spacebattles creative writing mass effect

• New threadmarks

Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.

Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.

• The list of Awarded content can now be filtered for specific types of Awards! Awards will now also appear on Threadmark lists. And for the month of June, we're proud to introduce the all-new Rainbow Award and Popcorn Award!

SpaceBattles

Announcements.

• Sunday at 4:27 PM

25th Anniversary Forum

• Tuesday at 5:37 PM

Creative Works

Creative writing.

• Original Fiction

Story Ideas & Recommendations

• Creative Writing Archives

• A moment ago
• S. Shortcake

• Dramatic_Spoon

Art & Design

• Contest Submissions
• Contest Archives

• 50 minutes ago

Creative Interaction

Roleplaying.

• Roleplaying IC
• 9 minutes ago
• Disposable_Face

Grand Strategy

• Grand Strategy IC
• Lords of Ether - ***Archived***
• Star Wars: Rebuilding of Empires
• From the Ashes

• 32 minutes ago

Fiction Discussion

General fiction & media.

• Media Madness
• Anime & Manga
• Image Threads

• 2 minutes ago

Games & Gaming

• 3 minutes ago

Vs. Debates

• Technical Analysis

The Real World

Water cooler.

• Bargains, Barter & Benefactions

• 4 minutes ago
• Bo_Lo Knight

News & Society Focused Discussion

• 24 minutes ago

The War Room

• raptorgalaxy

Recently awarded

Forgotten, forsaken (post canon worm/kantai collection).

• Posted by: Primemountain
• Yesterday at 2:22 PM
• Forum: Worm

To Fuel the Guttering Flame(Transformers SI)

• Posted by: AshlingWaltzes
• May 4, 2024
• Forum: Creative Writing

• Apr 28, 2024
• Apr 27, 2024

Exploratorium Quest (Vaguely Starsector Fleet Command/Space Exploration Quest)

• Posted by: SparraNova
• Yesterday at 4:08 AM
• Forum: Quests

Forum statistics

• Show Spoilers
• Night Vision
• Sticky Header
• Highlight Links

Follow TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/SpaceBattlesDotCom

SpaceBattles.com » Trivia

• Follow the Leader : The Creative Writing forum is infamous for focusing on a certain franchise ( Mass Effect , The Familiar of Zero , and especially Worm , the site having gotten so clogged with Worm fics that a subforum was created solely for them) and devoting thousands of pages to snippets and full fics set in that verse, often variations of the same theme . For example, the board has a multitude of Worm fics featuring its protagonist with a powerset of any number of other famous fictional characters.
• Spacebase DF-9
• « Trivia »
• Space Battleship Yamato

Important Links

• Action Adventure
• Commercials
• Crime & Punishment
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• Animation (Western)
• Music And Sound Effects
• Print Media
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters As Device
• Narrative Devices
• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Derivative Works
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Fate And Prophecy
• Image Fixer
• New Articles
• Edit Reasons
• Isolated Pages
• Images List
• Recent Videos
• Crowner Activity
• Un-typed Pages
• Recent Page Type Changes
• Trope Entry
• Character Sheet
• Playing With
• Creating New Redirects
• Cross Wicking
• Tips for Editing
• Text Formatting Rules
• Handling Spoilers
• Administrivia
• Trope Repair Shop
• Image Pickin'

Advertisement:

Five Tips for Creating an Engaging Space Battle

Image by Bill Lile used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Space battles are an important aspect of science fiction, especially space opera , and we want them to be engaging. At first blush, that might sound easy. Space battles have hyperdrives and torpedoes and lasers, oh my. How could that not be engaging? But it’s harder than you might think. Spacecrafts are complex and alien. It’s easy to drown your audience in endless technical details, fill page upon page with ships firing ineffectually at each other, or leave the audience wondering why the battle was set in space at all.

Fortunately, we storytellers are clever folk, and we have methods at our disposal for ensuring our space battles keep the audience on the edge of their seats. So strap in to your favorite spaceship and spool up the FTL drive. It’s time to explore some tips on keeping your space battle engaging.

1. Plan For Distance

I say this a lot, but space is big . Really big. So big that it’s difficult for our puny meat brains to comprehend. It’s also really empty, meaning that hostile ships will probably see each other from a long way off. This means that combatants will be engaging across millions of miles or more.

At those distances, the speed of light is no longer effectively instantaneous. It takes light one second to travel 186,282 miles, so by the time you see something happen that far away, it actually happened one second ago. At space distances, it’s impossible to know exactly where your enemy is. By the time the light * bounces off them and reaches your sensors, they’ve already moved.

This makes shooting difficult and calls for unique solutions. Ships in your setting might fire volleys of long-range missiles that can track the enemy once they close the distance. Or your ships might employ powerful prediction algorithms to guess at where the enemy is going to be and then fire at that spot. They might even sweep arcs of laser fire through the void like swords , trying to score a hit.

You have a lot of freedom in what options your space combatants use, as long as it has some plausibility. You can even use far more outlandish possibilities if you set them up properly. Your ships might battle by creating small gravitational singularities next to the enemy or broadcast mind-control memes via radio waves. What’s important is that your weapons feel like they’re designed for use in space. The vacuum is starkly different from any other battlefield, and unique weapons will help bring that home.

If you want a battle to take place at close range, you’ll need to set up a good reason for it. If it only needs to happen once, you could craft a scene in which two ships open fire as they depart from the same station. If you want close-range battles to be the norm, you’ll need a more robust explanation. Perhaps your setting’s FTL drives teleport ships directly to their destination, Battlestar Galactica style, which allows combatants to get really close to each other before attacking.

2. Determine Your Character’s Level of Control

A space battle probably won’t be your hero floating alone through the void. * They’ll be on a spaceship and fighting enemies who are also in spaceships . This adds a layer of distance between the combatants, and it affects how you portray the battle.

First, decide how much control your character has over the ship. This can be broken down into three broad categories.

• The Character Is the Ship: This is for battles where the character is an artificial intelligence or a human with their nervous system wired directly into their vessel. They control the ship as if it were their own body and feel damage as if they were being hurt. The battle will be immediate, with no delay between the character’s thought and action.
• The Character Pilots the Ship: In this scenario, the character isn’t part of the ship, but they control most or all of its functions. They decide where it goes, when to fire the weapons, etc. The ship is like an all-encompassing piece of equipment . The battle is still fairly immediate, but there’s a slight delay between thought and action because the character must operate the ship’s controls.
• The Character Commands the Ship: Your character doesn’t operate any controls themselves. Instead they give orders to a team of subordinates. The character makes plans, but they must depend on others to carry those plans out. There is a longer delay between thought and action, because every order must travel down the chain of command .

