Shot, Lance, and Missile: the weapons of Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series

I'll be doing a big post about the military science fiction series tomorrow, but I'll do a brief rundown before talking about the weapons systems in the TLF series. In a nutshell, it's hundreds or so years into the future. Humanity is divided into two major interstellar factions, the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds. There's two smaller factions, the Callas Republic and Rift Federation, but they're allied with the Alliance, so I don't count them as separate entities. The series follows Captain John "Black Jack" Geary as he's revived from stasis one hundred years after being forced to abandon his warship after it was attacked in an opening salvo of a war between the two powers, a war that is still ongoing. Not long after being revived, he's placed in command of the Alliance fleet (which had been lured into a trap and ambushed) and charged by its former commanding officer to get it home.

Oh hey, look, Sherlock Holmes getting bad touched by Spock

Or it could just be a picture from Star Trek 2: Transphasic Boogaloo.

Picture via Tor.com.

The USS Enterprise, the Queen of Scifi starships

The Serenity, Millenium Falcon, the White Star, and others are all iconic starships in science fiction, but without a doubt, the Enterprise rises above them all.

Picture via Nerd Approved.

RavenstarStudio's mobile repair station is an awesome model

One of my finds while ass deep in blogs last night was this kickass looking Forge Class Mobile Repair Station.

Fifty years ago today, John Glenn became a rocket man

I didn't realize it until I saw Beyond Apollo's post about it, but today marks the fiftieth anniversary of John Glenn being blasted off into orbit. Certainly, he wasn't the first man in space - that honor goes to the late Yuri Gagarin - nor was he the first American in space - that would be Alan Shepherd - but he was the first in this country to orbit the big blue mothership, so that made him a hero during the early days of the space race.

My hat off in humble respect to John Glenn and everyone who has journeyed into the final frontier, regardless of who they are or where they are from. Same goes to the ground crew and everyone behind the scenes, who never get enough of the credit, in my opinion.

Now that's what I call a space battle

I saw this after action report on the most excellent Super Galactic Dreadnought, a blog about space-based roleplaying gaming. In this case, it was a battle involving a game called Starfleet Wars, now called Galactic Knights. Desert Scribe writes a pretty good report and it's worth reading. I'll let him set up the scenario:

...Three separate forces--an Avarian transport convoy, an Avarian military task force, and the Terran super galactic dreadnought--all crossed paths in the same sector of space...

And we're back

Sorry about that, I went off half-cocked and deleted Rayguns and Spacesuits because of second thoughts. Fortunately, I had third and fourth thoughts and undeleted it. Regular posting to resume shortly.

In which I give the USS Enterprise-F an A.

It was recently announced that the next member in the proud lineage of the Enterprise family would be appearing in Star Trek Online, Cryptic Studio's MMO. The Enterprise-F (for fantastic, I assume) is an Odyssey-class vessel designed for combat and exploration. It was designed by Adam Ilhe. My thoughts after the jump.