poppyhaze

no first use policy

  • she/her/tā

会说中文 ✨ QC at Falcon Safety Products ✨ will never be a famous writer



Boarding actions are inevitable in orbital battles, when the ship is wasted, oxygen vented, and planetside is not safe, there is only one place to go. So slide in the ceramic plates into your asbestos flight suits, the Marines hand out plastic rifles, and pray you make the leap.

Escape pods are designed to also be used for boarding, but the ergonomics have been compromised, you sit 10 deep, seats facing forward towards the breaching ring, hoping those armor plates haven't expired, as the engines blast you out of your dead hulk towards an enemy ship you hope is slightly less crippled.

They stick a Marine or an officer at the front to encourage you, they say with this many pods, shuttles, and mech assistance, we have a very good chance. It's easy for them to say, they have combat armor, their gun is rated for more than just emergency use. Check the safety.

The shock of the clamp was so sudden it made you want to vomit as the officer with the terahertz scanner shouted, "WE GOT GOOD AIR, STARTING CRACK, 5 SECONDS"

The cyberwarfare suite slowly slid open the doors and the officer threw a flashbang through. After it went off the radio barked, "OPEN HELMETS", no need for internal oxygen anymore, time to steal theirs.

The rest of you crawled over the collapsible seats like a comedy routine as the officer stood in the empty, undefended hallway. Their missile tub had run out of ammunition and the conscript crew evacuated. The Marines found an on-board gym to work off their adrenaline.



pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

never fear, organic nanoparticles consisting of a trinuclear cupric complex of the acylhydrazone derived from salicylaldehyde and the dihydrazide of dipicolinic acid will turn purple in the presence of spermine, and thus tell you if your steak is going bad. and other things I'm guessing ~Chara

(source : https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.6b01295 published on my birthday!)


qualia
@qualia
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Reactor refueling was always a slow process, something for the engineers to do, but the mech pilot needs to be in the cockpit anyway. Rarely does anything go wrong, so it's easy to zone out, check out the food cassettes, and select a meal.

Meals for pilots are always tube food, but its not as finely ground as baby food. They leave just enough texture that you can chew. Exo-atmospheric missions require you to wear a helmet and use the food port for the straw, but at the railhead, you don't need the helmet.

Select "Food Cassette" on the UI which rotates into place, then set the exterior viewscreen to relax-mode, natural scene, deep forest, cracking fire at night, adjusts birdsong and animal noises to be just infrequent and distant enough not to block radio transmission.

Now to the food, in the hot cassettes are the starters and mains. There was mashed potatoes with gravy, creamed spinach, sage stuffing with chorizo, egg fried rice with sausage, pumpkin soup, onion and cheese galette, hmmm the stuffing sounded good. Lets heat that.

Fingers flash on the controllers and after a short delay, a nice hot tube drops. The glove has just enough insulation to make it easy to pick up. Use the straw and the tube hisses slightly. One squeeze later and a synthetically powerful sage flavor fills the mouth.

As you eat/drink the stuffing paste, savoring the spicy sausage bits between the soft bready texture, the eye tracks the mains options: turkey in gravy, beef pot pie, chicken pot pie, fish cakes in aioli, ham with collard greens, General Tso's in broken rice, that's new.

Turkey would be too obvious considering the time of year, but the General Tso's sounds interesting. Another few clicks, the empty stuffing tube discarded, a sweet, savory flavor fills your mouth. The tiny chunks of meat that come through are somehow crispy.

Better not to think too hard about how they managed that food magic in a thermostabilized metal tube. You decide to check the cold cassettes for dessert to not think. Everything's caffeinated, puddings, fruit, apple tart, oooh, another new option: German chocolate chestnuts.

You've never tasted real German chocolate, but it caught your eye, and soon a cold tube drops. The chocolate flavor is a bit weak, the caffeine's bitterness obvious, but the chestnut pieces have a nice lightly sweet flavor and a bit of texture. The best new dessert tube.

The radio crackles to life, the groundside engineers confirm the reactor is refueled and nominal. You hit screen reset and drop your foot to open the trash hatch as the mech releases spent tubes to a ground station. "Didn't save any for me?" the engineer jokes. No time for that.