Explore the surrounding area in the foothills. Any abnormalities of any sort? If not, head higher, unless it seems dangerous, in which case head back to base and send this message to Simus:
This facility likely produces soldiers of some sort. Sods or the like. I would like to requisition a few, as I am going into the mountains where the overload was going to find out what it was seeking, and I do not think my wholly human form can protect me.
((If this takes multiple turns because of how much area I'm covering, I'm okay with it.))
You wander around in the foot hills, over dusty red soil and dry underbrush. There are odd, twisted sort of trees out here with fat, reddish pink fruit hanging from thin, strained branches. You occasionally see some sort of small animals running around, though it's hard to make out what they are exactly. They remind you of the lizards that live on more terraformed planets, darting through brush along with the mice and snakes and poisonous insects that always in habit the deserts.
You can find nothing of any real interest out here; though as you look around you do notice a glint of chrome circling overhead.
Charles researches the following:
- What is the average length of service for a typical UWM soldier?
- How do the specialist units such as shadow walkers and urban executors differ demographically to the typical soldier?
- What issues have sparked the most rebellions, coups, or other actions against the UWM?
- How often do industrial disputes occur in the UWM supply lines? What are the usual causes?
Depends on where he's stationed and if we include time dilation. Because that could be between 5 years and 300 years or more. In general, assuming he doesn't die or get trapped in stasis or jump distortions for several generations, 5 to 10 years is the average, though many stay on longer.
They tend to be male, come from heavily fortified and long standing UWM loyal worlds, generally more intelligent, and are usually prone to certain sociopathic traits, if not naturally then by training.
Like most rebellions, they only really got rolling when the average state of living for the individual sank below a culturally accepted norm. Lack of food, too little living space, too much disease, etc. Humans, you will find, are not likely to upset the established order as a whole until their lives, as a whole, become unbearable. There are instances where the government itself rebelled, and the citizens followed them so as not to go against the established order of the local vs the galactic, but those are rarer.
More often on the edges of things, where private suppliers are common and law is rare enough that space fedex might just shoot space UPS out of the sky to clear up the competition; lunar wars style. However, as you get farther in all the work of supplying anything is either done by the UWM itself or by a private corporation that basically has a monopoly on it and heavy governmental ties.
The shells can do course corrections and detonate into a flack cloud before hitting, making it harder to evade, but if you wanna build closer cannons, that's perfectly alright.
You could probably manage to have them mostly free floating if you just fucking covered their opposite end in thrusters and had them all fire to compensate for the shot; though it would probably still shove itself out of orbit for a bit and need to fly back. A large asteroid would work to compensate; it would probably still shift the thing a bit but not enough to matter until after a couple dozen or more shots have been fired, and we can just tug or thrust it back into place after that.
Protecting against fleets eh? Well, depends on the make up of the fleet. They bring a capital ship through and you're probably screwed unless you can put several "Hammer" rounds into it; and it's got enough automanips to make that sort of thing hard. Assuming they don't do that; which they probably won't, the nuclear landmines and lasers should deal with most things; or at least cripple part of the fleet. At that point they'd probably either retreat or head for the planet, if they're really gungho. Because the route they'd take is unknown, we'd have a hard time placing defenses along it, meaning we would need to either place them around heph, or create them to be mobile enough to go out and take down the fleet before it reached it's destination. We could do that the traditional way: ie we build ships of our own and have them head out and get in a slugging match; or we can use the fact that we're in control of an extremely powerful ai and create a huge swarm of modified steve bots with built in entanglement communications that would attack and disable the ships.
1)So the shells already have course correction?
2)If we let the cannons rotate around the star at about the same speed as the jump point, would that mean that we always have them between ships coming for Hep from the jump point? Would this be useful to continually attack them while they make their next move after breaking the jump point blockade?
3)What other threats does ARESTEVE think we are vulnerable to? And when you say "bring a capital ship through" you mean through the jump point blockade? And how does its automanips defend it against shells exactly? And how vulnerable would it be to, say, lasers?
