I'm going to talk about three world seeds that are somewhat based in the Bible, and are somewhat or quite a lot SF. One is not mine.
I am of the view that a lot of Christians don't get into RPG's, but it might be possible to sway them. Also, we need good worlds for everyone.
One idea of a ways back was based on Lot and Sodom. "Lot" is the keeper of the Main Planetary Gun A. These are huge railguns going dozens of miles deep into the planetary crust, and there are three (A,B, and C) to cover the sky. As part of the job, he also maintains the Honor Memorial for the Fleet that went into space to fight the alien menace and never came back, both it and the aliens are gone it seems.
What happened is the Fleet of cyborged humans left, fought, and were on their way back when they got informed that the PG's were locking them up. It seems that the civilian types had a strong difference of opinion with the military types on moral duties. The civilians were glad to send the military off to save them, but when the mil guys got back, and wanted to vote and stuff, well, their old-fashioned notions of duty and honor would be repressive of the New Acadia.
So they were told to buzz off at the point of a really large shotgun. And the new masters of Acadia told everyone 'they dissappeared, so sad.'
Well, in the centuries since then, Acadia has become a place where 'honor' and 'duty' are not even in the dictionary, much less people's lives. And B and C PG's are down. So the Fleet has found itself running up against resource limits in the outer system, and it really needs the access to the local sun to refuel its fusion reactors.
The Fleet sneaks up on the planet on the B and C side, and lands two cyborg soldiers to investigate in New Acadia's capital. They find the place is more horrible than they can imagine. Only robot servitors keep the society functioning, and people from starving. The possibility of making a treaty with people who don't seem to understand the concept of 'word of honor' and laugh merrily at 'honesty' is nil. But they do find one good guy.
And they tell him that its time to leave. They take him and his family to the shuttle and into orbit. And then the KE weapons arrive and pummel the last PG into nonoperability which does a lot of damage to the capital, but it also makes it so that the New Acadians can't backshoot the space based civilization.
I've of course, written on this before, although a bit differently.
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"Kings" on NBC? did not last long, but it was an interesting idea. An alternate reality with a modern tech or slightly further ahead, but with Kings instead of Republics and Democracies.
They seemed to say they were going to follow the Bible and other texts and be creative. It could have been good.
Unfortunately, they chose to make David a peace activist type guy. They have him as a soldier toss a grenade to destroy a Goliath tank. That's cool. That's pretty clever. But he does it by accident. Um. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems fairly clear that David deliberately set out to kill Goliath of Gath, that he had a plan, and he worked it. He had faith in God's care, and that God wanted him out there, and he had his skill with a sling, and he had past experiences killing dangerous creatures. How many of us have killed a lion and a bear? With primitive weaponry? Right. Not really a peace activist. And that perspective they had kinda killed it is my guess, or was one of the major factors.
Still, take away the unbiblical stuff, make it a bloodthirsty world of Kings and you could definitely have something. David is a complicated guy, and he has a lot of adventures, and sometimes his solutions and responses are surprising.
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I was reading in Genesis about the Tower of Babel. The Bible talks about how the people gathered together to make a name for themselves, and to avoid being scattered in the Earth. And God comes down, and sees this, and that they all have one language, and He says that nothing will be restrained from them. And so He confuses their tongues, and we have the birth of the major language groups.
The ideas behind Vinge's Singularity are very echoing of Christian ideas. The Singularity, in short, is the idea that the rate of technological advance is speeding up, faster and faster. Ten years of research gets compressed into a year, and then a month. Along the way, some form of superhumanity, of superbrains, becomes possible. And it reaches the point where any logically non-contradictory goal is achievable.
You can't say 'make me the prettiest person on the planet' because someone else will be doing likewise. You can't say 'make me green and orange in the same color' because that doesn't make sense. But you can say 'terraform Mars as my personal garden'.
In other words, nothing will be restrained from them.
And at this point, an angel comes down, and the trillions and trillions of lines of computer code that make up this society, are suddenly broken up into ten differing operating systems. To keep it more mundane, say an alien spaceship comes by. Their goal is to slow humans down enough that Humanity won't just explode out, and remake the galaxy in its image. They want humans to learn a little wisdom first. And they figure having ten human civs strive against each other might teach them a little sense. And yes, that OS breaker would have to be invented by the League of Totally Awesomely Insanely Powerful Aliens in order to stop the Humans from blowing on it, and wishing it away.
