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Author Topic: You are an Independent Scientist! (Nov 12, 2016)  (Read 37308 times)

FallacyofUrist

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #390 on: April 24, 2017, 05:50:37 pm »

Attempt to design a bitcoin mining virus.
+1
+1.

More specifically: A virus that turns computers into our loyal slaves, and makes them toil for bitcoin which will be given to us(except when somebody is using the infected computer, at which point the calculations stop as so to not give anything away).
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FoU has some twisted role ideas. Screw second-guessing this mechanical garbage spaghetti, I'm basing everything on reads and visible daytime behaviour.

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Mardent23

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #391 on: April 24, 2017, 06:03:00 pm »

+1! We  shall take over the internet, one computer at a time! Starting with those Trademart peons! Our  idea was genius! And good for media attention!
« Last Edit: April 24, 2017, 09:51:43 pm by Mardent23 »
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Chiefwaffles

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #392 on: April 25, 2017, 12:18:02 am »

November 8, 2016

Another morning, another day for innovation!

The first thing is fresh on your mind - a bitcoin mining virus. With some cunning programming, a simple virus can be created and spread to unsuspecting computers. Then, when the computer is online and not in use, the virus can utilize a portion of system resources to generate bitcoin and send it back to you. A genius, totally original plan. One programming montage later, you do some test runs with the Miner Virus and briefly analyze the results.
Spreading the virus is working great. It can be spread through the standard vectors - emails, websites, and also videos. Though with things like websites you have to have an infected website first. However, you found that it does seem to trip most antivirus programs, so it's largely limited to people that neglected to install an antivirus.
But then there's the actual profit. It makes you... $1/week. You'd have to infect over 400 computers to match the profit you get per day from selling venom. And it will burn out any computer after 2 weeks! It's a safety measure, of course, to avoid being too obvious, but still. 2 weeks of a dollar a week. Not amazing.

Well, not every venture can be a success. You spend a sizeable amount of time playing with the scorpions, who seem to be ambivalent to the whole "playing" thing. After relaxing a bit, you head to the super convenient Patent office where through the wonders of plot efficient bureaucracy, your patent for the Cooperation Edurarium gets approved within minutes. You bring it back to the workplace and make a listing for it online. No potential buyers come forth throughout the rest of the day. Perhaps the world isn't ready for the Cooperation Edurarium?


You spend the rest of the day actually inventing things. You take the Shockdrone apart to get at the Shock baton first. You spend $40 on materials like metal and wiring for the frame of the planned Shock-gun. Eventually, after some fiddling, you begin the actual work on the project. It's an interesting challenge, converting the Shock Baton MK2 from contact-based to ranged, but your intellect makes anything possible!
The new Shock-gun is eventually functional. It retains the shocking effectiveness of the baton, but with an extended range and greater power usage. It's still very power-efficient and you believe it will take 600 shots to drain a full MK4 Energ-E cell. It still has to be plugged into a power source such as your Backmounted Energy Distributor, and has a range of 2 meters. The range isn't groundbreaking, but it's better than contact and can always be improved upon.


Before hitting the "bed", you get a call from an unknown number. You have no idea who they are or how they got your number or how they know you, but evidently they do.
"Is this the scientist-guy? Who made the quad-chopper? I have a deal for you. Meet me tomorrow at ..."
The rest of the call is an address and time for tomorrow that you write down somewhere. It's easy to get to if you want to meet the guy, and easy to ignore if you don't.


You find it a bit harder to sleep tonight as you still feel the after-effects of various... lab accidents relating to accidental discharge of the shocking components utilized earlier, but eventually you do fall asleep.


You harvested 2 ml of venom, turned it into lasting venom, then sold it for $60.

Spoiler: You (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Creatures (click to show/hide)
Makeshift Data Terminal
Spoiler: Contacts (click to show/hide)
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Quote from: RAM
You should really look to the wilderness for your stealth ideas, it has been doing it much longer than you have after all. Take squids for example, that ink trick works pretty well, and in water too! So you just sneak into the dam upsteam, dump several megatons of distressed squid into it, then break the dam. Boom, you suddenly have enough water-proof stealth for a whole city!

RAM

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #393 on: April 25, 2017, 02:23:08 am »

More playtime! Guide them through some of the coopedurarium. Invent small puzzles for them to solve. Teach them basic sentence structure...
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I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
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Read the First Post!

stabbymcstabstab

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #394 on: April 25, 2017, 08:00:16 am »

+1 to RAM's idea, lets also work on diversifying the Miner Virus to things like skimming cash of bank accounts in smaller amounts so as not to get caught.
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Long Live Arst- United Forenia!
"Wanna be a better liberal? Go get shot in the fuckin' face."
Contemplate why we have a sociopathic necrophiliac RAPIST sadomasochist bipolar monster in our ranks, also find some cheese.

