Sadly, the word is 'almost' rather than actually.
In the shower, I began to write a song about my feelings as a closeted transwoman.

Unfortunately, brilliant as the shower-thoughts were, I couldn't close it out into a coherent song, I was struggling to finish it and soon after leaving the shower, I lost it.

I learned that today was the international transgender visibility day so had I managed to write it, it would've been perfectly timed for today.

But unfortunately, I couldn't make it manifest.

​Ah well.

Yeah I did nothing today.
I did watch my favorite streamer do a one day complete runthrough of a rather wholesome (or rather, HOLEsome, harhar) game that had a fair amount of cursed energy, a perfect fit for the community, so it was still a good day, it just wasn't a productive one.

Largely useless, but stuff all the same. Namely developing the epilogue of the nine adventurers. (Spoiler alert: in a setting where it literally by necessity takes nine champions to defeat the world-ending threat, all nine live. Because if they hadn't lived, they wouldn't have managed to win.)

Short version short, seven of them basically become demigods (and the other two survive through other methods), each through their own methods. Continuing to exist on the mortal plane by default, immortal, and more or less balancing each other out. One as a direct result of their adventure, two through their own merit, one was already on their way to that status before the adventure, and three as a reward for their services, especially when taking into consideration that without them ascending, the others would run amok unchecked.

As demigods on the world, they do have limitations to what they can do, not having unlimited power to do what they will, varying in nature. Confined to a zone of influence unless visiting each other a common one, but also having set amounts of interference they are allowed to make on the world, with them mostly being unable to directly tackle new challenges, because part of their role as demigods is more or less that they are guides to the next generation of adventurers. Some more active than others. (They can do little interventions as minor acts of gods, so to speak, but cannot singlehandedly tackle every issue, every threat, to their world.)

There's more to it than that, obviously, but I'm not quite in a sharing mood right now; I kinda want to sleep.

I had been floating an idea around in my head for weeks upon weeks (inspiration coming from watching one particular streamer and their friend group colloquially known as the chaos crew, in their D&D campaign with its myriad of characters), but today I actually brainstormed the details behind it.

Basically, one thing which I thought would be neat is to have a D&D campaign where there were nine different characters, of nine different classes, of nine different alignments​, too, covering the whole spectrum of alignments. Narrative-wise, this would be something of a challenge: what could bring them together and keep them together when they are normally people who would never work together? How could the group realistically be brought together and be justified in having done so, on a long-term, massive-scale campaign sense?

Well, with PCs controlling it and them separately creating characters it's probably possible to do, but unwieldly. Plus, I'm never going to have a group where I could run it and even if I could I wouldn't have a group that would so neatly slot into making the needed nine characters fitting the spec and keeping that knowledge of it out of their characters, and even if I did, I'm not able to realistically DM. Even if I could, all nine characters would need to live to the end and D&D being what it is, that's not easy especially with PCs that, in their narrative, should know they're not inclined to work as a coherent team.

However, while I could never have it work as an actual D&D campaign, it works incredibly well as a D&D-inspired narrative, telling a story which uses D&D concepts like alignments and classes and overall worldbuilding, but which is more loose and open to flexibility, such as not requiring the characters to have a strict 'level' system where they need to be of a certain level to use a skill, where they can lack skills that should be universally available at level 1 but have a skill that's normally level 18. (That said, for this narrative, I explicitly wanted it to be a bunch of fairly seasoned adventurers, including giving each of the nine one mythic 'weapon', more accurately stated 'item', which gives them powers spanning beyond those of their class.)

I made a notepad file with all nine with their basic facts, but I don't feel like reopening it and organizing it more coherently to translate into blog form tonight, but I might do that soon so that I can elaborate on the basic foundations that I gave today.

The long story short of it is, the protagonist and deutagonist, lawful good/evil (respectively), were actually fighting it out, but in their clash with each other, they ended up discovering an ancient ruin, and the lawful evil character, the deutagonist, was able to read the ruins and from it, learn of a world-ending threat, one which neither of them individually would be able to deal with but that by combining forces they would stand a chance.

Further research into the world-ending threat revealed that to counter it would require nine different champions of nine different classes, with nine different absolute defining traits, and--(the research is incomplete on details further but the outside meta continuation is nine different alignments); only by these nine epic champions of their values would they be able to win against the upcoming threat, which research suggests is coming soon, very very soon, as the protagonist and deutagonist could not have discovered the ancient ruin otherwise.

