Crozarius

Lore Impact (Medium) Team Purview: (Unathi) Short Description: A new cultural idea in the Sinta'Unathi (Karszekani) zeitgeist that idealizes a return to melee-based fighting where practical, encouraged by new modern technology such as energy blades and personal shields, and heavily influenced by the generational trauma caused by the mass suffering inflicted by the industrialized mass ranged warfare of the Contact War. How will this be reflected on-station?: Traditional/Honourable Unathi would have a more concrete IC justification to use melee weapons where practical, and the loadouts of Karszekani-aligned offships/NPCs may have to be tweaked to reflect this change in attitude. Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Unathi already have something of a reputation for being melee monsters, and this is backed up mechanically. However, what I believe is missing is a cultural reason for them to be so keen on melee; they have been using ranged firearms in warfare since the year 1800CE, so why do they like swords so much even in this modern age? Additionally, this gives another Thing that makes Unathi culturally distinct from Humans. Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Yes Long Description: I wrote a big manifesto on this earlier on Discord, and if you want to read the thing in its entirety you can find it here. However, I'll try to condense it down into the essence of what I intend in this post: Essentially, based on already established lore, the Sinta'Unathi have been using ranged warfare since the 1800s CE, and they had fully equipped their collective militaries with ranged warfare by 1950 CE. Industrialised warfare, basically. There has been a longstanding narrative thread about the pressures put on Warrior Honor by the "challenges" of modern warfare, but that has never really been specifically expounded on. The way that I see it, melee warfare would have fallen largely out of favor in Unathi warfare by the time the Contact War occurred, because it really isn't practical whatsoever to be using melee warfare as a primary tactic in a universe where each side is canonically equipped with machineguns and jet powered aircraft and ICBMs. What I propose is that the massive cultural shock the Sinta'Unathi experienced as a result of the scale of death of the Contact War has essentially soured their attitudes on the use of ranged weapons in warfare, and in light of new technology that has now been made available to the Unathi over the last few decades - Energy swords, hardsuits, and energy shields capable of repelling ranged weapons entirely - a new Renaissance of thought has emerged that maybe melee combat CAN be viable again, using these new technologies. This could be specifically a Warrior thing too, a desire to return to "The Good Old Days" where you could face your enemy in honest combat with a sword in your hand, and the victor be determined by the strength and skill of your own body, with only as much bloodshed as necessary. A less wasteful mode of war. Now, this isn't a proposal to make all Sinta'Unathi soldiers everywhere eschew ranged weapons in favor of melee, but more of an encouragement that they would use it where it's practical. Obviously in open land warfare it's still not practical to be using melee warfare, save for some niche cases where you might be able to do it (e.g. urban environments) However, one new MASSIVE frontier of warfare for the Unathi is in space. We're talking narrow hallways, close encounters, ship boarding and wall breaching. A perfect environment for Sinta'Unathi to employ this new melee and shield oriented strategy. As a bit of a tail to this: we all read in the Mudki arc, where the Karszekani successfully used teleporter tactics to directly teleport a bunch of Kataphracts into Izaku's throneroom to gank him. This is fucking awesome and should totally be enshrined as A Thing The Unathi Like To DoTM because teleporting eight hardsuit-clad melee monsters directly onto someone's bridge is an awesome visual spectacle, and could totally be displayed in a news article somewhere (A lot of non-Unathi ICly view Unathi as something of a joke militarily. I'd love to see the Unathi do stuff to prove their capability so that people stop dismissing them as low tech primitives)

Lore Impact: Small Species: Unathi Short Description: She Who Mauls is an Unathi animated television show. How will this be reflected on-station?: People might talk about having seen it, or make reference to it in casual conversation. Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: No, there are already other entertainment media that canon exist for Unathi, but I think it's cool. Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Yes Long Description: She Who Mauls is a science-fiction animated television series that began before the Contact War. Originally, it followed the tale of a prospective Zandi from an obscure settlement of Moghes attempting to qualify as a Zandiziite Warrior. A primary concept of the show is the idea of "Spirit Power" -- wherein the protagonist (And, eventually, antagonists) would improve their strength and martial abilities by channeling the power of their ancestors through their bodies, performing increasingly superhuman (superunathi? supersinta??) feats as the series continued. The unnamed protagonist's chosen Zandiziite moniker "She Who Mauls" was/is controversial with audiences, as the Zandiziite Games only admits Warriors; however, through her stunning "spirit power" abilities, she was accepted as a contestant. The story follows the trials and tribulations associated with She Who Mauls competing in the Zandiziite games with such abilities; her status as a woman is frequently bought up as a point of ire and contention - something to be overcome by succeeding in various games; and also touches on aspects of Th'akh religion through which spirit power is derived (This, also, is probably controversial considering that the Hegemony is largely Sk'akh. I think of it as being a fanciful and probably racist exoticism of the Th'akh religion by Hegemonic Unathi at first, and it just kind of melds into people going "actually this shit is fire") However, the Contact War began before the first episode of the second season could be run, halting production, and the chaos that followed the atomic exchange caused the studio to become defunct. It was considered lost media in the years following, and it was thought that the studio itself had probably been destroyed. However recently ((2464ish)) it was revitalized by an Ouerean animation studio built from members of the original studio who had fled Moghes during the war. The following second season, and the currently-in-production third seasons of She Who Mauls have left behind the original Zandiziite Tournament origins of the story to instead focus on more fantastical threats and antagonists to Moghes, as well as continually increasing the power levels of the characters to new heights compared to the originally relatively grounded abilities of the first season. The location of the studio on Ouerea have also allowed it somewhat more political freedom to cover some potentially more controversial topics or plotpoints. The second season focused primarily on a threat to Moghes from a group of invading Unathi Pirates claiming to be the Scythes of Sik'amakh themselves made manifest, deriving their spirit power from the Unathi Pirate branch of the Th'akh religion. The third and currently ongoing season introduces Aut'akh to the story for the first time, with them using their powerful prosthetics to fight on-par with She Who Mauls for a time, before unexpectedly switching sides to become unlikely allies against a sudden invasion of very powerful Human Shells with similar abilities.

