You mean new people would just spawn down there or are we talking NPCs? Or the people on heph having multiple characters, one for braining, one for combating?
((I meant for new people to have the option of starting there, although now that I really think of it, unless we regularly have missions for them as well, it's not going to be a terribly fair position. I didn't even think of the dual-character thing. Could we? Steve could probably run some checks on the stored inmates based on our requirements, and just send us a batch of exactly the people we want for using on missions. That way we could let our characters on Hephaestus do whatever regardless of how long it takes in RL time, and have mission stuff we could do at the same time. I mean, most of the things on Heph take time anyways. Design this, build that, research those, it's all intermittent actions. Granted, a lot of these are wall-of-texty actions, but still.))
I'm against multiple characters per person (in this game at least) but NPC's might be ok. Mostly just human rather then sod soldiers. You could put in a request for the type you want, and I could send you a few. Keep in mind we're pulling from a bank of criminals here, though.
Are you talking about the Hammer of Hephaestus? I don't think you understand: That thing could hit Earth from here.
Oh, I certainly do. In fact, it seems you are the one who might be missing the point: if the Hammer shoots at big enough ranges, then those ships can just dodge the shot, even if it goes at fractions of c.
If we take the jump point as just outside the orbit of the outer planet ( 7 000 000 000 km = 7 billion km = 48.8 AU) and place it at 50 AU, then the distance between it and Hep (which is about 1 AU from the star) is about 49 AU. Light would need about 407 minutes, or more than 6 hours, to go from Hep to the jump point. So a projectile going at 0.75c would need 9 hours to reach it. That's 3 hours to dodge. It would get smaller as distance decreases, but you see my point.
However, if it can do course corrections, then that doesn't matter as much, it can just keep homing in.
Yes you could build multiple, if you're really worried, but they'd need to be on planets or at least things of significant mass not to change their orbits via firing.
If it'd be freefloating in space, how much orbit changing are we speaking here? Could a pair of thrusters correct it?
Would building it in an asteroid provide enough mass?
Thirdly, what would ARESTEVE suggest we build around Hep for space defense?
Depends, what are you trying to defend against?
1) A UWM fleet coming in to take the planet back intact(ish).
2) A UWM fleet coming in to destroy the planet (or at least prevent us from using it, without the intention of getting it back intact).
So what we're gonna do here, after some prompting from pyro, is send 3 rifles to the Sword for Miya to distribute to good little boys and girls and we shall see how well they handle them in the coming missions.
Sure, I can do that. Just tell me what I get and what, if any, restrictions there are.
To be honest, I'm not entirely certain what I should do now. Before, I did try to make things clear and easy to remember, by condensing the data from previous posts into a spoiler with the important stuff. How do I do more than that? If I just post what I want, and PW or the committee posts what the appropriate cost and stats are, it kinda takes the fun out of tinkering. The only really creativity is just the base idea, rather than testing the idea and figuring out where it's applicable.
I understand your concern about making tinker too, ah, sterile and not creative. However, I hope you see the reason behind trying to ensure balance somewhat? Hmm, we'll have to try and find a middle ground between the fun of tinkering and working out solutions to technical challenges, and ensuring balance. Perhaps we just keep it like it is, bu with the designer trying to stay clear with pw what the end goal is or why he's asking for certain things, and with an additional round of looking at the end product and tweaking for game-reasons a bit? Or do you have a better idea?
The former is explicitly saying "It's not that good, BUT..."
That might be how you interpreted it, but that's not what was meant. Low damage, but very high rate of fire/volume of projectiles are what this thing does, no? So isn't it just the truth?
Again, they seem like bad attempts to polish a turd, and I think you'd be really good at polishing turds.
Perhaps, but I try not to do that, and instead spend my time with more worthwhile things than silly mindgames on an internet forum.
So seeing it poorly done makes me think you intentionally did it poorly, which implies a goal; I assumed your goal to be reducing my view of the weapon, as I had written the description to overplay it a bit, and it seemed like you thought that that overplayed description was my actual opinion rather than intentional aggrandizement.
Ah, you wound me. You still really think I spend time on crap like that? I just stated what I thought was what you were looking for (nice try to 'shift blame' to me though
I'll admit that you might have been searching for a more aggrandizing line, in which case I just didn't get the tone right yet. No subtle manipulating, just me not being able to read your thoughts and emotions to know what exactly you want (though having people in academics scream "ALWAYS BE OBJECTIVE" and "NO PURPLE PROSE ONLY FACTS YOU SHIT" at me might have something to do with it. Professor Drillsargeant can be so strict sometimes).
