ShipCore

The story starts off with a lot of technical jargon about ship weaponry capabilities etc which seems to set a tone for being somewhat heavy on the space stuff. That's an illusion.

Fast forward some ten chapters and it starts falling off faster than the insufficiently explained comeback in the prologue.

Our MC is a pendulum swinging between no knowledge kid and memory inserted newtype. More of the former the further along the story gets. It feels like she's regressing rather than evolving. 

New characters get introduced so sloppily that you either feel no connection or a negative one. 

And that's not even mentioning how MC has some sort of extreme complex about saving humans. The only kills she's done have been against sapient hivemind drones or machines. 

It tries to do too much at the same time while being surface level about everything. 

The story starts off strong, with a promising flair and ambitious worldbuilding. It's the kind of start that garners a certain polarizing expectation, namely that of a story that becomes an absolute gem or one that crashes and burns.

This one... does neither, or both depending on one's point of view. It's a story that tries to do a bit of everything, at subsequent (or the same) times. Sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. Space opera, survival, slice of life, empire builder, progression litrpg. The readers drawn to this story can form political factions themselves over their differences in expectation and tone.

Now one could give the advice that the author should focus on one aspect of the story and stick to it, but I won't do that. Much of the charm of ShipCore comes from it's large scale and wide scope in story beats.

However, the specific ingredients used to achieve certain athmosphere and plot beats could use a bit more care. Compared to the first act, act 2 was a bit more sweet, so much so that some of the readers were thrown off since they were expecting something with a bit more bite to it that wasn't as bad for their teeth. Act 3 tries to rectify this by adding a lot more salt, which left some of the fans, understandably, quite salty.

Once again, I would implore the author to keep using their full range of ingredients available, since I can tell that they have the potential to evoke many different emotional responses from their readers. Just take care which ones to conjure up in which scene, and why? What specific purpose does that emotion serve?

And lastly, concerning the battlescenes and the characters.

It might seem strange to pinpoint these two aspects of the story at the same time, however I would like to draw attention to the differences in the way these two are handled since the philosophies behind them seems to be almost diametrically opposed to each other. The space battles juggle many moving pieces, up and including how much ammunition each ship has, what their defenses are like, and how much physical damage they have accrued. An almost painstakingly amount of effort is put in to make them feel like every loss and every win is "fair". That is, it makes logical sense with what we know in universe and how the flow of the battle was developing. Ships will take turns getting their structural integrity described, and the author takes little liberties except for some rule of cool moments.

The characterbuilding, in contrast, feels amost aloof. While the characters in concept, background and potentential for awesomeness are for the most part original and great, their motivations are not. Or let me rephrase that, the consistency with which they stick to their supposed motivations and in which they actively try to pursue a certain agenda is not great. And it's okay for a character to be a bit inconsistent at times! That's part of being human (or NAI I suppose). But in order for such changes to feel "fair" or make sense at all, the reasoning and emotions behind such decisions needs to be shown as well. When the main character is put in a situation where most of her agency is stripped and she is against her will being moved further away (in the literal sense) from some of her goals, I expect anger. I expect obstinance. I don't expect a dull resignation because it might be the most logical course of action. Our most important side character does a full shift in goals and values, but little is shown of her reasoning behind it. I understand that the pace this story tries to keep is high, but just like a quick fleet skirmish an emotional development can be done relatively rapidly and still feel like it fits perfectly.

 In this sense, the only advice I could give for the battles is that it's okay to let it be a little more loose at times, and for the characters to use a bit more care and precision. Which is advice that's almost directly contradictory! Luckily it also shows the author is already capable applying both ends of the slider, the story only requires a bit more balance.

I hope this review didn't come out too negatively, because the author has all the right ingredients to carft an amazing story. I personally still have high hopes for this story, and I hope to see many more ShipCore adventures.

and stop when arc 2 ends. until then the story is really god, only to get destroyed by a railroady BS arc that is a mirror to every bad prison/slave arc ever in a story where the MC loses agency while even a modicum of logic would have easily averted that outcome. really disappointing, and i would have given even lower rating if the first 2 arcs hadn't been so good. a real shame to lose another strong starting story to mediocricy.

Overall:

It's a decent story worth reading, but be prepared for a large cast with some notable characters being neglected, an eclectic mix of tropes, and pacing issues that may leave you feeling underwhelmed at times.

Style:

No complaints. I like the author's style in general, they write some truly interesting battle scenes and dialogue.

Grammar:

Solid. No major grammatical issues have stuck out to me so far that have pulled me out of the story.

Characters:

Has promise. There's a pretty wide variety of characters and they're mostly all interesting, although some have been introduced briefly and then more or less neglected in favor of newer, shinier characters. There's a lot of characters in the story, but at times it almost feels like there's too many.

Story:

Deceent. The story started off slow but with promise, then started to pick up pace and move fast enough to get you hooked, but fleshed out enough to feel substantial... until the end of the first major arc. The story following that has dragged, moving quite slowly, with some minor blips that seemed like it was about to pick up again, but every chapter lately seems to move rather slowly. Pacing in the story is kind of like stop and go traffic on a highway: it was a bit slow starting on, then it got downright zippy for a while with some interesting curves and sights, but ever since that last major intersection, it's been a bit of a traffic jam. 