4)Finally, can we use the same designing procedure (like the one used for the exoskeletons) for the following things:
-generators
-fuel mixtures (mostly to get even higher energy densities)
-general computer hard- and software for suit systems
If yes, completion date?
1. Yes. Or I should say we have shells that have that capacity.
2.That would keep them with a bead on the jump point, yeah.
3. ARESTEVE rules nothing out. You were simply being too vague; for all he knew you could have wanted to protect against the Haebi or meteors or the influence of a wandering AP. As per capital ships, I believe we talked about them before. They're rare, and all of them were made back during the altered wars, but what they are is basically a small moon that they hollowed out/honeycombed and built a "ship" within. Think Death star, but rather then "Thats no moon" it's "Thats a moon. A moon with a giant laser cannon." They move entirely via automanips of massive size, and are literally designed to sit there and take as much damage as possible while dealing out as much as they can in return. Their movement systems are buried so deep inside them that even if you were to reduce their entire surface to molten glass the thing would still keep moving and probably just wipe out it's targets via ramming them. Which, assuming a small size, relatively low speed
Transient Crater Diameter: 1080 km ( = 673 miles )
Transient Crater Depth: 383 km ( = 238 miles )
Final Crater Diameter: 2700 km ( = 1680 miles )
Final Crater Depth: 3.19 km ( = 1.98 miles )
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 89500000 km^3 ( = 21500000 miles^3 )
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater, where its average thickness is 97 km ( = 60.2 miles ).
Though, if we look at the worst case scenario
10.25 percent of the planet is melted
Depending on the direction and location of impact, the collision may cause a change in the length of the day of up to 3.79 hours.
Transient Crater Diameter: 6420 km ( = 3990 miles )
Transient Crater Depth: 2270 km ( = 1410 miles )
Final Crater Diameter: 20200 km ( = 12500 miles )
Final Crater Depth: 5.85 km ( = 3.63 miles )
The final crater is replaced by a large, circular melt province.
The Melt volume is 3.26 times the crater volume
At this size, the crater forms in its own melt pool.
And from 8000km out from impact
The fireball appears 1220 times larger than the sun
Effects of Thermal Radiation:
Clothing ignites.
Much of the body suffers third degree burns.
Newspaper ignites.
Plywood flames.
Deciduous trees ignite.
Grass ignites.
The major seismic shaking will arrive approximately 26.7 minutes after impact.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 15 (This is greater than any earthquake in recorded history)
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 8000 km:
Most masonry and frame structures destroyed with their foundations. Some well-built wooden structures and bridges destroyed. Serious damage to dams, dikes, embankments. Large landslides. Water thrown on banks of canals, rivers, lakes, etc. Sand and mud shifted horizontally on beaches and flat land. Rails bent slightly.
As X. Rails bent greatly. Underground pipelines completely out of service.
The air blast will arrive approximately 6.73 hours after impact.
Peak Overpressure: 531000000 Pa = 5310 bars = 75400 psi
Max wind velocity: 18500 m/s = 41500 mph
Sound Intensity: 174 dB (Dangerously Loud)
Damage Description:
Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.
Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.
Multistory steel-framed office-type buildings will suffer extreme frame distortion, incipient collapse.
Highway truss bridges will collapse.
Highway girder bridges will collapse.
Glass windows will shatter.
Cars and trucks will be largely displaced and grossly distorted and will require rebuilding before use.
Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.
4. Depends. Are you trying to create entirely new versions or directions for energy generation and computer hard and software, or just better, or efficient systems?
Biochemical forge:
1.You said that this thing basically needs blueprints of a brain, down to the molecular level. Are there any libraries of blueprints, and if so, how expansive are they?
2.Look up a sod brain blueprint, or some sort of humanish soldier brain. Set it to produce, oh, ten brains. If no sod brain blueprint exists, ask a science crew to create one, assuming they can do it in less than seven days (Kill a few sods, maybe?). Send a message to Simus too, and if she doesn't approve it, don't do it.
3.How long does producing those ten brains take, in RL days? Remember, a batch of fifty fully-trained sod brains takes three days to make with a fleshpit, and you said a BF would be an improvement.
The Doctor:
4.Send the Doctor the below text, and cross all the fingers on all my aux bodies.
Recently, Xan's clone that was stored here was awoken. His abilities are quite interesting, and you are supposedly the one who gifted him with them.
You were very helpful with building Fleshpits here, and we have already produced a sizeable force of sod soldiers thanks to your efforts. However, it still takes a long time for a full sod to be grown using them- Do you think it would be possible to improve, supplement, or replace the fleshpits using Xan's abilities? He is fully capable of producing an entire body in mere minutes, given sufficient materials.
Another question is whether his flesh needs a direct connection to an organic brain to function; could one create a flesh form that changes shape based on the commands of a computer, or a braincase like those that we use in robotic bodies? And if not, could a sod's brain be modified to control flesh like Xan, or is the process so inherently complex that it requires a fully functional human brain?
Of course, the most important question is whether any of these ideas are wise. Xan's abilities could of course be quite dangerous. Also, do you have any knowledge or ideas about some form of weapon that would be particularly effective against something like him?
((Before, when I said I'd like Steve to send us frozen ampers, I meant NPC ampers. Not players. Basically supplemental security forces, and people we can delegate mass-brain washing jobs to. Also, we should probably ask Steve to only send people who have relatively minor crimes, like secretly dating a Magister's daughter, rather than the murderers.
Other thoughts: We have a construction crew and science crew Idle, and probably an extra of each pretty soon. We should do stuff with them. Did we ever decide how we would build larger ships? We should set the construction crew to start working on that. On that topic, we aren't even building any ships with the shipyard we just finished! That should certainly be a big priority.))
1. They're not generally available, for obvious reasons. However, if you let Miya know about your need for one, and he lets steve know, we could see about; ahem, liberating one for you.
2-3. Dependent upon things you don't have. Though you could attempt to make a copy of a sod brain. You'd just need a sod brain in the state you want it.
4.Oooo. That seems fun. Potential for a planetary sized flesh horror. For the sake of not having Pyro stab me though, I'm gonna say you should get approval with him before I have the Doc start sending you information for your project. Should probably get permission from Miya too, since he, keeper of the secrets, is better able to gauge how much abject fear we should feel towards that project.
((PSL seems like a good bet, since it is a newer concept than laser/gauss weaponry and, apparently, is of higher efficiency/cost ratio than those. The only problem I foresee that unlike gauss automanip-buffed cannons it would have difficulties reaching meaningful amounts of speed, so that'll have to be circumvented somehow, likely with those same automanips.
HEP - dunno; isn't it a 'close-range' weapon? Sure, in space there is no atmosphere to interfere, but then it isn't the best focused weapon, is it? Also, it being a 'black box' of 'FuckIfIKnow' variety (and that is after being studied by Sword's team of scientists, which means further NPC efforts are likely to be fruitless, just like with Nyartifacts), there might crop up issues with scaling it.
Actually, there is one more field we have neglected for so long. What about the Crystalline Projector? It's another black box, but rather of 'No Experiments Aboard Sword' variety, so Hephaestus research is our best bet. Even without side applications of said crystalline growths (like augmenting the sods, which I suggested a long time ago), it is a savage and highly destructive weapon courtesy of its projectile expansion after hitting the target. Scaled to space combat it might actually prove utterly devastating, capable of crystal-glassing planets. Then again, automanips might be required to achieve acceptable projectile speed.))
If it were mass produced yes, it would be cheaper. Though there might be...side effects if the vats aren't kept clean of foreign biological matter.
((Uh.. yeah. Should have probably moved that to OOC.
Also, just to have a productive turn:))
Anton Chernozorov
Look through the UWM ship database for a simple construction ship design, something fit for orbital salvage and repair ops, and general space structure construction. Order two of a fitting design built and launched.
Have ARESTEVE direct the shuttle fleet to start congregating the debris and salvageable ships in orbit, so that they form a more manageable clump instead of a scattered ring of clutter.
This process will be done on: October 3rd.
Put it on the list of shit what be in motion.
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Topic: Hephaestus No Longer Exists: Crater thread. (Read 188287 times)