An End in Sight?
26 Feb 2024Jana Razeki
Public logJana Razeki
February 26, 3310
[Text only]
No audio this time. Why, because I'm an idiot and forgot to hit the recording button. Or maybe the damn thing's not working again. Whatever, I'll just have someone look at it next time I'm not busy.
Anyway. So, today's kind of the big day. Aegis is throwing out their anti-Titan nanite torpedoes for everyone to use. And what am I going to do with it?
Nothing. Yeah, still. Like I said in my last log. I'm not interested in attacking the Titans directly, even as the source of my most recent problems(even if it's technically Azimuth, but that's a different subject). The reasons for that have changed slightly, though.
First and foremost - I do still have that view that it feels a little too optimistic that it is just going to be this 'easy', but I'll ignore that for the moment, because I've seen some people raise a few rather important points about this weapon. Most notably, the fact that it's kind of a shitty way of trying to kill something.
What I've seen is people discussing how using nanomachines to disrupt the structure of Thargoid biotechnology at a molecular level is a bit of a dirty weapon, and yeah, that wouldn't be a very good way to go, even compared to getting shot, which is probably also rather painful if it doesn't kill outright. What I then thought of was... it is even worse when you consider that it plans to overheat the Titans to death. Or destruction. Whichever it is - I'm not sure how 'alive' these ships supposedly are.
Yeah, the idea is to just destroy those things so the Thargoids leave. But what I'm not seeing discussed is the effects that overheating the Titans will have on anything inside them. Like, you know, any physical Thargoids that are manning those ships, whatever they might be. If those old INRA documents referred to in the Codex database are anything to go by, it'll probably only be the semi-intelligent or sentient 'drones', but getting cooked alive is not going to be any more pleasant to one of them than it would be to one of their 'queens', providing they exist (and they probably do).
Worse yet - what about our people on those damn things? I've not seen any mentions from Aegis about it whatsoever. It's all just "We need to get rid of the Titans ASAP", as if they suddenly just... stopped caring. What the hell is behind that? Did someone from Azimuth suddenly sneak into their leadership and plant bugs - no pun intended - in everyone's ears telling them how the Thargoids have to be here to eradicate us and must be defeated in any way possible, no matter the sacrifice, or without caring about any sacrifices made?
I hope I'm wrong about them not caring. Doesn't feel like what Aegis stands for, and something about this just feels fishy. Not just because the Titans kind of resemble gigantic starfish from old Earth(do those even still exist?). It's like someone just wants the Titans disposed of and gone as quickly as possible... but for what? Why? Does Aegis know something we don't, or is someone in the shadows trying to remove the Thargoids as a threat for some other reason? To me, it just feels a little too much like everyone wants to go back to fighting each other. Feds and Imps especially.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself too much, or I've got too much of that tinfoil floating around my messed-up brain. But if I said that this situation feels genuine, like there is an actual extreme urgency to actually need the Titans gone like they're marching through the Bubble actively destroying anything beyond recovery to actually try to wipe us out... I would lie(some people also think they might not actually be here for us, Kira included). And if Aegis somehow knows something worse is coming, whether that is thanks to Seo or something else, I feel like we'd deserve to know about it too. Not be kept in the dark about it until something like the initial arrival of the Titans happens again.
Urgh. Whatever. I thought this was just me going to 'talk' about how these torpedoes might end up ending the war. And maybe they are going to, one way or another. It'd be another lie if I said I wasn't, or wouldn't be happy to see Titan Oya gone from my home space. As much as that means when I've not really got anyone left in that space to care for, at the moment.
But yeah, I guess whatever is going to happen, the war will probably not look the same after those damn torpedoes. I wish I could be really optimistic about them working without causing too much collateral damage and by just driving the Titans off so the Thargoids leave us alone, but then we would have hardly learned anything about the previous mistakes that led to this conflict. Sure as hell feels that way to me, and it'd only be a question of time before we clashed with our only galactic neighbors again.
So... yeah, I can't say I'm too hopeful about it all, and those issues I have with the use of these torpedoes and their effects don't help it. I wish I could say it looks like there is an end within sight, to me, but instead it feels more like standing at the edge of a giant, pitch black pit, which could be a lethal fall, or be more like hopping into a puddle, or anything in between. And I'm not sure I like that.
