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It wouldn't take much to make it work. Mostly just getting away from the repeated cadence of "wasn't his usual, but; had never anticipated, but; he had expected, but; it was impossible, but;" etc.

And also not being a Shipfest fic, with all that entails.

But apart from that, it wouldn't take much to make it work. {; P

I genuinely like the line "[He] felt as though [she] [were] taking all his inmost needs out and gently polishing them until they glowed," so if that was meant to be silly, too bad. I might even steal it if I find an opportunity.

~Neshomeh

P.S. Detail-oriented, focused, and competent? Aw, shucks. ^_^

There are millions of works of art in the multiverse. Great paintings, music, plays; the list goes on and on. However, nothing compares to the art of comedy. It is believed that all writers of good comedy have a mental connection.

“And there’s nothing wrong with having a physical one as well.” Iximaz looked at her friend, a deep blush rising to her cheeks.

“But...” Scapegrace pulled her forward, her hands sliding into Iximaz’s short, red hair.

“You heard me. After all, a mental connection can lead to a physical one, right?” While Iximaz didn’t entirely agree with her on the whole connection idea, she decided that maybe this wasn’t so bad as Scape’s lips found her neck. Not bad at all.

Darkness - vast, all-encompassing, an entire spectrum of black woven like the cloak of night. Upon it hangs tiny stars, not twinkling, but steady as polished steel. Vast gleaming circles ride amid them - asteroid belts, ringed planets, impossibly-large eyes? They could be any of these.

Amid the black-on-black, subtle patterns can be seen - great streams across the void, like ribbons of dust a galaxy wide. They cross and recross, their intricacies drawing the eye inwards, until it is lost in the endless maze.

Something shifts. One of the dark strands twitches, curves upwards, and then with breathtaking suddenness snaps straight, straining like a leashed wolf. The other rivers of night respond, first one, and then all moving at once, chaotic complexity flooding the blackness.

At last it settles down, the web of night forming a new pattern, a new truth. All is silent; all is still.

… and then Iximaz straightens up, and the laces, the eyelets, the hooks and the rich velvet filling her view all return to their normal proportions. She smiles up at Kaitlyn, presses a kiss onto her collarbone, then steps back and nods.

"There you are," she says, patting the fully re-laced black corset. "All sorted."

((CORSETS WILL NEVER DIE. ~hS))

Thoth's heart was filled with love for Neshomeh. Sure, she wasn't his usual type (and how!), but after seeing her in action, it was impossible not to fall for someone so detail-oriented, so focussed, so…

… competent.

Neshomeh's pulse quickened. She had never anticipated - never dared dream - that the day would end this way. Perhaps it never should have. But she had no intention of backing out.

Thoth swallowed nervously, but soon all hesitation was gone, overwhelmed by the simple delight of the moment. That much, he had expected - but he hadn't imagined it would be so thrilling.

Trembling though she was, Neshomeh was nevertheless filled with desire. It was impossible to put into words how Thoth affected her so, but perhaps - shocking though the thought was - this wasn't a time for words.

Thoth felt as though Neshomeh was taking all his inmost needs out and gently polishing them until they glowed. He had never felt this way before.

And neither had she.

((You no longer deserve physical descriptions, because this. ~hS))

Anyone who hasn't opted in is free to still do so in the previous thread, but I feel like we should get this show moving.

The Official Ship List & Opt-ins/outs

Welcome to the thread where we write terrible shipfics featuring our fellow PPCers. ^-^ Typically with one another, but nobody's going to object to the occasional agent, canon, or random object (except the people who've said they will). Generally try to keep it PG-13 or below, respect people's conditions, and don't worry about accuracy - this is the Shipfest, not the accurate-representation-fest (we don't have one of those)!

You're free to take inspiration from the Official Ship List, or to come up with new 'ships on the fly. You are allowed to write about yourself, but 1) be aware of how you might make people uncomfortable, and b) try to stick to 'ships of you that other people already suggested. Don't worry - there's plenty to go around, and no restrictions on multiple people writing the same 'ship. And remember: if someone writes a terrible shipfic about you, the best form of revenge is to write one right back!

If you need some inspiration, check out the Shipfest Archives, now complete(!). As usual for the PPC, the more recent the story is, the more it represents our current ideas.

Let the shipfic commence.

hS

Apparently when I replace the image with a gallery, the caption (uppermost line of the infobox) is hidden on display. Is there any way to fix this?

Given your enthusiasm about swords, it seems only right that I suggest shipping you with the Master Sword! Or Cloud's Buster Sword. Or Sehpiroth's Sword. Basically, I ship you with most swords found in fiction!

History is full of 'unbeatable' weapons and strongholds which fell because of weaknesses nobody thought of. There's a famous story that the impregnable Chateau Gaillard fell to the French - and King John of England lost Normandy - because French soldiers snuck in through the toilets. A thousand years more recently, a certain 'unsinkable' ship turned out not only to be sinkable, but I understand the design actually made it sink faster once it was holed.

