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Post by Waspinator on Jan 3, 2011 20:46:50 GMT -5
Day 24, Sim room, Semi-private
Somewhere a black, green and purple wasp the size of a truck hovered in exactly the same way a brick doesn’t.
Specifically somewhere was the Holodeck and Waspinator had just been doing random turns and stuff while he awaited his newfound instructor thanks to a certain other Mayhem pointing him in the right direction of who to annoy. Insectothopters don’t fly like jets, they fly like helicopters, so Waspinator's choices for instruction were very limited, and he had apparently got lucky.
Haha! Take that fate!
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Post by Spinister on Jan 3, 2011 22:38:44 GMT -5
Spinister is so sick that he needs a wheelchair most of the time. Spinister is also very, very good with manipulating the simulation room. It is, after all, from his own reality, and he has full officer privileges for the simulation room. Most Decepticons don't know just what that means.
Spinister, hovering in robot mode, appears behind Waspinator, quite out of nowhere, soundless and without warning. He tries to tap the insect on the back and says softly, "Boo."
It's not actually Spinister, just a puppet simulation he's written, a simulacrum of what Spinister was like before he was sick, but Waspinator doesn't need to know that his teacher is nothing more than solid light and code!
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Post by Waspinator on Jan 4, 2011 5:30:48 GMT -5
Sneaky helicopter is sneaky.
Waspinator totally failed his spot and listen checks by rolling a two and a three, a low wisdom score coupled with poor skill ranks was never going to help him versus the multiclass hunter/rogue with the huge circumstance bonus on his move silently and hide skill checks.
The giant wasp nearly jumps out of his skin while spinning around with twin stingers blasting staccato canon fire around the room. The rampant fire stops as he spots the source of his panic just short of targeting his teacher. Not a good start.
Waspinator’s mental notes: Lay off the coffee-milk, it makes Wazzpinator jumpy.
Being an ex Autobot on a ship full of ‘Cons didn’t help there either.
“Sorry bout that, Spinizter doez sneaky real good”, oh yes, act the good soldier, “Wazzpinator reporting for instruction!”
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Post by Spinister on Jan 4, 2011 18:33:35 GMT -5
Spinister brushes off the flattery. He coolly watches as Waspinator panics, crossing his arms. As delightful as panic is to watch, that's a habit he'll have to break Waspinator of. It's no good.
He waves a hand, and the simulation changes - they're still hanging in the air, now over seawater, but shore is in sight. A series of large buoys with loops above them at varying heights have been spaced out around them in a race course. Spinister points at the race course and directs, "Three laps, fast as you can."
He can call up Waspinator's specs, but theory and practise don't always agree, and he wants to see what Waspinator can actually do before he starts.
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Post by Waspinator on Jan 4, 2011 21:05:50 GMT -5
Waspinator is silently impressed by the ease in which the roflcopter instructor makes the scenery change; clearly he has a mastery of the sim room better that the wasp was hitherto unaware.
And he was happy if Spinister wasn’t the talkative type, that simply meant that when he did speak, you had to listen, no worthless talk to tune out.
He quickly snapped a salute with one of his front legs and dived immediately into the racecourse. This was actually his first full out flying, it takes him most of the first lap to get used to the combination of speed and turning, slowing as necessary to make a turns and overshooting more than once. By the end of the second lap he finding the racing lines and picking his speed a lot more accurately and doesn’t overshoot a single loop though he struggles to make some of them, his wings clipping a few. By the end of the third, Waspinator is almost as happy flying as he was driving; he’d certainly never had any problems with rain. But then the added dimension of altitude wasn’t significant yet.
Three laps done, he pulls back up in front of the hovering copter bot “Next!” So far so good, Waspinator was willing to try anything to learn everything. He fly upside down backwards while watching bizarre anime if that would help.
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Post by Spinister on Jan 5, 2011 18:56:56 GMT -5
Spinister moves his fingers, and the course changes. Instead of a normal oval track, the shallow sea is covered by a 3D floating grid of hoops, arranged in cubes, such that each cube is made of six hoops. Currently, the hoops are white. Waspinator will find himself right in the middle cube.
