The Ghost of Evangelion (NGE/GitS)

[Vehrec]

I think they spent an hour just correcting how the kids held the guns. Getting it perfect.

[Jonen C]

Originally Posted by TheFourthman

Is this a DX reference?

And it's not the only one, but we missed the other one when it first appeared in an earlier chapter.

The UN has nine levels of security clearance above top secret. As far as I remember, ANGEL/0A is the lowest of those (the clearance required to review the UNATCO Employee Handbook).
SERAPHIC/8X is... Well. That information is above your clearance level, in fact, I'm not entirely sure you're even cleared to know about the existence of SERAPHIC/8X.

Originally Posted by Vehrec

I think they spent an hour just correcting how the kids held the guns. Getting it perfect.

Yes, that is indeed probable. But if they were shooting at all during that period, they would not take many tries to hit the target - unless you only count hits dead center, which may be trickier if the range is great.

[LatwPIAT]

Originally Posted by Rabe

Good chapter, nice to see Saito.

Thank you!

... I didn't think Kusanagi had that level of clearance... Hell, I don't think anyone other than maybe Gendo, maybe Akagi and possibly Fuyutsuki have that level of clearance.

Unless I've got it backwards, shouldn't Angel/0A be the lowest? And that'd be the baseline to even know about ECCO... So that report might be Archangel/1B, to know what ECCO is supposed to do... Or maybe higher, but still well below the highest... Throne/6G?

Ah, well... In all honesty, I just needed something to mark its level of clearance, I could vaguely recall some of a Deus Ex' terms, and every time I make a DX reference you seem to fall into an ecstatic joy, so I just took it from memory, and its just supposed to be a reference; the UN and/or the Japanese government doesn't actually use the full range of UNATCO clearance codes; it's not a DX crossover, after all.

Hmmmm... Rei Ayanami, nanoaug clone and metaphorical half-sister of JC and Paul Denton, goes to school in Switzerland with her fellow co-pilots Shinji Ikari and Asuka Langely Soryu. Evas are built in Universal Constructors, and the head of the Instrumentality Committee is Bob Page, who wants to become all-pervasive, like air or radiation, and conquer the world with an army of mass-produced Mass Production Eva units. Meanwhile, UNATCO agents Maj. Kusanagi and JC Denton are trying to stop the mysterious, malevolent "Ikarus" from hacking and subverting Internet 3 for its own, evil purposes, which they do by bringing 2nd Lt Maya Ibuki and Dr Ritsuko Akagi to Vanderberg Air Force base to attack the problem at the core. Then, they receive an emergency call from an Ocean Lab, which is under attack by a 400 meter long giant monster...

No! Bad LatwPIAT! No rewrites!

...play up the angelic symbolism and a lot of neat, gothic imagery. Evas with kill-switches, grey death infecting Unit-03--*twack* Ow!

Originally Posted by Jonen C

If there was any doubts of the genres this crosses into, this sentence have removed them. Bravo.

Fuyutsuki is channeling Edmund. Oh joy.

Speaking of Josephine Avalon... I suspect the reference will be obvious in retrospect but right now? I've got... Wait... No. I've got nothing. Yet.

The little discussion between the Avatars... Ominous.

Thirteenth string - Zagadka - Polish noun, riddle, puzzle, enigma. Appropriate for the preceding, I think.
Oh. Hum.

*snicker*

AES Philip Mead? Oh, subtle! I like. The National Secessionist Forces probably don't.

As you can probably tell, I, like every other fanfic writer there is, has a near obsessive-compulsive need to pepper my stories with shout-outs to every piece of fiction I've ever takes the slightest interest in. For example, the whole part about Ishkur using its crystalline structure to generate powerful laser beams was a reference to how the Disclosure virus colloids in Eden: It's an Endless World! work. There's going to be a lot of references. You should probably make a list.

IGIGI - a term used to refer to the gods of heaven in Sumerian mythology.

It can also be translated as "those who watch over"

Yamabiko - ... The train or the spirit?

Niseko? More train related stuff?

All the anti-Rakbu operations are named after trains. Apparently someone in ECCO or the JSDA are rail-enthusiasts. (Unlike me, who just goes to Wikipedia and picks a name at random...)

