Interim Project: The Battle of Dragonspace

So, I remember that the idea of doing something on Moogle Club was thrown around, before we get started. I was looking over the White Cell stuff, and I had a thought. The Battle of Dragonspace, and especially if we include a lead-up that has some smaller battles and the like (and maybe some stuff from Battle of Albrook, too, but I feel that’s Travis’s show), might be a fun thing to write about.

I think a lot of us have irons in the fire here (and those who don’t could hopefully add a few). It culminates in a massive space battle, with two sides:

Anti-White Cell Task Force: Guardian Space Force, Sky Riders Aerospace Navy, Scandian League Combined Military Space’s remnants, possibly some of the Unbound
White Cell Allied Fleet: Space Armada Granda Army, Esper Union Aerospacy, maybe others?

We could also do stories about smaller engagements, both in space and on the ground that lead up to it. There could be stories about space pirates slipping into the SAGA flagship, the Executor. There could be rocking mecha battles, special ops confrontations, and tense negotiations.

For how to structure it: I’m thinking a fourth forum for Moogle Club, under Kupopolis Related Forums, just for this. No threads or anything; we just do posts as they come to us, collaborate freely, and try to tell an exciting story leading up to and including the battle.

Thoughts?

I guess it might also be called a Mini-IS.

After some talk with Matt, I’m gonna lock this for now! That’s because we had an idea for something friendlier to everyone from shooting the shit. I’ll post it shortly. We can revisit this IN THE FUTURE.

I had a durr moment: lockin’ this is silly, so if you’d like to discuss it, feel free! Also apologies to Travis for freaking him out.

Space Assets in the Battle of Dragonspace
Based on what we’ve seen from the flurry of White Cell notes thus far… Based entirely upon my recollection of stuff people’ve written. But here, in a very broad sense, are the various fleet presences we would see in a retelling of the Battle of Dragonspace. Feel free to correct any mistakes I’ve made in the telling of it:

•SAGA: The Space Armada of the Grand Army, lead by General Velasco, joins with Erdeny and Torstensson. Most of SAGA’s capital ships go with Velasco, with a few noteworthy exceptions (e.g. the Reinhardt in Carrionspace). By the time we get to Dragonspace, White Cell has decided to make an example of the Scandian League: the Executor and her fleet are in orbit and are pounding the eveloving snot out of Dragon III.

•EU Aerospacy: Betrays the Esper Union and joins with White Cell, bolstering SAGA’s fleet numbers. Though, on its own, the EU’s space presence diminished dramatically after the Sky Riders went off on their own, their partnership with White Cell’s SAGA helps to form one of the most powerful (and threatening) space fleets the Web has ever known. Elements of EU Aerospacy are likely part of the White Cell presence in Dragon.

•Sky Riders: Join in various efforts to resist White Cell in space. By war’s end, they reestablish their affiliation as the official space fleet of the Esper Union. (we always knew those crazy kids’d get back together in the end…) At Dragonspace, they are part of Thames’ coalition (perhaps known as the “Coalition of What’s Left”).

•GSF: The Guardian Space Fleet spends much of the war playing defense, trying in vain to keep White Cell from rolling over its colonies. They end the war strong, however, as Grand Admiral Thames rallies the anti-White Cell elements together in a single fleet to confront the Executor’s fleet at the Battle of Dragonspace.

•Rogue Squadron: Under Prime Minister Gorgon Wells, the Medinan Space Service was disbanded. What was left was embodied in a single fleet that operated under the GSF’s colors, called Rogue Squadron and commanded by Medinan hero Jarrod Rogue. At some point during the GA Civil War, Commander Rogue managed to bring several old Medinan vessels (and their unemployed crewmembers) out of mothballs to bolster the squadron’s numbers. Though they, like the GSF, were unable to defend the majority of their colonies from White Cell attack, Rogue Squadron was there to prove its mettle at the Battle of Dragonspace.

•The Unbound: Once thought hunted to extinction by the increased Guardian, Tasnican and Sky Rider efforts to stamp them out, this loose association of pirate captains was brought together by the curious charisma of zombie space pirate Marbles Marlowe. Marlowe’s Unbound helped to keep White Cell from entrenching in the Alter Dimension by raiding their supply lanes, and when it came time to assault the White Cell fleet in Dragonspace, Marlowe and his raiders were eager to accept the invitation. But what does this mean for piracy after the war? Newfound legitimacy? A frank discussion of imperialism and a redress of the wrongs committed by the powers of the Core? Or does something similar to the old status quo “cat and mouse” game resume immediately thereafter? (candidly, Marlowe looks forward to the latter… yarrr…)

•The Forthenan Grand Fleet: A lesser spacefaring power, Forthena earned itself some points by keeping White Cell from digging its claws into the Alter Dimension (with the invaluable assistance of the Unbound, of course). Long enjoying a close friendship with the Guardians, of course they’d ask the Forthenans to join in the final push against White Cell (and, of course, the Forthenans would say yes).

•The Balian Fleet: The space fleet of the Kingdom of Bal is a hand-me-down from the old IJF. While the designs are old, and originally inferior to modern vessels, the partnership between Bal and Guardia has given the Balians access to better tech and upgrades over the years. Bal’s fleet has, at the time of the Battle of Dragonspace, the virtue of not having seen damage from confrontations with White Cell, so their numbers were at full fighting force when they answered the GSF’s call to arms.

