My longtime PC died a few weeks ago, when the motherboard suffered a lethal injection of electricity in the wrong place, so I've bought a refurbished ex-office PC and I'm currently using that. I did attempt to merge it with the gaming parts of my old PC, but due to issues with cases (the office PC bits won't fit in the gaming PC case and the gaming PC bits won't fit in the office PC case) I've basically dismantled the office PC, damaged it, and reassembled it so that it works, but the case won't actually fully close. Hopefully I won't spill a drink on it because it'll go straight in.
Nevertheless, it's great to be able to use it, and also to take this opportunity to copy everything off it - I do have files going back quite a few years on it. The oldest files I can find are some science fiction stories I wrote in 1999, about Commander William Thrax and the crew of the K2a-class starship "Explorer", one of the Solfleet vessels defending against the aggressive "Belan" alien race.
The technical designs for the K2 and K2a. I'm happy to report that my graphical capabilities are as good as they were 15 years ago.
Particular highlights from the stories (which generally involve the Explorer fighting off waves of Belan spaceships) include:
The force stayed in a lump as it closed on the battle around Sirius base - because all good generals keep their task forces in "lumps".
Suddenly from out of nowhere, a Belan fighter burst through the ranks of the human fleet, firing point blank range into everything there - everything there?!?
The rotatating lasers on the sides of the human cruiser emptied several crippling busts into the passing fighters. - I never knew that if you made lasers "rotatate" that they could fire busts.
I hope Natasha is behaving herself on the flagship of the fleet. Her and sensor equipment - if you're not careful the computer storage could fill with intense data of an asteroid if she's interested in it. - It's been fifteen years and I still can't imagine why I ever wrote "intense data". Or even imagine what intense data is for that matter.
A third ship, a hunter-killer, appeared. They blasted the side of the Explorer. "Shields shaky!" someone shouted. - possibly the best status update ever given on the bridge of a starship.
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