[M] TradeHard, an Interstellar Adventure of Exploration and Trade (OOC)

[StormWolf]

Security Chief it is!

[Atethecat]

I'm thinking of creating another character, but I can't quite make up my mind on what I want...

[StormWolf]

Spoiler: Chief Korso 

Full Name: Anson Korso
Alias: Chief, Watchdog, ULF-10642
Species: Aug-Terran (manufactured post-human)
Biological Gender: Male
Age: 34 Galactic Standard Years

Spoiler: Appearance 

Anson cuts a figure, that much is certain. He stands at an even 1.9 meters with broad shoulders and a thickly muscled frame, affectionately (or not) referred to as "a regular brick shithouse". Fair skinned with cropped brown-blonde hair and beard, Anson is hirsute and heavily tattooed with the popular geometric neo-deco style of certain industrially inclined Terran cultures. He bears scars from a lively military service, as well as surgical marks from his various augmentations and upgrades as ordered by the Technocratic Union. A QR code is stamped into the stump of his neck, not a tattoo, but a pattern of melanin he was born with. Right beneath it is his oldest surgical mark. Anson’s eyes are a cold cerulean and wide like predator looking for his next meal.
Unless required to wear a helmet or to have no accessories on his head, Anson can almost always be seen wearing a patrol cap that looks like it has seen its fair share of wear and tear.

Spoiler: Off Duty 

When off the clock, Anson will usually be seen in his service coveralls. Commonly a bland khaki, olive drab, or navy blue. If he’s feeling particularly casual, he’ll have his coveralls half down. If he is planet-side, he'll usually don a jacket of some sort or another should the weather demand it. He always has his utility belt on him, his service sidearm holstered at his hip, along with restraints and utility knife.

Spoiler: Kitted Up 

When kitted up for full-tilt operations, Anson suits up in his Mk.IV JÆGER hardsuit, a highly customized combat and exploration suit specifically designed for frontier combat.

Crew Position: Chief of Security

Spoiler: Personal Equipment 

Mk. IV JÆGER Hardsuit: An exo-suit with micro-servos for augmented physical performance and resistance, as well as jump jets for full three-dimensional navigation, reactive digital camoflage, mag-plates, and limited internal atmosphere management.

Spoiler: AIM-501 Rifle 

The Asgari Industries model 501 chem-rail modular rifle, commonly called the ‘Ranger Rifle’ among Firewall personnel, and Anson’s very favorite gun. The M-501 uses a combination of chemical acceleration and magnet rail propulsion to fire caseless ammunition at massive velocities in semi-automatic, burst fire, and fully automatic modes. By design, the Ranger Rifle is highly modifiable with a wide array of internal components capable to tweak and swap, as well as various attachments and furniture.
Anson's golden standard is a basic Operational Battle Rifle loadout, favoring accuracy, range, and versatility to stopping power of raw destructive force. This includes a multi-range scope (reflex to 5x), angled foregrip, extended magazine and chem-clip, and telescopic barrel.

Spoiler: MAWLR Particle Magnum 

A truly unique piece made by Anson himself using compatible components from his late SOs service rifle and whatever was on hand through the years. It’s loud as it is ugly, and kicks like a rampaging rhino. The MAWLR definitely violates most firearms regulations. With it’s overclocked plasma burn, a full clip could melt its way through military grade plating. Wyatt Earp had his Peacemaker, Anson has his MAWLR

Spoiler: Skills 

Anson is, by every extent, a result of a spartan military industrial complex. As a former member of of the Technocratic Union’s Ranger Corps, and a patched in member of Firewall’s Alpha Company, he possesses a great deal of martial, mechanical, and practical know-how. It is frequently said that ‘if it fits in a hand, Anson can find a use for it’, and that is only partially hyperbole. Given time, even with the most peculiar of alien weaponry, Anson will likely find a way to use it short of genetic sequencing. Furthermore, he is well versed in solo and squadron-based tactics, naval weaponry and tactics, interrogation, stealth, demolitions, wilderness/urban/zero-G survival, basic mechanics, field first-aid, and terrestrial piloting. To a lesser extent, Anson can pilot spacecraft, but not through complex and dangerous environs. He has a passing knowledge of software and ship systems, always better at breaking them than repairing, maintaining, or manipulating them. Chief Anson Korso is a marksman, martial artist, and competitive drinker par excellence.