Tenth string - FANSERVICE!
(YAY!)

People were asking for me to have Saito teach Shinji how to target and shoot Ishkur, so having a long scene in which just that happens, I would be doing a "service" to my "fans"; hence, "fanservice" of the sort I really like. (As opposed to sexual/titillating fanservice, which I have a hard time writing.)

An hour froom shooting to hitting? With sniper rifles? Unless the range is long enough that wind is going to be a factor (bullet drop being corrected for by setting the sight, if range is known), I don't see it - sniper rifles are easy to hit stationary targets with. Well... Okay, yah, it could take that long, with inexperienced shooters, if the range is long and the target very small... But frankly, they should've scored a hit (if only a bad hit) faster than that. Unless they're firing one shot at a time and taking several minutes discussing what went wrong with every shot, or something.

Or was it just Rei not hitting for an hour of shooting? In any case, if it took a full hour to get a single hit, they should have started with a closer target. Morale is a factor in learning, shooting and missing is not good.

...I'm 18, I got out of conscripted military service for poor physical condition (or having poor skill in math or English) and the last time I fired any weapon that was not emplaced I was 12 years old, and it was a BB gun, at a target 10 meters away.

I missed every shot.

I'm know about how to fight with a hasta or a galdius than I know about being taught how to fire a gun. "An hour" was a figure I made up to show that neither Shinji nor Ayanami are very good at marksmanship (Rei also has that unfamiliar arm of hers) and that the sniping process is a very slow one; it's as much to show that they don't have a very high rate of fire, in this case. I just... The chapter was dragging on when I wrote that part, with a few sections I wasn't too happy with, and I was really peeved that with computerized scopes controlled by the Magi, knowing how to adjust their scopes (I could have, and shouldn't, probably write at least 2000 words on that alone...) would not be so important, so it couldn't quite feature.

Stupid modern technology making away with the good ole' ways of snipin'; why, in mah days, we didn't even have a scope! We had to kill Russians with iron sights we did! And we didn't have any of this fancy camouflage either. If we wanted to avoid detection, we stuffed out mouths with snow so out breath wouldn't give us away! And we killed them in droves! None of this "waiting for a shot while wearing diapers"; no, we killed one for every hour of daylight! And if we got ambushed, we didn't have one of 'em fancy "spotters" you kids are always talking about, with their "assault rifles"; no, we had to kill them ourselves, with sub-machine guns! 200 of them. At once!

Hey, get off my lawn you rascals!

(tl;dr: LatwPIAT doesn't actually know anything about the military)

Lorien?

No idea what you're talking about.

Oh, and GAH programmer technojargon! *ducks and covers*

Ah, this is simple:

In computer logic, there are a number of logic-gate processes that are endemic; AND and OR are among these.

AND takes two values, and checks if both are equal to a third value. (Written something like (a AND b) == TRUE would check whether a is a true statement, and whether b is a true statement. If both a and b are true statements, then that string would evaluate as true; it's true that both a and b are true. (You can also make other comparisons, like (a AND b) == "cake" which would check whether a and b were both variables (just like in math) equal to the text-string "cake" and return TRUE if a and b equals "cake", but FALSE if either is not equal to cake [like "pie"])

OR, on the other hand, checks where either a or b is equal to whatever, then evaluates to TRUE if either is, and FALSE if neither is. (a OR b) == "cake" would return TRUE if a == "cake", TRUE if b == "cake", TRUE if a == "cake" and b == "cake" and FALSE if a != "cake" and b != "cake"

XOR (eXclusive OR), which is a function not all programming languages use, checks whether only one of a and b satisfy the conditions, and will return FALSE if both do. So, for (a XOR b) = "cake", a == "cake" b != "cake" and a != "cake" b == "cake" returns TRUE, while a == "cake" b == "cake" and a != "cake" b != "cake" both return FALSE.

The thing is, AND and OR can be short-circuited by checking the first term; In an AND function, if the first term (a) doesn't satisfy the condition, you don't have to check the second term (b) because you will return FALSE as an answer anyway. Likewise, in an OR function, if the first term satisfies the conditions, you don't have to check the second term, because you will always return TRUE anyway.