Spinister observes, "You fly like a car. Don't. You can move in any direction in an instant. Turning radius is now meaningless to you. Reversal is painless. Fly through the green hoop."
One of the six hoops that makes up the cube turns green, the one directly behind Waspinator. As soon as he enters the cube behind him, the hoop to the left of him will turn green, and so on, forcing him through a course of unexpected and extreme turns, with straight stretches, back and forward, up and down, now and then for variety, to keep him paying sharp attention.
Spinister expects that it will take a long, long time to fully break Waspinator of a lifetime of habits that no longer apply to his current existence, but they'd better get started now.
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Post by Waspinator on Jan 6, 2011 15:15:03 GMT -5
Flying in reverse, easy in theory, seeing where he’s going, not so much. As a car he realised he had much better all round awareness while his new insectothopter mode could only see from his actual eyes. It made sense really but still – no reversing mirrors. Instead he had to crane his head around to see, big bug eyes made up for a short neck.
Once the relative position of the green loop was realised, he reversed through it easily if a little less than straight. Once through, the loop to his left turned green, idicating the next for him to fly through. He felt he could turn on the spot easy enough but flying sideways – strafing- he wasn’t sure. “Doez Spinizter want Wazzpinator to maintain prezzent bearing and practizz flying in different directionz or practizz quick on the spot turning?”
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Post by Spinister on Jan 6, 2011 16:55:17 GMT -5
Spinister directs, "Maintain bearing," precisely because he suspects it'll be awkward for Waspinator. There are times when turning will be useful, such as when tracking targets, but Spinister is thinking that turning'll be a lot easier for Waspinator to figure out, so they'd better get the tricky stuff down first.
He already sees that Waspinator is having trouble with learning how to see - it's only going to get worse later, when Spinister starts adding in bogeys. For the first few months, new pilots may as well be blind. Their optics may physically be able to focus on a distance and track small moving objects, but they just aren't there mentally. They're more likely to panic over a mote of dust on their optics than actually see the enemy.
That's how they die, a lot of the time.
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Post by Waspinator on Jan 7, 2011 4:41:01 GMT -5
Waspinator concentrated on trying to fly sideways; he wasn’t exactly sure how he was supposed to do it though, like a baby learning to walk. It was probably quite a painful sight to watch but he eventually worked out that he had to roll slightly to generate sideways thrust. It had taken him a few moments to click that although helicopters didn’t have to roll their body, they tilted the plane of their rotors. It was a bit like leaning into a turn, with out the turn.
The loops that went up, down and forwards were obviously easy to fly; backwards not too bad but strafing was definitely a learning curve. As to seeing the loops, left, right, straight – no worries, up, down – barely an issue. Only behind was proving difficult as he had to move his head to find the loop first. Waspinator would never have an issue with dust on his optics distracting him; he could focus on anything at such an extreme close range anymore.
Sometime later, he exited the course, and you could just tell that Waspinator was going to practise flying through Ship anytime he went anywhere – in both modes. How a wasp grins is not well documented but one would have to look no further than this wasp.
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Post by Spinister on Jan 8, 2011 15:35:34 GMT -5
Spinister may have the most applicable experience for Waspinator of anyone here, but it's not perfectly applicable, and he knows it. His rotors don't work like wasp wings, and Spinister was built with rotors. He never had to learn how to fly, only how to use anti-gravs in robot mode, and that was pretty easy - he was already used to thinking in three spatial dimensions and one chronal dimension. In fact, the only one in the crew who may have ever had to learn that method of thought was...
When Waspinator exits the course, Spinister brings up something more difficult - there is no defined course anymore, but there are green rings, and they appear near Waspinator without warning. Their orientations aren't so nice as up, down, left, right, front, and back - they're at the numbers of a clock in three dimensions, and the number and the dimension appear to be selected pseudo-randomly. Waspinator might need to go up toward eleven one moment and left toward two next. Spinister announces, "Time to learn what 'on your six' means."
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Post by Waspinator on Jan 8, 2011 21:39:05 GMT -5
“Wazzpinator done boot camp, on six means behind… how doez that work if enemy above Wazzpinator at angle?” Because really, Top Gun shows nothing about the calls for all the variations when you add the vertical dimension. Waspinator loos around the new course completely lost as to which green ring to fly through first, or second or third for that matter.
