR from there right? Just build 4 NANDs, pass input A into gates 1 and 2, B into 2 and 3, 2's output into 1 and 3, 1 and 3's output into 4 for a XOR, use NORs instead for a XNOR. That's all of them right? So now just build a ton of those and arrange them into a computer. It's all logic and math from there.

Oh right. It's... an absurd amount of logic and math, and I can only fit so many words in a blog post. So we'll have to go all...

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

Meanwhile, again, if you can spare some cash I'd really appreciate it.

#computers #computer science #history #electronics #education #relays #transistors #vacuum tubes

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drunkenskunk · 8 months ago

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Meanwhile, en route to the Icebreaker...

All was quiet on the Dragon's Tooth. The old IPS-N clipper being used as the home-away-from-Hell's-Gate for the Strategic Response Team was currently on its braking burn towards the Icebreaker Borealis, and the ship's clocks had all been set to the station's local time. As a result, it was close to “one in the morning,” and nearly everyone on board was asleep.

A hatch suddenly opened onto the mech bay. Scarlet stepped through the open door, wearing only a tank top and sweatpants. A part of her knew she shouldn't be walking around in here with bare feet, but she was worried about making too much noise. In fact, she was worried about a lot of things...

Before she knew it, she was standing before her mech: Big Red. An old Everest, battle scarred and rough around the edges, she'd been slowly tinkering with and upgrading the ancient beast over her last several months on the team. What stood out the most was the armored “boombox” she'd had custom fitted to the right shoulder. It housed the barrels, rotor assembly, and firing mechanism of the Leviathan heavy assault cannon, fed by a pair of armored ammo belts and connected to the immense ammo drum mounted on the back. It wasn't the newest addition, but it was certainly the most obvious, especially when compared to the other assault mechs in the militia's rank-and-file.

The war machine was still harnessed and braced in its alcove, completely immobile and powered down: exactly as she'd left it several hours earlier. That wouldn't have been notable, had it not been for the unexpected... calamity from earlier. And it was why she was here right now.

See, Scarlet had ordered some explosive vents for Big Red some time ago; after all, heat buildup during the last few fights was becoming a bit of an issue, so she might as well put that heat to some good use, right? But for one reason or another, she had kept putting off the installation. This was likely because everything had become Completely Fucked in Calliope ever since the arrival of all those warship fleets in system. She'd been way too busy running “all hands, repel boarders” combat drills with a lot of the Hell's Gate militia, on the ever-increasingly-likely chance that they'd need it.

Now that the SRT was on their way to the Icebreaker, she had plenty of time, and Agarin even offered to help her get them installed. Getting the physical parts slotted into the mech went as smooth as every other installation in the past, and everything seemed to be going fine. And then she powered up the mech to install the firmware updates.

The instant the fusion core spun up, the machine started moving all on it's own, ignoring any commands and struggling against the restraints and maintenance catwalks holding it in place. Big Red's distinctive purr – a clicking sound with an unknown source the mech would occasionally make – had turned into a ferocious, almost animalistic roar that Scarlet was sure must have echoed throughout the entire ship. The whole machine bucked and writhed uncontrollably, very nearly ripping the umbilicals out of the bay, and if Scarlet hadn't been strapped in by the assault harness and connected through the cranial jack at the base of her skull, she was sure she would have been tossed right out of the open cockpit like a ragdoll.

Just as she felt like her options were running out, Agarin had hopped into the open cockpit with a grace that she thought shouldn't have been possible for someone so damn tall (did that tail of his help with balance?). He was intent on interfacing with the mech using some of his implants and technical know-how in the hope that the two of them working together could get the machine to calm down... but as soon as the handsome dragon man plugged himself in, everything just got worse.

In truth, Scarlet could barely remember everything that happened. Big Red misidentified Agarin's presence in the system as an attack, battering him through the connection with words like INTRUDER, INTERLOPER, and HOSTILE, repeated over and over again... and because she was hard-wired into the machine as well, her mind was also hit with the same mental assault.