XOR can't do this, because you have to check that a != b when a is satisfies the conditions. The problem with this is that when you don't have an XOR function in your programming language, you have to write long, tedious strings to create one, such as ((a OR b) == "cake") AND (a != b) == TRUE

What Fubuki did wrong was to say ((a OR b) == "cake") AND (a != "cake") == TRUE), which is a long, tedious and redundant way of writing b == "cake"

In what I remember of C++, at least.

Long, fun chapter.
ISHKUR's little rampage was fun.
All in all, fun times for all. Lovely party. When's the next?

Thank you. The next "party" will hopefully be in a month or so, if I'm not distracted by other writing projects or procrastination. It's going to a fun little chapter with Asuka and Kaji in Germany, and more setting-development of the type I had in Layer 02. It's even going to feature more of--*realization* You sly dog, Jonen C.

WHEN IT'S DONE.

Originally Posted by Jonen C

The UN has nine levels of security clearance above top secret. As far as I remember, ANGEL/0A is the lowest of those (the clearance required to review the UNATCO Employee Handbook).
SERAPHIC/8X is... Well. That information is above your clearance level, in fact, I'm not entirely sure you're even cleared to know about the existence of SERAPHIC/8X.

Checking up on nuwen.net, the only time Seraphic/8X is used is internally in MJ12, while the antepenultimate one, Throne/6G, is publicly known in the UN. Additonally, cosidering that it should be 8I and not 8X, Seraphic/8X is probably not known even to the UN itself.

[Jonen C]

Originally Posted by LatwPIAT

[snip: Service! Service!]

No! Bad LatwPIAT! No rewrites!

...play up the angelic symbolism and a lot of neat, gothic imagery. Evas with kill-switches, grey death infecting Unit-03--*twack* Ow!

Just. As. Planned.

As you can probably tell, I, like every other fanfic writer there is, has a near obsessive-compulsive need to pepper my stories with shout-outs to every piece of fiction I've ever takes the slightest interest in. For example, the whole part about Ishkur using its crystalline structure to generate powerful laser beams was a reference to how the Disclosure virus colloids in Eden: It's an Endless World! work. There's going to be a lot of references. You should probably make a list.

I don't actually compile lists, but I point out what I recognize. And sometimes what I recognize to be a reference without identifying what it is.

It can also be translated as "those who watch over"

I SEE.

All the anti-Rakbu operations are named after trains. Apparently someone in ECCO or the JSDA are rail-enthusiasts. (Unlike me, who just goes to Wikipedia and picks a name at random...)

... Neat. Or railroading. Whatever. Stupid pun.

People were asking for me to have Saito teach Shinji how to target and shoot Ishkur, so having a long scene in which just that happens, I would be doing a "service" to my "fans"; hence, "fanservice" of the sort I really like. (As opposed to sexual/titillating fanservice, which I have a hard time writing.)

I never said it wasn't fanservice.

...I'm 18, I got out of conscripted military service for poor physical condition (or having poor skill in math or English) and the last time I fired any weapon that was not emplaced I was 12 years old, and it was a BB gun, at a target 10 meters away.

I missed every shot.

Got out of conscripted service thanks to being a beanpole, but before that (and a while after muster) I was a member of a voluntary youth organization. Got to learn how to shoot, starting with the .22 long and working up.

Fired a real sniper rifle (PSG 90) exactly once, four or five rounds total, and long before that I even got to shoot five shots with an old Mauser (Swedish m/1896) battle rifle just before it was retired. (At age fifteen. Technically, we were supposed to be sticking to .22 until age seventeen, but the Mauser is a bolt action and was being retired.)
Hitting the target isn't an issue with either weapon, but then that was at ranges of less than two hundred meters, so it's pretty much physically impossible to miss the target if you've got a good position.
Getting a good shot grouping, though, is trickier, and putting said grouping near the bullseye.

The scope, and bipod, on the sniper rifle improves accuracy significantly - very significantly.
But assuming the range they're working on is significantly greater than two hundred meters, difficulty increases...
If they're taking a lot of time and making every shot right, they should start landing hits on the second or third try, if not the first, getting one shot per try to get them in the proper sniper mindset.
And they should manage a try in less than fifteen minutes, possibly repositioning after every try? Okay, yeah, it could take an hour.

