Star Wars Advent 2018 Day 15 and a Rogue Trooper

I think Rose has found someone to aim that stun gun of her's at ...

We have a rogue trooper today, away from his barracks and with a Rose between him and the gun rack.

I think his future may be a bit dark.

A bit like the middle book ! It's Rogue Star by Andy Hoare. It's set in the grim dark future of the 40th millennium, yep it's another Warhammer 40k book. This one was a bit different because it wasn't looking into the Imperial Guard or the Space Marines or the Mechanicus as in Titanicus, this book was about the Rogue Traders who ply the dangerous spacelanes looking to bring good to those who will pay hefty amounts to receive them while avoiding the dangers out there.

This is another that I haven't read in a while but I remember it giving great descriptions of the worlds visited by Lucian Gerrit and his crew and the hidden dangers present. There's also a devastating space battle.

On to another rogue trooper and we have the first Mass Effect book, Revelation. This one is all about Captain Anderson and the rogue agent Saren. Saren doesn't like humans much and that's really brought home in this book. However, it's 200 and a bit pages that just expand out a few lines of dialogue in the game. If you've played it, then there isn't much extra here. You learn a bit more about characters that are fleshed out some more but there isn't much actually new.

If you're a fan of Mass Effect (and most game players are !), it's well worth it. But if you haven't played the games (please do, they are excellent) then this is one to avoid.

Best is last this time.

David Weber made his name with a character called Honor Harrington. She starts in this book as the Commander in charge of the light cruiser Fearless. The book opens with a set of training scenarios where Honor is fated to be on the losing side. She doesn't like this, so she turns the tables with some clever strategy.

Which a superior doesn't like and she finds herself semi-exiled off to the Basilisk Station (hence the name of the book !). She sets about sorting things out in the system, only for the People's Republic of Haven offer to take over and effectively annex the system.

The series of books is very definitely set up as a shifting situation with an ongoing war between the Manticore Star Kingdom (the English) and the Havenites (French revolutionaries) with the Andermani (Germans) and the bloated Solarian Empire (the Americans) looking on from the sidelines.

These are an excellent series of books, although I admit I did stop reading at Storm From The Shadows. That's the second in a spin off series and I'd read 12 of the main series.

The good - the technology that is in use for the ships is kept very consistent and (as much as scifi usually is) realistic. There are gravity drives in use which happen to get around the problem of human fragility to acceleration. The gravity drives provide the equivalent of shields but the main weaponry is a combination of long range missiles and shorter range Lasers and GRASERs (Gamma Ray lasers). The missiles are nuclear tipped and will attempt to knife their way through opposing ships by using X-Ray bomb pumped lasers. There is a lot of combat in the earlier books and it's presented extremely well.

But there's also an intelligence in the interactions of the characters. It's a series that stayed highly interesting up until the later books where too much daft politics started creeping in as well as silliness with the espionage related technologies.

I'd highly recommend this series as something to enjoy for however long you feel able to stick with it.

How's me ? I think I'm past the hump of my bugs, although they'll probably slow me down a fair bit. If I'd attempted to do anything physically then I'd have been flat on my back almost immediately.

Instead .... Stellaris. (And I probably just got the neighbours very concerned with an extended paroxysm of coughing, you know - the type where you see stars and there's a ringing in your ears.)

This is from not too for before I shut down for the evening. The Nomnivorian Raveners have already eaten (literally) 3 opposing races fairly easily. There's just been a substantial change in the game for the 2.2 update which is ... very much up and down for me.

The up is that there's much more scope now in how you arrange your planets.
The down is that there's much more scope now for your planets to destroy your economy and bring your progress to a juddering halt.
(Your income can suddenly flipflop from +100 income to -100 income and it took some understanding as to why).

There is a reaction that you can do as a player, by manipulating that economy by turning off certain buildings so your workers go to the buildings that work the foundation stuff. But I'm not convinced the AI knows how to do that. One of the huge strengths of Stellaris was that it gave me a fun challenge, in the early days at least. I'm not convinced it can do that at the moment and it definitely feels like the expansion and gameplay patch has been rushed out.

Will keep an eye on it, continue this current game and then play other things when the campaign is done and the Nomnivorians have eaten the galaxy.