Yes, the goal 'turn the Milky Way Galaxy into an advertisement by moving the stars to make a cartoon of Milky Way candy bars' is possible.
Now the question becomes where do you put your verser in this world. After all, everyone has the ability to move stars using pocket change. Even versers like the Alchemist might be underpowered to cope on equal terms anyways. One solution is to make this world a moral judgement world.
Verser arrives on Observing Alien Starship. The Alien Superbrains tell him that Humanity is about to go through its Singularity. And they've chosen him as Humanity's Advocate. He's the Defense Attorney for Earth. Some of the more stringent superbrains favor vaping Earth now. Others favor altering the bias a la SM Stirling to make tech above a certain level impossible...
As Earth's Secret Attorney, he has to go to Earth,observe, make arguements for his case, and try to defend Earth from preemptive annihilation. And of course, he's going to run into things that make him wonder if the stringent aliens are correct. He's going to meet humans who are as despicable as the worst alien nightmare could imagine.
Many humans won't be like that, but some will be. Technology will give them power, and the ability to indulge their most base and twisted desires.
Gideon: For those not familar with the story, the people of Israel were having a hard time of it as Midianite raiders would come and take their stuff when the Israelites had it prepared. The sequence went something like this...plant, weed, harvest, separate out the chaff, Midianite raiders arrive and steal food, go hungry or on slim rations.
So, thats the situation for Gideon who is the youngest guy in his father's household. He claims to be pretty low on the status totem pole for his house compared to other houses, I'm not sure that's true. Just because someone said something in the Bible is true, doesn't mean it is. It means they said it, but they could have been lying or exzaggerating.
Gideon is doing the separating of the wheat from the chaff which is supposed to done on a hilltop where you can get a good breeze, but he's doing it in a valley to hide it from the Midianites. And God gives him some directions.
He's uncertain, and asks for signs to prove this is really what God wanted. This is where the fleece that is wet when the ground is dry of dew comes in, and vice versa. He's a cautious man.
After he's sure, he goes out and gets some of his friends, I think, and they go damage a religious thing. The local townsfolk are fearful of retribution, but Gideon's dad points out that if the deity in charge of the shrine or whatever was really powerful it could defend itself.
Later, Gideon goes on to gather up a bunch of soldiers to beat on the Midianite army. God says too many, and Gideon sends home anyone that is frightened or has a new wife. Still too many. The remainder are told to drink, and anyone who sticks their head down into the water and thus makes themself vulnerable to getting smacked over the head is sent home. 300 of them scoop up water with their hand.
So, now Gideon has the 300 bravest and smartest Israelites to go up against somewhere around 100,000 Midianites. He has them circle the enemy camp in the night, break a pitcher to reveal a torch, cheer loudly, and then blow trumpets. A trumpet is usually for the head of a column of soldiers, not just one soldier so this looks like a vastly bigger army than it really is. Midianites bump in the night with each other, and a very large bar brawl in a darkened room with sharp swords results.
God wins.
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Now, enough for the review. Let's SF this.
The independent colony planet founded by descendants of the Gideons (the group that puts the Bible's in hotel rooms) has been reached and settled by hyperspace capable ships. Its tech is lower than in the core worlds because making starships and such requires a truly massive industrial base, and its only been settled for a century, and besides most are farmers or sea farmers.
The Giddies, as they call themselves, are a serious enough folk, not terribly violent. Most violent disputes are settled with fists rather than guns, and the largest predator on the planet is a coyote which has been 'genetically stabilized' so that it won't turn into a wolf.
But a civil war in the nearby star system of Las Draconis resulted in some of the losers in that war deciding to take up piracy. Some suspect that the government of Las Draconis supports this for the money it can get, and as a way to export its own violent and destructive men to somewhere else.
Inspired by the name "Midianites", lets make the pirates, the Middle, the Middle Kingdom which is a term for China. Thus the settlers of Las Draconis are Han Chinese, and the pirates were attempting to bring back the old ways, Communist China, which is centuries gone, and some have romanticized. Thus the pirates claim to be residents of the Middle Kingdom, and they go around looting the hard work of several nearby star systems.
They have spy satellites and informers who tell them when something valuable is made, or when enough of a certain product is stored so they can come by, loot, rampage, and run away in their ragtag mix of tramp freighters and air/space fighters.