Stupid modern technology making away with the good ole' ways of snipin'; why, in mah days, we didn't even have a scope! We had to kill Russians with iron sights we did! And we didn't have any of this fancy camouflage either. If we wanted to avoid detection, we stuffed out mouths with snow so out breath wouldn't give us away! And we killed them in droves! None of this "waiting for a shot while wearing diapers"; no, we killed one for every hour of daylight! And if we got ambushed, we didn't have one of 'em fancy "spotters" you kids are always talking about, with their "assault rifles"; no, we had to kill them ourselves, with sub-machine guns! 200 of them. At once!

Hey, get off my lawn you rascals!

(tl;dr: LatwPIAT doesn't actually know anything about the military)

Training is how you get good, after all... But "you can't fight ideas with bullets."

No idea what you're talking about.

Babylon 5 reference. "Who are you?" "What do you want?" "Why are you here?" "Who do you serve and whom do you trust?" "Where are you going?" "What is truth, and what is God?"

Ah, this is simple:

[snip: Jargon]

In what I remember of C++, at least.

I've pretty much hardened myself as a HISTORY and LITERATURE nerd (admittedly with military and SF specializations).
Jargon just pours straight through me.

Thank you. The next "party" will hopefully be in a month or so, if I'm not distracted by other writing projects or procrastination. It's going to a fun little chapter with Asuka and Kaji in Germany, and more setting-development of the type I had in Layer 02. It's even going to feature more of--*realization* You sly dog, Jonen C.

*Woof.*

WHEN IT'S DONE.

Checking up on nuwen.net, the only time Seraphic/8X is used is internally in MJ12, while the antepenultimate one, Throne/6G, is publicly known in the UN. Additonally, cosidering that it should be 8I and not 8X, Seraphic/8X is probably not known even to the UN itself.

Yup.

[LatwPIAT]

Originally Posted by Jonen C

Just. As. Planned.

Your plan culminated in me being hit on my head by my muse?ⁿ

[n] ...or was it the first step of a more complex plan to make me re-write GitE as Deus Ex Evangelion? *twack*² Which isn't going to happen, I swear!
[2] Your plan seems to be working...

[Dartz]

This is fun.

I like how you've meshed the tech between universes, though some of the maths goes over my head.... which is an odd experience for me. More used to applying it, than theory-ing it.

Nicely played with the training. Braking radiation also made me squee....

I'm just waiting for one of the Pilots to go full 'borg.

[LatwPIAT]

Don't worry if the math in teh Mathematical Adventures of Rei Ayanami goes a little over your head; it was written with the full knowledge that I was tackling one of the more difficult concepts in mathematics, and not really being serious about it.

At all.

It's good to see that you like the sniper-training and bremsstrahlung parts; the first I wrote because I felt that there was a specific lack of military tactics in NGE in general, and a lack of sound tactics in general: Giant flying thing that could nuke us all from orbit?

Let's knife it!

Now, when it comes to military tactics, giant robots like the Evangelions aren't really my thing; since there are so few of them, they can't really be used, I imagine, in conventional tactics. Even with three of them, you can't really do the Pincer Manoeuvre, because if you flank from both sides with Evas and meet at the back, the main strength of you attack isn't the advancing force, but the flanking force! It's not like a move like that wouldn't be telegraphed anyway; an Eva can be seen from 32 km away by a prone soldier, assuming no obstructions. You need at least 50 km of range if you want to hide and Eva from an equally-sized enemy in open ground, so suddenly the battlefields become huge, and even with a walking pace of close to 80 km/h [that is before the ground shatters under the weight of 1000 tons of Eva coming crashing down, mind you] that means things are going to take a lot more time and be of a lot larger scale than any of the three settings I've merged in there can accommodate.

Really, if I were to make a comparison, the conventional Eva-battles in GitE probably have more in common with a police or SWAT team taking down an insane criminal or terrorist with magic powers than they have with being vehicles in a conventional war (that has giant robots)

So either, I need more, better giant robots (their own power supply, mass production) or I just have to write something that isn't quite the giant robot war I'd like to write (instead, I'll just read ANE and AEE, which cover than angle nicely. Especially AEE Chp. 7 and CATOclysm.)