Your character’s level of control will have a huge impact on how the battle is perceived. When a character is one with their ship, they perceive space as if through their own eyes. They “see” anything the ship’s sensors can detect. A pilot depends on display readouts, whereas a commander must often have data interpreted for them by subordinates, because there’s simply too much information for one person to handle.

Different control levels also influence a battle’s pacing. At the greatest degree of control, the battle will be fast and frantic, much like a sword fight , because the character is effectively fighting via their physical body. A pilot will have a little more time to think, but not much. They must plan each maneuver with only seconds to act, staying one step ahead of their enemy.  A commander must endure delays as their orders are carried out. Use this time to build tension while the character speculates what the enemy will do next and reflects on the cost of failure.

3. Use the Environment to Add Novelty and Realism

Space is an environment unlike any other. It is cold, and yet things stay hot for a long time because there is no air to transfer heat. It is dark but also filled with the light of many stars. Emphasizing the alien nature of space is a great way to make your story more engaging, because the coolness factor and the added realism will ground your audience in the setting. To emphasize the environment, use some of these elements.

• Microgravity:  This is also known as zero gravity or weightlessness, but in absolute terms, there’s always some gravity around. * Thanks to novels like The Expanse , microgravity is becoming more common in scifi stories, but it still has a lot of novelty value. People move differently in microgravity, and things just float around unless something pushes them. Describing how a character launches themself across a room, or how their hair billows around them, will just sound cool. Meanwhile, describing all the handholds, straps, and special drinking vessels needed in a weightless environment will make your setting more immersive.
• Acceleration: In space, the only limit on how fast something can go is the speed of light. That means for most spacecraft, it all comes down to acceleration. The ship that maintains greater acceleration for longer will have a major edge, but it comes with a cost. Acceleration produces a gravity-like effect inside the ship, and the faster a ship accelerates, the stronger the gravity. If the g-forces get too strong , they can injure or kill a ship’s crew. This is a great way to build tension: the ship accelerates to avoid incoming fire, but if it goes too fast, the crew won’t survive.
• Inertia:   In an atmosphere , any moving object will stop eventually, either because it hits something or simply from air resistance. In space, this is not the case. A moving object will keep going practically forever, unless there’s a powerful gravity well nearby to pull it in. In your story, this quirk of physics is most likely to come up after a ship has been damaged so badly its engine no longer functions. At that point, the ship is adrift, unable to halt its progress, drifting into who knows what.
• Radiation: Space is full of radiation. So much radiation that it’s one of the biggest obstacles to putting a human on Mars . A space-battle setting probably has some kind of reliable radiation shielding, but that can disappear once the hull is breached. Even more dangerous than natural radiation is the radiation humans bring with them. A nuclear torpedo or breached fusion drive can put the crew in serious danger if they don’t find shelter quickly.

Those are just four of the many options at your disposal. You can also have characters overwhelmed by the vastness of space  or create a powerful dissonance between the vacuum’s peaceful silence and the many people dying with each flash of a breached reactor. The important thing is to bring in space itself as part of the story, so your battle doesn’t seem like it could have taken place on land, sea, or sky.

4. Design Battle Tactics

One of the toughest parts of narrating a space battle is deciding what the ships do. Sure, you can write that they fire at each other, but without understandable tactics, that won’t mean a lot to the audience. A fight between humans is relatively easy to understand, but when space-faring vessels get involved, it’s harder to comprehend what’s happening. If your audience doesn’t understand the fight, they won’t be invested in the actions your characters take.

Fortunately, you don’t have to drown your audience in technical details. Instead, define what kind of advantage the combatants are trying to get over each other. For a low-tech example, consider naval tactics in the Age of Sail . In those battles, the main advantage was in keeping the enemy within your broadside, while staying out of theirs. This was simple in theory and incredibly complex in practice. It took a masterful knowledge of both the ship and the wind to maneuver properly, but a story about that period doesn’t need to explain everything. It just needs to show how the sail adjustment and weather reading allows a ship to get the advantage needed.

A story of space battles can use the same principle with different specifics. If your ships fight primarily with long-range missiles, then their tactics might revolve mostly around defense. Your characters would have to decide how to allocate their electronic countermeasures and point-defense fire. Do they try to stop every missile, or are they willing to let certain sections of the ship be hit in order to protect others ?

On the other hand, if your ships fight by sweeping space with laser fire, their tactics could focus on herding the enemy into a smaller and smaller volume of space, until there’s not enough room to maneuver properly. No matter the specifics, the important part is that you have a general method and goal that’s easy to communicate . That way, when the characters order a specific maneuver or firing pattern, the audience understands why they’re doing it.

5. Make Damage Matter

Finally, once you’ve figured out foundational details like distance and tactics, you’ve got to make this feel like a battle. One of the greatest weaknesses of space combat in fiction is that it can feel like two computer-generated objects are just flashing lights at each other until one of them disappears. In a battle, people are trying to kill each other, so it should feel like the characters are in danger . To do that, you must make the battle damage matter.

One of the more popular techniques in this area is to show how damage degrades the ship’s capabilities, making it harder for the characters to win the battle. This can work, but it requires that the audience have a thorough understanding of the battle mechanics in your story. Saying the main deflector dish has been disabled won’t matter much if the audience doesn’t understand what the main deflector dish did in the first place. Some storytellers try to fix this by having a character explain in the moment why losing the deflector dish is bad, but even that’s not great, since it can seem arbitrary or contrived.

Instead, you’ll get the best result if you first set up how the various components of your spacecraft work and then start taking them away. If your ships fight by lobbing missiles at each other, it’ll be easy to explain how the ship’s three radar dishes guide the missiles to their targets. From there, it’ll be intuitive that losing a dish makes the ship’s missiles less accurate.

A second option for making damage matter is to make it affect the characters directly. This is what Star Trek tries to do whenever consoles on the bridge explode, but you’ll want a method that makes a little more sense. * My personal favorite is to craft a setting where everyone wears spacesuits during a battle, so you can breach the hull without instant death by asphyxiation. Nothing makes the action impactful like a shot passing straight through the bridge, nearly taking off the protagonist’s head.

If it’s not feasible for battle damage to reach your characters’ location, you can still make the damage matter by endangering their friends. If you establish important relationships between your protagonist and some of their crewmates, you can ratchet up the tension by having some of those crewmates send a frantic call to the bridge saying how that last hit fractured the hull in their section and they can’t take much more.

And of course, if you picked a character who is one with their ship back in step two, you have even more options at your disposal. A character who inhabits their vessel can feel battle damage as a physical injury and react accordingly.

Like any other conflict, space battles follow the basic rules of storytelling. They need proper stakes, a strong motivation, a clear turning point, and so on. But space battles also have their own specific requirements. A poorly built one will seem distant and boring, but with the right techniques, the space battle can be a truly compelling piece of fiction.

