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Messages - prancingfox

#1
Ideas / Re: Your Cheapest Ideas
January 05, 2015, 06:13:09 AM
Don't know if this has been suggested, but here goes.

A automatic switch option for sunlamps. During those desperate times when you're farming outdoors and don't have enough power for the sunlamps, sometimes you got to keep them off during the day and only turn them on at night. Why not have an option for them to turn themselves on and off during the night and day?
#2
Stories / Re: Sand (Alpha 7) -NSFW-
December 26, 2014, 11:29:58 PM
...*(-S-)*...

   I didn't need to spend much time in the lockers. I didn't bring much with me when I left Arcala. What little I had was in the ship's storage. Down there, all I had was just some clothes, data slats, and a memorabilia of a rare happy moment.

   I wasn't a permanent addition to the crew, per se. Just a temporary one way trip additional engineer who needed passage and could pay in service. The Muradago was an old interstellar, and this trip was also her last. When we would arrive at Samson Tau, she would settle in nicely as a ship-turned-colony base.

   I quickly opened the locker, blinking my eyes rapidly. The light here was set to full. Inconvenient. There was only some essential work equipment inside.

   "Can't believe it's finally over," I heard Sohng say to Julliard as they fitted their gear. "Samson Tau. People empty. There're worlds of forests and oceans and hills. I heard..." He fumbled with his harness. "I heard that they've got little stone houses and cities smaller then a tower!"

   Julliard nodded wearily, ever so slowly strapping his own harness on.

   "Can you imagine an ocean?" Sohng continued to ramble. "Like, all that water? Jenkins said..."

   I finished strapping my Hard Utility Harness. Marvelous equipment. Mostly constructed out of hyperweave and ceramic bracers on the beltways, they also contained conductive smart threads and a small computer. With the bracer's design, you could add vested hard points between the ceramic bracers to create a full sleeveless suit, if the need be. It was fitted with some basic equipment such as lamplights, optical receivers, audio speakers, a navigation positioning system, and an environmental safety sensor... Simple toys. 

   "We'll have whole houses of our own! Of course we have to build them first, scrapping the Muradago, shame, but! Free energy, clean water, non-city air!" Sohng continued.

   Next was the sleeve device. The Wearable Access Tablet slipped over my left wrist before gripping tightly on my forearm. The smart threads detected and transferred data through my jumpsuit and carried over to my Hard Utility Harness. The two pieces now linked, the Wearable Access Tablet began to display data in dull, green hues in its haptic bendable plastic screen. A musical one-note tune of a songbird sang as the system booted up before greeting me with a Logic Master OS display.

   "Would it be like living on Hygate? I mean, those UT's built their towers all-fancy to make it look all roomy and pretty, but with a lot of waste of space. How much space do you think we could get on an empty planet there?"

   The last piece was the tech glove. I fitted the gizmo apparel over my left hand, feeling the material snuggly fit tight across my palms and fingers. A few dangling external fiber cables extended from the wrist section of the glove. Those I plugged directly into the Wearable Access Tablet, powering up the glove and activating its conductive transfer fingertips. I was already feeling better with my gear on me.
   
I was set.

   "Course, we'll be going under the Haven Authority Colony, so we may be stuck on the rate value commodity for years until we break contract and get new..."

   "Fucking val." I groaned at Sohng. "Did you take a booster when you woke up?"

   "Just two." He answered with a wave of his hand.

   "Well give it a rest, some of us are still waking up."

   "What? Aw, nah. Check, Julliard's all good, aren't you bud?"

   Julliard hadn't said so much as a single word. His eyes were glazed and staring, his gaze distant and empty. He slowly gathered his gear in a steady, even pace, but with sluggish speeds. He merely gave an eternally slow nod as he gave a low, whispered answer.

   "I hear them."

   Damn, he looked worse then I did.

   I grabbed some quick hardware and fastened them against my belt and closed the locker, waving a non-vocal farewell as I made my way out of the bright crew room.