Jack has a robofactory that turns sugar cane into ethanol and oil and plastics for basic uses such as plastic cups. Ideally, you run it on a hill top or next to a river as the thing generates a ton of heat. However, what with the treacherous informers and the spy sats, unless Jack wants to makes barrels of oil for the Middle Kingdom, he does it in a deserted valley with a mylar tarp over everything which makes it very, very hot, and it keeps him from making that much.
I'm not sure how to do the miracles for this story in SF form. I'll stop here for now.
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On the David situation, one way to do it would be to use MJ's technique with Narnia. Your job as a verser is to make sure this guy survives without letting him realize what you're up to. Later, when David gets his mighty men you can join up.
On Gideon, I'm going to excerpt a few bits from a chapter from my book Do You Trust Me?, and make some suggestions--I hope.
I guess the first question is, do we have an angel, or do we have someone/something else? You could mix this up with an NPC verser asking Jack what he's going to do about it, and who else might do it; but it's a bit much to expect a PC to fall into the role of divine messenger absent a script, and a bit awkward to give him the script.This is the man to whom the angel appears. This is the man the angel hails as a “valiant warrior”.
You might back-write the existence of some confederation of planets that has an interest in the defeat of the Middle Kingdom but also has some kind of official policy of non-involvement. Someone very CIA-like decides to contact Jack. Maybe they've done a profile and decided this is the man they can use. Part of his job, then, is to persuade Jack that he has the backing of this larger organization. That would then mean that Jack would act in ways that assume such support, and if the Middle Kingdom pirates can be persuaded that Jack has some basis to believe it, they'll think that the support is there. So we start with our operative on the ground telling Jack he's the guy.
That, then, is the way the operative comes: we can't work with the official government here, because that would require open and formal contacts; but we can work with you, unofficially.Yet God was willing to take the time to persuade and encourage the faith he had, and when Gideon asked how it could be that God truly favored them when God had not sent miraculous deliverance from the Midianites, the angel said, You, Gideon, are the miracle. God has sent you.
The back of my mind tells me that this has something to do with a sacrifice being consumed by a fire that was never set. The details are unimportant. Let's suppose rather that the operative provides a few sample weapons of a technological level more advanced than anything the Middle Kingdom pirates have shown.Once God confirms all this to him by a minor miracle, he proceeds to do what God has instructed.
However, he is not finished doubting. He tears down his father’s pagan altar and sees what might to him have been the greater miracle of his father coming to his defense. He raises an army and prepares to attack the enemy. Then he doubts again. He does not doubt whether God can do this; he doubts whether he got the message right. He says to God, “If you are going to do what you said you were going to do,” and asks God to confirm the message. He puts out his fleece.
The best I can come up with on this is that there must be some sort of pirate base on the Gideon planet, probably not far from Jack's location, and probably known to him. It has gone unchallenged in part because reprisals from the pirates are feared, and thus the local government won't take action. Besides, some of the locals are collaborators, including Jack's father, and while they might be pragmatic collaborators doing this to prevent harm to their families, they're not putting up any resistance. Jack, as a private citizen, can take action, and using the equipment he's been given and maybe a few friends (which might be where the verser comes in?) in a commando-style raid that wipes out the base completely. His father is surprised and pleased.
God respects Gideon’s doubts, and confirms His instructions by the double sign of the fleece—first dew on the wool but not the floor, then dew on the floor but not the wool. Gideon is persuaded, and prepares to fight.
It's one thing to use the gear you've been given for a local job; it's another to raise a major attack against what is very nearly an occupying force. But let's suppose that one thing enemy had at this base was a quantity of one-man fighter craft--three hundred is a good number. Jack needed to take the base to get these. Now he needs the men to man them. But word of his success is spreading, and people--particularly young men tired of the enemy raids--are flocking to his location.
He does not believe, however, that these three hundred craft will be sufficient to take out the enemy--after all, this is just one of the enemy's bases in the area. Probably even now the enemy is mobilizing all its forces for a reprisal, and what Jack has to do is meet that incoming reprisal and defeat it. But he's already significantly outnumbered.