P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?

More in Space

How the Bobiverse Turned Excitement Into Boredom

Episode 422: alien aliens.

Building Mass Effect: How Bioware Imagines the Future

Building Baubles: How Revenger Fails at Technology

Episode 306: transportation in spec fic.

Kathy Ferguson Professor of Political Theory in Star Trek.

Your patronage keeps this site running. Become a patron.

Recent Articles in Storytelling

Do Your Lovebirds Have a Solid Reason to Stay Apart?

Making Your Character’s Choices Fit Their Personality

Three Ways to Give Your Romance a Tense Throughline

How to Create Atmosphere in Your Writing

How to Turn Your Concept Into a Story

Recent comments.

A Perspiring Writer

Oren Ashkenazi

Love Mythcreants?

Be our patron.

Join our community for special perks.

Comments on Five Tips for Creating an Engaging Space Battle

The Lost Fleet series, Star Wars: X-Wing series, and the Thrawn books all have pretty involving space battles, and they do their best to get the science of it right (or as close as possible in the case of the Star Wars ones, which have to conform to the established onscreen material).

I would think it’d be pretty impossible to write a realistic space battle scene in a universe where space can conduct sound and ships close to within feet of each other before firing their weapons.

I have reached at least a couple of headcanon conclusions about the physics in the Star Wars universe. For example I think that time is Newtonian (thus avoiding a lot of problems with time dilation and FTL travel), and that empty space has drag, at least for small (non-planetary) objects, which explains things like the need for constant propulsion to keep constant speed, the way space fighters maneuver, and a few aspects of the WWII-style naval battles. And maybe the sound in space.

In one of the X-Wing novels, a starship is mentione to have a rudder for a “luminous ether”, which caused drag.

In EVE online the official explanation is that the ship’s warp core causes an effect similar to drag and due to its inner workings cannot be shut down entirely or else it would explode (which also neatly explains the ship’s critical existence failure upon reaching 0 hp – the warp core is breached, stops and everything explodes).

Too much of fiction, especially TV & film, ignores the realities.

“Buck Rogers” & the original “BSG” used to really bug me. Buck had a Thing that drove me crazy: aileron rolls that looked flashy, but didn’t actually change direction at all. That’s a great way to get killed.

“BSG” treated the Vipers like fighter aircraft. I know some of it was lack of money for miniatures & SPFX shots, but it would have paid to spend some for stock footage of the Vipers moving directly sideways, or vertically, or radically diagonally, or just rotating on their axis & shooting back.

The idea of predictors is pretty accurate. Space battles limited by STL are very like antiaircraft: the target is much faster than the gunfire, & predictors were around even before modern supercomputers. Now, calculating a target’s likely future position would take account of every bit of environmental data & dead-accurate estimates of the possible delta-vee (up _and_ down) from point of contact: human limits are fixed, but a given ship will vary. So intelligence on hostile ship types & capabilities will be worth more than platinum.

Probably laser (or EM) main battery would be secondary to guided missiles capable of enormous delta-vee & extremely high velocities, plus a variety of terminal guidance options, & high innate “intelligence”.

There’s also an issue of heat rejection. It might be combat is less an issue of hitting your enemy than making him generate heat beyond his ability to reject it. How robust are the radiators? How vulnerable to large delta-vee are they?

Are there any articles on gun fights specifically? I recall gun tactics getting mentioned briefly, but I don’t recall any articles going into details on that subject specifically.

I do have a worldbuilding article about guns, but nothing specifically about gunfight scenes. https://mythcreants.com/blog/six-ways-guns-change-a-fantasy-setting/

Thanks. I’d like to see that subject covered in an article or podcast episode if at all possible for you guys.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Email * (will not be made public)

Dan Koboldt

Writer, blogger, and genetics researcher

Space Battles in Sci-fi

August 3, 2018 by dankoboldt 3 Comments

The Expert: Michael Mammay

Michael Mammay  graduated from the United States Military Academy and served as an Army officer for 27 years. He holds a masters degree in military history is a veteran of Desert Storm, Somalia, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his spare time he writes science fiction and fantasy, usually with military influences. His debut novel Planetside was published in July 2018 by Harper Voyager. You should  follow him on Twitter .

Space Battles in Science Fiction

It’s probably not news that the space battles you see in movies aren’t particularly realistic. Open any thread on Star Wars and you’re sure to find people pointing out a dozen things that defy the laws of physics. There are simple ones that most people know: Sound doesn’t travel through space, for example. But what would it really look like? While there are many things that go into realistic space combat, in this post I’ll talk about three factors that would influence those battles: Where the battles would happen, why most of it would be automated, and why you’d probably never actually see the enemy.

Location, location, location.

To quote Douglas Adams, from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.” Because it’s so big, there’s almost no chance you’d ever fight a battle there, because you’d never encounter the enemy. For example, say your space fleet is hanging out around earth. Say your fleet can go really fast. Let’s say 30 kilometers per second. That’s fast. For reference, that’s how fast the earth travels around the sun. It’s about 1/10,000 the speed of light, and it’s over 87 times the speed of sound (mach 87). It’s the speed that most asteroids hit the earth.

Say you detect an alien fleet hanging out somewhere in the vicinity of Mars’ orbit. If you started out immediately to engage that fleet at full speed, it would take you about three weeks to reach it. That’s how big space is. And that’s if the enemy sits there and waits for you. If they move, you’d have to change course. We’ll talk about why that’s a problem later on in the post.

The solar system in perspective. Numbers represent astronomical units (AUs), each representing the distance from the Earth to the Sun. (Credit: NASA)

Of course you can just speed up your ships in your fictional world, but that would mean the enemy would have faster ships, too, probably, and it really doesn’t matter. Space is way bigger than just Earth to Mars. If you went a hundred times faster than the previous example (now going 3000 km/s), you’d reach Mars in just a few hours. But at that new speed, it would still take you four weeks to reach Pluto’s orbit.

So where would you fight? The best historical example we have of this is the Pacific Theater of World War II . The Pacific is big, and with the slow speed of the ships involved, the size created a situation similar to what we’d expect to see in space. If you look at the major naval battles from that theater, they all happened near land. They happened near some piece of ground that interested both sides. They didn’t find each other in the ocean. They met to contest something they both wanted.

Translating this to a war in space, we would expect to see battles in places where both sides wanted to control something. It could be resources, either from a planet or an asteroid, or if you’re using something like jump points for faster than light travel, two forces might contest to control that point. What it comes down to is that holding space itself doesn’t matter. There needs to be something to focus both forces on the same spot to bring them together. In my novel, PLANETSIDE, they don’t fight in space at all. They go down to the planet and fight there. That’s not a great example, because in my galaxy, one side has a decided technological advantage over the other.