Combat recordings from dozens – maybe hundreds – of past engagements flooded both of their minds. Indescribable death and carnage on an unthinkable scale that she had never before witnessed. Screams of the dead, entire worlds on fire, and the machines who burned them. Pilots murdered by the score, one after the other, their names and faces blending together. Recordings, information, tactical data, and images force-fed directly into her brain through the cranial jack, overloading her senses and layering on top of one another until the horror and anger and pain of it all melted into nothing but noise.

The whole experience only lasted for a few minutes, but it had felt like hours.

What she did remember clearly was Agarin doing some kind of Clanner Space Magic to ask her a simple question: “Do you trust me?” And while she responded with as an enthusiastic “yes” as she could possibly muster right then and there, it was like the mech had also been given pause by the question. Before she knew it, the connection in her mind began to fade, and the mech powered down of its own volition.

That was several hours ago. She stared up at the wedge-shaped head of her mech, and the distinctive mass of cracks around the left optical unit. She half expected it to start moving again to look at her, but the trio of cameras remained shuttered, and the head was still and immobile.

“Can't sleep?” came a voice from behind her, and Scarlet practically jumped out of her skin. She wheeled around and was face-to-holographic-face with Siren, the Dragon's Tooth NHP pilot. She had her arms folded across her chest, and she was looking at Scarlet with a curious expression. Was that amusement or annoyance?

“Wh- I- well... no.” Scarlet stammered out eventually. She brushed some errant strands of red hair out of her face. “I'm just... y'know, I'm still... still just a bit on edge from earlier, yeah?”

“And you thought checking in on your haunted mech in the middle of the night would take the edge off?” Siren asked, tilting her head with her mouth cracking into a smirk.

“Hey, c'mon, Big Red ain't haunted, I just...” she tried to wave it off dismissively, but Scarlet briefly looked over her shoulder to glance up at her mech – as if checking to make sure it was, indeed, still not moving – and then quickly turned back at Siren. “Look, I know we're headin' to the Icebreaker for that party bein' thrown by the Kingdom Aniline or whoever, but you know what things've been like lately. Fer all we know, we're headin' into another fight, an' I... I just wanna make sure he's good t'go, and isn't gonna freak out. Don't want any more surprises.”

“Sorry marine, I'm not letting you boot up that thing again while we're in transit and without proper support,” Siren shook her head. “I heard about the Vent Crab Incident back on the Gate, and I'm not letting you blow any holes in my ship.”

Scarlet screwed up her face in frustration. Apparently that fake Muse post Pearce made a while back (do mechs even know what they're doing or do they just see crab flowing down a vent and think “absolutely not”) was still floating around the Omninet. And, sure, she had accidentally blown up a vent crab (and several bulkheads) with a mech scale rifle round that day, but she didn't even have a Muse account!

“I promise I'm just gonna run some diagnostics,” Scarlet said, holding up her hands in what she hoped was a disarming gesture. “I'll keep him in low-power, won't even spin up th' reactor. Just wanna be sure everything is fine, so I can put my worries to bed an' get some sleep.”

Siren was quiet for a minute, scrutinizing the mech pilot. The holographic NHP eventually sighed and shrugged.

“Alright, go on. But I'll be keeping an eye on things, and I'll have my hand on the kill-switch the second I even get a whiff that something is about to go wrong.”

“Hey now, you don't ha-” Scarlet began, but Siren held up a blue shimmering finger.

“These terms are non-negotiable, marine. Now go on, check on the spooky boy, I'll keep watch from here. But do try and be quick about it. I've got some friends in a game of Fleet Command 5016 on standby, and I don't want to leave them hanging for too long.”

And with that, the Siren hologram winked away.

Scarlet turned on her heel, scampered up the access later, and popped the cockpit hatch as quick as she could, just on the off chance Siren decided to have a change of heart. Once she got settled in the command couch, she flipped a series of switches to start the mech in low-power mode. While the monitors and consoles around her began to hum softly, warming up into a diagnostic boot sequence, she reached behind her head, feeling around for the metal jack behind her seat. She moved her ponytail out of the way with her free hand, and slotted the jack into her cranial port with the other.

The connection was immediate and made her grit her teeth, just like always: a sharp electric buzz at the base of her skull that blossomed into icy fingers prodding inside her brain. The sensation wormed its way down through her neck and flooded her extremities until everything tingled uncomfortably, as if her whole body had fallen asleep for half a second. Then the sensation passed, and a relative equilibrium was achieved between Scarlet and her war machine.