I have the nine characters fleshed out pretty well.

The fundamental threat and how the group combats it, less so.

​Still, it's a promising start.

But the thing is, it isn't an existing song. I got a made-up Broadway Musical song stuck in my head, one of my own creation.

So I figured I should share it.

I feel the need to reiterate: this is not a song written about anyone I know.
This is, explicitly, a fictional character, singing about a fictional person. I don't even know anything about the singer or the person they're singing about. The singer could be a good person or could be a total misogynistic jerk or anything in-between. The person being sung about could be a total manipulative bitch or a literal angel or anything in-between. They could be close, they could be enemies, I don't know, all I know is that I got a rather catchy tune stuck in my head with some rather humorous lyrics and that the style of them is of a broadway play musical.

I'm not even sure if this is the entirety of the song, or just the choruses of the song.

But I figured I may as well share it:

She's a bitch! (she's a bitch!)
A real-life witch! (real-life witch!)
She's got no respect for rules 'cause she's rich!

She's a bitch! (she's a bitch!)
I really wish! (really wish!)
She wasn't so seductive with her lips!
---
She's a bitch! (she's a bitch!)
A real-life witch! (real-life witch!)
What was I thinking when I gave that kiss?

She's a bitch! (she's a bitch!)
I wanna ditch! (wanna ditch!)
But she's so hypnotic with those tits!
---
She's a bitch! (she's a bitch!)
A real-life witch! (real-life witch!)
She's the type of person I shouldn't miss!

She's a bitch! (she's a bitch!)
She gives an itch! (gives an itch!)
But she's so magnetic with those hips!



Obviously, the parts in parentheses are sung by backup singers, to support the lead singer on this song. The last three syllables on the long lines are emphasized, with the same emphasis as the short lines.

I find it a rather humorous, but apt, song.

In the previous blog, I mentioned that one side had developed their state of the art interceptor the Stingray, replacing the Shark, augmenting their striker, the Hammerhead, against the opposition with the slightly-out-of-date Mangrove Missiles and the Swordfish. The slightly out of date side compensated for being beaten to the next generation of warfare technology with the next generation of warfare strategy and tactics, by having genius battle strategies that revolutionized their warfare and allowed them to stay even.

Well today I developed their eventual answer. Ideally I'd name it after some other aquatic animal to keep the theme naming, but lacking a name, I've stuck on the Whirlpool Torpedo. This state of the art torpedo, also unmanned like the Mangrove Missile, is almost just as fast and maneuverable, but is very heavily armored (with a design that helps to deflect lasers, to boot), as heavily armored as a Hammerhead, even featuring a weapon on par with the laser weaponries of the Shark and Stingray. (Sharks have a weaker, but wider-area, laser weapon; Stingrays have a more powerful, but narrow, laser weapon; this laser is shaped slightly smaller than the Stingray's but is as weak as the Shark's.)

There are a few tradeoffs, however.
1: The torpedo is huge. It's about as long as the Swordfish is, slightly longer in fact, albeit slightly more narrow. Its huge size means that it's relatively easier to hit, and while the torpedo is super-durable and basically can't be shot down, it can be knocked off-course, and while it is good at speed/maneuvering and is just as much a smart-torpedo as the Mangrove, the deflections can be stacked to indefinitely keep torpedos from colliding with key targets.

2: The torpedo is almost as destructive in explosive discharge as the Mangrove, but is overall slightly weaker, especially since the detonation is in the back rather than the front of the torpedo. (The explosion of a Mangrove aims forward from the site of impact, penetrating hulls even if the torpedo doesn't. The explosion of the new torpedo actually aims the explosion backwards from the site of impact, which makes it less effective at hull breaching, but was a necessary sacrifice for the other advantages.) It can puncture through hulls with actually greater ease than a Mangrove due to it literally drilling through armor (which penetrates through shields, too!), but while that will utterly obliterate Interceptors and Hammerheads alike, for a Warship it needs to actually get a very good direct hit to deal lasting damage to a Warship.

3: Because it is so huge, it cannot be mass-produced the same way Mangrove Missiles can be. A Swordfish isn't able to carry so much as one, and a warship has a limited supply of them, able to carry a maximum of ~250-500 (each slot taking up the slot of a ship that would previously be a Swordfish), and while they can be over time restocked, in the course of a battle of attrition it is possible to run out of them.