I have absolute confidence in Goolies' ability to RP as a tree. +1

I greatly like this idea and I'm in favor of it. Move the bloody xenoguns here too! Security characters can now sit down instead of standing in the central ring. Revolutionary!

I loved the arc as a whole. Finally, Unathi event focus! Fucking awesome. The events were all great, and I really appreciated the shift in focus of the Horizon doing things that it makes sense for the Horizon to be doing. The lower stakes missions were all very cool as well, and I really appreciated opportunities to cement my characters with canon rounds that didn't feel too dangerous, while also giving the opportunity to do *real* stuff that isn't just chair RP. A completely biased nitpick I have is: I feel like there wasn't enough consequence for crewmembers causing trouble during events. A point was made at the beginning of the arc, before the first event, to tell players look at and familiarise themselves with the Unathi legal system and laws, but it was never actually put into practise. Between multiple crew stealing from Unathi, disrespecting/backtalking important figures / guards, looting Mudki, and generally being dishonourable, I'm surprised that nobody got punished, either by the SCC administratively, or by the local guard themselves, for being shitheels. I feel like it was a missed opportunity to bring a much needed reality check to some players who are used to being assholes during events without consequence. People fucked around but unfortunately nobody found out; there wasn't a single lost hand! I think that it lessened my enjoyment of the arc as a whole very slightly, that the Unathi legal system / cultural values were largely disregarded by the crew without consequence and didn't have much impact on the events beyond non-crew related things like the Gawgaryn being executed and so forth.

I liked the test, as a proof of concept for a worst case scenario high intensity test. It felt like a high intensity canon round expedition in a lot of ways. I don't have a problem with it being high intensity; It was a direct upgrade from the weekend highpop round just rolling merc, because we had a cool map and a mission instead of a contrived gimmick. It was extremely laggy for me though. I would love to see peaceful oriented rounds where science and service and (people not security) get to shine. It's just the nature of things that not every round type has something for everyone to do. Some rounds Security is going to be doing this sort of assault, and some rounds they'll be unoccupied. This already happens in our current Secret model. As a BC, while I do like the cool factor of using the Intrepid as transport, I felt bad for Samga who had to be banished to the cockpit dimension for 3 hours and couldn't participate in the round because she had to shuttle back and forth. I was dreading being put on this duty myself. I guess this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Intrepid is not good for expeditions of mote than 5 people + pilots. There are not enough seats and buckles and standing space and storage space for more than maybe 9 people, possibly 13 if you use the sofa, office chair and medical bed. It's a shitshow. We need a bigger dedicated away mission lander; science would get mad if we turned their science ship into a bus.

As someone who was directly involved in this, as one of the Security Officers that round on the team beside Rakka (Kozha Ilkhi), and directly involved in this gunfight towards the end, I wanted to add that we were aware of Stacy Keely being armed to the gills prior to this happening; I reported that they had full armour and long weapons, and had welded the operations bay shut. Following that, we got the radio messages But at that time we had Shaw and his thrall on the run, location unknown, and we were actively dealing with a Vampire Hulking out in medical, we lost contact with Stacy and couldn't follow up on this. Both of the other two antagonists had gone loud, so to speak, and we were spread very thin at the time, and had been involved in multiple fights by the time Rakka encountered Stacy in the brig.

Bayar Yeke is cool, I like them as a OM. I've played about 5 or more rounds with them as Command, and interacted with them as Sec Officer, no problems. They already got got by the multi-line announcement fumble which was funny. Rite of passage achieved 😆

I like the realism of the idea, but I admit that I don't move crates or roller beds often. Looking at it, I like the spirit of the idea, but the Horizon just doesn't have the infrastructure to support it. I feel like this should be temporarily reverted while we wait for certain things to be added; Hoverbeds, handcarts, and a couple of medical elevators (I'm CERTAIN that you guys can squeeze in an elevator in there, even if the first one didn't work out. You've got several entire wings of medical which are literally never used!

I like the spirit of the stairs are dangerous PR. If anything, this just exposes the unrealistic mapping of Medical, and medical should be remapped with this in mind instead of reverting the dangerous stairs thing