A great book where the author gets it right is Dauntless (The Lost Fleet #1) by Jack Campbell. If you want to read space-navy done well, you need this series.

Automated Space Battles

I have some bad news for you. The Cylons win. There’s a common saying that ‘speed kills.’ That’s not quite right. Acceleration kills. To be accurate, instead of speed, we will talk in velocity. Velocity is simply speed and direction. Acceleration is a change in velocity over time. So if an object changes speed and/or direction, it is accelerating (or decelerating, which is negative acceleration.) When there’s a significant acceleration, that force acts on the object, putting strain on the machine in question and the person inside it. Guess which one breaks first? We often refer to this as G-Force.

Human tolerance of linear acceleration (Wikipedia)

There are a lot of factors that determine how much G-Force a human can survive over time. An average person can probably handle five Gs, while a trained pilot in a special suit can routinely pull nine Gs over short periods of time. But whatever number you use, the human is the weak point in the system. We can use suits, or maybe drugs to help a human survive higher Gs for longer durations, but it’s still not going to be as much as the machine can stand on its own. The machine can out-accelerate the human, meaning it can change speed faster and change direction faster. That’s a pretty tough advantage to overcome in a battle.

Dogfights in Space

There are no dogfights in space. I know they look really cool, which is why they happen in the movies. But in reality, at super high speeds, you simply can’t turn. Consider our space fighter from the previous example, travelling at 30 kilometers a second. She flies by the enemy, and now she wants to turn and get right on the enemy’s tail. If she starts turning at the rate of one degree per second…that means it would take her three minutes to make a u-turn (three minutes!), she would pull over 50 Gs in that turn and pretty much turn herself into jello.

But she wouldn’t turn. She’d use small thrusters to flip her ship and accelerate in the opposite direction. Let’s make her super-human, and say she can sustain ten Gs for long periods of time. To decelerate from 30 kilometers to zero, at ten Gs, it would take her just over five minutes. She could then accelerate back up to speed in the opposite direction in another five minutes. So ten minutes later, she’d be right on the enemy’s tail. If he stopped and waited.

The race to develop combat spaceships would revolve around which side could make the machine that could handle the most G-Force and which side could develop the best AI to pilot it. You could also go with remotely piloted vehicles, but there would be a time lag, depending on the distance that your signal had to travel.

Some books that got this right include Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War , where they put human crews into liquid filled pods while computers fight the ship’s battles at high Gs, and The Expanse series, which regularly shows the effects of G-Force on humans and how they try to counter it via special seats and drugs.

You Can’t See Me: Visibility and Warfare

I talked above about how there aren’t dogfights in space, but more than that, the two fighting sides probably won’t see each other. Even in modern warfare, most air and naval battles would take place out of visual range. While you can see farther in space (because there’s no horizon), the distance between forces will increase so much that it won’t matter.

Actual footage of space warfare with missiles.

Missiles, with no humans aboard, will accelerate faster than ships with humans, and projectiles fired in space will continue on their trajectory forever (or until another force acts upon them.) The battle could come down to who can get more missiles at the other side fastest and get through whatever missile defense the other side had.

In a world where people carried enough missiles to overwhelm defenses, there’s a good possibility that both sides could destroy the other at the same time, since both sides would likely launch their offensive salvos at maximum range. On the other hand, if defensive weaponry had a technological advantage over offensive, you might see a situation where neither fleet could damage the other significantly. In those cases, they might close to shorter distances to try to act inside of the enemy’s defensive capability, but there are so many permutations on that that it’s hard to figure (which leaves a lot of room for writer imagination.)

It also depends on what we mean by ‘see.’ There are a variety of sensors one could use to locate the enemy. A really hard one to defeat would be anything that detected heat signature. You can make your ship cold, but you can’t get it to match the 2.7 degrees Kelvin of space, no matter what you do. Even with the engine off, you’d generate heat, and that heat has to go somewhere that’s not inside your ship, or you’d eventually burn up. One thing is for sure; whatever means one side had for detecting enemy ships, the other would work to counter it. That could evolve over days and weeks, but it could also happen with AIs working in real time to try to fool the other side’s sensors. Much like in the Battle of Britain, an advantage in early detection technology could have a huge impact on a battle.

There’s Always More Sci-fi

I’ve only hit three aspects for creating realistic space battles. There are many, many more. It’s always fun to read how different authors get past these points. Some invent technology to render the physics irrelevant, which is fine, but my favorites always tend to deal with most of the problems realistically. Feel free to enter the comments below and talk about what books got it right.

Planetside by Michael Mammay

A seasoned military officer uncovers a deadly conspiracy on a distant, war-torn planet…

War heroes aren’t usually called out of semi-retirement and sent to the far reaches of the galaxy for a routine investigation. So when Colonel Carl Butler answers the call from an old and powerful friend, he knows it’s something big—and he’s not being told the whole story. A high councilor’s son has gone MIA out of Cappa Base, the space station orbiting a battle-ravaged planet. The young lieutenant had been wounded and evacuated—but there’s no record of him having ever arrived at hospital command.

The colonel quickly finds Cappa Base to be a labyrinth of dead ends and sabotage: the hospital commander stonewalls him, the Special Ops leader won’t come off the planet, witnesses go missing, radar data disappears, and that’s before he encounters the alien enemy. Butler has no choice but to drop down onto a hostile planet—because someone is using the war zone as a cover. The answers are there—Butler just has to make it back alive…

Buy It:  E Shaver | Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble

Related Posts:

Ready to put science in your fiction.

August 29, 2019 at 12:13 pm

I always pictured it more like submarine warfare with drones, remote piloted or semi-autonomous, replacing torpedoes and mines. The enemy, which is probably just one or two fairly large vessels, somewhere out there at the edge of sensor range, trying to get a firing solution while you do the same.