However, the advantages of a smart missile built to survive everything the latest generation of interceptors and even strikers which can be thrown at them, while being an unmanned weapon, make it hugely effective as an augment (rather than replacement) to the Mangroves and Swordfishes, to help them more effectively combat interceptors and strikers, and thus, more effectively combat the enemy warships.

By this point in time, the side with the Hammerheads and Stingrays has learned from their blunders in strategy, catching up and evening the warfare across the board, but with this new advantage to their enemy, they in spite of having previously been state of the art, are now a bit behind. Their compensation for this is, frankly: Ace Pilots. So, so many of their pilots became just so good at piloting the Stingrays that as long as they didn't have the misfortune to be massacred in the surprise strategic strikes, they learned to master their craft to the extent that they're just. that. good.

And with time, these experienced veterans were better able to train the new recruits, too. With the benefit of lots of experience, and now facing comparably-strengthed enemy craft rather than having a clear technological edge, and with their opponents being mostly unmanned (and thus, largely unlearning, tho the advanced targeting system of the unmanned torpedoes is always being updated to be better and better and they do receive extra guidance from human pilots), they just learned as humans how to fight that much better.

So the war remains even.

I can't edit dates anymore for some reason to be on the right day--yesterday I SWORE that I had the date, correctly, set to the 23rd (the blog about my loneliness was the blog for the 23rd, not the 24th), and I can't change the date on this blog, which is the blog for the 24th, not the 25th.

So uh. Just keep in mind, that this is the blog for Wednesday the 24th, not the blog for Thursday the 25th.

This trend may continue, but when it is broken hopefully sooner rather than later, you'll see a double blog with the chronologically-written-later blog placed before rather than after the chronologically-written-earlier blog.

​Because weebly is pretty crap at archiving blogs, honestly.

As a reminder, this entry is almost assuredly going to be displayed below the entry for yesterday the 24th. But this is the chronologically written later entry, written on Thursday the 25th, the actual date of the blog (at least if the weebly fix is actually there), whereas that entry which will almost assuredly be displayed above this one was the entry for Wednesday the 24th.

In other date related news: I've utterly messed up on Kongregate badge of the days this week, making it impossible to get more than 2-3 badges of the needed five.

This would normally devastate me if not for two factors.
1: Kongregate isn't producing new Kongpanions, they're rerunning existing ones and this one I already had as golden anyway, and,
2: 3/7 of the week's badges were Mediums (MEDIUMS!), on Flash Games (FLASH games!), which I hadn't earned--notably, Kongregate's sad pathetic excuse of a workaround to let you play Flash games still? It doesn't allow you to earn badges. So because it takes 5/7, I wouldn't be able to get the needed 5 anyway.

I could rant pretty endlessly about how the administration of kongregate has vastly mismanaged their site tho, but I think that discussion is best saved for a future day. (Suffice to say: they just don't care, to put it bluntly.)

Because it is late at night and I just lost my first draft of like a solid third of the blog and this is a long complex thought that has multiple nuances to it and some of the information pertaining to it was already deleted in my brain due to being typed out and then removed.

But basically.
I am selfish;
I am a narcissist;
I am arrogant;
I am self-centered;
I am demanding;
I have an overly inflated feeling of entitlement;
I think I deserve more than I have right to;
I am everything that I despise in seeing people who are the type of being I loathe;
I am someone who wants more than what I have been given;
I am someone who is this and so much more. (Sorry, I typed out at least 2-3 better descriptions the first time that were deleted due to weebly being absolute crap at saving your work when things go wrong.)

Basically, to explain why I am saying this and what the issue is.

I am a member of multiple communities--but I am just a member of those communities. Nothing more. Admittedly, nothing less! And that's where the guilt and self-loathing comes in. I should be content with being a member of those communities! Being a member of those communities is a blessing, one that I cherish. I love being part of those communities and having them in my life brings a gigantic smile to me.

​But that makes the guilt so much worse. I have an internal self-loathing, a hatred of myself, because I feel like I am betraying the very core of those communities, the ones that welcome people with open arms, are friendly, but make it clear in no uncertain terms that being there is a gift and that people who're jerks will not be tolerated.

