Hello, folks! So this week is my final week on active duty in the military. It’s weird to think I will soon by hanging up the uniform and stepping back to the civilian world. I’ve been doing this for so long that it does make the whole situation surreal. I always said it would come one day, I just didn’t really expect that day to be this soon. Oh well! More time to write! I’ll be able to be home on a regular basis and the words shall flow like waterfalls!

Rising Angels: Hope update: Finishing up the last tweaks this week. I’m fairly happy with how the story is going along, happy with the new expanded scenes, and just happy with how things are going overall. Considering how rough things have been lately, this is one of those few moments when I got to be just happy. Most of the work is finishing up and I’ve been building the trailer video this week. It took a bit to get my software working again to make videos, but things are doing well. Hopefully, we will have the video done by Weds and will do an out of cycle update when we get the Greenlight up. I love the song for the video, I hope you all will as well.

Writing: So last week in our talk, we were going over how the Katajion Directorship teaches people and advances them through the education system. We started at junior academy, went to senior academy, sector academy, and finally wrapping up with specialized training. At this point, we have a fully qualified member of the Katajion Directorship. Different sectors have different amounts of training. From the start of sector academy to completion of specialized training, anywhere between one year for smaller sectors to eight years for highly technical and specialized fields can pass. What does this mean? If you add in fast burners in the junior/senior academies, you can end up with some very young members employed into some decent ranked positions. Not incredibly common, but it does allow people like young, naive Kylie to end up in a position where a more experienced person might reside.

Now that we’ve explained how people end up in the positions they are in, let’s address the giant elephant in the room about rank and discipline in the Katajion Space Sector. Even I have to admit that there isn’t a lot of it to go around. But that is part of the biggest ideals of the KSS. The first thing we have to address is rank. One thing I am very surprised that nobody has ever mentioned is that there are no task-grade troops on the KSS Nimross. No flight sergeants, no troopers, nothing. The most junior officer is Kylie as a Flight Officer. They have her, two lieutenants, a captain, three majors, one colonel, and one deck-grade officer to command it. There’s a lot of brass, not a lot of people who get things done. While Commander Rasoona has the official command, she barely outranks Colonel Nelson and holds a tentative grasp on her majors.

One thing I do hope everyone also remembers from last session is that ranks are dependent upon the position. This has a bad tendency to cause the mentality of “I outranked you two weeks ago! Being a pilot now doesn’t make you a better leader then me.” If you pair this with the history of independence and freedom in the ranks, you get a situation where you get fiefdoms in the ranks. The Katajion Space Force is a meritocracy. If you do amazing, you get put into positions to do more amazing things. You blaze up and bring your friends who helped you up. Sooner or later, you hit a point where you can’t get up and start to set your roots there. Worse yet, if you are moved to a lower ranking position, those roots are still there and that authority tends to create conflicts. While the situations are often brokered behind closed doors with the assistance of the Intelligence Sector, it does nothing to stop that breed of insurrection. The joke since it was nothing more than an RP between friends is that the only people we stab harder than our foes is ourselves.

Which is why the Katajion Space Sector often hires third parties to help with their war efforts. While it is often hidden under the guise of supplementing existing forces, mercenaries are hired on a regular basis to help ensure that the mission is completed. They are the fallback option when Commander of the Wings John Doe took his air wing to liberate a captured position without direct orders from his chain. Pirates, freelancers, professional mercenaries… if they can be counted on to complete the mission and defend the directorship, they can find good money. An example of this is elven ranger Yoi Mono. While she is brought to the Katajion Space Sector as an exchange officer, she is kept on by Anton Rogers as a hired unit. In order to keep some sort of semblance of a chain of command, all hired units are given a campaign (temporary) rank in the Space Sector. While this does keep things easier to keep track and manage, it, yet again, breeds unrest and independence in the ranks.

So where are we at? We’ve got officers who are talented at their jobs, but often outside their experience levels. We have senior officials who are in lower positions because they weren’t able to keep up their burn. Experienced, but sometimes jadded. We have outside units that have authority over regular units. While this creates units that are very effective at what they do, it often creates turmoil and the occasional insurrection in the ranks. You’ve got a regular military force that operates like an irregular one. The modern idea of a professional military force does not apply to how the Katajion Directorship, especially the space force, operates.

That’s going to wrap up part two of the lore of the Katajion ranks and why exactly the events on the Nimross played out exactly like they did. We have one more part to go and that’s why exactly things fell apart exactly as they did during the events of the Nimross’s expedition. We are going to talk about the characters themselves, why the cards played out as they did, and things to notice in upcoming stuff. Until then, Chief out!

The video of the post is fitting for this week. Very fitting.