[…] Space Battles in Sci-fi with veteran officer Michael Mammay […]

[…] Space Battles in Sci-fi […]

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

If you're into , , or fantasy & science fiction, I'm glad you're here. We should connect. . This is the best way. You'll get updates whenever I have news to share or post new articles. No spam, I promise! . I love following and retweeting authors & fans of SF/F. . Check out my board devoted to writing inspiration and authorship . I love books. You love books. We should connect there. Click on the big red X on the top right to close this box. New threadmarks Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen. Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers. Creative Forums The Subtle War (A Psi-effect-inspired XCOM II/Mass Effect Quest) Thread starter Omniatrix Start date Nov 5, 2019 Crossover   Sci-Fi   Tags mass effect xcom 2 (xcom) female protagonist ck2 quest discussion is the best thing since sliced bread The Subtle War The Ethereals were defeated. ADVENT was broken. Humanity Awakened. Now, more than a century later, unified humanity must respond to a new threat and perhaps a new opportunity. User Total 67 Prologue: Background Selection Turn 22 results Turn 22, Episode 1: Strangers come to town Recent threadmarks Threadmarks Nov 5, 2019 At first glance it looks like just another miner's colony. There are no visible ships docked around the asteroid, just a series of shabby metal structures planted on the surface. As the shuttle begins its final approach, it becomes clear that this isn't just any asteroid. It's closer to the size of a small moon, even if its gravity isn't strong enough to have fully rounded it off yet. The man-made structure on the surface that, at first glance, seemed like signs of a small, two-man mining outfit from this perspective now seem to be evidence of a much larger endeavor. The airwaves and the psinet are nearly silent beyond the crew of the shuttle, indicating the mining colony is likely abandoned. As you approach, the ship closes on the surface without coming to a stop, and you are briefly concerned about the possibility of an impact. Then, the largest structure on the surface slides away as if on rails, revealing a docking station inside the asteroid. You watch through the bubble field as your shuttle slides into the dock. Despite having full Magus certification, out here even you can't make out more than the faintest sense of your closest friends and family. When the fake building slides back into place behind your shuttle, even that flickers out. You've felt it before, that total disconnection from all of your psionic anchors, and yet it still feels unsettling. An entirely psionically shielded hidden base. Even the isolated local net inside the base is subdued, filled with an air of professional acknowledgement and not much else. You can feel a few channels buzzing just outside your perception - the long-term staff of the base, probably - as well as the blurry incipient stages of the psionic channel forming amidst you and your fellow passengers. A two hour shuttle ride in which very few of you talked to each other is not particularly conducive to the kind of subconscious camaraderie that forms psionic channels, though, and so you are left with neither your anchors nor any proper psionic circle. It leaves you feeling somewhat off balance. The ship sets down on the hanger floor and after a moment the bubble shields fade. You step off the deck of the ship and join the other passengers in gathering near the hanger's exit. There's a brief psychic shift and you feel yourself directed to a man off to the side. His uniform is crisp, if rather plain. He stands at attention as you meet him and you exchange a brief psionic salute. "Ma'am," he acknowledges you. "Welcome to Vesta base. I am to escort you to your briefing room." You nod, and he turns to leave. He briefly touches your mind to offer you a mental summary of the route you will be taking, but after a moment's consideration you decline. As you walk, you exchange smalltalk both in physical space and over the net. Despite knowing his name from the brief contact you made a moment ago, he formally introduces himself as Lieutenant Wu Cole. He is, it turns out, one of the fixed staff of the base. Though he can't tell you exactly how long he's been assigned here, he does admit that he was from one of the first graduating classes at the Callisto academy, which means he can't have been here for more than three years. Your briefing room turns out to be surprisingly deep into the station, and you're even more surprised to find that it is behind a heavy mechanical door. The thing whirrs to life as Lieutenant Cole stops, and when it opens you find that there is a green force field shimmering in the air through the doorway. "Here you are, ma'am," Lieutenant Cole says with a gesture. Over the net, he indicates that the field is semipermeable and that only those with authorization - only you, in this case - are capable of passing through. This is a lot of security for receiving your orders. You do have a clearance level appropriate for this kind of thing, so it isn't like you're entirely unprepared for this. You've never actually experienced this kind of security before, though. You take a deep breath and step through the energy barrier. The door whirrs to life again and slides shut, cutting you off from your psionics once again, severing the ephemeral little connection you had developed from your brief conversation with Lieutenant Cole and the meager beginning of a channel you had been building with your fellow passengers both. This is more like what you would expect from a psionically shielded structure. Few are big enough to have a proper active psinet inside of them. Instead, it's just this alien silence in your head. And for some reason, they felt it necessary to have a psionically isolated room inside an already psionically isolated base. The room in question is relatively small, with around a dozen chairs facing a holographic projector near the front of the room. There appear to be soundproofing panels along the walls, and between them riveted metal. You're alone in the room, and you go back and forth over whether you should take a seat or wait for further instruction. Before you can come to a conclusion, however, the lights begin to dim and the projector flickers to life. You feel a brief touch on your mind and you realize to your shock that this isn't just a hologram projector, it is a full-fledged Codex communicator. After a moment of static, the image resolves into a figure. It is a plain man in blue business attire, his face hidden in shadow. His build is almost aggressively average, and if it weren't for his bald head he would look completely unremarkable. When he speaks, the message is mirrored over the psionic connection. His voice is gravelly. "Hello, Commander." xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx​ "Nearly a century and a half ago, an alien race visited Earth with the intention of conquering and enslaving our species. Their ultimate goal was to twist humanity into perfect vessels for their minds. They nearly succeeded in wiping out all opposition, and it was only thanks to the efforts of the legendary insurgent organization XCOM that the Ethereal puppet government, ADVENT, was overthrown. While humanity tore away the remains of the Ethereals' chains, XCOM spent decades assaulting every Ethereal observation station in the system. "XCOM was officially disbanded with the formation of the United System Council, and their research was passed to their successor organization, XARC. Since then, special operations and intelligence has largely been handled under the USC Navy and Marine corps. There has been no need for an organization of XCOM's scope in the near century since. "When the first attacks came from the Ethereals' forces, humanity had to contend with two terrible revelations. The first, that we were not alone in the universe. And the second, that our only known peers are existential threats to us. Humanity as we know it has been raised on the