So what does it say about me that behind my surface demeanor as a member of their community, that I am the jerk that I hate the most? That I am the very thing I despise. I hate people who feel like they are owed more; I hate people who feel like the community is cheating them and not appreciating their work; I hate that mindset because it is an incredibly toxic one and unhealthy and a sign that someone has a fundamentally wrong view of what it means to be in the community.

But I hold similar thoughts to them. I love being part of the communities, cherish them more than anything else in the world...but I can't get over the part that while I am nothing less than a community member, I am also nothing more​. One voice among many. A single cog in the machine. A small part of the wheel. Someone who you notice most not when they're absent, but when they return from an absence.

In most of these communities, I just...don't have much staying power. People wouldn't mention me if I were to disappear. They wouldn't notice. They'd greet me back upon a return and say they missed me, but until the return, would they even realize I wasn't there? No, because being a single cog in the machine means that I am too small, too unimportant, to be worth that attention, worth that notice.

And deep down there is a very deep sense of loneliness.

I'm not such a fundamental piece of any community such that if I were to leave that community, my loss would be felt deeply. While I always provide a unique voice that is uniquely valued, I am one voice among many. Not unique. Not truly. While my exact contribution is one of a kind, I am still nothing special, nothing truly of my own, not someone who stands out.

I do things in the communities, even notable things, but nothing I do is something only I could do, and nothing I do is important enough to be a pillar of the communities. I am a member, nothing more.

And more than that.

I just feel so alone, surrounded by folks that are the closest thing I have to a second family.

​Because while the communities I am a part of are like a second family, they are an extended family with too many members to truly connect deeply with and separated by the internet and by a culture of sharing things only as they come up and only in short bursts of text. I let people know me, but only when it comes up as an organic chance for them to know something about me.

So at the end of the day...

...Nobody knows me.
Nobody is close to me.
Nobody has connected to me.

There are people that I might call friends, and if I am lucky, they would reciprocate and call me a friend, too.

But we don't interact outside of the community we're a part of.
We don't connect strongly across all aspects of the community.
We talk, we do activities together, we create things as a community, we build amazing things including irreplaceable memories.

But in spite of all that.

​I remain isolated.
​Alone.

People see me and they see Bree, sure. They know me, they interact with me, I am a part of their communities.

But I am still distanced from them on a deep level.

Because I just blend into the crowd.

I'm a part of their communities, but they never see me as anything truly more.

None of them truly see me as a friend, not in the deepest sense of the word at least. The type of friend who connects to me and talks with me regularly outside of the community, over discord or skype or similar, the type who offers to game with me specifically rather than game with the community.

In the communities, nobody would invite me, me specifically, to play with them in a game, to engage with me in a talk, to watch an anime or a movie or something with them. Activities they do with their friends. Because even if they call me a friend and genuinely think I am a friend...they don't see me in that​ intimate of a way to connect with me on that deeply personal level, able to truly see me and know me and just...connect to me.

I get occasional messages.

But nothing consistent, nothing where the spark of friendship is truly kindled over time into more.

So I remain alone.

And I remain unimportant.

Visible, but basically invisible.

Around, but not standing out.

Part of the scene, nothing more.

And I should be fine with being part of these wonderful communities.
I shouldn't need to feel important.
​I shouldn't need to feel unique.
I shouldn't feel pressured into being more than myself, to be something I am not.
I should be happy being me, in these communities, as a part of them, invisible but still notably important and while irreplaceable in exact contribution, happy to not be so important that I'm irreplaceable in a bigger way.

But I am feeling that way, because while I may be introverted...I still crave deep human connection. I connect to humanity in general really easily! I integrate into communities fairly flawlessly, become a part of them, become a notable name in them, because I connect to communities and integrate into them with great ease.

But I don't connect to any single one human. 
I connect to humanity in general but I don't connect to any single human.

And that is why I feel so invisible to the point where I am literally tearing up, the only reason I can't cry being a biological inability to.

I connect to humanity, to communities, and they in turn connect to me as part of their communities.
But I don't connect to any one human, and they in turn don't connect to me.
They don't see me, they see a member of their community.
And vice-versa is true, too. I try to see them as them on a deeper level, but I, too, just like them to me, can't truly see them as the person they are, and am held up, stuck, on them as being that member of a community.

So that leads to a very, very, very deep feeling of intense loneliness.