(Really though, I'm more of a small-unit-tactics person, with a preference for WWII-style, company-sized encounters with maybe a few vehicles on either side. The only problem is that unlike a certain mindwrenching horror, I can't just throw in a scene of that whenever I like unless I see the need for lots of poignant flashbacks to WWIII and WWIV.)

The bremsstrahlung part, meanwhile, is just there because I like information. Especially science and especially especially physics, but in the end, I am addicted to information, which I have no doubt is reflected in everything I write, because like all writers, I'm under the delusion that because I like something, other people must like it too. I like near-future science fiction, and I think phone-phreaking is fascinating. Hence, I once invented a fictional island-group for the express purpose of . . . having old, phreakable phonelines there just in case I wanted to have phone-phreaking plot set in the future.

With a 20-page digression on the history of phone-phreaking, of course.

So, I have bremsstrahlung in my story, and I'm not sure if everyone knowns what bremsstrahlung is. Hence, I feel a need to explain it. In detail.

(Incidentally, EarthScorpion has been as kind as to launch a TVTropes entry on GitE. Apparently he thinks I like Technology Porn.)

[Dartz]

Originally Posted by LatwPIAT

Don't worry if the math in teh Mathematical Adventures of Rei Ayanami goes a little over your head; it was written with the full knowledge that I was tackling one of the more difficult concepts in mathematics, and not really being serious about it.

At all.

It's good to see that you like the sniper-training and bremsstrahlung parts; the first I wrote because I felt that there was a specific lack of military tactics in NGE in general, and a lack of sound tactics in general: Giant flying thing that could nuke us all from orbit?

Let's knife it!

Ground launched orbital nuclear strike... it's the only way to be sure

Now, when it comes to military tactics, giant robots like the Evangelions aren't really my thing; since there are so few of them, they can't really be used, I imagine, in conventional tactics. Even with three of them, you can't really do the Pincer Manoeuvre, because if you flank from both sides with Evas and meet at the back, the main strength of you attack isn't the advancing force, but the flanking force! It's not like a move like that wouldn't be telegraphed anyway; an Eva can be seen from 32 km away by a prone soldier, assuming no obstructions. You need at least 50 km of range if you want to hide and Eva from an equally-sized enemy in open ground, so suddenly the battlefields become huge, and even with a walking pace of close to 80 km/h [that is before the ground shatters under the weight of 1000 tons of Eva coming crashing down, mind you] that means things are going to take a lot more time and be of a lot larger scale than any of the three settings I've merged in there can accommodate.

Really, if I were to make a comparison, the conventional Eva-battles in GitE probably have more in common with a police or SWAT team taking down an insane criminal or terrorist with magic powers than they have with being vehicles in a conventional war (that has giant robots)

So either, I need more, better giant robots (their own power supply, mass production) or I just have to write something that isn't quite the giant robot war I'd like to write (instead, I'll just read ANE and AEE, which cover than angle nicely. Especially AEE Chp. 7 and CATOclysm.)

The problem with developing tactics to fight the Angels(Rakbu), is that they're not all going to just amble into the middle of the city and let themselves be shot at. You can train for the last Angel, but you can be guaranteed the next Angel is going to be something entirely different to what's gone before, so stuff has to be made up on the fly under the gun.

There's no reason conventional military tactics can't have an input... but the Average Angel/EVA is so far out of conventional military thinking, only unconventional techniques are going to get it to work.

But don't ask me about tactics... I don't know anything beyond putting a few nuclear ICBM's on an S2 equipped EVA would make a very nice second-strike weapon.... given that they are pretty mobile and so are hard to target with ballistic missiles, and about the only non-Angel way to kill one is to hit it with a nuke itself, or another EVA.

(Really though, I'm more of a small-unit-tactics person, with a preference for WWII-style, company-sized encounters with maybe a few vehicles on either side. The only problem is that unlike a certain mindwrenching horror, I can't just throw in a scene of that whenever I like unless I see the need for lots of poignant flashbacks to WWIII and WWIV.)