Of course, even more common is the inside job. The Fall of Constantinople happened in part because someone opened a gate for the besieging Ottomans, and by and large, 'get someone to open the gates' is a much better strategy than 'attack stones with swords'. So I think it's entirely plausible that, of the millions of people involved in the 'what if we made a giant ball that kills planets?' project, someone was going to be at least mildly opposed.

Come to think of it, DS1 was already an inside job before Rogue One - Tarkin's belief that the station could take out snubfighters without its own fighter support let the Rebels get far closer than they should have. Wookiepedia says there were seven thousand TIE fighters on the battlestation - but Tarkin and Vader refused to use them. Incompetence is also a form of betrayal...

As to making a second one: there's a great quote from Han Solo in one of the later New Jedi Order books:

"That's not what the Empire would have done, Commander. What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done."

And yeah, he makes the exact same point in The Force Awakens... the Empire is so predictable that Han Solo can see what's what. I mean, eesh.

hS

Basically what it says in the title. Do the folk in this thread who think the Death Star is unreasonably weak think the idea that the design was intentionally sabotaged by the designer makes things make more sense, or nah? I mean, I still think they should've maybe thought up a different superweapon after the first one went down the drain. Honestly.

Pirate shipfic?

Pirate shipfic!

(As an aside, I have always felt that the Treasure Island subreddit should be called r/jimlad. =] )

I've actually used 'Corsette Corvettes' for the moment, and may wind up paring it back to simply 'Corsettes'; it works a little better in my context. So a proper Corsette Corvette fic is still yours for the taking, ifyaknowwhatImean.

hS

What if you refused to launch those TIE fighters until some uniformed flunky pointed out the blindingly obvious fact that huge turbolaser turrets can't possibly rotate fast enough to hit Rebel snubfighters? And then you could launch, like, half a dozen, with the Emperor's pet wizard in charge of them. I bet that would end really well for you. :D :D :D

(Interestingly, Wookiepedia asserts that in the original continuity, the Death Star couldn't have proper onboard particle shielding - the superlaser drew too much power. Hence why they only shoved a bit of ray shielding over the exhaust system and called it a day, I guess.)

hS

First off, the contention that the Death Star is indestructible apart from 'one tiny weak spot' is flat-out false. Case in point: the rebels, still with nothing more than a bunch of starfighters (and a single beat-up freighter) destroyed a second one - and, whichever continuity you're in, practically made a living of blowing up knock-offs. Starkiller Base. The Darksaber. The prototype in the Maw. The Eye of Palpatine. The Galaxy Gun. All of them went pop, usually without firing in anger more than once.

Looking just at DS1 itself, I'll remind you that General Kenobi - who'd been furloughed for an entire generation - managed to infiltrate it essentially by accident. If he'd had a trained Intelligence team rather than a wacky smuggler, the Empire wouldn't even have known they were freeing high-security prisoners until the next change of the guard (if then!). And once you're inside, destroying the thing is almost trivially easy. Two possible approaches:

• Steal some proton torpedos from the TIE bomber bays (or put together something more portable). Carry them down to the reactor which Antilles, Calrissian, and Nunb attacked in the DS2 run. Detonate. We know that makes Death Stars go pop.
• Muck about with the navicomputer, changing the coordinates of the next jump (the Lara Notsil plan). Depending on the continuity you're in, either find something like an exploding star to jump the thing into, or simply point it at an uninhabited planet (The Force Awakens demonstrated that this is possible). Boom.

And that's just off the top of my head. There must be hundreds of ways Tarkin's vanity project could be infiltrated and destroyed.

Which brings me to my second point: your claim that just because one woman couldn't make off with the thing, it's somehow safe from defection? Please. One disaffected pilot could carry out the proton torpedo plan. One angry main cannon technician could divert the beam slightly, causing it to strike the inside of the 'barrel'. One Rebel sympathiser on the night shift navigation team could pilot it straight into the Unknown Reasons. The Death Star isn't secure against all possible rebels - it's utterly at the mercy of every one.

... and it wouldn't work anyway! Grand Moff Tarkin may have believed in the power of an iron fist, but as General Organa said, 'the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers'. The destruction of Alderaan did nothing to stop the Rebellion, turned Leia Organa into a highly effective frontline fighter (rather than a mediocre spy), and - at least in Legends - gave the Rebellion many of its best pilots, who defected after they heard about it.

And this happened every time. The destruction of Camaas made the Camaasi universally beloved. Isard's attempt to turn Coruscant into a plague-world led directly to her own destruction. In the NuGFFA, Operation Cinder... well, that wasn't meant to achieve anything other than misery, but Starkiller Base's single shot led to the fall of the First Order. Tarkin may have thought you can blow up planets to subjugate people, but someone should have stood up and said, 'um, nah, doesn't work'.

Darth Vader, of all people, had the right of it: "the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant compared to the power of the Force". The Emperor already had the most powerful weapon in the galaxy at his disposal - but in both continuities, he never even told the general population about his powers! If he wanted to rule through fear, then "I can literally open a dark magic wormhole over your head and blast your planet with uncontrollable Force storms" (see Dark Empire) is far more persuasive than "my space station is big, please don't touch it".