Especially since I know I can connect to people closer!

I connected to a very close friend group in my earlyish days on the internet and they truly were my friends. We unfortunately had our own life growth and life struggles and life issues so over time fell out of touch and the sites we used were slowly forgotten one by one, but I wasn't a member of the community to them and they weren't members of a community to me; they were my friends and I had them.

Heck, even more recently! I had a bloody girlfriend for a year and a half! And they are still a good friend! They're not a member of a community to me and I'm not a member of a community to them. So they are the proof that I can make friends even now.

But they are my only friend.

​I admit that maybe having started out romantically could've been a contributing factor to keeping them as a friend for so long, but it shouldn't be a prerequisite. And even were it, how come I haven't gotten the spark with someone else?

​I don't think I've mentioned this in my blog before, but basically, when it comes to my friend, I've come to the conclusion that I am a better friend than I ever was a girlfriend, but also more importantly: I have moved on feelings-wise.

​I realized that if I were to ever find a potential second romantic partner, I wouldn't be hung up with feelings over my first. That while they are still my good friend and I still get endorphins, feeling happy, from interacting with them and am glad to have them as my friend, that I have the ability to fall in love with someone else.

Truly, deep down in my soul, I know that I have moved on; I have a deep level of fundamental peace, feeling at ease with it in a way hard to describe as anything other than knowing I moved on.

But while I have moved on, and I could fall in love with someone else.

I haven't connected with anyone on that level enough to have found someone else to love.

I want to.

I want to find someone to love.

But even if I don't!

I want to find someone else to connect to as a friend.

I am perfectly happy forming platonic relationships; my current friend is one of the happiest relationships I can have yet we are obviously fully platonic now.

But I've got nothing.

No new friends.

I realize you can't force friendships; that doesn't lead to real, genuine friendships.
So I am not trying to force a friendship.
​But just because I'm not trying to force a friendship doesn't mean I don't actively want one and am on the search, lookout, for one.

I am always looking for the potential to connect with someone on a deep, fundamental, friendship level.

But I keep on getting disappointment after disappointment, where time after time again and again. I come to realize that the people who I've gotten closer to still see me as a member of the community, just one they are closer to than the average member of the community. And then nothing more comes of it, and then I end up seeing them the same way. Someone whose name I know, who has similar interests to me who I talk to more often than others and who I see a lot...but that's as far as things go on either side. It goes no further, it doesn't transcend the boundaries of community and go into friendship.

So I continue to feel alone, even when surrounded by a crowd of loving, caring, wonderful human beings.

And I feel horrible for wanting more from them than what they give.

And I feel despicable for thinking I deserve more.

I basically feel like I am spitting on the image of their gifts to me. That they give me so much and that by wanting more, I am insulting them, that I am proving I don't deserve the thing I want, that if they knew the thoughts I am having they would push me away, not unjustifiably so, because the things I am thinking are things that jerks who say them get banned for being jerks because it's a jerkish line of thought to be so self-centered and arrogant to think you are privileged to more than what you are given, when you are, in truth, owed nothing.

I know I am owed nothing.

But I still want something more.

I really want friends.

Having what amounts to an extended internet family is wonderful.
But I want friends, and the extended internet family dynamic isn't friendship.
I know what friendship is; I have had friendships, and in the communities, I see examples of these friendships. I see streamers on discord talks with their friends; I see friends talk about things only they are privy to, things they did as friends rather than did as a community together.

And I know that I don't have that, in spite of seeing it literally on a daily basis.

And it leaves me just...feeling so guilty for wanting what they have, in spite of knowing I should be content with what I have, and knowing that I have a lot of fault, both in not realizing the full extent of what I have and a lot of the lack of connection being my fault.

I know I can't shift the blame onto them; it's not on them, it's not their fault that they're not friends with me after all! That's pretty much on me. I don't share my voice, I don't share live video feed of me, I am not sharing aspects of my life more actively, I am passive, I am reactive, I am just...not proactive, I am a sponge that absorbs things rather than really pushing myself forward.

Right now tho I basically just feel like...if I were to die, news of my death wouldn't spread. Nobody in the communities I am in would know I had died, and aside from my friend, even if they did learn, nobody would go "my friend died". I just would vanish into a distant memory, be nothing more than that, not truly be missed, not truly be felt as a loss.

