Not to be confused with Space Battleship Yamato
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom is the second novel of the Chronicles of Old Guy series. It features a collection of stories like the first, with an overarching plot starring Old Guy, and Fanboy, officially weighing in at a million metric tons and designated an Asgard-class interstellar battlecruiser. Per the Amazon blurb:It is the distant future and the human race has gone. Whether extinct or moved on to a higher level of existence, nobody knows. Their civilization has been inherited by the cybertanks: massive atomic powered war machines with mentalities modeled on the human psyche. Theirs is an idyllic existence: throwing parties, killing aliens, creating works of art, shooting skeet with hypersonic missiles.
But now an ancient evil from the darkest nightmares of humanity threatens to resurface and destroy them all. Are the cybertanks up to the challenge?
- Can an immortal undead vampire find true happiness with a sentient interstellar battlecruiser?
- Are space monkeys regulated by any arms control treaties?
- What was it about that black cloud thing in “The Chronicles of Old Guy”?
- Why are neoliberal economists so darned evil?
- Who’s tougher, an alien robot spider or General William Tecumseh Sherman?
- Is it wise to annoy a super-intelligent weapon of mass destruction called “Smartass”?
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom provides examples of:
- Author Tract: As with the rest of the series, narration praises physical books, and indeed physical data storage, over electronic data. The reasoning on how hard it is to hack/suborn physical data and its relative resistance to erasure/corruption. One wonders how many drafts the author lost. Also, there continues to be a constant denigration of Neoliberals, or rather super-rich elite and how they will lie and ruin society.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Fanboy is huge. A million tons, with dozens of turrets that are equivalent to the main armament of a Magma-class, secondaries and tertiaries that put the primaries of other Cybertank classes to shame, and a spinal main gun that runs almost half his 1.5 kilometer length. But given the tyranny of orbital mechanics and inertia, he's borderline useless. Even a post-scarcity society like the Cybertank's can't afford to send him around, and most Cybertanks can form functional spacecraft themselves if they've got extra fuel and supplies. Fanboy was named such because he'd never seen enemy action himself and always bothers others for their combat recordings. [[Spoiler: turns out, at the end of the novel, his design proved perfect to take on several Amok interstellar battleships, and WIN. He gets "promoted" to Space Battleship Scharnhorst from his favorite anime, although most still call him Fanboy.]]
- BFG: Magma-class cybertanks have a two-meter bore plasma cannon that is easily capable of knocking out targets in low orbit. Fanboy has several of these mounted in turrets. Plus he's got a spinal plasma cannon that's about eight hundred meters long and several meters in diameter.
- The Big Guy: Taken up to eleven with Fanboy. He's the largest Cybertank in existence.
- Captain Ersatz: The titular Space Battleship Scharnhorst is an in-universe show.
- Expy: Space Battleship Scharnhorst, for crying out loud
- Even better in that in-universe, Megazillus was friend to children everywhere.
- Meaningful Name: Fanboy's never been in a combat action, so he loves watching all his peers' combat recordings.