FallacyofUrist

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #395 on: April 25, 2017, 09:10:34 am »

And more importantly, make it more efficient(less burnout) and harder to detect.
~~~
So, what about the call? Should we go to the location?
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FoU has some twisted role ideas. Screw second-guessing this mechanical garbage spaghetti, I'm basing everything on reads and visible daytime behaviour.

Would you like to play a game of Mafia? The subforum is always open to new players.

Mardent23

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #396 on: April 25, 2017, 09:31:19 am »

We should convert some of the venom into Antivenom, and then sell it to the University Hospital. About the location, we should come, but bring our weapons , mask, and clothes. If we have their number, we could launch a probe virus.  Also, +1 to miner virus.
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vishdafish

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #397 on: April 25, 2017, 03:12:29 pm »

+1 to bringing weapons and mask to the meeting. Maybe we should go one hour early and observe from a safe place so we can see if anything is fishy.
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crazyabe

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #398 on: April 25, 2017, 03:18:32 pm »

So, what about the call? Should we go to the location?
Yes, we should go to the Location.
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Mardent23

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #399 on: April 25, 2017, 03:22:14 pm »

We should go one hour early and observe from a safe place so we can see if anything is fishy.
Agreed.
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RAM

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #400 on: April 25, 2017, 03:54:04 pm »

Can we produce some sort of crude replica of ourselves wearing a heavy robe and such that is capable of a good imitation of an ambulatory motion?
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Vote (1) for the Urist scale!
I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
Urist has been forced to use a friend as fertilizer lately.
Read the First Post!

Chiefwaffles

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #401 on: April 25, 2017, 09:50:54 pm »

November 9, 2016

The first portion of the day is spent theorizing.
An example of a theory thought of today is some sort of replica for yourself. The device would match you in size and with heavy obscuring clothing could appear to be human at most examination. The body is simple. It'd take time - maybe a full day or some time spent every routinely for a few days - and a lot of scrap metal. The size would be perfect for a MK4 Energ-E cell, making power a relative non-issue.
Imitating human-like walking is the hard part, however. Unless you're insanely lucky, you reckon that despite your incredible intellect it just won't work out at first. But through iteration and revisions it could probably be improved to a workable level. Unless you think of some method to circumvent this either by creating some genius technique or device or whatever or finding a better way to spend your time when making it.
In terms of price, $200 would cover the metal and therefore most of the body, $150 could be enough for electronics, and you'd of course need a MK4 Energ-E cell. Though you can always just use resources and materials that you found yourself and have instead of buying it, but that'd take conscious effort. Oh yeah, and you'd need clothing for it too. A method to control would also probably be a good idea. But if you go through with it, you'd get a pretty nifty invention.



Enough thinking! Time for thinking and doing! Exciting things! Like programming!
You spend the next few hours working on the Miner virus. Your goals were simple: easier on the computers as to prevent burnouts, a more stealthy virus, and getting their password to routinely and subtly take cash from their bank accounts. Okay. Maybe that last item is harder than the rest, but it won't stop you from trying!

...And in a completely unreasonable fashion, you manage to find a technique for the probe virus to use to access bank accounts without being caught. The universal flaw that you somehow found requires that the accessed money must be in very small amounts. Otherwise, the security present may catch onto the disappearing money. It also needs to be local; you'll only ever see the money from the viruses. You can't directly access the compromised accounts.
All in all, it should net another $2/week. Not an extreme amount but it adds up.
Unfortunately, the time poured into exploiting the extremely lucky opportunity ends up hurting your other goals in improvements. The burnout issue is not fixed, but at least you didn't somehow make it permanently worse. Though the virus should now be able to get past most standard consumer antivirus programs. More advanced server, corporate, and hobbyist antivirus stuff still laughs at your attempts of infection.
You decide not to push your luck any further, and finish with the programming for today.


You turn your mental gaze towards the scorpions. You imagine they're very happy to see you, but scorpions surprisingly aren't expressive. You spend some time trying to teach them any semblance of sentence structure, but don't make any progress. Despite their natural smarts, education of your intended scope simply won't be possible without some external help to their intelligence.
Shelving the sentence structure and little scorpion graduation hats for now, you instead make some puzzle-based lessons for the Edurarium and guide the scorpions through that. After some time spent, you feel like the scorpions are closer to learning something but aren't quite there yet. Trying again with the same lesson plan could provide better results tomorrow if desired.