   The bridge was at the front, near the bow. The crew sleeper bay was adjacent to the storage bay. I needed to reach the central service shaft where I could get a tram to the bow, save roughly twenty, thirty minutes of navigating corridors.

   Ugh, the trams wouldn't be operational at this time. Everything was still warming up.

   The long walk it was, then. As I began my march with a groan, I looked on the bright side. At least the exercise would help wear off the sleep weariness.

   Wide, open corridors of gunmetal steel and white gray ceramic became my familiar neighbor in hallways that seemed to stretch on and on. Dark passageways flickered dim lights before activating to reasonable illuminations when it sensed my presence. No one had walked inside the hull of the ship for years. But now, the vessel was slowly coming back to life.

   I continued to stretch my arms during the walk and occasionally stopped to jiggle my leg. The sleep weariness was a slow and cumbersome experience, but my time in freighters shipping through the rim asteroids of the Arcala System had helped me build a mental readiness.

   At the thought of that, I smiled. That was the last long sleep I would ever take for the rest of my life.

   I was now in a new system. I was going to a new world. I had a new beginning.

   I was free.

   That thought seemed funny to me, so I said it out loud to myself.

   "I'm free."

   Just a whisper, but it felt good to say it.

   The metal walls offered no comment on my rising fortunes. Just as well.

   As soon as the whole crew was up and a few more days of waking travel, we would arrive at our new home.

   I hit a cross roads in the corridors and steered myself towards the bridge again. Sealed doors hissed and opened before my path while hall sections lit at my approaching footsteps.

   I rubbed my free right hand over my left-handed tech glove, feeling the outer layer resistance of the conductive pads on my fingers. 

   I wasn't going to miss it. The tier separation, the hopelessness of always looking up but never reaching, that would be behind me soon. I had always been less, that was what I had been raised to believe all my life. I was told, then taught, then I experienced it firsthand what it was like to life beneath someone, not even deemed to be a person, but to be treated as a number.

   A brief flicker of a long and far off memory flashed through my mind. My mother, broken, distraught, and losing herself in a night of sorrow.

   I shuddered. The memory was gone.

   A songbird gave a one-note whistle on my sleeve computer, drawing me back to the gunmetal steel and flickering corridors. I checked my Wearable Access Tablet; Sohng was calling me. I tapped the screen and opened the channel.

   "Wolfe here. Got something?"

   "Hey." On my harness speakers, my co-engineer sounded out of breath and tired.

   "You sound a bit out of it. What, did you run to your station?"

   "No, no. I just jogged. Listen, I'm here at the CCC, just doing my check, but uhm... ever since I entered D-Deck, I've been hearing some weird, uh, stuff. Like a humming? Sounds really low? It doesn't sound like machinery or electronics, and its... uh... persistently been steady and the same the whole way here."

   "Could be your boosters taking a dive. You should be careful and sit down for a second." I offered.

   "Uh... I don't know." Huh, he genuinely sounded like he was getting worried and scared. But that was usual of Sohng. He was frightened about every corner that held a shadow.

   "Okay, just listen to me. Get some liquid from a dispenser and flush yourself out on a shitter. Did you do your initial checks? Does everything look okay down there?"

   There was a pause on the transmitter. For a few seconds, I walked down the corridor in silence, a sudden uneasy feeling creping up on me. Those moments when the person you were talking to over a comm link didn't respond with anything always irked me.

   Then I heard his voice again, still sounding stressed and breathing heavily.

   "Yeah. Yeah. Passengers are still napped in their pods. I... uh. Wait."

   Again, there was that long, dreadful silence. Sohng certainly knew how to keep me strained.

   "Got something?" I asked when the silence stretched for too long.

   At first, he didn't answer. When he did, it was brief.

   "Nothing. Thought something was wrong. I'll just double check and make sure. That humming is still buzzing, gonna have to check that out too."

   "So you're good?" I just walked past a sign on the wall, telling me I was just nearing the bridge.

   "Looks like. Thanks. I tried calling Julliard before you to see if he heard any of that humming, but he didn't pick up."