•The Brigade of the Arcing Talon: The Merge League’s air/space service. Throughout its history, the Merge League has taken a very different path toward power. Where most nations rely upon the great technological advances that have been made possible since the Great War, the Merge League has attempted to keep pace through advanced magical research. So it was that the Merge League built upon weapons originally devised by the Dark Wrath, and built a space fleet of shadowy dread-ships modeled after the flying terror Sathanas. Commanded by Tyranthraxus of the Clock (an Amethyst dragon masquerading as a time mage), the Merge League’s fleet found itself fighting in Dragonspace alongside the GSF – a force that had not long ago been an implacable enemy.

Oooh, that’s handy. I think the Malakim sent some forces here, too; what was left after the fighting basically went with SAGA. I’m not sure if Hannibal and Derik have thrown down by this point.

I had a couple of rough thoughts on how this could be run. Since it’s focused on one location – with likely exceptions, but they’re probably just exceptions – I was thinking it might be better to run it without threads. Instead, we’d pick up, say, four weeks before the Battle of Dragonspace begins (in-story time). Out of story time, we’d advance a week every… oh, maybe 2 or 3 weeks, until we get to the battle itself.

Then, we write Until It’s Over. The idea would be keeping some pacing between our plot threads and finding ways to weave them together, while also showing the immediate build-up to the battle.

Re: Threads, the nature of these boards at moogle.club almost make threading a baked-in proposition, since posts don’t appear chronologically, but rather in the order of their latest reply. Or maybe this is something a reader has some control over through filtering? I dunno. That was my assumption anyway; but if all BoD posts went in as replies to a single forum post, rather than posts to a separate BoD forum, that might solve it…

I dunno. These boards are a far cry from what Sliver was, to be sure.

Yeah, what I’d do in a threadless situation is post the starter for each post as the topic, then the follow-ups as a reply. So posts in progress go to the top, but when it’s finished it’ll be chronological. Mostly.

Look at it this way: it’ll make us all the more eager for Mike’s thing when he finishes!

Most of SLCM-Space gets thoroughly trashed by SAGA before the cavalry shows up. They have a few ships that participate in the big battle, though there biggest contribution is a ridiculously powerful Dracoform. (Inspired by basically space battle in Gundam – it needs a clever name!)

Well, there have been to date Jade and Zog and Ryu-model Dracoforms… surely there are Breath of Fire bosses whose names we haven’t mined for content yet!

Bo knows Dracoforms.

+500 points

Did a little thinking on things I’d like to hit in this:

  • Van and part of SRAN, with some Grand Army forces, departing for Unity. Probably in the very first part of the Mini-IS.
  • Hannibal versus Derik, and generally Hannibal’s presence and then eventual vanishing.
  • Something with the mom of one of the characters I’m gonna do in the main story; maybe as a Malakim, maybe as an Aerospacy mecha pilot. This might be for the other mini-IS? I’m still brainstorming.
  • A space Dracoform pilot who is secretly a member of the Dragon Clan. When his Dracoform goes down, he turns into a dragon and goes apeshit on SAGA.
  • The SRAN admiral vs. the Aerospacy admiral.

Blowing up the Executor feels like a “duh.”

I was looking into mods and extensions, but this forum’s creators seem pretty adamant on staying threadless. Forums can have sub-forums ad nauseum though.

No worries! Good to know sub-forums are an option, if a kinda clunky one.

Better late than never, huh!?!?

Anyway, my original plan for the End of the Executor was to have Manta and/or Praxer to sneak Celiose Cole onboard, where he could (1) have a dramatic final confrontation with Torstensson and Erdeny and (2) use his super-secret, special Generalissimo codes to (apparently) sacrifice himself to take out the Executor.

I think we are almost literally picking up a year later and amazingly I remember the details.

Makes sense! I was thinking the SRAN might do this crazy balls-out attack with asteroids that just fails? The asteroids get blown up and the SRAN take heavy losses. But hey, they… save the Scandians…?

(I won’t get tired of that irony.)

Here’s a thought I just had:

Can we do a “White Cell Anthology”? A sort of thread where we can just dump stories and posts that happen during White Cell, without the expectation that they would need to be a full-blown IS or even be in order? Sort of like how, in Neo, we had a few random posts that happened between Proper and Neo?

My original gut feeling was that doing all of White Cell as a “true IS” would be a bit of a chore, and most of my interest in Kupopolis Reborn had to do with Kuper Heroes and random other silly things anyway.

On the other hand, there are points of White Cell that it seems almost a shame to do without. (like…the Battle of Dragonspace!) I actually had to think a lot about how I was going to characterize Erdeny as a hate-filled bitch determined to set herself apart from her father by being “opposite day Celiose”, and I feel like putting White Cell 100 percent in the background robs us of some important moments of setting up Reborn and climactic moments from Proper.

In other words, I don’t want to do all of White Cell, just the good bits, and they may not all be in order. (I do want to leave at least certain things fuzzy in case the demands of a Reborn story make it convenient to have something happen, much like how lots of stuff in Proper happened “during the Great War”.)

Also significant to the above:

I don’t necessarily want to do the White Cell anthology first! I kind of like the idea of a thread where people can put “stuff that happened in White Cell” whenever they feel like it, with maybe more coordinated efforts for multi-writer key events (like the climactic battle of Dragon, or the Four Seasons Campaign in the Upperlands in Mana which is like the “ostfront” of this war.)