However, he appears disquieted and anxious in the tight confines of a starship. He is a man who excels planet-side, thriving under a real sun with dirt under his boots. To him, a hazardous and unwelcoming rock in space is always preferable to the flying coffin of a starship.

Spoiler: Strengths 

As made evident earlier, Anson has an expansive repertoire of practical skills at his disposal, made possible by the nature of his being. Though he looks human, Anson is much, much more. His designer spliced in several Terran genetic strains with the human genome base. He has the sharpened senses of Canis Lupus and the healing capabilities reflexes, and muscle torque of Panthera Tigris, further augmented with synthetic and surgical alterations. Anson’s skin is tougher than a normal human, his nervous system amplified with a cortical stack to bolster hand-eye coordination and reaction speeds. Synthetic adrenal augs and other chemical combat stims can be switched on with a subdermal oral stimulus (biting the tongue), allowing him to operate at an enhanced capacity for a brief period of time. Due to the enhanced neurons provided by his stack, Anson develops combat muscle memory and subliminal pattern recognition very quickly. In layman’s terms: the longer someone spends fighting him, the worse time they are going to have, and he remembers the way a person (or people) behaves.

Spoiler: Weaknesses 

One of Anson’s greatest assets is his enhanced senses in the field, making him a prime ranger in alien biospheres, but if there is not a hospitable atmosphere, Anson is confined to his helmet, making his sensed useless, at best. At worst, sharp audio feedback or flash bangs could leave him highly disoriented. Furthermore, Anson’s combat stims are highly toxic. Prolonged use could lead to organ damage and overdose. If something were to render Anson’s Jæger suit inoperable, he’d be stuck inside of it until the systems rebooted, or unless he was able to muscle through the servos and activate the failsafe. Like any soldier, even those trained in many disciplines, Anson will find himself limited in efficacy when unable to use any of his weapons or tools of the trade.
Combat Muscle Memory is hard-coded. If an individual or faction suddenly changes up their behavior, it will take Anson time to adapt, which usually means getting slobber-knocked for a few shakes.

Spoiler: Personality 

Anson is a pragmatist and a realist, never one to give a crap shoot when the chips are down, and bluntly honest to the point of offense in most cases. Yet, he possesses a kind of rough, unrefined charisma that can be hard to deny when he is on your side... like a grinning pitbull. While not terribly strict in adherence to any particular military discipline, he stringently follows a personal creed and code of conduct he holds others to, whether they know it or not.

Spoiler: The Korso Creedo 

-Crew comes first.
-Do not start a fight, but always be the one who ends one.
-If someone fires upon you, make sure they don’t live to regret it.
-There is no such thing as “acceptable collateral”.
-Do not trade any life but your own.
-Trust your gut before your head gets in the way.
-There’s 3 kinds of people: Bad people, people you follow, and people you protect.
-Whatever you do, be ready to answer for it.
-Every kid needs an adult who gives a shit, no matter what.
-Do not challenge your SO’s position, unless their orders conflict with the above.

Spoiler: History 

Anson's story begins in a test tube, like so many others like him. There has long since been an unspoken practice in the Technocratic Union of pushing the bleeding edge in military bio-tech. TU's program started with augments and modifications, 3d-printed super-organs and tissue, but it wasn't enough. They needed more.

Enter the AT program. Military grade, designer-specified soldiers. Anson was among the first batch of the Union's 10th generation ATs, designed for prolonged service in unspecified theaters. Unlike his predecessors, Anson does not have a shelf life. He ages along the same grade as a normal humans, and has all the biological bells and whistles. It was as close as the TU's infamous Dr. Zaratha ever got to playing god - creating a completely different lifeform. For all anyone knows, Dr. Natalia Zarathra is still out there practicing, making monsters for the highest bidder.

So, there began Anson’s journey, as a serial number and a multiple choice scantron. Once the proper pieces were sequenced and he was incubated it the tank, where he underwent several in vitro operations and REM education coding. By the time Anson was decanted from his tank, he was physically mature and combat ready. Yet, being within the first hundred of the 10th generations, he was rigorously tested by the Union’s QA department, who “hammered out the bugs” with memetic conditioning and surcical procedure. Test runs involved deployment across the sector to quell dissidents against the Union and their subsidiaries, in which Anson performed admirably, beyond expectations.