I am effectively invisible; I effectively don't exist.

But I want to exist. I realize that selfishly wanting to be visible is a bad thing. Not all visibility is a good thing; there is such a thing as bad visibility and I loathe the jerks that are that. But I just...

I want to be someone.

I want to connect.

I want to be a buddy.
I want to be a friend.
I want to be something more than I am to people now.

But I'm not.

​This is one of the reasons why I want to get into content creation of my own.
I have a tiktok for a start but I want more. Streaming could be an avenue of manifesting this content creation. So too could writing, actually making my work come real.

Because I just feel like if I truly share my work with the world en masse on a large scale, that maybe it can help with that connection.

If I form a community of my own, then while the community members of my community would just be community members of my community, I feel like just the act of building a community would open me up in a way to just...connecting to others. The connection need not be two-way, tho obviously I would love that. I just want some form of connection beyond just "you are here, and I am here, and we are in this community doing this thing and having this in common".

And I just...have nothing.

People know my name, even in spots I'd expect them to not remember me, but I remain a nobody in spite of this.

I am the most highly visible nobody of all time but still. Being a highly visible nobody is still being a nobody.

I just don't feel like I even exist.
Being greeted by name is nice, but it's not a way to feel like I exist.
Having my messages read by the streamer does make me smile, but it's not a way to feel like I exist.
Having chat members react to my messages does make me smile, but it's not a way to feel like I exist.

​The only ways I feel like I can feel like I exist are either connecting to people or creating works of my own that are distributed to the masses at large, spread virally through good word of mouth as "hey you should see this, Bree made this and it is great" as proof that I exist.

Basically, there's two ways of feeling like I exist.
A deep human bond, or a legacy of lasting work that others see, and continue to spread to others as something that has a dedicated following to it.

And I am lacking in both.

So now I am just.

Feeling so, so alone.

And so, so deeply full of self-loathing because I feel like I shouldn't feel alone when surrounded by love and kindness.

​But I am.

Let's start with the freshest.

I often revisit similar concepts with dozens upon dozens of ideas and today was no different: revisiting the idea of entire underwater societies using futuristic, but entirely subaquatic, technology, the whole Atlantean aesthetic of underwater cities and featuring submarine-like warships...

...Except modeled a little bit more after space ships than submarines today. I came up with some really neat designs. While the design of the warships is fairly generic and similar to both sides, I actually went through the work of developing five different smaller ships. On one side, they developed the cutting-edge Stingray, an Interceptor-class single-pilot vessel. Weaponry: a single laser mounted on the front. Fairly heavily armored and with unmatched maneuverability and large bursts of speed, capable of pulling feats no other ship can, but having a few drawbacks. 1: being new, 2: taking a higher learning curve to master the mechanics involved, 3: not enough room for extended life support systems, so is shorter range and has no escape pods, 4: if their fin is disabled, they're dead in the water, 5: only one singular weapon.

They are basically an underwater fighter, designed to intercept incoming enemy missiles and shoot them down, as well as shooting down the enemy's fighter-bombers, while dodging from warship gunfire.

They are paired with the also fairly new (but slightly older) Hammerhead, a Striker-class single-pilot vessel that is loosely akin to the "Flying Fortress" B-17: very heavily armored, so heavily armored that it basically takes a warship's firepower to bring one down (keep in mind that a warship has a manpower of ~300-500 between Strikers and Interceptors so that's ~150-250 Hammerheads per Warship), while having a single turret that can fire a warship-class laser, torpedoes, or a warship-class railgun-enhanced bombshell. They are basically invincible and have the firepower necessary to penetrate warship's defenses, meaning one of them packs the defensive power of a warship and offensive power of a warship, but with a severe drawback: they're slow as molasses. They might not be able to be shot down short of incredible sustained fire or a warship's weapons, but they lack maneuverability and especially speed. Once deployed, their movements are slow and linear and predictable enough that they are easy for anything except a warship to outmaneuver.

The Stingray and Hammerhead effectively serve as fighters and bombers for warships that serve as essentially BSG-style catch-all warships, which have a huge deployment of vessels while being massively armored while having a huge armament.

Their opponents are behind in the technological side, in need of developing their next-generation warfare (they are aware their technology is being made obsolete and are working on catching up, they just haven't bridged the gap yet), so by all rights they should be losing the war, but are managing to trade even by clever tacticians and strategists who are pioneering new aspects of underwater warfare.