understanding that, though we may not technically be alone in the universe, we are ultimately alone in purposes. "When XCOM destroyed the primary Ethereal command center on Earth, as ADVENT was revealed as the puppet regime it was and the first Commander sacrificed their life for humanity to Awaken, XCOM learned the Ethereals' greatest secret: they had their own existential threat. Something is coming. Something is out there that made the Ethereals afraid. "Unfortunately, the Ethereals' record of this new enemy did not survive the war, and so it has been the work of XARC to piece together everything that the Ethereals knew. Progress has been very slow, but with the help of a cache of alien tech discovered during the terraforming of Mars and an alien superstructure under the ice of Pluto's moon, they have discovered something else. "We are not alone. There are more than just the Ethereals, their servitors, and this 'Hungry Tide' the Ethereals were preparing to fight out there. Information is vague and difficult to decipher, but researchers believe that the Hungry Tide engage in some sort of cyclical process of seeding the galaxy with sentient life only to harvest entire galactic polities millenia later. There may be entire societies out there that are fated to become victims to our new enemy. "In light of this new information, the USC has decided that it is time to take action. It has been decided that a new task force will be formed as a centralized executive body in charge of all USC operations relating to extra-solar operations. "Your background and your security clearance make you the perfect choice for leadership of this new Extrasolar Command division. You will spend the next three weeks in briefings here on the Vesta Secure Operations Logistics Station, familiarizing yourself with the resources we will be making available to you and selecting your staff. It has been more than a century since the founding of the first XCOM, and once again humanity finds itself under threat of extinction. We trust that you have what it takes to live up to the historic role you will be filling. "Welcome, Commander, to the new XCOM." xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx​ It has been nearly nine hours since your initial briefing. You've been given a more detailed presentation on your new command as well as a schedule for the various briefings and consulting sessions you will be subject to for the next three weeks as you prepare to properly restart the XCOM project. For now, you've been shown to your private quarters on the station. Your first round of paperwork has come in to formalize your new position, and you are taking your time to go through it and make sure all the information is up to date. Your name - Leah Shepard - your age, your medical data, your psionic rating, all that's correct. There are just a few things you need to look over, though.. []Polity of Origin : Where in the Sol system did you grow up? [This will give you small general skill bonuses and also determine more narrative elements of your background, like what kinds of political and social scenes you're familiar with.] -[]Earth : The cradle of human civilization. With the ongoing colonization efforts, the population density of mankind's homeworld plummeted compared to pre-war levels. Paired with the environmental restoration efforts made possible thanks to Ethereal terraforming tech, the modern Earth is a natural paradise, filled with sprawling park-cities, nature preserves, and high-density agri-ponics centers. This connection to nature, and the historical significance of the planet as the birthplace of humanity, has made it a psionically richer place than most of the colonies, and while religious sentiment is on the decline after the immediate post-Awakening boom, Earth is definitely a bastion for what remains. Earth is also the only celestial body to hold multiple USC member polities at once, which can make for a somewhat more...enthusiastic political scene than you will find in the colonies. Start with +3 to spirituality (psionics) and +2 to diplomacy. You're a little more in touch with your spirituality, and you're used to natural environments. Inter-polity-level politics is something you're more aware of than you otherwise might be. -[]Mars : As befitting the planet's name, Mars has a militant reputation. The early settlement of the red planet was begun in secret by XCOM as a staging ground for their actions against the Ethereals in the wider system. Proper terraforming didn't begin until after the dissolution of the organization, but the roots have remained. Considered the unofficial home of the military, the planet is also known for its expansive shipyards and factories that supply most of the USC's fleets. Even with the terraforming, life can be somewhat difficult, as the surface is still largely chilly arid desert. Start with +3 Martial and +2 Learning. Nearly everyone you knew growing up has gone into something tangentially related to the military, so you have a very in-depth understanding of inter- and intra- corps hierarchies and politics, and the ones that didn't were generally engineers who stuck around for the design jobs on the planet. -[]Luna : Earth's primary satellite was also the USC's first official terraforming project and the first to officially reach full habitability. In the immediate aftermath of the warring states period preceding the USC's formation, the moon was seen as something of a safe haven for the wealthy and powerful away from the petty Earthbound squabbles of the rest of humanity. Luna was also, thanks to the incredibly high concentration of income, one of the first non-Earth polities to demand independent representation on the USC. While the corporate barons of turn-of-the-century society are largely a thing of the past, the decadent bubble-cities of Luna are still the seat of a surprising concentration of monetary and social power. Money, fame, and influence are the name of the game on Luna's surface, and anyone who lives there is someone who thinks they can play or has already won. Start with +3 to Stewardship and +2 to Intrigue. You have a working understanding of most of the system-level businesses, mostly because all of them have their headquarters or a major branch on your home. Your family wasn't old money or anything, but you're also not a stranger to high-society parties and scheming that goes on there. -[]Spacer : You weren't raised on any fixed celestial body. Your family were miners, or traders, or itinerant laborers. You spent most of your childhood and teenage years in a ship, drifting from place to place. Meeting people and finding jobs is a labor all it's own out there, and you have to learn to keep an ear to the ground to find work. It's not exactly an uncomfortable lifestyle - most ships are large enough to house large extended families with plenty of room to spare, but it is in many ways more communal than living in any landbound colonies. Your shipmates are your clan, blood relation or not, and Spacers as a whole stick together. It also means everyone gets real familiar with their equipment, because no one wants to get stuck out in the black thanks to a faulty eezo capacitor that no one knows how to fix. +3 to Learning and +2 to Intrigue. You spent a lot of time examining the ship's tech, and so you're very familiar with Ethereal-based starship tech. You don't have many specific contacts, but you know how to sniff out a tip even when you haven't got much to go on. []Career History : you have no doubt you were chosen for this position based on your record of excellence in your field. What field was that, exactly? [This will determine your primary stats, and (assuming I get enough responses for it to matter) the other stats will be decided by the runners up.] -[]Martial : you've been in USC Special Operations Command for a few years now. This kind of broad operational paradigm is not something you've encountered before, but you do have experience directing SpecOp teams and planning and logistics for clandestine operations. -[]Diplomacy : you were pulled out of a leadership position