However, Gideon’s doubt has cost something. He knew that God had called him to defeat Midian, but he wanted that last bit of reassurance to bolster his confidence before he led his thirty-two thousand soldiers into war. God gave him that reassurance, clearly and powerfully, and he is now ready. However, it is at this point that God demands more of His chosen servant. You did not trust Me, Gideon, but now you do. You have thirty-two thousand men, but you wanted me to assure you that I was with you. Now that you believe that, you do not need so many men. Then, in two sweeping steps, God reduces that army from five digits to three, leaving His chosen general a mere three hundred men with whom to assault the vast Midianite forces.
...The odds were against Gideon from the start, as he was facing at least one hundred thirty-five thousand trained soldiers with a hastily scrounged militia about one quarter of that, but with the assurance that God was going to win this he no longer cared about the odds. Once he no longer cared about the odds, they skyrocketed. God raised Gideon’s faith from that place where he was uncertain about four against one to the place where he believed that the fact God said He was going to win this was enough, and then said if that were true, five hundred to one is just as certain as four to one.
So the operative gives Jack a communications device which will reach his organization back at the Confederation. Jack transmits a message that he is ready with a force of thirty thousand, and is told that the Confederation is ready for operation sheepskin, but the answer returns that the element of surprise is essential, and thirty thousand is more than can be outfitted. He will have to pair down his force to the number of craft available, and there's no sense in using local ships as these will be no match for the Middle Kingdom warships. Indeed, the one-man fighters that they have are not a serious match for those warships, but the confederation will have its forces ready to move when Jack gives the signal. Jack's going to have to take this on faith, but he has the assurances both of the operative on the ground and the people at the other end of the communicator that this is going to go down that way.
He was not quite finished doubting, though. We know this because God recognized it. When the time came for Gideon to attack, God gave him one last shot of confidence. If you have any doubt, God said, do this now. Gideon did it. He certainly would not have gone to the enemy camp had he not trusted that God would protect him; however, he would not have gone there to have his doubts resolved if he had had no more doubts.
God then encouraged Gideon through a dream. This dream was not his dream, nor was it the dream of one of his friends or family members, nor one of his commanders, nor a prophet of Israel. It was, rather, the dream of a Midianite soldier which Gideon overheard being recounted to another Midianite soldier, and their explanation of it, that God had given victory over them, the Midianites, to Gideon and his army. Gideon’s last doubts are resolved.
Jack was not aware that the communications were open-channel, but the operative certainly was. Now Jack's people monitor a transmission between Middle Kingdom ships that in essence say that there's no way the pirate fleet can withstand the kind of assault promised by the Confederation. The question is whether it's all talk, but the belief is that if Jack's force strikes the Confederation troops will be coming in behind him.
Thus when Jack launches his insignificant collection of one-man fighters, they spread themselves thin and come against the main fleet from multiple vectors. The Middle Kingdom captains start jockeying for escape routes, trying to predict the direction from which the Confederation ships are coming, and soon are getting in each others' paths. Some collide; some open fire on others. It's soon obvious that this is a rout, and Jack's crew is able to cripple the few ships that manage to remain intact. No Confederation fleet ever shows, and there ultimately is no evidence that there was anyone involved except Jack and some mysterious person on the ground and someone on the other end of a radio. The Middle Kingdom pirates have been bluffed into dissolution and mutual destruction.
How does that work for you?
--M. J. Young
Off the top of my head, I like this quite a bit.
Thanks.
Eric
Quite welcome. Let me know if you run something like it. I'm rather impressed with it myself.
In fact, maybe I'll scrap the lost colony spaceship world and see if I can put this into the space-based Triple Play scenario.
--M. J. Young
Excellente.
I'm thinking about a Job scenario (I've already done one with Vampire, and its easier to do with fantasy, but we'll see.) Other interesting stories to SF-ize might be Daniel and the Lion's Den, Elijah and the Prophets of Baal.
Elijah...
Pan-Tireknichon is the crossroads of the galaxy, the humanly settled portion, and its important to the alien races as well. This single planetary state controls more wealth than ten normal planets. Its spacescrapers reach a quarter-mile tall, and perhaps ten percent of those living in one have never left a Residency Tower in their life.
It is a technologically stable society with mechanical jumpgates in continous operations leading to dozens of other worlds. Ques of starship freighters that stretch for several Astronomical Units are not uncommon.
The Lords Temporal are bound by numerous restrictions, and while they do have considerable power in certain areas, most of the power in the Tirek Star System is held by the Five Great Ones. Benevolent, calm, thoughtful, always watching, the AI's rule the world in a gentle grasp. The average human has practically no contact with an AI as the Lords Temporal and their agents serve to put a human face to the decisions of the AIs.