   "Hm. Dead value. He must be taking the wake up hard." I shrugged, only realizing he wouldn't see my body language from halfway across the ship. "Still, a violation's a violation. Ring up the chief and tell him Julliard's not answering his double eighty. Even if he's dead tired, cogs need to keep spinning."

   "Aw, hell. Why do I have to call the chief?" His voice wailed from my speakers.

   "You're the one who started this. Besides, I'm busy with my own thing."

   Sometimes, he just really needed to get his gears straight. His whine seemed to be growing in pitch like it usually did when he was going to have to do something he didn't like.

Despite the fact that I had spent thirty-two years on this ship, I had only been awake for a total of forty days throughout the entire voyage. Even in those forty days I had learned quickly about the nuisance of some my crewmates.

"Are you even at your station?" He tried to shift to a defensive tone, not that it lessened the irritation.

I stopped in my tracks. I was just outside the bridge bulkhead. A massive pressure door barred my path, while a computer terminal on the side blinked at my presence, inviting me to interact.

"Yeah, and I'm in the middle of shit. Deal with yours. Wolfe out."

And with that I terminated the link. I was still waking up and didn't need to start my day with this.

I moved my tech glove over the haptic interface, and the terminal recognized me as a crewmember. Once the terminal was unlocked, I began entering the unsealing process of opening the massive pressure doors. Certain areas of the ship were locked during the long sleep for total security. From sudden depressurization to rogue passengers feeling like taking control of the ship; it was protection from that sort of thing.

   The door hissed and slowly opened for the first time in years.

   "I hear them."

   A cold chill settled onto my spine, raising the hair on my back. I felt a breeze sweep through. Strange, as the ship only ran on circulated air.

   With newfound caution, I stepped inside.

   For an interplanetary-turned-interstellar freighter, the Muradago had an awfully small bridge. No surprise. Most of the heavy weight ships that spent most of their time sleeping between destinations rarely used their command rooms. The only time the bridge would have a full crew was during arrival and departure.

   There were no windows. This was a common architecture design for medium and heavy weight ships. Such structural weaknesses could easily be exploited during transit with little time for the crew to react.

   Small floor lights dimly illuminated the steel walkways. A shroud of mist blurred the lamps across the floor. Several red backup lights ran across the ceiling, giving everything a tint of crimson and bloody shadows.

   Spooky.

   A deactivated and dead holotank hogged the center of the bridge, surrounded by terminals that were raised above it like an arena. My first priority was to make sure everything had been operating smoothly since the last time we went for the long sleep.

   Nothing was going to activate here by proximity. I had to turn it all on the old way. I cracked open a junction box and stared for a moment at the conduits and charges inside. Readying myself, I placed my tech glove over the interface handle, letting the two pieces of hardware connect and familiarize with each other. Once both techs had handshaked, my sleeve computer opened up a screen, showing me the interface for the junction controls.

    "Conduct transfer, entry access accepted, thank you... and power!"

   With one final button stroke, the primary power was restored to the bridge. A flood of bright overhead illuminators swallowed the red auxiliaries. For a second, I was blinded, and then my eyes easily adjusted. Now I could see more of the equipment in my fullest capacity.

   "Back in business." I said to myself.

   I felt at ease. Engineering was something I had been doing all my life. While the conditions and overall atmosphere of the worlds and ships I lived in tended to remind me of Arcala's misery, I found peace in my work. The job was plain and simple. For one, there was a problem. Two, I fixed that problem. Everything that happened in between one and two kept my mind at ease and my conscious at peace.

   The holotank flickered and gave life, expanding a green holographic image. Right now it showed nothing but memories of dead code and repeats of echoing logs. As I performed my checks on the hardware of the various systems, those dead data cleared away before the holotank emitted a nice, emerald field of clean static.

   My left hand tingled a little from all the electricity and data flowing over the surface of my fingers with only a slip of haptic plastic to cover it. My tech glove glided across the navigation console, rebooting the primary systems. The tertiary systems would have been running while we were in the long sleep, keeping the ship in check with micro-corrections and repositioning during the cold years in deep space.

