I disagree, they are more productive because sun is a sun...
True but-We can plant them in isolated places were no humans reside
We'd have to worry about being found. If we don't curb their spread, they'd cover the planet, and that would allow the humans to accidentally alert the uber-enemy to our presence, (they'd recognize the Flower). If we curbed their spread, we'd still be in much greater danger of being discovered, what with having a surface presence.We can plant them after conquest, rapidly creating huge food base
Which would be how useful? Keep in mind we'd have to ferry all the food up into space at that point, and also that this doesn't mean we have to put it foremost on our research. (vs, say, closing the vents and going back to 'extremely hard' to locate)We can plant them in any place and turn it into a Martian weed
covered Finally we can treat aboveground flowers as underground meant to be raised on dedicated farms with artificial sun.
It would be a convenience to be able to grow in alkali soil, but why not just focus on hydroponics instead? We could re-splice the evergreen back in later to get the stim properties again.As for sitting in the hole for years... Problems with that approach:
1) Humans can and will increase their presence on Mars, making the war harder and harder
If we stay hidden, they won't be building defenses, and the process of terraforming would take a very long time. We can monitor their communications and strike/escape when needed.2) Large hives will create a noticeable seismic activity and temperature changes whatever we do
Unless we adapt to living in cold environments. We're body, after all. Seismic activity would only really register when our plans were coming to fruition.3) Our underground facilities can be discovered by pure chance with the prospecting humans will do
True. Hmm, we could always adopt the model of dense hives dispersed across wide areas, or tunneling at extreme depths.4) The longer we sit here, the more likely that advanced civs will visit Sol and establish embassies\trade posts\colony\Navy base here making our possible war with humans way harder
True, but we'd have to fight them anyway- say we break out early and take over the human system. The advancedciv already knows humans are there, and so discovers we're alive upon their first ambassadorial visit. If we wait, we can muster our forces.I'd prefer to start war sooner than later, starting with assimilating isolated human subhives...
Ideally that could be done with semiindependent raiding nomadic subhives that an survive without techs at all but are capable to use it
Meh, sounds a lot more vulnerable than staying hidden & staying deep.Making\stealing a ship to send a single queen with a single flower and a mate is an interesting possibility... Because that is enough to make new hive possible
Precisely, but it comes with the whole 'announcing our presence' bit.__________
Grizzly, you just gave me the best idea ever.
We should capture a human, actually multiple humans, and then try to hybridize them with the Flowers.
No neative consequences I can see from this whatsoever.
I see one: Flowers may decide that humans are better symbiotes than Kai
Inconceivable! There's no way puny humans could be better tenders than mighty kai! (Being facetious. In truth, I doubt they'd see more than a niche role, maybe a couple if they bring unique qualities to bear. More of a joke curiosity suggestion anyway.)Well, if you want to be safe we could breed a subspecies of flowers that is inherently parasitic and then try them out on human captives. It would be really cool - and effective - to have them, especially if we could design capsules to drop them from orbit onto a planet with. They'd plant themselves in hosts surrounding the drop site and we'd have the beginnings of a base right there.
Btw, this is very dangerous. Very very dangerous. But being body, I think we should get used to the concept of bio warfare. +1.
I suspect that the flowers may object to that. And I am not really opposed to extraplanetary organisms, I just feel that it will require more research and probably produce a less effective product. And my thoughts are that in space combat you probably want a mixture of quality and quantity, but you will want the odd bit of extreme quality for those occasions when you are dealing with something that has enough point defence to neutralise about as much energy as can be directed at its surface area and can generate a stellar destabilisation field that is effective from the outer solar system. But for all I know we can produce insane numbers of hyper-efficient caltrops that can emit focused or unfocused energy discharges from any appendage to zip along at mind-boggling speed and produce energy beams that could match anything feasible by conventional technology. I just suspect that someday we will need a shiny metal death machine with a spinal gun capable of propelling a super-dense high-energy packet at near the speed of light through a generated spatial fold and that the mind path would do that sort of thing better...
As for hitting out technological limits, I am not certain what that means, but there are several ambiguities. It may refer to the limits of the body path, and bear in mind that we seem to have general material synthesis, which is not skimping on the tech... It could mean that we have hit the limits of what we brought with us. It could also mean that we have hit a wall of diminishing returns as far as upgrading our weapons goes, and that we really won't get any more bang for our volume. Or it could mean that the mind path has nothing to offer that we don't already have... That last one seems doubtful to me...
Also, You sir are weak-minded for a kai! Of course we can do that. And we can do it better. In the previous world, the mind kai dominated, (ass-pulling here, didn't read any of the previous thread), but now it is body's time to shine! It's time for a paradigm shift. Let's make a superkaibrid like
this, except with more egg-laying and more Flower-planting. Let's impregnate the entire universe! Create a breed that is hardy, ubiquitous, and cunning!
Now, that doesn't mean mind doesn't have a place; indeed, there should be a synergy, mind helping where it's most convenient for body to ignore. For example, who says we need to develop a living railgun?
(yet) If we apply ourselves, we could easily use a cyborg model to satisfy both worlds! Body providing the host, Mind providing disposable tech! But with body taking the lead role, of course. Yes, a bright future indeed.
Also, I think it's refering to the lack of schematics- we only had so many, so if we wanted to make a space craft we'd have to design it from near-scratch. Which would likely take a tech queen & hive, and apparantly even with that it was a problem in the last thread, (if I read Ross right).