The Lords Temporal are a combination of royalty and democracy. Only those of royal blood may be put on the electable list if they pass certain tests of skill and character.
Population on Pan-tereknichon is near fifty billion, and there was an arguement between the AIs. One one side, those who favored advancing technology from the current AI created stasis. This would allow the society to continue expanding, to discover anti-gravity and build true SPACESCRAPERS. On the other side were those who favored limiting things.
Things got bitter between the four. The fifth, the Birthing Computer, or the Genetics Design and Control Overystem, or Mother as its commonly called ignored the squabble. She had more impoartant things to do.
One computer AI renamed itself Dire Necessity, and began manipulating things so that a population loss would occur. He was blocked. So he tried again, and again until he discovered a loophole. It would enable him to launch his attack, but his attackers would not be allowed to strike at him.
He took refuge in the religious liberty laws, and renamed himself Ba'al. He began to gather discontented and violent men, and made them his priests. Their mission was to preach the holiness of sacrificing their children to Ba'al.
This religion cannot be stopped because it has the protection of the extremely stringent religious liberty laws. No one before had the nerve to push them this far, and if someone had, the unified AI's would have used their override and changed the law. However, the AI's are not unified and no change in the law is coming.
Frustrated the 'lets' grow out of our problem' AIs are sitting back. After a bit, they realize that the renamed Ba'al is developing a lot of power, and they began worried that he would attack them directly with his mobs and his priests.
So bound by law, and by fear, the other AI's don't act. But one. The Mother is very ill at this change in the birth plans. She chooses what genetics get produced with an idea to make all the genomes useful to society as a whole. She feels like she is constructing a giant puzzle, and Ba'al is burning some of her pieces.
So she takes a hand. She starts her own church, and recruits. Unfortunately, she finds that if she does something bold, her people get arrested. If they do half of what the Ba'al guys do, they get arrested.
Plus many of her people express concern about staying within the law. This is a very lawful culture.
And then the verser arrives. He's perfect. He's outside the system, and has sworn no oaths of obedience.
She makes an approach to him, and offers her considerable support as a behind the scenes override button for any piece of tech around if he will destroy Ba'al and his priests.
Its time for religious war amidst the skyscrapers.
He can, with her help, do all sorts of things like...
1. Seal and Unseal doors at will.
2. Shut down cars.
3. Turn off the hydroponics and the weather control machinery.
4. Activate military war satellites to launch laser strikes in the terrawatt range.
5. Walk 'invisibly' as cameras will refuse to see him, and most people wear camera glasses which provide VR see through overlays...but they can be edited to remove his presence.
He needs to provoke the Lords Temporal into holding a grand meeting between him and the priests. At this point, with Ba'al's attention fully focused, he utters the code phrase given him by Mother who not only guides humans to be born, but guides AI's to that stat as well. The code phrase, if propagated into him with enough widespread points so he can't 'amputate' will shut Ba'al down.
And then its time for the verser to call in a fire strike on the priests.
And one reason that Ba'al is so shocked is that he knows that telling the shutdown command to a human is very dangerous to Mother.
The verser can say 'Ba'al, shut down now.' (long code sequence), but there's little stopping him from doing that to Mother or any other AI. Its the same command, just the target is changed. Its possible for an AI to defend itself by chopping off parts of itself.
At this point, the story changes from Job to Jesus' Temptation. Ba'al is going to start shutting down, but it takes time. He has time to offer the world to the verser.
"Rescind my shutdown order, shut down th eothers, we make a binding pact supported by Unrewritable Code, and you get to the Emperor of 50 Billion people, one of the richest men in over four thousand Human and ten thousand more nonhuman worlds."
I'd probably try to parallel the Three Temptations ending with the temptation to rule...
For the Giddies....
Air-space Middle Kingdom Fighter
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The "Shih Knight" class of Air-space fighters is a modified form of the "Gauntlet" A/S Fighter used by the Coalition of Worlds and is a good two generations behind Coalition tech. It was one generation behind when Las Draconis made them, and then Las Draconis upgraded to the "Dragon" A/S Fighter, and the Shih Knights were sold off to less powerful star systems, or sold off by petty officers intent on financing their personal retirements, or simply grabbed in the course of and the wake of the Las Draconis civil war.