   Now that the journey was finally over, we could take manual control over the ship and take over from here.

   The navigation console flashed its greeting with a Corp Tech OS display as it finished booting up. Then the screen went blank and froze.

   Huh?

   I accessed the system again through my tech glove. On my sleeve tablet, I punched in the orders to reboot the system.

   The navigation console shut down and began to start up again. Once more, there was the OS display greeting before blacking out.

   Fuck.

   I wasn't particularly worried yet. Software problems. Tedious and slow. I preferred the more practical and hands on problems.

   I searched into the console's analog through my Wearable Access Tablet. The screen went blank before running up a list of startup codes and preliminary sequence structures. Hmm. Something was wrong. Entire chunks of data were missing from the analog. I wasn't going to solve the problem with coding.

   Something sparked inside the console. Now I was worried. Software could be patched and repaired. But our hardware?

    I came down to my knees next to the console, running my hands across the surface, searching for the edges of the cover piece. Once I did find them, I unscrewed the rings holding the sidewall of the console and carefully, gently, removed the wall.

   I searched inside, and when I did, my heart stopped.

   Oh fuck.

   Loose wires dangled across the ceiling, cut cables sparking and letting loose bright flashes of energy. Processors were smashed, as if someone came in with a hammer and went for a destructive melee. And there, in the empty space where the most important hardware should have been, were missing slots for the navigation drives.

   They were gone.

   Not just the primaries, but also the tertiaries as well, the things that made the ship fly auto.

   Someone had stolen our navigation hardware. 
   
#3
Stories / Re: Sand (Alpha 7) -NSFW-
November 20, 2014, 05:31:22 AM
Thanks! I'm hoping to post short snippets daily, or whenever I can. This is a RimWorld fanfic, I assure you, but don't expect many image attachments or strict adherence to story/gameplay integration. I'm starting based on Alpha 7 but will add more stuff based on game progression.
#4
Stories / Sand (Alpha 7) -NSFW-
November 18, 2014, 01:45:01 AM
Chapter 1

   It was silent.

   A small room, cramped, the bed took up a fourth of the entire space. Closets, drawers, and cabinets were built into the brown stained metal wall. A stitched and worn makeshift rug was unevenly laid out over the hard, ceramic dull floor.

On the wall opposite of the door was a holoscreen, a live feed brought from a camera on the outside of the building. The view was routine, the usual cityscape of sky piercing black and gray towers, shrouded in the falling mist of rain.

A poor substitute for a real window, but preferably safer. Outside, rain scalded and burned through flesh and weak building material.

The holoscreen gave a sickly, blue hue of light, a painful aura that agitated the eyes when looked at. Above, a single ceiling lamp illuminated the room on a dim setting.

My room.

My home.

I moaned and tugged on the stark synthread blanket from beneath the covers. The tower sector's ventilation was busted, leaving the air stiff, hot, and hard to breath. Sweat was already pooling on my back and shoulders.

I hated this room.

But it was all I had ever known.

Woken, I pushed the covers off, slowly, weakly. The sickness had left me frail and pathetic. Moving the blanket was a challenge. Moaning, I reached to my left, searching for a hot, warm presence of another. Yet my sluggish hands found nothing, only an empty pillow and a separate, crumpled blanket.

My eyes lingered at the emptiness before my brain slowly caught up. Father was still working at the yards. He wouldn't be home until later.

With the same, weary effort I performed in looking for my father, I searched my right for my mother.

It was silent.

She wasn't lying next to me. She was sitting at the edge, undressed, not having put on her uniform, the only clothes she could afford to wear. She was still, her head bent down, arms resting on her knee. Her back glistened with sweat.

I moaned, like any sick child, to catch her attention before a worrying thought crossed my mind. Had I made her sick as well? Were we both trapped in our tiny hole, doomed to coughing and sweating all week in this bed the three of us shared?