“Alright big guy,” Scarlet said, trying to blink away the sparkles on the edges of her vision. “Tell me what ails you.”

The low clicking reverberated through the cockpit in response, and words quickly typed themselves out on one of the monitors.

<<HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE DETECTED>>

“Hostile architecture?” Scarlet said aloud. “Wait, y'mean the new parts?” She figured that was probably the problem, but she still wasn't entirely clear as to why.

The mech rumbled. A different monitor on the other side of the cockpit flipped on, and began to playback a recording. This was one of the many recordings that had been force-fed in her brain earlier, but it took Scarlet a minute to realize that was what she was looking at. After all, seeing an image on a monitor was a slightly different experience than a video feed overlaid with tactical and sensor data flowing around it like water, and transmitted directly into her mind through a cranial jack. Especially when there had been so much other information to parse.

The recording looked like it was the camera feed of a broken mech lying motionless on the ground, surrounded by rubble. It was hard to tell from the quality and angle of the recording, but she was pretty sure the mech this recording came from was much bigger than an Everest. Even so, the mech itself wasn't the focus: it was the inferno all around. It was like the whole world had been set on fire, and through the heat haze, she could see crude juggernauts marching past in formation. The recording shook with every stomp of their heavy boots, and streams of liquid fire surged from titanic flamethrowers.

More words began to type themselves on the other monitor, drawing her attention:

<<Rec:4533u//Hercynia-MycolFields//Varano,J.(Clover)//DECEASED>>

Scarlet turned back to the recording, with slightly better understanding. This was from 483 years ago? She knew this mech was old, but she had no idea it was that old. Hell, she didn't think the Everest frame was that old. Was that why it looked so different, and... so much larger? Had this machine not always been an Everest? The techs back on Hell's Gate had always joked that the “Rage Machine” was an ancient piece of shit, but... did anyone actually know how old this beast was?

And then there was that word that stood out to her for some reason: Hercynia. That was... Agarin mentioned something about that, after he got Big Red to calm down earlier, hadn't he? Her memory was still a bit fuzzy about that. Hercynia was... it was a planet somewhere, wasn't it? She wasn't entirely sure.

“Hang on, somethin' else is botherin' me. What are those?” Scarlet leaned forward, squinting her eyes, trying in vain to get the grainy picture on the monitor to come into focus. “Those mechs stompin' around, they kinda look familiar, but... hell, if I didn't know better, I'd say they were the same kinda frame Andros Capella was drivin' when he came out of that fire gate.”

Big Red seemed to shudder at the mention of Andros Capella... though, it was probably more accurate to say it sent a shudder up Scarlet's spine, directly through the cranial jack.

“Heh... yeah, I feel ya, big guy. You wanted a crack at him, same as I did.” Scarlet started to chuckle, and patted one of the consoles. “Well, look on the bright side: Pearce murked him, what? Four times in the last fight? An' Cassilda punched him t'death the first time. We'll probably get a crack at him ourselves, eventually.”

The clicking sound briefly grew in volume, before settling back down again.

“Alright, so these mechs yer showin' me. What are they, anyway?”

Another monitor above her and to her left winked on. It showed a wireframe of the mechs in the recording, clearly generated from what looked a mixture of official schematics and tactical data. Again, words began to type themselves out, drawing her attention.

<<U-MEF//GMS-UPA.1//Mk-1.Genghis//Worldkiller>>

“Wait, Genghis? That doesn't look like a-” but she cut herself off before she could finish her thought, as another one intruded. The Harrison Armory license she'd accessed to order the explosive vents was for the Mk II Genghis. Mark 2. She'd always wondered about that. Scarlet looked back up at the wireframe: this squat, brutal looking monster of a mech definitely cut a significantly different silhouette than the smaller, slimmer, sleeker frame of the Mk II... but the more she looked, the more she could see the resemblance.

Before she had a chance to ponder that any further, all the monitors cleared themselves, as a string of more words on the first monitor appeared.