in USC's Interpolity Coordination department, meaning you have a lot of experience talking to and bargaining with various governments - particularly new and prospective member polities, your specialty. Obviously, no one in the Sol system is going to have experience dealing with potentially non-hostile first contact scenarios, but if there's anyone who has the next best thing, it's you. -[]Stewardship : until your recent reassignment, you ran a campaign finance investigatory board for the USC's finance committee. You know money, and you know the businesses in the system that use it in politics, and you certainly know how to run an organization on a budget. -[]Intrigue : you've been in Intelligence for years now. Your department largely focused on investigation of organized crime and fringe governments out in the Jovian rim. Finding societies, figuring out how they tick, and breaking them if necessary is not at all new to you, the only difference is the scale. Running an organization like XCOM...it makes sense. -[]Spirituality (psionics) : contrary to popular belief, the infrastructure of the psinet isn't maintained by an order of monks - your department in the USC has historically been fairly autonomous, but is technically a government organization and not a spiritual one. The Caretakers largely eschew formalized hierarchical structures, but it's not arrogance to say you've been one of the more influential voices in the chorus in recent times. This new position is somewhat novel to you, but you are an extremely powerful psion and you do have a lot of experience with managing the logistics and the psionic health of an organization like this. -[]Learning : XARC may be the most famous of the USC's research departments, but it certainly isn't the only one. You're being pulled from a position as the director of the Advanced Reengineering Projects division for this job. You might not be as familiar with the political side of this, but your department has actually been the one in charge of outfitting the beginnings of the new XCOM project so far, so in many ways the new position makes sense. xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx ​ Wecome to The Subtle War! This is a CKII quest heavily inspired by the fic Psi-Effect by Cap'n Chryssalid over on SB. It's also heavily inspired by other Sci-fi CKII quests like Terminus Quest and May the Invisible Hand Be With You . I'll be pulling a lot of my understanding of the CKII system from those two quests. ​ ​ This is a bit of a NaNoWriMo experiment for me, it's been nearly a decade since I was posting anything more than sequential one-shots. I've been doing a lot of writing since, but very little of it has been published. I've been working on this idea off and on for nearly a year and a half now, and decided to stop finagling with the numbers and the background stuff that I have't figured out yet and just get something out there, so here we are. If you notice any weirdness with the numbers or the formatting, that'll be why. I'd I'll try to be consistent, but...I'll be the first to admit my muse is somewhat flighty. ​ ​ Feel free to ask any questions if I wasn't particularly clear about anything. ​   Reader mode Thunda birb seems promising. Let us see how it goes, then. [X] plan dark side of the moon -[X] Luna -[X] Intrigue   Feathery Raptor of snowy planes and frozen sea [X] plan spacers for the win -[X] Spacer -[X] Intrigue It kind of makes sense as the most important current task is infiltration, but neglecting learning is not good.   Chrestomanci Nov 6, 2019 [X] Plan Psychic Soldier -[X] Polity of Origin --[X] Mars -[X] Career History --[X] Spirituality (psionics) Advantages include: _ X-COM Commander is an extremely powerful psion _ has a lot of experience with managing the logistics of an organization like X-COM. _ experience in an informal organisation (where the Commander was very influential) _ Start with +3 Martial and +2 Learning _ a very in-depth understanding of military hierarchies and politics   Erzherzog_Karl [X] Plan Commander -[X] Polity of Origin --[X] Mars -[X]Career History --[X]Martial   [X] plan dark side of the moon   x0Nothing0x [X] Plan Psychic Soldier -[X] Polity of Origin --[X] Mars -[X] Career History --[X] Spirituality (psionics)   Just Some Guy [X] Plan friends in all places   Thedarkrider33 [X] Plan Commander   KnightDisciple Brotherhood. Unity. Peace. Part of me wants an Earth origin, but looking at current numbers... [X] Plan Psychic Soldier   John_Elysium [X] Plan Psychic Soldier -[X] Polity of Origin --[X] Mars -[X] Career History --[X] Spirituality (psionics) Don't worry Earth is still the Motherworld and will always hold a special place in all of humanities eye.   edofthesquid [X] Plan Psychic Soldier   The Lurking Gadfly [x] plan alpha class psyker -[X] Polity of Origin --[x] earth -[X] Career History --[X] Spirituality (psionics)   Dream Logic An offseason swallow Late but here's a plan anyways [X] Plan friends in all places -[X] Polity of origin --[X] Earth -[X] Career History --[X] Intrigue Like the idea of us being here primarily to make sure the org can run its stuff while we set up networks and diplomance everyone.   Nov 7, 2019 edit: changed my vote [X] plan dark side of the moon   ChaosCircle UlseDovThur Similar threads May 10, 2024 Words: 1.3k Jan 24, 2024 Words: 1.6k inquisition Dec 25, 2023 Words: 2.9k HelereTheAce Jun 11, 2024 Arcanestomper Jul 14, 2023 Get the Reddit app An inclusive place for fanfiction in the Mass Effect fandom -- OC, recs and discussion. Fic only, no fanart or fanvids. All fics and pairings welcome. United we Stand(Halo/Mass Effect crossover) Are you tired of the UNSC curb-stomping mass effect races even when it should make no logical sense? Are you tired of the Council being morons for the sake of making moronic decisions that incite needless conflict? Do you want a story where the author makes a genuine attempt to blend together Halo and Mass Effect lore without it feeling forced? Well, look no further than United We Stand the crossover we've all been waiting for. The Council opens a relay to Orion's Arm only to find dozens of destroyed human worlds. Now using all the resources at its disposal the Citadel marches to war and stands with the UNSC against the fearsome Covenant while also learning to manage new technology, galactic economies, and each other. All while an eldritch threat from the shadows traped in slipspace threatens all sides and all organic life the galaxy. ...Seriously check it out this fic NEEDS more attention! https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/united-we-stand-halo-mass-effect-crossover.736864/#post-56106655 New threadmarks Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen. Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers. If you are interested in interactive stories, check out our Quests section! With Quests, readers get to make choices that affect what happens next after every chapter. The list of Awarded content can now be filtered for specific types of Awards! Awards will now also appear on Threadmark lists. And for the month of June, we're proud to introduce the all-new Rainbow Award and Popcorn Award! Creative Works Creative Writing Original Fiction 2 minutes ago Broken Saint Story Ideas & Recommendations A moment ago Dramatic_Spoon Creative Writing Archives Jun 15, 2024 3 minutes ago emirbravo20 Forum: Original Fiction Forum: Worm Mar 10, 2024 Words: 110k Jun 7, 2024 Jan 4, 2024 Apr 14, 2024 May 2, 2024 Apr 20, 2024 Feb 16, 2024 Words: 100k Chaos Fantasy Apr 27, 2021 WindsweptCity Jul 2, 2023 Words: 440k Alotoaxolotls Jun 17, 2024 Derpy Dragon Words: 1.5k RandomBlueCat Nov 5, 2023 Words: 310k the buttonline Jun 18, 2024 Words: 7.2k Jun 10, 2024 Words: 9.6k The Horus Lupercal Dec 6, 2023 Superspleen Aug 27, 2022 Tomb Spyder Jan 16, 2024 iamawesome300 Feb 13, 2022 Nov 9, 2021 Words: 170k Nilbogoblin May 29, 2024 Words: 2.5k Feb 29, 2020 Words: 240k Feb 25, 2024 May 22, 2024 Words: 2.3k May 11, 2024 Fabius Maximus Jan 15, 2019 Words: 210k IdleMuse0307 Oct 1, 2023 Words: 280k Raskolnik0v Mar 6, 2024 Spacepony21 Sep 22, 2023 Words: 180k Jun 4, 2024 Without synonyms 336 COMMENTS mass effect Mass Effect: Knights of the Force Book 1: Rise of the Force As Reaper's cycle of extinction continues, the Galaxy was in greater danger than anyone realized! The Force itself was threatened by the actions of the Reaper, and if they are not stopped, the whole galaxy will be absent in the... Threadmarks. Words: 8.1k. Creative Writing Creative Writing For writers and readers of original and fan fiction! ... Spacebattles' Trending Stories (Weekly Stats about Creative Writing Subforum) Summertime Madness; Jan 22, 2024; ... Operation ECLIPSE (Mass Effect/Sonic games Xover) - READ THE MANDATES (informational) Lermis; Nov 26, 2023; Words: 110k; 1... 