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I have to be careful not to make the first two chapters even longer. I currently have each of St. James's ships hit twice. The first time it does a lot of damage to the three ships, but not enough to fully cripple them. The second time, it hits like a bomb under the bridge of the Almighty (it shears off a big chunk of the main part of the vessel). Including the sister ships, that makes for a total of six strikes, most of them different in the specific damage they cause, so there is pretty good variety as far as trying to describe/keep the battle interesting. A 20% reduction could work, although it wouldn't really change much about the battle, but it might seem more realistic. For example, perhaps the Hercules ups the amount of energy it produces for the beams as part of the second strikes in order to really damage the Colonial ships. Doing so also damages (overloads?) the neutrino reactor onboard the Hercules, although not enough to fully cripple it (she loses all ability to fire weapons and engage her stardrive, but she can still maneuver at sublight).

I've been skimming a few articles on energy frequencies, since shields are really just energy. I could perhaps explain the superweapon by stating that it requires a huge amount of energy to produce beams powerful enough at "extreme frequencies" to do real damage, frequencies outside the range of what ordinary shields are designed to protect against since they were never intended to repel beams at those frequencies since nova/supernova weapons can't produce them. It requires too much energy to do so, which the Hercules is only barely able to produce six times before its neutrino reactor is damaged.

Some technobabble cacas like that. The alternative to frequency babble might be to use "phase" babble, the physics of which would remain conveniently undefined.

Looks like a complete description of hypercannons is still way too complicated to explain in the middle of a battle:

By the process of elimination, I'm going with my original idea of some kind of energy beams that can "push" through a target's shields as if the shields don't exist (like neutrinos through matter), resulting in the beam hitting the hull directly. Seems rather like magic, but I no longer care.

Following is for chapter 1, quickly explaining the term boiler as part of a destroyer's description. All other details can wait until the end of act one, where I show a ship imploding-exploding in battle for the first time.

I think it works.

By the way, in the scene above and many like it in book two, he's decided to push Satan's buttons by doing/saying outrageous things. If you remember, he's pissed off at his father and God for bringing him into the world solely to settle the bet between them. Love never had anything to do with it, in spite of what his father told him repeatedly while he was growing up in the orphanage. In the last chapter of the first draft, Conner thinks the price for his services will be high indeed. Angering his father is part of that. At one point, in front of the aforementioned Protestant ministers, his father (still in the form of De Rosa) keeps interrupting, trying to prevent Connor from doing and saying stupid things that would give away that he's not really Christ, so Connor tells a Swiss Guard that if De Rosa interrupts the "Lord" again, then the guard should throw De Rosa out of the building. Should be lots of fun.

Thanks, George. I'll probably go with Connor/Satan destroying holy sites in book two as part of turning everyone toward Connor as God. I came up with a scene for book two, where Connor is pissed off at a delegation of Protestant ministers who had come to the Vatican asking to see him perform miracles in person. They want to be sure that what they saw on TV at the end of book one was real (eg Connor's halo, the holes in his wrists, his otherworldly voice, his able to rebuke the storm and make it go away, etc.). Connor teaches them a frightening lesson (don't test the Lord!) and tells them they need to convert to Catholicism. He then tells them to go back to their parishes and preach to as many people who will listen that the Lord is a goddamn Catholic!  :-)

As I noted above, though, I think the hunt for the Antichrist in Rome is too much like distinct episodes that don't build tension/urgency. I was curious if you noticed that while reading it and if you see it now that I've pointed it out.

EDIT: I wrote this post in response to your original reply to me, not in reply to your most recent post.

Hi Sol. Just a quick reminder to please get rid of the group Mysteries & Thrillers.
Everyone should move over to Thriller/Mystery/Suspense instead.

It looks like I missed one to be deleted: Mysteries & Thrillers. We're keeping Jack's group (Thriller/Mystery/Suspense) since the latter is more active.
Everything else looks good.

Thanks
Dirk

True. I currently explain the term boilers late in act one, which may not be soon enough. I don't want to stop to explain the term mid-battle in act one, so a different name may be appropriate, although I like boiler. I currently use neutrino-to-energy reactor when I first introduce the concept, neutrino reactor for most of the narration and for Brain's dialogue, whereas most humans refer to it as boiler. I even considered calling engineering the boiler room. :-)

I decided to treat the article that speculated about neutrinos powering cell phones and EVs as a not-so-crazy idea, rather than waste another day trying to calculate if it's actually possible. As a result, my powertrons have become neutrino-to-energy reactors, usually referred to as neutrino boilers, or just boilers. The origin of "boilers" comes from the fact that when a neutrino reactor is breached, it implodes into a singularity and then explodes like a mini-bang, with plasma temperatures reaching 250M degrees (now that'll heat your water!). I don't intend to explain how a neutrino-to-energy reactor works, though. The name should make it pretty obvious what it does, which is all I need for a Lucas-ian space opera (the s--t just works; don't bore people by trying to invent hokey explanations for impossible tech).

I may, however, mention in the Galactipedia article on FTL travel that if a ship's atreidite-based reserves (batteries) are drained (e.g., in battle) and the ship is too far from a major source of neutrinos, then the vessel can become marooned in space, unable to power the boiler and recharge the atreidite. That adds a nice element of risk to space travel, although primarily for vessels forced to move away from a major neutrino source (e.g., a star). That could be military vessels engaged in combat, civilian ships fleeing pirates, etc. In those situations you better hope your atreidite-powered interstellar drones are fully charged to go for help. And since drones can't carry huge reactors, they can only make a limited number of jumps before they run out of power.

Thanks, njc. I started reading it but had to spend the rest of the day dealing with other people's f-ups. I'll finish the rest of the article later this week. If other people only did their jobs the way they're supposed to, we'd all have a lot more free time, and companies could shrink their call centers.

For example, a few months ago, I tried logging into the Alberta government's portal, which allows us mortals to perform functions without having to deal with chronically understaffed call centers. Well, for some reason, my new computer (HP Win11 Chrome) kept getting an error 429 when I tried to log in, reset my password, recover my username, etc. Useful error message if ever I saw one. So, I called the call center (non-IT folks) who asked a few questions, including whether or not I have another computer. Turns out I do - a Chromebook. So I trundled downstairs to try it, and it worked. At that point, the tech guru at the call center concluded the problem lay with my PC and I'd have to call the manufacturer. When I pointed out that my HP works perfectly with thousands of websites I'd visited since buying it, he insisted there was nothing that could be done at their end. When I asked to speak with someone in IT to do more troubleshooting, he said there was no one he could transfer me to, and repeated that I'd have to speak to the manufacturer. Can you imagine the call with HP Support: My HP doesn't work with Alberta.ca's login page, although it works everywhere else, but the highly technical call center folks insisted it must be a hardware problem.

Fortunately, there is another way to contact support, which is through email. So, I sent them an email and made my case, including the fact that just because their software works with some PCs, doesn't mean the problem isn't on their side. I eventually got an email back (an electronic form letter), which explained some possible causes of error 429, and things to try, up to and including reinstalling Windows. Can you imagine? I went so far as the step to reinstall my browser but then stopped. I emailed back that I had tried everything (a fib, I know) and asked what else they suggest. That was the last I heard from them. About two weeks later, I tried logging in again, and lo and behold, it worked. I guess whatever hardware problem was causing the error must have self-corrected. :-)

This is the kind of crap I was dealing with all day. :-(
Dirk

Well, if the sun only puts out enough neutrinos every 176 years to equal the energy of a gallon of gasoline, then those cell phones and EVs better sip that gas very sparingly. :-) I think my problem is in the underlying numbers. I got some of them from Alexa, which didn't always quote sources I would necessarily trust if I was googling for the same info. This could be an example of the Alexa AI relying on crappy sources, which Open AI admits is a general problem. And of course, as companies all scramble to integrate AI and use it to answer questions based on shitty sources, googling will increasingly return crappy search results, which is already a known problem even without AI.