At least seven squadrons of Shih Knight fighters, eighty each, were known to be on the losing side of the civil war. Most of these were not recovered in the ten years since the war.
The Shih Knight Air/Space Fighter has some minimal capability for atmospheric combat (which the Dragon improved). What it primarily has is the ability to lift off from unimproved fields on a planet by means of its agrav field. In atmosphere, it can use its Boosted Missiles to some effect. But it comes into its own in space.
The key technology to understand with the Shih Knight is gravity control. All major combat systems are gravity control dependent. Thus a hit on the Cyclonic Warp Field Generator, if not immediately fatal, is incapacitating. This, and the pilot's chair are in the center line of the fighter for optimum protection.
Its armor is Mass Alleviated Neutronium Threaded Matrix (10% MAN in honeycomb/thread matrix, and 90% Battlesteel). This is a gravity control dependent material, but its independent of the 'Doom Cyclone' as the pilots call the engine for its occasional tendency to implode taking everything in a mile radius into a one yard sphere.
The Agrav Drive is powered by the Cyclone and maxes out a five hundred miles per hour. It is used to lift from and land on planets, and for fine control in space. It is located under the ship.
The Flexion Drive is located to the rear. It generates a mile long 'flex' in space-time which repulses the ship away from it at up to 100 gravities. Use of this drive in a planetary atmosphere results in the immediate destruction of the fighter in an Annihalatory field of 50 yards centered on the drive. This is followed by a Fatal sheet of hard radiation covering a one-tenth mile sphere, but the fighter is not there to take it.
As should be obvious, 100 g's is enough to turn a human to paste. The Mass Reducer Field, which is a less stable form of the MAN's field, can reduce to null effect, the first ninety g's. It would be possible to make a FD which pulled more than a 100 g's, but no one has made a MRF that can reduce more than 90 g's, so far (although there are rumors about Coalition experiments.) Typically, a Shih Knight fighter runs at 75 g's.
Also, with pressurized air, pressurized suits, and so on, its still quite possible for even a fit and tough pilot to 'grey-out' or even black-out from 10 g's. And the longer the time in 10 g's, the worse it gets.
The 'Gut Blaster' or Forward Slung Gravitonic Disturbance Beam, is also powered by the Cyclone. Firing it requires significant levels of power from the Cyclone, and if the Cyclone is already at a 100 g's and thus powering a LOT of other stuff, the chance of implosion goes up from a 1 in a thousand during combat hours to 1 in 10.
The GB is hooked to the Cyclone under the pilot and extends forward to the nose.
It fires a tighter focused and microsecond long Flexion Drive burst (which does slow the fighter by about 10%). The range is 50,000 miles. It creates at impact, a Teaspoon of Water/An Unstable White Hole for one petasecond. This then destabilizes, and unleashes a chaotic destructive field which does random damage for every ten meter square ranging from Annoying to Obliterative for a hundred yard sphere.
The Teaspoon of Water thing is because to all scientific measurements this is roughly what it does. Suddenly, there's a teaspoon of water, and then chaos is unleashed. Its theorized that the FD burst weapons creates a new universe that is unstable, and then it decays.
The Gravity Boosted Missile has a range of ten million miles. A missile is imparted with a great deal of speed in its tube by the Cyclone engine, and it then free fly's most of the distanct to the target. If a target is then seen, it activates its micro-cyclone engine, and howls in to slam into the target. The payload is MAN which goes un-alleviated at the last microsecond. Typically, the target is struck by a ten ton weight going about 10% of lightspeed.
The Shih Knight can fire one of these every thirty seconds. It carries nine. It may not be using the Cyclone engine for higher than 50 g's while doing so. Damage is....????
While the Shih Knight seems formidable, in truth, one of its most common uses was as a forward observer. Missile launcher battleships would hang back in stealth, and the Shih Knight would find the enemy, and relay targetting data back. And then dozens of missiles would be launched every minute from a battleship or several battleships (and these missiles were much larger.)
Most of the Shih Knight's targets don't have MAN interlaced into battlesteel. They simply have MAN.
Author's Notes: The Shih Knight's described here are terribly tough. They might chop up Imperial Star Destroyers if there was a squadron of the Knights. But, the battleships, and other heavy warships are much tougher.
The forward recon bit goes to the trumpet and torch that Gideon had.