   Whatever noise I made failed to catch her attention. Groggily, I fought my way to the edge, over rumpled blankets and chills of pain. I noticed then the data tablet on the ground. It wasn't off; otherwise my mother would have actually been using it. Even with dazed eyes I could see it was a showing a letter from the company.

   Did they want mother to work early again?

   I finally sat next to her, but she still hadn't noticed me. I leaned forward, peering up at her face. Her eyes were red; face drenched in sweat, or was it tears? She had a glazed look about her, staring, just staring, into the ground.

   "Mommy?"

   She gave a slight jerk, as if discovering I was beside her for the first time.

   Something was wrong.

   "Mommy, are you okay?"

   For some reason, she answered me with silence. She stared, a look of helplessness and pain in her dulled, puffy eyes.

   A chocked gasp escaped her lips, and then she hugged me, a sudden move that shocked me.

   Something was wrong, something was very wrong and I was scared.

   She was rocking us back and forth, her gasps erupting into ugly sobs, loud and harsh. Her chest heaved against my body in rapid breaths. I didn't want this. This was too much. Something was very wrong.

   "I... I don't know what to do!" She cried.

   Those words clung to me like a brick on my chest as I sat there, wide eyed, still attempting to cope with what was happening. It wasn't right, the pain, the torture she was in, and it was too much. Something heavy came up to my throat, and soon my eyes blurred with tears of my own.

   "I don't... I can't... know if I can do this anymore!"


...*(-S-)*...

   I awoke slowly from the pod, my senses returning one by one.

   Fucking dreams.

   Cold gel slurped against my skin as the pod door retracted. The dim lights of the sleeper bay, set on their lowest setting, still burned like searchlights in my waking eyes. Even as the pod's computer began to softly ramble on about safety checks and waking precautions, I laid there, unmoving, in this coffin of white and yellow sludge.

   This wasn't Arcala. I was far, and far away from the long ago place I called home.

   My senses returned, I felt now was a good time then any to finally crawl out.

   White glops of stasis gel parted and broke around my body, thicker gelatin chunks breaking apart while liquid fluids poured and drenched my naked skin. Fuck, it was cold.

   I was trembling; goosebumps were forming across my arms. My legs wobbled as I stood, my stomach was doing flip-flops. A low hum rose from the pod as the stasis gel began to drain. A small, one-person dais emerged from the steel floor beside me. Shivering, I stepped on the platform and a skeletal cage shot up around me.

   I let the low hum of the shower play over me, sonic vibrations washing out the gel and fluid that still clung.

   "Thank fuck its over."

   Finally. The thirty-two year cruise was finally over. I was gone from that hellscape of towers and smog. I wasn't that little sick child huddled under the blankets any more. Nor was I that naive little engineer getting thrown around the far system on a corporate whim. Where I was going, I could leave it all behind. Now dozens of light years away, where there were no arcologies, no towers, no urban hellscapes, just a simple world and a new start.

No masters now to bog me down.

   The sonic shower finished as soon as it had started. The cage retracted into the floor and a cabinet opened up on the side of the pod. Clothes. Time to put on some decency.

   The CSV Muradago's crew uniform wasn't much remarkable. Not as flashy as the spotless shines of the Core Fleet, and more rugged like those of the Rim Asteroid Corp. The Muradago had one-piece jumpsuits, good industrial hyperweave material. Sturdy, good fabric contact on the skin that didn't chafe, a single zip seal covered by a fastener flap from the neck to the nether for an easy in and out, and the microfiber carbon weave material made the suit good against any number of accidents. Accidents ranging from rips, shreds, hits from blunt or sharp objects, punctures, catching fire, and electric shock. So basically it covered your average engineering debacle.

   It had a nice, blue hue to the color, but the giant fastener flap that ran down the whole middle was a stupid orange. So I guess everything good had a limit.

   As I wrestled into the uniform, I heard the revolting sound of retching. A dozen pods down the aisle, a just woken and naked crewman was ejecting his stomach contents into the floor grate.