Wont be the only time our favourite pseudo hero is confused.
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Post by Spinister on Jan 9, 2011 21:28:25 GMT -5
No dice. Needlenose has never been a helicopter, so Spinister can't ask Needlenose how he coped with changes in spatial mapping.
Spinister directs, "Fly through the ring closest to you. It'll vanish, and a new one will appear in a random location. Think in polar coordinates and centre the axes at your centre of gravity."
Ues, the dreaded polar coordinates that no one likes.
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Post by Waspinator on Jan 10, 2011 23:29:00 GMT -5
Waspinator being the part technological creature that he was, has a neural processor and in theory it should act something like a calculator, one that finds such things as polar coordinates and multi dimensional vectors rather straight forward, now imagine it’s a solar powered calculator kept too long in a dark drawer.
He studies the green ring suspiciously for a long moment before attempting to fly part sideways, slightly up and semi forward to pass through it. With practice, such movements in three spatial dimensions would become second nature for the ex-car, for now they were awkward, a challenge to be surmounted rather than an annoyance to be cursed. It would actually taken him longer to learn to become aware of what was behind him rather than learning to fly in all sorts of weird directions. This was obvious by the time Waspinator reversed through the last ring, his buzzing wings clipping the side yet one more time. His inability to see behind him was actually proving slightly frustrating, but there wasn’t a chance in a zillion he was going to let his little annoyance show to the so far willing instructor. There was good reason Spinister was a Mayhem, this had been made very clear to Waspinator.
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Post by Spinister on Jan 11, 2011 16:28:41 GMT -5
A human brain's probable processing power is around 100 teraflops, roughly 100 trillion calculations per second, according to Hans Morvec, principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. None of that amazing processing power and speed means much without the right education, just like robotic processors are pretty useless without the right software. Transformers being learning machines like they are, they can basically write new software for themselves as they learn, but none of this makes the learning easy! Spinister cheats with regards to looking backwards. He's binary bonded to his Nebulans, and he can handle all three vantage points. Looking behind him is as easy as having Singe or Hairsplitter look back; Spinister doesn't even need to move. he does have enough training in looking for the weaknesses of other to pick up on the fact that Waspinator's having a problem in that area. He notes aloud, "I'll work up some backing drills. Enough spatial awareness for now. Let's see what your maximum rate of climb and fight ceiling are." A mind can only handle so much of a thing at a time before performance starts to suffer. Better to switch to another topic now and start fresh. The holo-puppet transforms into a helicopter, ready to follow Waspinator up on some climb and ceiling trials. Spinister's fairly sure he, when well, ought to have a faster rate of climb and ceiling than Waspinator, so the puppet should be able to keep up - Spinister's helicopter mode breaks some of the laws of materials science, anyway - but if Waspinator really does have a faster rate of climb and higher ceiling, the holo-puppet is just a code construct, and Spinister can just make it faster and stronger for teaching purposes.
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Post by Waspinator on Jan 12, 2011 23:25:59 GMT -5
“Straight up it izz”, Waspinator’s wings beat furiously, his initial acceleration is quite good, large wasp wings can push a lot of air, however he hits his max climb rate very quick due to the limits of his wing servos. Compared to a helicopter, he has neither the climb rate or the ceiling, the rotating motion of rotors proving more powerful than the beating motion of wings. His organic nature even limits how long he can stress his components to hold his maximum ceiling to less than a minute before he starts to slowly lose altitude.
"Queztion, how well can Spinizter shoot upwardz?", because Waspinator can shoot down very well, just as easy as straight ahead. If push came to shove and he ever had to fight Spinister, getting directly above the helicopter might be the only advantage he'd have.
OOC: At a guess, wasp vs. a helicopter: the wasp has better acceleration but the copter has speed. Spinister’s skill, reflexes and awareness more than matches whatever advantage Waspinator has in acceleration. Also if I remember correctly, ‘Cons can fly in space so those with Anti-grav possibly have no maximum to their ceiling. . How does this sound?
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