Anyhow... off to my usual 'status update' section. Should be a little less of a downer or deep thinking. And maybe people also use these logs to reveal some of their personal details, but hell, the stuff I could be talking about really isn't the kind of thing that I want to be mentioning in this kind of log. or publicly at all.
So, what have I been up to?
I guess, starting in chronological order, I went off to have a bit of 'fun' poking around in Thargoid-controlled space at those small military sites that always seem to have something for people to recover. Whether it's data, a memory chip containing data, or something else. You'd think these sites would've been picked clean, by now, but I guess not.
Anyway, I definitely don't have the gear to be doing anything idiotic on foot - like fighting one of those Banshees that way - so I stayed in a Scorpion and fought it out with it in that vehicle. Good thing those Revenants are kind of dumb and so restricted in whichever programming or intelligence they've got that they wouldn't go far enough from the settlement to help their big brother. Or sibling. Whichever it is. Damn things are tough, though. Even a single Banshee eats up about all of the Scorpion's missiles, and a third of the ammo that the surge repeater holds. I'd have driven underneath it, or tried to, to hit its exposed underbelly, but with Revenants swarming a settlement? Not a chance I'd try that.
It wasn't as difficult as I expected, though I did take care to use terrain to my advantage to shield the Scorpion from fire if its shields needed to recharge. And I did a mostly good job of avoiding those... bomb barrages, I guess they are. Only got one stuck on the shield once, directly in my view, and it admittedly looked kind of funny. Not very effective against shields, and it was active when the bomb blew up. But yeah, I think I'm gonna be staying away from this type of activity for now. Once I had disposed of the Banshee at both sites I took a mission for, I snuck my way past those blind Revenants without further shooting, and got out that same way once I had the item that was asked for.
After that... I decided to go on a bit of a trip so I could get myself access to Palin's services. For thruster upgrades, of course - only real reason I had for that. For the most part, I hopped through neutron star routes core-ward to get there faster, because really, I'm no explorer and don't want to be. Still, I decided to poke around a little once I got far enough, if only to sell the semblance that I was not just doing this because of an unreasonable access requirement. You can imagine I was quite surprised to find that the B type star which I chose as my destination, and was registered in a third-party route plotting service, actually turned out to be undiscovered, and contained a biological signal on a planet. So I chose to investigate further...
the scanner said these things are classed as 'bioluminescent anemones'. Can't say that told me much about them, but they look a bit funny. Honestly remind me of pumpkins more than a sea-dwelling lifeform. I took a shot of my ship facing the star as well, for good measure.
Those things are bright, alright. Even a thousand light seconds away, the planet's surface on the daylight side was so hot it wasn't safe to go out even with a suit. So I only briefly stepped out in the shade and with my shield on, while remaining in the Scarab's own shield bubble. Still started sweating in the time that it took for the footfall tag to appear. Shouldn't have gotten any radiation-related issues though. Med scanner certainly showed no levels outside of the usual.
Oh, and I didn't bother putting my health on the line for a plant scan that I didn't care to perform. So if you want to go get it, for any reason, feel free. The system should be Byeia Thaa SJ-R e4-10. My first discovery... or, well, technically. I came across an unmapped system with a Y class dwarf on the way there. Needless to say, it was only frozen rocks, so I'm not really counting it as anything noteworthy.
I took a bit more time to poke around after that, as I still had to go further. I found a moon orbiting close to an ammonia-life gas giant, though maybe I mostly went there to try finding broken Thargoid sensors on the moons, because I needed the sensor fragments and i didn't want to go near an active one. Sure enough, they were there, as I'd heard they would be, in such systems. And I got a nice picture out of it too. Tried to line the moon up centrally with its parent, but didn't have the patience for that. No pictures of sensors - didn't want to be near them for long in case their owners showed up. Avoid any wrong impressions.
