Voidsong (A NaNoWriMo 2018 winner)

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Synopsys:

The Empire thought humanity died, and forgot all about it. The Empire is mistaken.

A Note From the Author:

This story was written as a National Novel Writing Month 2018 entrant. As such, its entire 50,000+ word length was written between November 1, 2018 and November 31, 2018. Overall, I would consider this no more than a polished draft. In that vein, the chapters have no names, only numbers.

Special thanks to Chronus on youtube for answering my questions on NATO radio procedures!

My Apologies to the Finnish Language, which I have abused in (probably) unforgivable ways to create Twisted Empire names. If anyone is interested, break the names up by commas and toss them into your favorite translation program (I used Google Translate, and tried to avoid umlauts and other accents) for some semi bilingual boni. If I got something wrong (and I know I did… somewhere…) let me know over on reddit and I will see what I can do to fix the mistake.

Lyrics, where included, are cited in footnotes.

Information

Status: Completed
Year: 2019
Author: Necrontyr525

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.2/ 5.0
Followers: 35
Views: 37,042

Reviews

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Community Reviews(2)

Some Guy with a PotatoRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
The story overall is very well written. It's a neat take on "hfy" type sci-fi, the species, societies, and technology aren't totally different from what I've read before but they're still very interesting to read about. The story focuses a lot on intersteller navel engagements and ship/fleet level tactics and logistics. There's a couple gramatical/spelling errors here and there, nothing major and it's not enough to distract from the story. Considering this entire story was apparently writen in a month and hasn't been edited since, I find that totally forgivable. Overall, I enjoyed the story and would reccommend it to people who like sci-fi and reading about ship-based combat and HFY type stories.
There are two glaring issues that stand out to me that make this story a lot harder to read:
The first issue is the unneeded extensive use of alian jargon. The first chapter starts off with a table giving conversions for an entirely new time system used by the alien race which differes wildly from our human time system, followed by a list of alien navel officer rank conversions. Yes, it is realistic that an alien race from a very different planet and star system with a totally different culture would have a different way of measuring time. However, making the reader decypher and calculate out all the conversions every time the perspective shifts to an alien is needlessly complicated and makes reading the story feel more like doing homework, especially when putting together a timeline and figuring out the time between events is a major part of the story. It would be far fairer to the reader to simply put the time conversions [in some form of brackets] in order to {indicate translation} to human units, with a forward at the beginning of the story explaining asmuch. I don't mind the rank conversions as much, this story seems written with tactically inclined readers in mind anyways and such readers are likely used to grasping how command structures fit together, but wider audie
ScarecroRoyal Road
★★★★ 3.5
Seems like a decent story. But I have 3 main issues so far. I'll try to avoid spoilers past chapter 1:
Forcing me to learn an entirely new system of measuring time is a bit too much. If it will be required to understand the story, then i might not be able to continue, especially if i don't get to read it all at once. Fingers crossed...
Miniscule variance in real world data from that of computer model's, on a variable which is expected to change drastically, is unlikely to cause an irreversible chain reaction in terraforming, at least not in the way described. Those are the type of things scientists accept as highly unpredictable, measure continuously, and make sure their plans are able to adapt to. The variable mentioned is one small contributor to a huge sum that is already highly unpredictable. Even a change by 100x, could still probably be within the margin of error of the total. Other factors could probably cause the effect mentioned, but that particular one would require many way more significant things to have gone wrong first. Those would naturally take the blame instead.
An empire capable of FTL between star systems, does not at the end of said exploration send out a manned vessel (somehow classified as a destroyer) that would allow itself to fall to attacks within the limited striking cabability of an earth mining drone. That would require for the destroyer to disable its stealth, allow the miner to keep a target lock, fail to engage active countermeasures, fail to outrun said unknown miner, and then be defenseless while it somehow flies past their shields, mines through their reinforced hull, shrugs off any close range counter attacks, ignores any honeycombing, and then simultaneously disables all environmental, life support, and escape systems. Imagine captain Ahab attacking a modern day NATO destroyer the same way he did Moby Dick and somehow managing to completely destroy it with no survivors? Not, very believable...
P.s. Sorry, but this is the end of t