Chojin Patriarch
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And another Paul discovers the delight of having the equivalent of a liquified encyclopedia poured into his brain. Good thing he can't get a headache unless he wants to now. Right, then. Let's see if it had anything useful in it...27th August 2013
Midday
Uuuuuuuuuuuugh…
Alright. Alright. Organise.
Not really an impediment to him, especially if he can find specs for the systems. Outside of truly exotic materials, it's trivial to fabricate what he needs.It was a ship, a Cheops class warship. And I also got enough of the technical schematics to know that it's never going to fly again. It would literally be easier to just build a new ship. The upper part of the bridge and Mammon's private quarters, which is probably why the fire was focused there. It being destroyed means that the controls for the entire ship no longer exist.
Huh.
Nothing is truly Idiot-proof, after all. It might seem to be, until nature breeds a better (worse?) idiot.I could probably run cables from the generators to jump-start an industrial revolution. The power supply is actually designed to be maintained by ignorant peasants and so is heavily idiot-proof-. Idiot-resistant. I mean, the ship got shot out of orbit, slammed into the ground and then got bombarded by something, and the worst that happened was a radiation leak that was contained in the engineering section.
And if he's got any memories of the franchise (reasonably possible, given there's two alternate continuities, effectively,) that should be ringing a bell.But more to the point, as far as I can tell, the Cheops is an older class of ship that is outclassed by just about everything these days. Mammon put it here because it wasn't worth taking with him on his travels because the other 'gods' he visited had ships that were superior to it but which were inferior to the ships given too him by the 'Supreme God' Ra.
Ding ding, we have a winner.
But is it the movie or the TV series? As I said, there are differences. Minor ones, and ones largely ignored by the fans.
So, no stargate on the planet. Removed by another party, or simply deployed and removed by Mammon's people after the locals were placed?
It's amusing how many TV stargate locations are entirely the opposite of that. Mostly because those worlds were nominally still controlled by Goa'uld.Okay. In the film Ra just flies to… Ah, whatever that planet was called, and he had those ring teleporters. There probably… No, it's an interstellar civilisation. Logically, every world they're actually using would have a gate, probably in a fortified location surrounded by guns, barricades and force fields somewhere within convenient travelling distance of a city. Except-. The gate activated, stayed open for a few minutes and then… They needed to enter coordinate on their side to open a portal back. That's no use for mass transit. It wouldn't be able to handle enough throughput. So the stargates are just… Convenient for small groups of people? And the one on that mining world was only there because it wasn't worth picking up and moving to somewhere more productive?
Ah, I was right: The tax records of the Systems Lords.Did Ra only turn up because he detected it activating when it wasn't supposed to?
Alright, so having them mine… Whatever they were mining, and sending a ship every few years makes more sense. That also matches what Mammon is described as doing: touring Ra's vassals and collecting their tax payments. I've got logs of what he picked up and the locations of those planets… But I don't have anything explaining what those coordinates mean.
Ah, if only he knew... And I so see him pronouncing it like the candy. (with a short 'a': 'Jaff-fah', rather than the 'jah-far' of the warriors.)There are also a few mentions of people called 'jaffa'. Apparently, most 'gods' use them as soldiers and naval crew, but Ra didn't, preferring to use humans. So when I encounter other gods I'll have no idea what their soldiers look like because all the images on file show humans.
Mammon used human soldiers as well, though that's because he couldn't get something called 'prim'ta' which the 'jaffa' need. Maybe that's what they eat? Or a drug, like ketracel-white? Ra appears to the supplier for most of Mammon's advanced technology, so if it wasn't something he used it would make sense that Mammon couldn't get it. Whatever it is.
Smaller populations, less risk of rebellion or advancing unexpectedly. And it's easy for single planets to fall through the cracks, really.There are census records here for the planets Mammon visited, and… These populations seem very low for industrial worlds. Which might just mean that they have a high degree of automation and so don't need manpower?
So what happened to the planet in the film? Did they suffer from some sort of environmental disaster, and Ra decided that it wasn't worth moving them? But… The settlement wasn't that big. It would only have taken a few days at most to move them all, and this census shows that there were plenty of places that could have taken them. Did he… Forget about them? That might explain the lack of technology…
Probably because it's not called 'Earth' by the Goa'uld. As for why Ra turned up on Abydos... Good question. Maybe the unexpected gate activation, as Mammon-Paul theorised. He'd probably have presumed it to be another Lord poking their nose in...I'm not seeing any mention of Earth by name. References to an original human homeworld mention that there was a rebellion and the gate was cut off, but… There's no reason that I can think of why they couldn't just send a couple of ships to re-establish control. Maybe the fact that they had enough humans to populate their empires already and didn't think it was worth keeping? But then, why turn up for the American military if he'd abandoned the planet?