146 147 148. Creative Writing Archives Creative Writing Archives | SpaceBattles. New posts. Awards. New threadmarks. The tag system overhaul has now been fully applied to our Quests (interactive fiction) section! If you are running a quest, please check to make sure that the correct tags are added to your thread. If you are interested in interactive stories, check out our Quests ... self-insert Forum: Creative Writing; A Certain Magical Battle Nun. Threadmarks: Chapter 1: False Start ... Hello this is my first time writing something or more like attempting it. But I think it will go alright. ... artificial intelligence mass effect self-insert; Replies: 336; Forum: Creative Writing; A Newborn Human Goddess (Multicross SI) SpaceBattles Creative Writing. For writers and readers of original and fan fiction! Post your stories for others to read and comment on. Criticism must be constructive. Threads 50.2K ... Link your SpaceBattles account to Discord for access to the official server! Sign up or login Forum statistics. Threads 623,320 Messages 49,001,304 Members Inspiration Strikes! (A Quarian Pseudo-SI/OC in Mass Effect) this is looking good so far, other Inspired Inventor fics I know of if you are looking for ideas and inspiration Inspired Mass on spacebattles Mass Effect Quarian SI Big Ears, Big Brain on Questionable Questing Mass Effect Oc!alien SI Inspired Voyage is a good Star Trek: Voyager application A Ghost Of A Chance the original greatness that ... Largely Spacebattles recs wanted : r/FanFiction Mass Effect. Elder Scrolls. Witcher. Searching for individual fics on SpaceBattles can be somewhat difficult due to its nature. It originally was just a discussion forum that eventually created a creative writing section, so a lot of quality of life search features other sites have don't exist on SB. Spacebattles broke Wormfic, here's how: : r/WormFanfic Alice, Bob, Carry, and Dave read a bunch of Wormfic from Spacebattles. Alice loves it, sticks around forever reading whatever fics seem to interest her. Bob likes a bunch, but gets bored and finds them same-y after a few weeks of reading. Carry reads some and writes a new one inspired by one from the front page. 40000th Catalyst (40k Mass Effect Reaper Self Insert) Having a soul validates you as an individual metaphysically. except in 40k, the metaphysics were never relevant. The soul is only a immaterium connection. It doesnt increase a persons validation, because it ONLY provides power. Actually having a soul is meaningless in 40k unless you're a psyker. @Black-Aengel-01. The Citadel Expedition (Mass Effect/ Stargate) Creative Writing . The Citadel Expedition (Mass Effect/ Stargate) Thread starter 40thousandninjas; Start date Jun 10 ... (Mass Effect/ Stargate) Thread starter 40thousandninjas; Start date Jun 10, 2023; Tags mass effect stargate crossover Prev. 1 … Go to page. Go. 83; 84; 85; First Prev 85 of ... fanfiction Happy Lunar New Year from SpaceBattles! The Gifting system has received a major upgrade. ... Media: Creative Writing ... aliens espionage fanfiction mass effect science fiction Replies: 4; Forum: Creative Writing; Creative Writing 101- Space Battle Genre Mass Effect - This universe is perfect for epic space operas and tales of survival against enormous odds. You have multiple alien races, ancient technologies, and the ominous threat of the ... Spacebattles/SufficientVelocity fic recs : r/WormFanfic Below is a list of my top currently watched fics on SufficientVelocity and Spacebattles. Ask for more information about one and I will summarize and link to it. Wasteland Galaxy - fallout/mass effect The Path Unending - original cultivation A cyborg in the wasteland - fallout/eclipse phase (?) Hard Enough - pokemon si Lost Lion ... SpaceBattles.com Trivia Follow the Leader: The Creative Writing forum is infamous for focusing on a certain franchise (Mass Effect, The Familiar of Zero, and especially Worm, the site having gotten so clogged with Worm fics that a subforum was created solely for them) and devoting thousands of pages to snippets and full fics set in that verse, often variations of the same theme. Five Tips for Creating an Engaging Space Battle Use this time to build tension while the character speculates what the enemy will do next and reflects on the cost of failure. 3. Use the Environment to Add Novelty and Realism. Space is an environment unlike any other. It is cold, and yet things stay hot for a long time because there is no air to transfer heat. creative writing Spacebattles' Trending Stories (Weekly Stats about Creative Writing Subforum) Hi Everyone, TLDR: Weekly Summary Statistics for Creative Writing posted every Monday Over the years of being a Spacebattle's member, I have noticed a lack of statistics about how stories are trending. ... For those who have played Mass Effect, or even those who haven ... any good quests you would reccomend in spacebattles and ... This is a StarWars CK2 styled quest about a Cheeky-Miraluka who is a crime lord and part-time (Wannabe) Sith (she is actually while also technically not a Sith). Watch her conquer the galaxy while having fun and making profits. " The Troll is strong in this one". Prt1. Creative Writing Creative Writing Archives. For stories to be archived and/or posted without extraneous comments. Threads 603 Messages 14.6K. Threads 603 Messages 14.6K. Table of Indexes - A Thin Veneer - Chapters, Comments & Stats. Jun 15, 2024; kclcmdr; Worm. For all fan fiction related to the webnovel Worm and the Parahumans series by Wildbow. Threads 7.2K Creative Writing With Quests, readers get to make choices that affect what happens next after every chapter. The list of Awarded content can now be filtered for specific types of Awards! Awards will now also appear on Threadmark lists. And for the month of June, we're proud to introduce the all-new Rainbow Award and Popcorn Award! Creative Works. Space Battles in Sci-fi August 3, 2018 by dankoboldt 3 Comments. This article on space battles is part of the Science in Sci-fi, Fact in Fantasy blog series. Each week, we tackle one of the scientific or technological concepts pervasive in sci-fi (space travel, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, etc.) with input from an expert. The Subtle War (A Psi-effect-inspired XCOM II/Mass Effect Quest) Wecome to The Subtle War! This is a CKII quest heavily inspired by the fic Psi-Effect by Cap'n Chryssalid over on SB. It's also heavily inspired by other Sci-fi CKII quests like Terminus Quest and May the Invisible Hand Be With You. I'll be pulling a lot of my understanding of the CKII system from those two quests. United we Stand(Halo/Mass Effect crossover) : r/masseffectfics Well, look no further than United We Stand the crossover we've all been waiting for. The Council opens a relay to Orion's Arm only to find dozens of destroyed human worlds. Now using all the resources at its disposal the Citadel marches to war and stands with the UNSC against the fearsome Covenant while also learning to manage new technology ... Creative Writing With Quests, readers get to make choices that affect what happens next after every chapter. The list of Awarded content can now be filtered for specific types of Awards! Awards will now also appear on Threadmark lists. And for the month of June, we're proud to introduce the all-new Rainbow Award and Popcorn Award! Creative Works. assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis