-I mean... we've seen how Thingguy is in SA. Though one might say that once reunited with his comrades he can let them handle the seriousness while he reverts somewhat more to his unserious mode.
-Strider's backstory felt more integrated in the story and also had a purpose of explaining why Stir wants to accompany Thingguy.
-Thingguy didn't have to outline everything, just be somewhat more clear about what they might be able to do. But I guess it works this way, too
-Eh, still sounds wrong. Stir and the Merry Band are shown to ally with Thingguy, but not "becoming KOTOS" in this very story and yet how is that any different from what you're describing? And KOTOS has never been "everyone who fights along with the KOTOS". Since the beginning, Perpetual Doom, KOTOS have been a very small group fighting alongside their non-KOTOS allies. I understand that this might just be a Thingguy abuse of the term rather a Stirling abuse of the term, but still feel like pointing it out. KOTOS has never really been used to describe KOTOS friends and allies and so it doesn't seem right in this instance either. Heck, even people who've explicitly shown desire to join the KOTOS post PD have not always immediately been regarded as official members (though then again what's there to consider official about a broken apart group?)
-May I present this little excerpt?
"thedude walked back into a small room in the dungeons of his castle. Well, fortress would be a better word for it.
The fortress had once been a mountain, Mt. Thunderclap. But thedude used his moderator powers to carve away the mountain to make a massive stronghold the size of several villages. thedude ruled by fear, and his fortress did that well enough.
thedude entered the dungeons and stared at the two minifigures he had chained to the wall. One of them was one of the most powerful knights of the old war, Sir Talmid. thedude had been submitting him to his most potent mind control devices and tortures for the past fifteen years, but he had held out. He would turn eventually, though. He has before. It's only a matter of time.
The second minifigure was not a knight, but a Nexus Forces Super Sentinel he had captured and turned some odd years ago. He had easily succumbed to the power of thedude, and then the dark lord put him through all kinds of physical tests and missions. He was thedudeâs most deadly assassin. Lord Brocktree"
I also thought that at some point I must have said something about this myself, but I can't find it right now, so there's a possibility I might never have said it actually, though I definitely remember thinking how Talmid and Brocktree were in Thunderclap and concluding with or without you that they must have been in an even deeper dungeon. I also thought that it was stated somewhere that Talmid was put in Thunderclap after his escape and recapture during thedude doesn't like snow + C&E. I'm not sure if that was said in some story, someone's comments or my mind, though I don't think it was the latter.
-See the problem is that if we were to say that Oswald did build it from scraps and therefore was able to receive the messages properly, then logically he would also be able to send them. And thus we go back to the same question we discussed before on why do they really need to go search for that specific spoiler stuff later if Oswald's already managed as much.
Oswald being able to make out some scrambles or what not doesn't sound very convincing either. Seeing as he said that the people on the ship "say some fun stuff sometimes" means he must have understood what they said at some point. But would be something rather hard to achieve if you consider everything needed for it.
Firstly, Oswald needs to be listening on the right frequency in order to receive the NF transmissions specifically and not something else (which would also mean that beyond their unencrypted communications needing to have that much reach, the NF needs to be using frequencies that at least sometimes are different than what's used around the Merry Band's area; the former of the two might be the more unrealistic part, but let's say we ignore it for the sake of the story). With enough trial and error, though, this is not inconceivable.
Secondly, Oswald needs to be able to demodulate the signal he receives. This is typically performed by hardware in communications which would not allow for much trial and error, but it's probably also possible to be done with software. That doesn't mean it'd be easy though. Even if Oswald understands telecommunications, which he probably does to some extent at the very least, the main issue is that he doesn't know what kind of modulation is being used and it could even be a kind he doesn't even knows exists. I can't guarantee that between the Nexus Force and the Militiregnum practices, the same methods are taught. For a better image of what this means, Oswald would have to be able to get the first waveform from something like the second waveform:
If the transmission was analogue then this is about where the journey would end, if you played the waveform you got on some media player, you'd hear the transmitted voices.
However, it's likely the Nexus Force would use digital communications instead. That means the waveform does not represent any physical quantity, but instead just bits. Being able to recognise the bits in such a waveform is probably an easy process, since they'd be represented by two unique repeating smaller waveforms and I'm sure Oswald would be able to isolate them and understand the pattern.
So, then you've got a series of bits. That's all grand and all, but then converting all that to information you can understand is not that easy. You need to understand what each bit (or rather group of bits) represents before its information is useful to you. That's where protocols come in. If you don't know what protocols are being used, it's very hard to understand what everything means. I was gonna make an example of how layered protocols work on the Internet, but this might not be the best example. While Voice over IP stuff exists and it could potentially be more widely used in an organisation like the Nexus Force that was built from scratch, but already having the knowledge of several inventions, so being able to skip old-style phones and just base all of its communications on an Internet-like network, the radio-calls referenced here might still be different and would in fact probably have to in order for Oswald to be able to pick up on them without the ability to hijack connections. So things might be simpler than protocols inside protocols inside protocols, but there'd still be something. Getting even just some scrambles of information out of the bitstream without any clues would take some very wild guesses.
We could potentially bypass the protocol issue by deciding the NF uses analogue as well, but there's still the issue of modulation.
-Then I guess I could have some fun seeing who it could be, if you give me the time frame for this.