You actually pointed the way at this yourself: Warhammer 40K. Ol' Sheevy made himself Emperor, but as the sole remaining fully-powered Force user in the galaxy, he should have been God-Emperor.

(For more Star Wars/Warhammer malarkey, you may be interested in Star WarHammer: Everyone Has A Headache, quite possibly the greatest crossover ever to come out of the PPC.)

hS

Point defence turbolaser turrets, on-board TIE fighters, potent shield banks, and putting a bit of sealant in that one weirdly-positioned thermal exhaust port.

Eeyup, hi. Still here, just slipped back into lurk mode for a bit and then all the sudden there it was, my five year Boardiversary. Doesn't quite feel real, like any moment now I'm going to realize no, of course I haven't been here that long. It's still year four or three or even two. Doesn't help that I first found this place five years before I joined. Stars, what a crazy decade. But hey, no use staring slack jawed into the abyss of time all day, there's fandom work to be done!

So, I've been thinking a lot about Star Wars. Not that that's terribly unusual for me, but I've hit upon a few things that seemed worth posting around here. The first of which is this: the Death Star actually makes sense. From an in-universe perspective, anyway. I don't have the training to speak to the science of it. Let's break it down, shall we?

First off, we all know blowing up planets is pointless. it requires an enormous amount of energy for no real benefit. Unless you're dealing with something like Warhammer 40K, but for most continuums you get exactly the same result from having one suitable capital ship fire on the planet from orbit for a day or two. Even better, you can be selective about your planetary devastation if there are bits you'd actually like to hold on to after you're done. Or if that doesn't matter to you a large asteroid accelerated by a tug or shuttle could easily save you the effort of even firing your weapons.

Point is, only the planet's surface really matters. A fact so obvious that not only does the Imperial Navy have a specific named order (Base Delta Zero) to implement this strategy, so does Starfleet Command (General Order 24). And of course the Covenant use it as standard procedure. So, if it's so obvious that blowing up planets is daft, why did the Empire waste such an absurd amount of time, manpower, and resources on building the Death Star? Because, I think, blowing up planets wasn't the point, it was a statement. Not just to say, "Obey or we'll kill you," that's Tuesday for the Empire. Rather, it says, "There is no possible way for you to stop us now." And as far as the Empire knew, they weren't wrong.

Obviously blowing up an entire population of presumably fairly wealthy tax paying citizens who are likely also much loved by the rest of the galaxy is a less than stellar PR move, but erasing an ancient and quite famous system from the galactic map does a spectacular job of demonstrating the power of the Death Star's superlaser. If it can blow up a planet, no ship in the galaxy could possibly withstand even a glancing hit from it. And it's no use firing at it either, its shield generators would have to be enormous, and anything really important is likely buried under literal miles of durasteel. The largest capital ships in the galaxy could have burned out their own reactors firing for days to no effect. Were it not for one tiny weak spot and a supernaturally lucky pilot, the Death Star would have been functionally invulnerable.

So, you've got an invincible space station. So what? The Empire could probably have produced hundreds of Star Destroyers in place of the Death Star, why not do that instead? Simple: every single one of those hundreds of Star Destroyers needs a captain, a crew, support ships, berths, marine contingents, and supply lines. All opportunities for a captain to desert, a crew to mutiny, a rival to capture or convert them, or subversive elements to destroy or even commandeer one. And over time those losses could add up to a fleet able to actually hurt the Empire. A path remains, however long, however dangerous and infeasible, to victory.

But you only need one Death Star. It could localize all that power in one location that could be overseen by the few people the Emperor actually trusted. Yes, it leaves the Empire slower to respond, but as long as it exists there is no chance for any rebellion, any Imperial secession, any rival power to ever achieve more than momentary victories. The Death Star will always arrive. Turn your world into a fortress, assemble a fleet that could fill a star system, hide in the deepest subterranean depths where no orbital scan can ever find you, it doesn't matter. The Death Star will come for you. There is no hope.

And that, I say, is why the Emperor built the Death Star. Because he recognized that the Galaxy Far Far Away would never truly be his as long as there was the slightest hope of defeating him.

And that's all I've got for today. Blimey I can talk when you give me a site without character limits. Been spending too much time in chatrooms and on social media, feels good to have some breathing room. Thanks for wading through my rambling while I dust out the fandom corners of my brain. Brace yourself for my next Star Wars adjacent ramble, canon schisms! Coming soon-ish to an internet near you.

-Badger

I finally got my schedule sorted out, and I read the mission when it was released, so I should be good there. You can email me or DM me on Discord (GeniusGamer#0992).

That's quite a long time. It's nice that you can celebrate your original joining and your return in the same month too.

...do you know what? I think I'm just going to use the concept as the title, at least for now.

~Z, writing silly things

I just checked, and your two intro posts were just two days shy of ten years apart; that's pretty cool! Was it pure coincidence?

hS

You'd best believe I wrote the story within an hour of suggesting the ship... are you planning to use that name as a title, or can I pilfer it?

hS