Trust me... if you want a scene of company-level forces fighting against an Angel or an EVA... you'll figure out a to do it, or to translate it to EVA scale. It's an entirely new method of warfare... as new as the aircraft in 1914... so new tactics will be developed while people figure out how to use these things in a conventional army.

The bremsstrahlung part, meanwhile, is just there because I like information. Especially science and especially especially physics, but in the end, I am addicted to information, which I have no doubt is reflected in everything I write, because like all writers, I'm under the delusion that because I like something, other people must like it too. I like near-future science fiction, and I think phone-phreaking is fascinating. Hence, I once invented a fictional island-group for the express purpose of . . . having old, phreakable phonelines there just in case I wanted to have phone-phreaking plot set in the future.

With a 20-page digression on the history of phone-phreaking, of course.

So, I have bremsstrahlung in my story, and I'm not sure if everyone knowns what bremsstrahlung is. Hence, I feel a need to explain it. In detail.

Sometime's that's fun. Sometimes it's just as fun to leave that stuff as a genius bonus, especially if it's not actually relevant to the plot as a whole. It's fun to catch things that let you know the author knows his stuff... and rewarding to know them without having them explained to you. You feel like your privy to some secret information.

(Incidentally, EarthScorpion has been as kind as to launch a TVTropes entry on GitE. Apparently he thinks I like Technology Porn.)

That's how I found it, actually. Though, I'd imagine having a page like that would be a bit of a double edged sword. I for one, would be completely unable to stop checking it to see what people are saying 'behind my back'.

[LatwPIAT]

Originally Posted by Dartz

The problem with developing tactics to fight the Angels(Rakbu), is that they're not all going to just amble into the middle of the city and let themselves be shot at. You can train for the last Angel, but you can be guaranteed the next Angel is going to be something entirely different to what's gone before, so stuff has to be made up on the fly under the gun.

There's no reason conventional military tactics can't have an input... but the Average Angel/EVA is so far out of conventional military thinking, only unconventional techniques are going to get it to work.

Actually, part of the reason, in Ghost in the Evangelion, Cpt. Katsuragi was transferred to ECCO as the Tactical Chief of Staff was that she sat down with everything that was known and she had classification for about my Adam-equivalent and analysed the information in order to produce a series of documents on how to conduct anti-Rakbu warfare. Granted, she was working with outdated information, most of which was classified by the AE, the UN, the government of Japan or any combination of the three, and trying to write it for fighting with conventional weapons such as tanks, infantry, warships and aircraft against something Adam-like.

Most competent generals and tacticians would probably have figured most of the stuff out eventually, but Misato wrote the whole thing pre-emptively. It's a bit like Sun Tzu's Art of War: It all sounds so simplistic you think to yourself "I could have thought of that!" but in the end it's still easier to just teach promising specialists straight from the book than have them figure out all the tactics themselves.

Of course, the document is of limited value against Rakbu that don't look and/or act like Adam, so in the end they still have to make a lot of stuff up.

Which is why Cpt. Katsuragi works for ECCO, since she wrote the book in the first place.

But don't ask me about tactics... I don't know anything beyond putting a few nuclear ICBM's on an S2 equipped EVA would make a very nice second-strike weapon.... given that they are pretty mobile and so are hard to target with ballistic missiles, and about the only non-Angel way to kill one is to hit it with a nuke itself, or another EVA.

Oh, oh my. That can't be good.

SNAKE: "Eva!? It can't be!"

Solid Snake is sent to infiltrate Shadow Moses, where they were doing experiments with fitting an S2 Engine to Eva Unit-01 while testing it's second-strike capabilities. Among the hostages taken are Cpt. Misato Katsuragi and Shinji Ikari, the son of Plant Manager Gendo Ikari. The terrorists planned to force Shinji Ikari to pilot so they could use the S2 Engine to launch an undetectable nuclear first strike and blackmail the White House for the embryonic Adam stored in Area 51... Gendo Ikari has been secretly plotting this and plans to unite Unit-01, Rei Ayanami and Adam together so that he can be united with Yui Ikari in his Outer Heaven, and only Snake can stop FOXHOUND and Gendo Ikari from forcing the ever-passive Shinji to pilot against his better judgement.

No, bad LatwPIAT! *twack* No distractions!