Is something like 'This weapon projects frankly irresponsible volumes of fire at targets at distressingly high speeds' more what you are searching for? If not, care to give me an example that would (that stays in-universe, mind you, like the other Armory items). Should it dazzle the mind with flashy new-age jargon? Promise potential buyers firepower heaven? Coax them by saying it attracts nubile young women?
Maybe if I'd thought about it longer than five seconds I'd have decided that was reading too much into it, and that you're just bad at aggrandizing things. But knee-jerk thinking is another bad habit of mine, as is probably obvious. >.>
No harm done, but remember how I said a while ago that not bothering going down in that particular rabbit hole was so much more productive? I think this proves that point a bit.
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.
((Well, I'm all for double characters (for this case only, of course), as if you can have two different characters, then you can always have two clones or something - but mark it, going that way can bring the whole game to ruin.
@GM The idea behind incorporating the can of the stuff, I believe, was that it would refill between missions like medical suplies in MkII+ suits/fuel in Mk III suits. That is why the increase to the overall cost was, indeed, anticipated. Adding an intake port would potentially be quite useful for field medics, though probably situational.
To think of it, can't the fleshknitter be injected or something? Or is it about treating 'closed wounds' and such where the suit might still be unpunctured?))
The fleshknitting stuff is really about closing wounds rather then anything else. It's quite effective at regrowing flesh but it doesn't regrow it "Right" so to speak. It works fine on muscle and bone and even nerves to a degree but it can't regen organs; you'd just end up with a mass of organ cells that aren't set up in such a way as to be useful.
If you want to have a small reserve of it in there naturally, at the price of an increased cost, thats more then alright, I was just pointing out it's gonna add cost.
Hmm. Simple then. The intent is obscure.
Follow it's trail up until the point where it got hit by the Heavenly Phallic Justice of ARESTEVE, or it becomes dangerous because of radiation or whatever. Try to determine what, if anything, it was heading for.
The trail leads to a crater in what you assume was the foothills for the mountains surrounding the enormous, ancient crater in which the above ground complex lies. If there were any hints as to where it was going, they've been blown away now. You can see nothing in particular it was headed for.
I have a headache and a shortage of time, so no replies to the big conversations. Sorry.
I'm against giving us extra characters, but it'd be cool if Steve could ship us some frozen ampers. Sods can't use amps, so it's the only big hole we have in our forces. Otherwise we can just possess robosods.
Piecewise: My actions are quoted below.
Rocket Rifle:
1.What does it do to a human being wearing an MK.I?
2.What does it do to a synthflesh body?
3.What does it do to a human wearing a civic defender's longcoat?
4.What does it do to a steel plate, like the hull of a ship or a structural wall?
5.Finally, what does it do to a battlesuit?
Cutting Laser:
6.What does it do to a battlesuit? Before you've said they were relatively ineffective, but really, I want to know. Even if it's just 'heats up to a warm glow'.
Piezoelectric Shard Launcher (full size 
)
7.What does it do to a battlesuit?
Heavy Gauss Cannon (Solid metal slug rounds- NOT nuclear)
8.What does it do to a battlesuit?
9.Also have a pair of robosods possess aux bodies and stalk Xan from the air. In case he does anything bad. Can't be too careful.
I'll assume you're talking about the standard one and not the hybrid that Pyro made in the now distant past.
1. Kills them. At least assuming it connects with their chest from the middle distance it's actually functional at.
2. Damages it. But Synth has good resistances to shrapnel and explosive force so it might blow the fingers off a hand or a chuck of flesh off, but it won't kill an undamaged body.
3.The longcoat would probably be able to absorb most of it, though it would shatter in the process. Minor injuries, most likely, unless they got unlucky.
4.Not much. The explosive and the shrapnel aren't powerful enough to do much damage to solid metal like that.
5.Even less.
6.It depends on how long you focus the beam on it. You could theoretically cut it in half, but you'd have to focus on it for a long time. I'd say that in reasonable time limits you're not gonna get enough effect to be terribly useful. Heating, maybe a small amount of cutting if you really get good focus, but yeah.
7 Full size it can put a pretty big stake of crystal straight into it. With a really good, lucky shot you could hit the pilot in a single round. But thats a best case sorta deal.