<<Protocol 1: Link To Pilot>> <<Protocol 2: Uphold The Mission>> <<Protocol 3: Protect The Pilot>> <<ERROR//PROTOCOL CONFLICT//ERROR>> <<HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE DETECTED>> <<PROTOCOL 3 IN JEOPARDY>>

“Y'know what... after seein' all that? I don't blame ya for takin' that stance,” Scarlet reached up to scratch at her head. “I wouldn't want somethin' from those big fuckers in me either.”

Big Red rumbled again.

“Protect the pilot...” Scarlet muttered under her breath. “Well... I dunno if it'll help things, but... that's the whole reason I got these parts. I wasn't thinkin' of where they came from, but what they could do fer us, y'know?” She gestured with her thumb above her right shoulder. “That big fuck-off assault cannon we got from the Drake license generates a lot of heat, and I'm not sure I know how to squeeze in any more heat sinks without sacrificin' some structure.”

The screen winked clear, and another string appeared in its place.

<<...PROCESSING...>>

“Hell, if you don't believe me, believe what Agarin told ya earlier. We're all part of a team. Agarin, Fern, Cassilda... hell, even Pearce and that gaggle of NHP's he's been collectin' like playing cards. We all look out fer each other. We all make sure we come out the other side of every fight in one piece. An' that's all I was tryin' to do, yeah? Use whatever I can to keep myself alive, so I can find my Five Minutes, an' keep all them alive.” Scarlet let out a heavy sigh. “I... hell, I don't know if I'm makin' any sense. Am I makin' sense?”

The clicking steadied, and Big Red rumbled in sympathy.

The monitor flickered, and one more message scrolled past:

<<Protocol 3>> <<I will not lose another Pilot>>

“Yeah, don't you worry 'bout a thing, big man,” Scarlet patted one of the nearby consoles. “I'm not goin' anywhere.”

With that, she flipped the switches to fully power down the mech. The connection at the base of her skull went cold, as the monitors winked off and the hum of the consoles fell silent. She reached behind her head to disconnect the cerebral jack, and she sat nestled there in the command couch, waiting for the pins and needles sensation of neurons firing at stimuli no longer present to subside.

And as she sat there, surrounded by silence and darkness, a memory crossed her mind. An errant thread, begging to be pulled.

The memory was one of the visions she'd seen, when the team had been caught in that paracausal labyrinth deep beneath the surface of Botzmann. She still wasn't quite sure of how any of that shit worked, or how a cascading NHP was responsible, but it was like reality itself had been cut up and stitched back together; even time didn't make sense, experiencing pasts that never were, and impossible futures that still might be. And while Scarlet was lost, separated from the others, she had stumbled across a mirror. No words were said, but she somehow knew what it was the moment she saw her reflection looking back at her.

This Scarlet stared at her with tired, empty eyes. She was old and grey, with hands covered in blood... but none of it her own. A trail of death and carnage followed behind her. This was a Scarlet that had never found her Last Five Minutes, because she'd deliberately avoided finding them at any cost. This Scarlet was so good at keeping herself alive, that she had become the last one standing.

This was who she feared she could become.

“Yeah...” she said aloud, to no one in particular. “Guess I'm not goin' anywhere.”

#Lancer #Lancer RPG #lancer ttrpg #in golden flame #vex wasn't lying that one sure is plumed in golden flame #Strategic Response Team #Dragon's Tooth #GMS Everest #short fiction #my writing #Xeans' IGF campaign

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rileyslibrary · 8 months ago

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Omg how do you think the tf141 boys (especially Simon) would react to taking a Pilates or yoga class. I feel like they’d scoff at the idea being all “ofc we can do that we’re trained militarily men!” and then once they try it they have to stop to take a breather so they don’t die lmao

Ghost on a reformer machine? Lol, yeah, I’m pretty sure he’d make fun of the idea and then get his abs rekt while trying to push through. All while trying to show absolutely zero signs of weakness (but his legs will be shaking.)

Or getting drilled into a correct posture?

“Oh no, no, no, we’re not slouching in this class, Lt.! Stand up straight, legs parallel and hip-distance apart, tighten your glutes, engage your core, close your rib cage, chest out, relax your arms, shoulders down, elongate your neck, imagine a string attached to the top of your head. We’re not acting graceful in here; we ARE the motherfucking grace!”