On one such prolonged campaign, Anson fell into enemy hands and off the Union’s grid. A rebel cell in the sector had mustered up enough blood money to hire out a Private Military Company, one of the best – Firewall. Through blood and sweat, Anson was subdued, his squadron terminated. In the hands of the Firewall bio-techs, Anson’s memetic programming was cracked through a painstaking process of psychological and physical... purification. Through such means, Anson learned from the Firewall Alpha Squadron, who treated him as family. They imparted upon him actual know-how, not just digital, sterile combat information. They taught Anson how to improvise and empathize, how to be a person, if not a violent person by nature alone. In him, Firewall has a bleeding-edge asset, a chance to turn a major profit in the extended galactic theater.

Other:

[ｒａｂｂｉｔ]

Spoiler: w i p 

Full Name: Saiph Ekko Regulus
Alias: Static
Species: Terran
Biological Gender: Female
Age: 29 GSY
Description / Appearance:

Spoiler: x 

Spoiler: kit (for missions/excursions, etc): 

Crew Position: Communications Officer
Personal Equipment:

handheld communications devices: aesthetic example x cont
compact display, limited function

Skills: cryptography, codes, technology, linguistic, communications gear,
Strengths: Space Orc™ (you get the idea)
Weaknesses: body's natural inhibitors, keeping her from using strength, mental capacity, etc to maximum - adrenaline, etc, can override this, but usually results in injury or exhaustion; Saiph's biggest fear is drowning
Personality:
History: Having grown up rough in the slums of a major trading port, there were always new people and things coming and going, and Saiph learned languages that way as a child. She hustled and stole, nearly never knew where she was going to sleep next, but when she was nine years old, she and her friends found an old radio in the scrap heap. The thing barely functioned and her friends lost interest quickly, but she fiddled it with enough to understand it's workings, repaired it, and was hooked: it opened up a whole new world to her, outside the hull of the trading port, and presented new opportunities for her future. Though self taught for a while, she showed enough promise in the eyes of one Thaddeus Ess, the proprietor of a small but successful custom communications business and storefront.
Other: Saiph likes hot food. Like, hot-hot-burn-your-mouth-and-you-refuse-to-blow-on-it-hot food. She likes spicy food, too, but temperature is a thing, since she didn't get a ton of hot meals as a kid.

[ｒａｂｂｉｔ]

whoops

[Splat]

Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. I still want to join, I’m just having trouble coming up with a cool alien. Once I do that, I’ll get a sheet going.

[Holeypaladin]

Glad to see so much interest! @StormWolf; and @ｒａｂｂｉｔ; as you work to finish up your characters, I suggest reviewing note number 4 under the Important Setting Information! It's possible that "Terra" is a fairly common name for various planets across the galaxy, however, as it's a Latin word, and Latin is thought to be one of the ancient Promethean precursor languages.

[Q]

@Splat

I've always told myself the true alien can't be comprehended by the human mind - which essentially began my departure from my spaceopera-inspired daydreams. (They're now about futuropolii and domed cities!) I mean, I firmly believe we're not the only life in the galaxy, but it just wouldn't make sense to have a multi-solar civilization with just humans inhabiting it. Thus, my reluctance to play anything alien.

This brings me to another thesis: were it so the 'big bang' theory is actually right, perhaps the universe runs on a physical paradox: if one is to exceed the speed of light, this would create another big bang, and a reset would take place.

Hmm. I hope anyone can follow.

[Holeypaladin]

I'm of the mind that in order to appreciate many genres of sci fi, you have to accept that most of our theories might be proven incorrect. Since we have no means of actually testing the "speed limit" of light, it remains a theory... a theory which most physicists assume is factual, but still unproven. The only momentum laws that I consider factual and irrefutable are Newtonian physics, which are only applicable at speeds under .75C. A certain amount of "superscience" is necessary in order for interstellar travel to be practical, including FTL drives and, in the case of the Spice of Life at least, reactionless thrusters that have the appearance of violating Newtonian physics (though they don't in actuality, since they use a form of artificial gravity or electromagnetic field).

[ｒａｂｂｉｔ]

I figured that since Q used it that's what we were calling humanoids. Since she was born and raised on a trading station, not a planet, I was defaulting to that. Is that unacceptable?