I returned to the Bubble that same night. Next day, I got to Palin for the 'fun stuff' and set up a Challenger for anti-Thargoid duties. The setup process was quite boring, so I'll just leave my initial impressions of the thing here - it's not terrible, convergence of its fixed weapons in the 'ideal' configuration is a bit odd and requires some mental adjustment after the Krait, maybe. Thrusters are nice, sure has a lot better verts and pitch capabilities, not to mention yaw. But it might even be a little too sensitive for my own liking, so I only took it out for a short spin. And it's annoying how much Thargon missiles love to break those top hardpoints.
After that... I went out with the Krait, with the ability to get its thrusters fully engineered, to get the stuff needed for 'Titan access'. Access more like being brute forcing past the doors and walls they set up to keep humans out. One step of the caustic sink process had been spared from me already, as Glaives drop caustic crystals when you kill one, but I still had to get the rest. So off I'd gone to Titan Oya to get the stuff. Surprisingly quiet on my way in, like the Thargoids didn't care too much about my ship 'visiting'. Only got interdicted... once or twice.
I decided to try gathering the caustic samples first. Just went in with my standard AX setup, except a module reinforcement replaced with a research limpet controller and one (the) enhanced xeno scanner. My first try was... not exactly successful. I spent too long in the caustic cloud thinking I had to remain within detection distance of the caustic generator for that shittily slow limpet to attach. And I abandoned it because the ship was just going to melt around me. Burned off that caustic gunk with enough hull left to throw a repair limpet or a few at it and try again, though, as I'd planned on taking damage. likewise, an AFMU, mostly to patch the cargo hatch up.
I quickly figured out that I could stay in the 'light' corrosive zone and dip out of it after sending the limpet on its way, minimizing both heat and corrosion damage, since the controller has a five kilometer active range. And some of the caustic generators would even be just outside that stupid death cloud. That made getting those five samples surprisingly easy.
The corrosive mechanisms... well, if you've gone to a Titan, you probably know. If not, you just shoot the mines. From a safe distance. They have a stupidly big blast radius, certainly a lot bigger than you'd expect for something that size.
To get my hands on the pulse neutralizer - rather than bash my head against the wall five times, and suffer god knows what health issues getting slammed by that repelling pulse gets you, I decided to go to an active spire and do it more 'safely', since you get those energy surge analytics from a Banshee's disruption missiles. And there's plenty to go around those places. Kind of reminded me of what I felt when I visited an inactive one for that Titan torpedo armor project - really doesn't feel like it's a place humans are meant to go.
The unclassified relic was probably the most annoying part. I 'borrowed' a probe from someone's fleet carrier for a lot of credits, so I could get in there, then paid Guardian sites a visit for a relic. Only one, though. Also stayed to pick up four more weapon blueprints, just in case. And thought a bit more about whether there's not something we could have learned if the Guardians were still around, or if our interactions with them would've been any different to that with the Thargoids.
All I have to say about those big, crashed ships, which seem to be from the first war... they're hella creepy and I'm glad I generally stay away from those places, or any nebula where there's Thargoids.
So, yeah. With the caustic sink and pulse neutralizer in hand, it was time for another visit to Titan Oya. Thargoids were a lot less happy to see me around now, and I got interdicted a lot while getting distance to the primary star. Like, a lot. Didn't discourage me, though. Oddly, no Glaives on any attempt, except for the hyperdictions.
It still struck me that the sight at the edge of that cloud is... what do I call it? Ominous? Dreadful? Awe-inspiring? A mixture of all three, perhaps. I thought of it less when I arrived to gather the caustic tissue samples from the mines, but now... well, knowing where I was headed, I couldn't help but feel something.
I did the thing of heading through the cloud pretty easily. And knew the timing of the pulse neutralizer pretty well from others' footage. Maybe also that time I visited Hadad because the Thargoids took that one certain friend of mine there after abusing what trust she might have had in their species. emphasis on might.
The difference wss, in this, I was alone, or certainly not part of a larger fleet. Easier to stay hidden, also liable to go wrong a lot faster. And the Thargoids are definitely quite upset at human visitors now, whether that is because of our weapon-building project or general interfering. I picked up a few of the local 'materials', whatever use they might have, and... I think about 21 pods, mostly because things got a little too hot between that and the material gathering to stay longer. And constant harrassment plus that damn disrupting field kicking my ship into the Titan's hull dropped my own low enough that I felt it was time to go.