Ah, his first realisation of his transfictional insertion. The understanding that he's in a science-fiction story, but it's all very real.The picture of Ra on file matches what I remember of the film.
I'm… Disturbed by what that means for me being here.
Certainly, the lack of oversight on this world will make it easier to go unnoticed.I mean, is he still alive? Is killing the ruler of an interstellar empire where everyone else is kept in line by him objectively a good thing? I mean, yes, him super-nuking Earth is worse, but not getting into that position in the first place seems best of all.
No. That's a problem for another… Another year.
Even if he asked the locals how long they'd been here, he has no way to guess how long ago they lived on Earth to calculate the difference.I still haven't found something that can tell me what the date is. Oh, all these files have dates, but there's nothing to tell me what that relates to. There are images of the planet, and I can tell that some settlements that exist now hadn't been started yet, but an impact like this could have sent enough dust into the atmosphere to cause a year-long winter. That could have caused them to retract-.
Pointless.
So, no obvious weapons, no armour he'd consider worth it, and who knows what requirements to get any of it back online if he wanted to.Equipment is also a bit of a bust. Since this ship was just supposed to be a glorified space station, Mammon didn't keep much stuff here. And I'm not sure which of the things listed in the manifest are weapons, because the people working with them would just know that and wouldn't need it stated explicitly. The images show the human soldiers carrying staffs and wearing the headdresses I remember from the film, but the staffs could just be ceremonial and the headdress…
I was half expecting that scene from 'A New Hope' where one bangs his head on the doorway.Oh, there's actually an analysis of its internal systems here. Looks like it had sophisticated scanners and target assistance built into it, meaning that unlike a Stormtrooper helmet it actually makes it easier to hit the target. Must take a little getting used to-. Oh, and Ra didn't share those upgrades. So most of them-.
Oh.
To be fair, the helmets are kind of silly. Intimidating, but silly. And really, I've heard it put thusly: The Jaffa weapons are weapons of fear, for terrorising simple peasants. Which is why they look so sloppy against human soldiers trained to kill.That suggests… That the gods don't understand their technology either? Or maybe whatever these jaffa are don't need them? I don't see what advantage animal-head helmets have… Except intimidating uneducated peasants, perhaps? But the gods don't wear them… Don't know.
A full search of this ship should be first-. Second on my agenda. First should be letting Menelik know that I've made this part of the ship safe. And take him with me. Watching me open up crushed passages should reinforce the 'god' thing and let me ask some questions without making him suspicious.
True, one man with the ultimate tool does not an uplift make.And then… Find some of the worlds on this list. Once I know where they are relative to here, I should be able to calculate where the rest are. And see which of them are worth visiting. Is there any point getting a stargate? Even if I could find one, I don't know the symbols I need to go anywhere or to get back. And this world doesn't have anything worth trading yet.
But I'm not qualified to perform an uplift by myself.
Big ideas. Just a matter of working out how, since an office assistant isn't exactly an engineer. Regardless of what eclectic knowledge our dear author learned before he began writing.How about I start with mapping? Once I know where iron and coal can be found, I can offer to take people there to build… Farms first. I can chip in with a road-. No, a canal-. Or whatever makes most sense. And then a mining settlement can be built. And I can work on building this world's first steam engine, which gets us mine pumps and trains. And steam ships for travelling the world.
It's more about quality of life, at this point. Making daily lives better for the average person.And…
And that's not enough for a civilisation, is it? They don't need any of those things. No rivals to out-compete. No predators to kill or diseases to overcome. They're growing because more children are surviving than dying and they need more stuff, but…
And perhaps he'll run into a certain galaxy-exploring team of soldiers and scientists...Why hasn't another god added this world to their domain? I'd guess because there's nothing here apart from a crashed ship so it isn't worth the effort. Before I try changing things here, I need to see some of these worlds. I need to find out what their autocracy looks like, how they treat their people and how those people live. Once I know that, and I know more about how their society works… Then I can work out what I can do to improve this world.
So, a natural spot to leave Mammon-Paul, thinking about how to progress in a real-life game of Civilisation. One with deadly consequences for messing up, though. Meanwhile, we still don't know what's going to be happening in OL's side of the episode. Perhaps he'll poke the Dreaming in an attempt to reach Themyscira. Or perhaps Boss Smiley will show up again to complain about his 'Status Quo' being blown out.