The Nightstar Zoo

Is that Ganni as in F'sherl-Ganni? As in the Wormgate network? And/or the teraport-supression project?

Which leads me to wonder: How is it that no civilization a Wormgate had not yet reached ever developed the teraport? Or was there some project to get to them too?

Best guess? Developing a teraport in the first place is probably extremely difficult to do without having levels of energy and/or knowledge that are hard to attain without galactic levels of civilization. Which sounds easier to a planet in early-stage space travel: making quintillions of holes in the universe accurately or waiting for the uber-advanced civilization you've made contact with to set up a wormgate closer to home? By the time the fledgling civilization catches up technologically, they are unlikely to think themselves capable of coming up with a superior alternative to interstellar travel than the ancient method no one has ever topped in hundreds of millennia.

The "Ganni Project" probably refers to the Galactic Core.

Small comic for a Sunday.

Oh Ganni boy, the pipes the pipes are calling...

Kevyn's Ego - starting wars since 3095.

And without a punchline. Is this actually the full comic, or are we missing some bits?

You were missing some bits. It updated just now.

Much better. But concerning

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If you need to use a squeegee, they're probably at least Laz-4

So apparently the galactic civilization has crashed and died twice before. The use of the giant gatekeeper network, a.k.a. "connect but constrain" kept civilization under control significantly longer than before.

We still don't know what causes the crash of the galactic civilization. We just know that this object has seen several prior civilizations.

I'm starting to wonder if, "ripping holes in space" has a tendency to actually break apart space-time, breaking civilization, and leaving planets isolated until space-time has a chance to heal.

It's a shame that no one with the knowledge of that past is still around; that the knowledge was not carried across the extinction barrier. Oh wait, It did. And if someone is trying to erase information, they will want to go after the Oafans.

if only there was some way for the Toughs to go over and read up on the information that was carried across the barrier. But given the huge amount of information in that archive, they would either need a librarian, or someone that was alive at the time.

I suspect the real answer for them would be to get into an information war. I suspect that by the time they figure that point out, the Charlie will be doing a hamster dance.

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I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.

The term 'end-gun' (which, I assume, refers to DPAS/NUSPI) suggests a different explanation.

The ripping holes refers to the teraport, the end gun is indeed the long gun/etc.

The possibility of the teraport damaging spacetime is possible and concerning, but they haven't actually indicated that yet.

I wonder what they know and think of the dark matter issue. If their concern over the teraport is over that then they might be pleasantly surprised by the way that went. What they think of the plenipotent dominion is another matter entirely, as is what Petey knows of and thinks of the All-Star. The archive could well have noticed its creation and activities.

Kevyn has dealt with space/time ripping disasters before. And by extension the rest of the galactic community of scientists. So I doubt that that is the case with the Teraport. They would have noticed if it was damaging things.

I will note that this at least relieves any concern that object 4118-6 will be destroying galactic society to keep itself safe. Its inhabitants seem positively happy to find galactic civilization alive and thriving. I doubt they are going to suddenly reverse their stance and become an extinction event themselves.

My guess is that what they are worried about is the Pa'anuri. I suppose there could be some other civilization destroying menace that people build stellar enclosures to hide from. But I feel we've come to far in the narrative to introduce something out of nowhere like that.

I agree with the position that if Terraports were damaging, somebody should have noticed by now. But if they WERE, the DaMEs could actually be intentional instead of slave-labor for world-forges. If terraports wreck the universe, and the best you can do is smash the gravitics needed to power them...

Of course, as with the Gatekeeper system, one questions the usefulness of a system that actually produces MORE death then just letting the universe end once.


From a slightly different tack, Petey might actually be new. Did past civilizations build a core generator? Because that's an absurd amount of power, even for civilizations who inhaled stars.

I'm just wondering how big that probe is. I'm worried it's the size of a planet.

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If you need to use a squeegee, they're probably at least Laz-4

Hmm, I was hoping I could guesstimate it, but we aren't given a proper scale reference in the strip, so the best I can do is an upper limit to size.

Here's a reference for the size of the enclosure, at least. It says Object 4118-6 is the size of Sol. In the strip, the curvature of the enclosure compared to the probe is essentially flat. So the probe is definitely smaller then Jupiter, probably smaller than Earth. My, currently tired, brain puts the size of the probe at no bigger than 1/6 the size of Earth.

On a side note, that strip also states their new objective.

Planet? Come on, you know the Law of Quote Mining demands it be the size of a moon.



Or have we already used that quote?

That's no quote ... that's a meme

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I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.

Frankly anything smaller than a star could fit that quote. It all depends on what size planet the moon is orbiting.

What I can't figure out, is who is talking to whom.

It sounds as if All-Star is talking to someone, but that someone obviously knows few things about both all-star and previous cycles, so it can't be captured crews. Then whom?

The All-Star is the stellar enclosure meant to contain the entire civilization of the beings who built it. And that includes the individuals of that civilization. For instance Everness refers to itself in the singular, but it also mentions we a few times. So there are certainly quite a number of individual consciousnesses in there doing things.

Including discussing the current galactic civilization and putting plans into motion.

The Toughs have referred to it as being one vast stellar mind, but they don't have all the information.

it's probably a set of core AIs. Like the gods from an anime I have to look up, but it's the movie where the AI represents itself as a red hat

FINALLY FOUND IT: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/A ... omParadise

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If you need to use a squeegee, they're probably at least Laz-4

That was actually a pretty decent movie. Didn't turn out at all the way I'd have expected, given who wrote it.

Back to the original question: It seems that the two main signifiers of the end times are the long guns and the teraport.
Long Guns are important because as Kevyn(?) explained, as soon as their military significance is discovered, the only viable strategy is to cut off all communications and go as dark as possible.
Teraports lead to conflict with the DaMEs and defeat conect-but-constrain.

Under these circumstances, I wonder how Credomar got built - the Gatekeepers supressed every invention of the teraport until Kevyn got by pretty much on luck, but they allowed the Credomar project? After all, that was absolutely during the time where the gate network was operational and thus the Ganni capacity for intelligence gathering was pretty much unparalleled. Or was perhaps the rededication of the Long Gun to the Credomar habitat a Gatekeeper plot?

Or it could be that the Ganni only knew about (or were only working with) the "connect-but-constrain" project, and never knew about the long-guns?

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I used to be Junius Gallio, until I messed up retyping my password in the Great Password Reset. Nice to be back.

" I gotta stop doing mathematics while sober."

Never knew about their existence or their significance? The first seems hard to justify since personnel travelling to Credomar would have to use a wormgate to do so and anyone with a high enough clearance to work on this would presumably be first on the gatekeeper clone/mindrip list.

If the people in charge of the project never traveled, and if the laborers were sufficiently compartmentalized that no one put two and two together, it's just possible the thing was complete before the Gatekeepers got wind of it.

Further, the fat man bragged he was immune to mind-rip. It's possible that only those who used the first, beta-generation of RED were in on the whole plan, and were capable of killing themselves when captured. Or at least to "lose" the memory when under chemical stimuli. (Top secret memory gets de-indexed when under the influence of drugs, or the proper passcode isn't given.)