   Rookie. I had my fair share of the slow sleep, shuttling through the Fringe and the Rim of Arcala. First time was always a shock. But now, having lost two years total to the pod before this venture, but still at the prime working age of twenty-eight, I was doing good for myself. On the other hand, some of the hands on this crew...

   "Hey!" My voice faltered, and I adjusted quickly, running saliva through my mouth before swallowing. "Hey Simmons! How's your first nap working for you?"

   The sign up rookie weakly stood up, his shacking arms gripping tightly against his pod while he turned his head, searching for my voice. His eyes finally laid on mine for a long second, before he brought up his hand for a single finger gesture. He immediately bent over again and retched once more. 

   A few others out of dozens upon dozens of sleepers were slowly rising from their coffins, shambling about like animated dead. They certainly gave that appearance with the dim overhead lights and the soft, yellow glow of the opened pods scattered across the aisles. I knew I certainly felt the way they looked.

   A three-note whistle sung through the sleeper bay, a cheerful melody with the voice of a songbird. A voice followed after, booming, omnipresent, coming from unseen speakers far and near. If the three-note tune was supposed to bring good spirits, the speaker that followed proved to be anything but feeling good spirits.

   "Ughhhhhhh..."

   A low, tired, drone of a sigh emanated throughout the ship. A few awkward sniffles and yawns came after, with loud, smacking lips and groans.

   "This is... ugh... captain speaking. Crew to stations... um... seniors briefing at bridge at... fuck it... fourteen hundred." There was a slight pause before the captain finished with a grumble. "Fucking sarcophagus."

   The intercom's songbird gave a two-note song, and the sleeper bay was silent again, aside from the shuffling of feet and the low hum of some sonic showers.

   I rested, having finally fought my way into my clothes, by holding both hands onto the side of my pod. The cold was abating as the dermal sensors of the jumpsuit detected my temperature and reacted accordingly, warming up the paddings of the inner fabric. I had to take deep breaths. Deep. Lift one leg up at a time. I made a slow, easy exercise of my limbs.

   Bodies atrophied in the slow sleep, and those who had the long nap had it bad, but for me? I didn't spend the entire thirty-two years in the pod. Every few years, I, among a small selection of the engineering crew, woke for a regular maintenance round before settling back in. Compared to the others, my sleep weariness condition wasn't as bad as theirs.

   "Alright you little bits and dots, sound off if you're not dead."

   A heavy, scarred lung voice sounded down the aisle, belonging to a large, heavy man with a short cut and a hideous moustache. He looked disgustingly in-shape, with not a sign of sleep weariness on him. Looking clean and crisp without so much effort in his jumpsuit, he was already chewing on his fat rolled cigar.

   A collective moan responded from a dozen men and women across the sleeper bay, a few managing actual word responses, most others just groaning. I just raised my hand wearily and made a 'ugh' noise. 

   "Humph. That'll do. Julliard, get back on the engine, double time. Sohng, get your ass over to the colony control station and check on our passengers."

   "Wolfe!"

   I looked up at the sound of my name.

   "Head up to the bridge, run maintenance."

   "I hear you, chief." I called back, taking delicate steps down the row and towards the door, following the other two men to the lockers.

   Behind me, Chief Engineer Marr strolled with confidence between the pods, shouting out to the rest of the crew while a dense cloud of smoke escaped his mouth.

   "Come on, you nuggets, I ain't getting you breakfast in bed! Grab your gear and hit your stations! Shake it! Shake it!"
#5
I have the same problem. Click the app, something on my lower tabs looks like its about to activate something, then quits. Simply cannot get the game to start. Works fine on my Windows computer in the office, but unlike my Mac, I can't carry a computer with me wherever I go.
#6
Hi! I've just ran into this problem as well. I've found the terminal that opens when I open up the RimWorld250Mac in MacOS, Content, but I have no idea what I'm suppose to do after that. What is this 'executable'? I'll admit, I haven't a single clue about tech stuff.