My friend grabbed my arm and forced me to come here to read this. Turned out I don't have to beat him up.

ShipCore was absolutely worth my time to read as of Chapter 19.

The author's style is what I call lean, quick, and action packed. It sometimes makes use of a lot of sci-fi lingo that is not super obvious, but things are rolled out slowly throughout the story and action and never really overwhelmed me as I learned what things were. I think this way of showing the world is way, way better than what a lot of stories do when they try to drop massive paragraphs on you that are impossible to read

The action scenes feel so active and you can feel the tension in the characters as they deal with life threatening situations and in fights.

Grammar - Not much to say here, I didn't notice any mistakes, although i noted there were some comments with corrections, the author seems to have made an effort to correct them. Good job author!

Story - The only category I find some weakness in. Not because the story is bad, but because the first part of the story felt a little slow. There was one point in my mind when I wanted to just make the story move on because it dragged a little. However once you are past that certain point in the beginning, WOW! Things pick up and really move, it feels like the author got her feet under them and it shows.

Charaacters - We don't have many characters in the story at first. Just alex and her robot AI whose personality grows over time. By the end of chapter 19 I felt like the two had a great chemistry of back and forth. We also have one other character who is important, and the interplay between the three is really deep. So deep I didn't understand at first, but then as we saw more and more of their history and the other character's thoughts I was floored. I really can't wait to see what they do next. I've even noticed that they have not stayed static characters either, all of them have changed each other in subtle ways as they interact.

Its really good.

Shows a great deal of promise and has set the scene for all kinds of ways it can progress.

Generally I avoid reviews this early in but the setting just scratches so many itches for me at once that I NEED  this story to continue.

My review was too short soo....

The writing is flowing and in the moment as the characters act and react making everything seem immediate, present and desperate.

Something, something, are we there yet, I prefer to write short reviews as I try not to poison the well of either the authors creativity or another readers joy of discovery in a story.

The first 2 books were amazing.

The 3rd one tears a few pages out and throws the rest into a fire. The main character loses all agency and intelligence that she had up till that point. She stops thinking at all about any alternative solutions and just tries the easiest one and then quits and folds when it doesn't work out immediately.

It also seems that the author diddnt think out a few facts about their world like if a massive ship costs 900 million creds how is it impossible to find a small 1 person ship for 150 million, and why couldn't she have just made money doing impossible repairs as she had already been doing on the mercenaries ships.

As soon as she decided to become a cadet I stopped reading.

The book is about a human-Aİ hybrid surviving and progressing in space through human colonized galaxy. This premise follows through impecabbly for books A1 and A2, with awesome space combat, character progression, ship building, corporation amanagement - the list of goodies just goes on and on. 

İn book A3 this masterpiece just implodes into itself into a story about anime girls doing anime stuff, just a complete slice of life hell. There is even an absurd anime-style academy! I'm not sure what made the author turn an epic space faring and space combat saga into this nonsense.

Resume: read A1 and A2. Skip A3 for like 99% - you won't miss anything. Hope by A4 author returns to his senses and starts writing about space, and not about anime academy girls.

It starts off as a good, reasonably hard SF tense survival story.  I really liked this portion (other than the prologue spilling too many of the beans).

Ater a while though, it turns into bad YA/anime style mush.  No real tension.  Bad guys always carrying the idiot ball.  The MC acts like a teenage fangirl pretending to be a ship captain (with some in world justification but not how it started). 

Overall I enjoy the first arc, and got very disappointed with the rest.  The title really does indicate this was where the author was planning to go though, so I guess the first arc was the mislead?  Oh well.

Overall: Shipcore is a wonderful adventure starring an interesting MC whi is part AI and part Human. She is supplemented by a snarky Ship AI whom she has authority over, much to its disagreement over the efficiency of the arrangement, and a woken-from-cryo time-skipped Marine who has every reason to hate AI. Would definiely reccomend if you are a fan of AI or space-based Sci-fi.

Style: Overall the style feels cohesive and creates a nice narative. The story bounces to other viewpoints to create perspective and flesh out the narative. 

Grammar: If there were issues with grammar or spelling I didn't notice them. Everything felt consistent and correct.

Story: I have very much enjoyed the build a ship to survive and fake it till you make it kind of feel the story has had. It is feel-good and funny while also including tech, strategic warfare, politics, and economics. I think the main issue here is the question of where are we going as the opening of Book 3 has kind of felt like the direction is muddled.

Character: Characters are where I feel the story could improve. The characters that are built into the first portion of the story are not fleshed out very well (MC/Ship AI memory loss issues do not assist with this). Supplementary characters who get introduced (Governor, Station Master, MilTech CEO, etc.) do not have much time devoted to their explanation even though some have become recurring elements. Character growth for the three main characters has been extremely slow moving in comparison to the pace of events unfolding. It is not bad, it could just be better.