Jokes aside, I wrote something last year about the TF141 boys taking a guided meditation course with reader.

#the librarian answers

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beeffilledshark · 1 year ago

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While I’m very happy at wfm’s success and how it’s drawn so many people into Gundam (me included), it’s so upsetting we have to do this song and dance and explain how to “interpret” the explicit narrative that Sulemio is a real romance despite “them never kissing or saying I love you.” The whole fucking point of Gundam and the Newtype story is “understanding each other without misconception,” and while Witches aren’t able to really do that the same way Newtypes are, the core story of Suletta is getting people to truly understand her.

Sulemio’s resolution is Miorine finally “understanding“ that Suletta WANTS to save her family and Miorine revealing her “ugly” and disheveled self she’s hidden from everyone, only getting a taste of it when she invited Suletta to her room in ep 4. Suletta “understands” her mother and Aerial’s betrayal after Quinnharbor and that they do love her, just that they think she’ll be fine separated from them and to not involve her in their machinations. Chuchu’s entire arc is the perfect example of this theme: she goes from violently hating Spacians and picking fights with them on a regular basis to basically becoming Suletta’s older sister and rescuing hundreds of Spacian students and providing food and aid to them. The tragedy of Norea and El5n is amplified by this theme since only El5n could possibly “understand” Norea’s agony and existential anguish in considering herself a living casualty of war as a Gundam pilot. What’s made worse is she “understands” El5n empathizes with her and truly cares for her moments before being killed by Cathedra after her rampage. Hell, the Space Magic solution of Gwitch is a direct reference to Unicorn where the Gundams project the love interest's voice throughout the Earth Sphere so that they can communicate directly with the common person.

If you’ve watched Unicorn as many times as I have, you know they drill this fucking theme into your head every chance you give them but similarly to gwitch, there’s no kiss scene or “I love you” scene. Gundam, and Sunrise in general, has a long-standing tradition of demonstrating the primary romance through the dialogue and actions of the characters. I have never seen anyone question if Audrey and Banagher are in a relationship despite them never having any kind of kiss scene or a scene where they utter “I love you.” Of course, they were kind of meant to parallel Amuro and Sayla, but the dynamic between Suletta and Miorine are almost identical: Gundam pilot who has to protect the Princess from scheming enemies on both the enemy and their side.

The point of this post is that you have to be able to possess an ounce of media literacy in order to understand the sheer plot and character interactions of most popular Gundam media. Now that a lot more people are interested in picking up this franchise, I’m BEGGING you to really think about these shows and movies beyond the mech fights. Every Gundam series has something you can pick apart and the first step in analyzing that is to understand some of the core ideas of Gundam. We don’t kiss here. We’re too high brow to have that so we have characters say shit like “promise you’ll come with me to Earth,” since it means Miorine intends to incorporate Suletta into her future and in her desires or calling the Princess of Zeon Audrey despite her government name being Mineva. Though it may have been forceful, Banagher understood what Mineva wanted and vocalized that by referring to her as her cover name until the end of the OVA.

I do also want to add, this theme is why the Blowjob Brothers exist in nearly every incarnation of Gundam ever. Once you learn how to interpret characters' actions and how they demonstrate love, you'll understand why the fandom has so many gay ships with varying degrees of "authenticity" or canon-ness. The difference with Suletta and Miorine is that it's unabashedly explicit and the focus of Gwitch.

Anyways, any fellow Gwitch enthusiasts who are dipping their toes into 0079 or IBO or any other property as their second Gundam experience, please understand that a LOT of narrative devices and characters are direct references or homages to the past and trying to catch up on it all is like trying to integrate yourself into a religion you converted into. There's a lot of unwritten practices and beliefs that you have to learn and teach yourself, especially since there's psychos out there in the fandom.

(this entire post was spurred on by a dipshit twitter user arguing Sulemio wasn't the goal of gwitch and they changed it mid-hiatus to appeal to the wokes asdfklafd;ljkasf. Anyways Chamuro is real and gundam loves doing polycules this is unironically true)

#gundam #mobile suit gundam #gundam unicorn #iron blooded orphans #gwitch #wfm #wfm spoilers

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