8.Probably damage or smash a layer of armor. Depends on how it hits, but if it hits flat on, yeah, it would get rid of a chunk of armor or at least render it mostly useless.
9.Already have a steve bot keeping an eye on him.
Anton Chernozorov
((Wall of green text warning))
Anton leaves the R&D crew to the task of assembling the final prototypes, and sits down to compose a message to Simus.
"XO, I need to bounce an idea off of you. I've been thinking about that suit design you've shown us, along with a few other things, and I need an outsider's perspective on this.
Back when I just entered HMRC service, I toyed around with a suit concept. It was supposed to be able to equip different specialized modules, making it customizable to any imaginable role. The idea was good in theory, but as I thought about it later, it had a major problem - the suit's individual modules would cost so much as to make the whole system impractical. It would have been easier to make individual specialized suits.
I had little time to work on it before that year-long mission, and I didn't have much time at all to work on it since, but after a few changes around here, and a few technologies I've seen, that suit of yours included, I decided to give it another go. This "MACS Package", for 'Mission-Adaptable Combat Suit', evolved out of a few concepts, and these concepts, more than the design itself, are what I'd like your opinion on. I'm no good with economics.
See, the cost of any given piece of equipment around here is twofold. On one hand, you have the actual resources that go into making the item. That is the cost we see here, on Hephaestus. On the other hand, there is the cost, in tokens, that typical ARM 'conscripts' see when they purchase the item on whatever ship it is they serve on. That cost is derived only partially from the first cost - equipment that is more powerful, also requires more qualified and competent users. Tokens just happen to be assigned according to competence during missions - it's a wonderfully self-supporting system. The more tokens you have to spend, the more qualified and competent you are at what you do, therefore the more you can be trusted with more powerful equipment.
This, as I said, doesn't bode well for a modular suit design, at least not one someone has to own. But when I saw the mission fund being introduced when we finally made a move against UWM, I realized that it's possible to have equipment exist in financial limbo. As long as the equipment is brought back, and its cost is within the budget, the total cost of all available equipment is irrelevant. And I thought... why not design a whole range of equipment based on that principle?
What I saw in your MCP suit, in Saint's attempts at power transfer systems, in some other things - they are just details of design. A more compact core suit, integrated power transfer, et cetera. The basic principle, the idea, is this: what if we have a collection of equipment, that can be freely exchanged without paying for all of it - only for the cost of things that can be equipped at any one time?
I'll provide an example. Suppose you have a person who buys the core of this 'MACS' suit, and then purchases a... let's call it a 'license' - a virtual piece of equipment that does not really exist, but functions as a down payment, represents the level of competence and trust afforded to the person. Now, when a mission presents itself and the suit needs to be equipped with modules to match the mission's tasks and the user's skills, there is no longer a need to sell off unused modules in order to buy needed ones. The person will just walk up to the Armory, or more likely the dispenser for these modules, and just grab what he needs, leaving what he doesn't need behind. Even though the whole package includes dozens of modules, he never owns all of them. The license means that he only ever owns what he has equipped, and 'tiers' of license can be used to allow access to more things. In a way, it provides him with his own personal 'mission fund', consisting of equipment he can take on the mission, attached to the suit.
The benefit of this system, for the user, is that it removes the need to handle "outdated" equipment. The core suit would come with all manner of mountpoints, power transfer routes and interfaces, allowing the same suit to be used as the base for a Mk3-like exoskeleton-assisted flying suit, a mobile armored exosuit, and even a Battlesuit, acting as the control interpreting interface in place of the standard control cuffs. Since the 'license' covers usage of all of those, no money is wasted while upgrading, even if the final result is a little more expensive than the standard alternative.
So, what do you think? I'm just a designer - I come up with these ideas, but I can't grasp the intricacies of managing an economy like that. Would it be a fair system? An efficient one? I can't tell."
Message Simus with the above.
Seek divine insight on whether such an exchangeable module system could indeed work alongside normally-sold equipment.
((GM opinion on this, PW?))
Idly tinker in VR, designing a generator-powered ducted fan flight backpack. ((i.e. the one on the right))
It seems like it would be possible, however the best way to do it would probably be to design the base suit to be bought, and then manufacture the modules for distribution via rental rather then purchase. Make them pay the full price only if they break the thing.
Author
Topic: Hephaestus No Longer Exists: Crater thread. (Read 190972 times)