They field an unmanned torpedo known as the Mangrove Missile. (Notably: they field it in addition to their normal torpedos and armaments, rather than as a replacement.) When it was introduced, it was state-of-the-art, in being deployed in the thousands to obliterate enemies en masse, interceptors, strikers, and warships alike. It's basically the ultimate "smart missile", think like the SG1 ancient ship's weaponry. 

The Mangrove Missile is incredibly fast and maneuverable, and has on it a small laser capable of damaging lightly-armored targets, but as a missile is obviously designed to penetrate armor and explode on impact. (It takes literally hundreds of Mangroves to sink a Hammerhead, unless the Mangrove manages to hit the main cannon on the Hammerhead, but on older-generation Strikers or Interceptors, the Mangrove was a 1-hit-kill. A Stingray can take a few Mangrove hits to non-essential areas, but it's explicitly a bad idea as a Mangrove can still destroy a Stingray fairly easily, the strength of the Stingray is in its ability to match the maneuverability of the Mangrove with a weapon that is specifically designed to destroy Mangrove missiles.)

Mangrove Missiles are basically infinite in supply, and can still shred through warships if given the chance, and can be guided by their fighter-bomber-ships for even more precise guiding beyond their naturally intelligent target selection.

They are augmented by the Hybrid vessel, the Swordfish, basically a fighter-bomber. Its design is such that it can, situationally, deflect laser fire (meaning that, in spite of not being cutting-edge anymore, they can still go toe-to-toe with a Stingray in the right circumstances), it's really fast and maneuverable, and it has two forms of weaponry: a single shot of a Mangrove Missile (albeit recharging over time; they can deploy one, and then deploy another if given sufficient time, think like a star trek replicator), along with the ability to guide Mangrove Missiles both in targeted-laser-fire (useful for potentially damaging, disabling, or even destroying interceptors) and the Missiles themselves (useful for pinpoint accuracy on disabling or destroying Strikers).

Their main weapon is railgun-hyper-accelerated rods, however. These rods, similar to Stingrays, are capable of hurting (but not destroying) warships, and with enough of them over time can actually cause critical damage. On older-generation Interceptors and Strikers, these railgun rods were instant-kills, and even on the current generation remain effective. While most of the Hammerhead is basically immune to the railgun rods, if the main cannon is hit from the front with one, it can destroy them. (The main issue with this is getting a shot off with the railgun rod without the Hammerhead destroying the Swordfish firing them, but the predictable movement of the Hammerhead makes this actually viable to do.)

While a Stingray can tank a few hits due to being reasonably well-armored, a Swordfish can launch a barrage of up to 30 railgun rods at once, and it only takes ~3-5 hitting to destroy a Stingray. As little as one, if hitting a vital system. (Again, the main advantage of the Stingray is in being the most mobile vessel in the sea while packing a large armament and reasonable survivability; it is not designed to tank every shot hit, it is designed to dodge every shot hit and to survive anything that it can't dodge.)

A big advantage of the Swordfish however is that it has a much longer operational range. Hammerheads are explicitly over long distances much much slower than a warship. Stingrays are explicitly short in operational duration. However, Swordfishes are actually faster than warships and can operate nearly indefinitely. They are primarily transported by warships for logistical reasons, but unlike the Stingrays or Hammerheads, they don't need to be transported by warships and can travel without them.

The Stingray's predecessor, the Shark, was an interceptor that was comparable to the Swordfish in speed and maneuverability. It had good armor, a good, wide laser, but also had the ability to deploy "flares", basically energy missiles, and mines, as well as a couple of side-mounted (but weaker) lasers. It wasn't quite as fast as a warship and couldn't operate indefinitely, but could still operate for a much longer time than a Stingray and had good weaponry that was cutting-edge for its time.

Sharks haven't fallen completely out of deployment, because they are still good, it's just that Swordfishes and Mangroves alike can instantly destroy them with one hit, and even a Mangroves' laser can damage a Shark Interceptor.

But this is about all I have on the setting.

And with that, I am wrapping this blog up.

I had two or three other things I wanted to talk about, but uhhhh...in writing this, I...forgot them because this was longer than I thought it'd be.

Ah well.

This feels like a return to form so I quite like it!