To put it simply, it's a game where if your ship catches fire, you can vent the atmosphere into space to put out the blaze. It's fun and procedurally/randomly generated so no two playthroughs are the same, and I'm having a blast with it.
The following is something I've been thinking about for a couple of days now, a short story set on board a ship from FTL.
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E-472 was not pleased.
He was trying to work on his latest puzzle, this one was a tricky shifting waveform of overlapping sound and visual encodings that could, with time and effort, be seperated into a simple message. Puzzles like these were a favored passtime among his people. And Engi who were particularly good at these puzzles were well regarded within Engi Society, not unlike Sportsball players, on earth. E-472 was very good at puzzles, but the demands placed on him by his current duties were extremely distracting.
His days used to be slow and simple, running the interface system of a semi-automated refueling vessel, he used to have a lot of time to ponder his puzzles. Puzzles were one of the only things he truly enjoyed.
He devoted 8% of his available processor power to decoding the waveform puzzle, 10% more was running a continual diagnostic on his positronic systems. With the requisite 17% running his motor skills and visual sensors, this left a nice round 65% of his processor power devoted to controlling the weapons console on The Kestral, the ship he was currently serving on.
Controlling the weapons was not hard. Calculating the exact timing required to fire the burst lasers so they would pass through the gap in the enemy shields left by the ion cannon was so simple, even an Engi child could have performed the task flawlessly. 65% of his processor power was overkill, really. But The Kestral was vital to the survival of the federation, and it would not do to make a costly mistake on this particular mission.
E-472 watched dispassionately as his burst lasers found the quarter-second gap in the enemy's shields and stitched a line of holes across the vessels bow. He noted a minor explosion within the enemy craft, and the sudden drop in power readings from two of the three lasers that had been pounding The Kestrals shields for the better part of six minutes now. He spent four tenths of a second calculating the most efficient wording and then sent a message off to the bridge.
TO: CPT A. JACKSON - SUB: STATUS REPORT - FOE WPNS DMGD. NO LNGR ABLE TO PENTRT OUR SHLDS. RCMD BOARD ACTN COMMENCE. - FROM: WPNS OFFCR E-472
Eight seconds later, the intercom next to E-472 buzzed to life. He felt a flash of anger at this latest annoyance. The rest of the crew continually insisted on using vocal emissions for shipwide communication. It was so inefficient! He quickly sent the /kill command to his anger subroutines, then, on a further two millisecond reflection, sent the /kill command to his entire emotional subsystem. By the time that trigger was processed, the captain was speaking.
"Good shooting, Eefour! Switch to ion cannons to keep their weapons offline while Rask and Trinson beam over."
Having anticipated the order, E-472 had already brought the burst lasers offline and began powering up the secondary ion cannon. This done he reassigned an additional 5% of his processor power away from weapons control and shifted it towards his puzzle.
He missed the days when he could devote his entire positronic brain to his puzzles for hours at a time. But alas, it was not to be. At least until The Kestral didn't need him anymore.
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I hope you enjoyed it! See you tomorrow!
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