My second attempt - 54 pods, and I'd wasted little time to get started. I'd probably gone through two or three storage chambers when a Scythe began to lurk nearby to pick those I freed up, so I moved elsewhere, only to get annoyed by a particularly persistent Glaive when the Titan's pulse went off. I fought it - with more time taken than I'd like due to only having two large AX multicannons at the time - and had maybe thirty-eight (38) percent hull integrity left... but fighting that Glaive had allowed things around the Titan to calm down, oddly. And I carried the AFMU to fix modules up, so I made sure the canopy was back at full integrity and went back in. Hull was down to 35 percent by the time another Scythe began to pay attention, as did a Glaive, and I decided it wasn't worth risking my existing cargo despite having leftover limpets. Way out went fine, with the exception of a caustic mine going off and reducing that hull integrity counter to 27%. Caustic coverage lasted throughout, thanks to having enough materials to synth some sinks up. Mostly necessary thanks to that annoying Glaive.
The third attempt was similar except I ignored the Thargoids more despite them making a lot of angry noises, only to fly away again or not fire because they were afraid of hitting the Titan(maybe?). And I gathered the pods a lot more quickly, thanks to a lack of interruption from Glaives, only Scythes that I didn't want sending who knows what into the ship via the cargo hatch. 48 on that 'run', before I decided to get out of there when the Titan triggered its disruption field. A Cyclops decided to annoy me at that point, but its cannon is not really that powerful so I kind of just looked at it in an annoyed way when it flew past my canopy. It didn't have its swarm out either, for some reason.
So, yeah, a total of 123 pods recovered for those initial three attempts. I might do more, I might not. I'm not sure - it's quite stressful, and I get the feeling that recovery work will get a lot harder once the torpedoes start flying. If they haven't already - Aegis has released an article about the torpedoes becoming available. And I guess their weapon isn't as bad as I thought at the top of this log, but I'm still not sure I like the idea of it anyway. So I'll likely keep my distance from it, except for maybe observing. They also acknowledged that matter of the remaining captives. Great. Except they're willing to throw them under the bus to prevent further casualties.
I guess my own contribution is just a drop in an ocean, but I wanted to be sure I'd done something. I asked Aegis if they could tell me whether those pods I recovered happened to hold someone I knew, by pure coincidence, but I was told it'd be difficult for them to make exceptions without being accused of unfair treatment. So I guess I'll have to wait like everyone else. Thought about delivering pods to the Allied rescue ship in Sun Wen, given how they stand on the matter - but it wouldn't matter, since no one I know well locally is an Allied citizen. So I just did it at the closest independent one.
Aaaanyway... that was another long one. And I'm really looking back and this and thinking... it's only been a few months since that Titan rescue in November, I think it was. But I've come quite a way since then. Not too long ago, I was kind of skittish when it came to anything tougher than a Cyclops, now those things are basically target practice for me, and I can take on a Basilisk without any real trouble, while I... don't feel quite as unsettled if a Medusa shows up. Hydras, well, let's just say I'm not about to put on a show and go for a kill solo, but I can put up a fight, at least. Even figured out that, done correctly, modified shard cannons will shred a Glaive before its melter field can do a meaningful amount of damage to the weapons. even feel a bit sorry for them.
And just look at me going to a Titan all on my own without immediately getting myself killed, or panicking like a headless duck. Or is it a headless chicken? You probably know the saying. Wouldn't have been too long ago, and I'd have told someone that I'd be doing this in the future crazy, while laughing at the statement a little.
Life's a funny business, isn't it? Wouldn't have done most of that - except the long-distance journeys - in any other ship that the Krait. Really just getting more attached to that ship as I go.
Maybe I can actually look forward to an end of the war now, too. Or I'll at least definitely be keeping a close eye on proceedings, even if I don't attack any of the Titans myself. I still need to figure out where to pick off from when I no longer have Thargoids swarming over my plans at any moment. And I wish good luck to anyone who partakes in these attacks - taking a Titan down will not be simple under any circumstance.
That's enough for today. Jana out.
PS: Here's some bonus pictures of the corrosive burn marks the ship picked up when I was done recovering caustic tissue samples and near the rescue megaship for the caustic sinks.