The Ancient Empire Overflowed with Romance (3)
> This is a boss-raid engagement against the Titan-class Mobile Fortress 'Grand Cross'.
> Phase 3 combat will not take place on the event map. It will take place in the real world.
> The interior of the Grand Cross is heavily stocked with strike craft and warships. Exercise extreme caution in combat.
> The fortress's main gun, the Grand Cross Cannon, cannot be fired while hostiles are in close proximity to the fortress or have already entered its interior.
Detailed information will be provided one week from now, when the event begins.
"This is a pretty unusual event."
"You're telling me… Starting on the regular map, jumping to an event map, then back to the regular map again — and that's where we fight."
Maybe it was because our staff hadn't run a combat event in nearly three months and had been pouring everything into non-combat ones instead. The event write-up had that thick, well-honed edge of people who'd been sharpening their knives for a long time, and I nodded along, thoroughly satisfied.
That said, not everyone shared my enthusiasm. A portion of the player base was already grumbling about the way the event was structured.
[Full event notice capture.jpg]
Does this make any damn sense?
If the fortress didn't move, fine. But this thing is bigger than most strongholds AND it can move — so why the hell are the ships charging in first just to get blown to pieces by the players?
Are the admins idiots?
He'd tried to lean on some half-baked "realism" argument, only for everyone else to pile on and point out that — going by the brief description in the notice alone — this mobile fortress was so derangedly overpowered that meeting it at the start would be a death sentence. He got thoroughly beaten down for his trouble.
Setting that sort of player aside, though, the rest of the community reacted to the event with considerable enthusiasm. And for good reason: not long after the notice dropped, a write-up on the Grand Cross went live on the Wiki tab, exactly as promised — giving everyone at least a rough picture of what they were dealing with.
[Grand Cross concept art — big and beautiful.jpg]
Got the info straight from the admins and had it vetted.
Lore-wise, this is one of the ultra-massive weapons built by the Ancient Empire — the same faction that showed up in a previous event, so you all know them. There are even more deranged things out there, but a lot of them are treated like MacGuffins in the setting bible, so I'm not going into those here.
Anyway. What is this thing?
Setting-wise, it's an ancient weapon that spent an absurd amount of time dormant in emergency shutdown. Its main gun, the Grand Cross Cannon, is a completely insane weapon built using an entire planetary system.
The barrel is the planets themselves, orbiting through the system. When a target is acquired, those orbiting planets align and reconfigure into a gigantic ring structure. After that, the three stars at the system's center transform and activate a firing black hole at the core. The resulting gamma-ray burst is then shaped through the planetary barrel into an actual beam that just… obliterates everything.
And that's just the main gun. Internally you've got asteroid belts, defensive fortresses and facilities built into the planets themselves, and shipyards and space fortresses floating around the system in stable orbits like our own bases.
What does that mean in practice? During an infiltration, you have to punch through a defensive line so strong it makes regular strongholds look like a joke — and once you're through that, an even larger defensive fleet than anything a normal base fields is waiting to greet you. Yeah.
And when I saw that write-up, a thought crossed my mind: maybe our staff had sharpened their knives a little too much.
Of course, once that wiki entry made it clear that the Grand Cross was a genuine big fucking awesome — large, beautiful, purebred mobile fortress — our big-gun battleship fetishists and players of every other stripe completely lost it across the galleries and chat channels.
And that those meltdowns were justified was a truth already written in the ancient chronicles of watermelon-blade and old sagas alike.
[Image of a frothing toad]
An ultra-massive fortress that uses an entire planetary system!
And a cannon powered by a black hole!
Fuck.
Se—
SEEEEEEEEEEX!!!!!!!!!!
[Grand Cross concept art & propulsion-section close-up.jpg]
The system is so goddamn huge they had to slap three Stellar Engines into it, and that is just chef's-kiss perfect.
It's straight-up amazing. Seeing that thing in person would make anyone lose their mind.