Here is a tale about my adventures in the Land of Neter against the Deep-Water Guard. It all started with me bying a game - From the Depths. It was inspired by Robbaz, and I thought it was going to be easy.
It wasn't.
I was greeted with a laggy, confusing, borderline unplayable mess. I did not stay around long.
A few months later, I decided, after watching Robbaz play around with STEAM! engines, to give it another go.
I started with a peice of shit. It was narrow, small, not very fast, and did not even have room for one gun (not that I had figured out how to make a gun yet) It capsized easily, it was unprotected, it was shit.
I widened and enhanced the body until it did not capsize (easily, anyway) and sauntered swiftly on to armouring it with the bestest, most heaviest armour I could use. And Missiles! and GUUNNNNNNNNSSS!!!! And I created... an even bigger pile of turd, probably the biggest since the USS Monitor. Some of its shortcomings included:
You can see, then, that the Electron-class (I have stupid naming schemes) was hopelessly outmatched by everything in the game. So I begrudgingly decided to go into story mode.
the first attempt, I had wasted all my material trying to build the ship from the start.
Second attempt... I got pummeled by the guard while I was waiting to make the boat.
THIRD attempt... I had learned. I built a barebones version with only one gun and a hull. I built it... and then promptly proceeded to retrofit it with all of the super amazing armour and missiles. I was pummeled and sank in a fight before it was completed.
The fourth attempt was my most successful one. I got the barebones working, but instead of retrofitting, I just built. Metal replaced the heavy armour, and ze missiles were dropped. I fitted four guns, added a metal cabin, and started beating the crap out of people. What.
I decided that a ship this successful needed a name. I was going to name it Electron, but it seemed fitting to name it after a person. Thus, the Nicholas Cage-class Schooner was born.
There needed to be a second ship. Face/Off was fresh in my mind, so I now had the K.S.S Nicholas Cage and the K.S.S. John Travolta.
Now I wanted to make an even better ship. I still wanted the dependable frame of the Electron/Cage-class So I think I will put the cabin on the front (like on a 309 metre ship on the great lakes) and have guns and crap on the back. I set to work on the Travolta, adding the front cabin and the rear guns.
The battle of the landlubber ship
I had just taken the Travolta over land to go to the other side (you can do that when the ship is out of play for some reason) when a fight came up. I could not get off land before the battle began.
so here I was, against an Atlas airship, fighting with a boat that was totally grounded, 50m high on an island. I put it into combat mode and...Blew up three of the four turrets from firing. It was not beached in a way that allowed broadsides, and the failsafes failed (or did not notice the other turrets).
It quickly became a stalemate, and I had enough time to think about getting this beached ship into the ocean where it belonged. I stuck some giant jet engines to the cabin, switched it to aeroplane mode, and dragged it (With great damage to the boat and the hull) into great Neptune's domain, where i conducted repairs and removed the engines. I could not save, as I could not destroy my foe. In the eyes of the game, then, the battle never happened. Learning my lesson, I decided to a)retrofit the Travolta to normal, and b) go and research ways to avoid guns from shooting each other. They never did this on the Cage.
The problem was super simple: thry were not trying to miss the turrets - they did not even know they were there. They were trying to miss the cabin, which was wide enough that turrets trying not to hit it also happened not to hit the other turrets. Putting it at the front meant they did not have to miss so much, and since the cabin was farther away (and also behind all of the turrets in that battle), The guns could miss the cabin and still hit another turret.
Fast forward a few months, and I somehow got back into the game after a hiatus. I returned to make a new ship, a much bigger capital ship that I called the Neutron-Class Destroyer. It had many new features that I came up with during the hiatus:
And a very important feature:
I was ecstatic that I had finally figured out missiles. I put 44 tubes of missiles in the bow of the ship, and I figured out that that could fire continuously! I was incredibly happy with myself. Too bad that the rest of the ship was mediocre at best, and downright horrible at worst. The bow was full of computers, missiles, and ammunition (So one good hit to the bow would knock out the ship), the thing was like the broad side of a barn in fights, and it wasn't too much better in the armament department than my trusty Cage-Class, so I filed it away as a good idea that did not work too well.
So I decided to arm the Schooners I allready used instead. First, a gun was deleted so I could put missiles (A dumb idea, seeing as I could have put them next to the bridge and had an extra gun), then I gave them a metal Deck, then I realised that I was making a new ship practically and went wild, staggering guns, redoing the hull to be alloy-in-metal rather than metal-in-alloy, making the base of the hull be constructed in a sensible way, and added an elevated bridge and more gun. the result? the Kerbin-Class Heavy Shcooner.
The Kerbin-Class represented the ultimate evolution of the Electron hull: A staggered gun layout, missiles on either side, and finally, some more interior space to allow more hardware. This was allright, but I felt unfulfilled. I set out to build a bigger and more powerful ship, given that I still had aspirations of making a ship to rival Robbaz's Ragnarök.
This adventure led me to find a curious limit I have: A mental size barrier. I wanted to make this new "Jahnsan" hull bigger than the Electron, but not cumbersome like the Neutron. So I built a respectably-sized single-deck hull. I plopped the old Kerbin-class right next to it, and… it was the exact same size, with a slightly longer and narrower bow. I was suprised, but I kept going. After all, the Jahnsan may not be bigger, but it certainly was more modern. The hull was cleaner, not carrying the the cruft that several generations of ships would accrue. It did not need a keel, it had slightly more deck and interior space, and I used that to the best extent. I placed a similar staggered-gun layout onto the hull - four guns, missile locations, and three 'decks'. This Jahnsan-Class schooner was of comparable strength to the Kerbin-class, but I felt it was simpler, so I upgraded my fleet, tout suite.
And then I discovered LASERS. Lasers were cool and hip and DEAR GOD I WANTED ONE NOW. So, I fiddled about with lasers with this new hull, and then I discovered that, instead of simply putting the laser modules on turrets, I could put the laser module in the ship and beam it to the turret. This is when I decided to completely dedicate an entirely new ship to this laser system. The result was the Wilson-class laser ship. Two turrets connected to a 'superlaser' deck (A deck filled to the brim with a single laser module), a smaller vertical laser to cover the area the turrets couldn't reach, and a conventional gun over a recessed bridge, just in case. The ship looked futuristic, cool, and it absolutely sucked because I couldn't figure out how to get the lasers to do more damage than a wet fart. Oh well, we carry on to the future.
Except… I didn't carry on to the future.
I took a break. For four years. That Wilson-Class laser gun? The Jahnsan-Class destroyer? Those stayed in their state. They never changed, even as I graduated high school, moved off to Canada, found myself smack-dab in the middle of $CURRENT_EVENTS. I don't know why, but it seems like I just stopped caring.
What made me start to care again? Well, I was on a Discord Server, and a person on there named Knarkle was getting into the game. He had a ship. I remembered I had the game, and took stock of what I had.