Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[On whether there are any good reasons for a warship to explode ...]

"There are no good reasons for warships, but we exist in a universe where causality is inherently amoral. We have warships for reasons. Sometimes we have reasons to make warships explode.

"It would be nice if all our reasons were always good, but at least the explosions are pretty."

-- Chinook, Goddess of Earth, Wind and Plumbing (originally a ship's AI, now the controlling AI of a ginormous, ancient, constructed habitat), in Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler, 2017-12-03 [This is not the best line in the page, but I didn't want to spoil the punchline for y'all. Go have a peek. I don't think you need this bit of background to appreciate it, but since I know some folks will wonder who the characters are: the two on the ends are avatars of AIs -- Petey, who started as a ship AI but became a fleet hivemind who now controls Godlike resources at the galactic core, and the aforementioned Chinook. The middle one, Putzho, was a living person who got his mind uploaded into a star-sized community-inside-a-computer, currently inhabiting an artificial body.]