One heartfelt goodbye to the scorpions later, you equip the Glock and stuff the mask in your undetermined on-person storage spot. Let's say it's a fashionable bag. You thought about bringing the shock gun, but your plan was to bring a "weapon" and the Glock felt like, while boring, it filled that role the most.
After you check to make sure you didn't forget anything, you head on out to the meeting spot an hour early. Much to your surprise, there's someone already there. Accounting for your weapon, you carefully approach and greet her. After identities are in fact confirmed, dialogue begins.
"I'll, uh, make it short. I have $25,000 in cash and I need a way to break into the military base's vault. If you don't want any part in it, just... walk away. But if you do help me, nothing bad for you or society will come out of it. Just call... this number," she hurriedly states as she hands you a small ripped piece of paper, "if you ever have something that can help. Please only call if you have something done that you are sure will work."
Without a goodbye, she quickly walks away, leaving you with the scrap of paper in your hands. You check it. It's a number, for sure. Confused, you head back to your humble abode where you decide not to ask how she even knows you. With some minor deliberation, you decide that you'll sleep on it.


You also realize, before you go to sleep, that there are projects you've been neglecting. Wireless Energy Transfer, that drone theft AI, and medical chemicals. All things that you started work on but never bothered continuing. You recall that all these things had to be worked on for some time if it was just you going at it, though. Monotonous, but hopefully rewarding work!

You harvested 2 ml of venom, turned it into lasting venom, then sold it for $60.

Spoiler: You (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Creatures (click to show/hide)
Makeshift Data Terminal
Spoiler: Contacts (click to show/hide)


Spoiler: GM Note (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: April 26, 2017, 07:03:03 pm by Chiefwaffles »
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Quote from: RAM
You should really look to the wilderness for your stealth ideas, it has been doing it much longer than you have after all. Take squids for example, that ink trick works pretty well, and in water too! So you just sneak into the dam upsteam, dump several megatons of distressed squid into it, then break the dam. Boom, you suddenly have enough water-proof stealth for a whole city!

RAM

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #402 on: April 25, 2017, 11:11:38 pm »

Military vaults are difficult. Some gun drones could provide a distraction, but also produce evidence, and more importantly put everyone on alert. A bored guard is generally less of a problem than a distracted one... A compromise is a distraction to a different location that the location will send personnel to, gives them something interesting to talk about without giving them the impression that they are personally involved. But it also puts you on a time-limit as the distraction will be resolved and reinforcements of some sort are likely.

Chemical and biological attacks sound nice, but in practise, you might be able to disable the whole facility, but more likely than not, onset of symptoms and exposure will vary quite a lot and it doesn't take long to send out an alarm. And killing military is not the best P.R. for someone who lacks an army of kill-bots with which to conquer the world. Things get a lot more complicated when you switch to non-lethals. Sedatives tend to be very dangerous in the absence of ongoing medical attention, people vary a lot in their sensitivity to electrical currents and location is everything with that. Muscle relaxants tend to go for the heart and diaphragm... You could maybe develop some sort of narcotic that temporarily scrambles the understanding of motor functions and speech? A sufficiently fine needle should produce little sensation of penetration...

 Attach it to a stealth-drone? Something that hovers near-silently, projects its background onto its forward-faces, and has almost no thermal output for an operational duration. The thermals should be easy enough to defeat by insulating the functional components from a transparent casing and shoving ice-packs in there. Ice packs stop it producing too much heat or needing ventilation while insulation keeps it from looking too cold. It is the potential basis of a measure to penetrate through personnel without raising an alarm, if you are quick enough to disable whoever is monitoring the guards.

Cameras are a pain. If they are any good then they are overlapping, which means taking out two of them, which is a pretty much impossible coincidence. Either it isn't a coincidence, perhaps robobirds hate their own reflections? Or it doesn't hit the cameras, maybe some sort of crossbow-delivered overload device that shorts out the whole camera network, but that requires some assumptions...

They won't have any automated defences worth mentioning on observation duty, as identifying friend from foe(I.F.F.) is too much of a hassle, but they could have something on the vault itself that needs to be disabled from a keypad or something... Still, it should be pretty easy to take out the sensors. I can't see anything using sonics or electrosense or anything, should be plain old radiation spectrum which should be easy enough to block with a goop-gun of something particularly tarish, like tar... Worst-case they have redundant stealthy eye-covers that can be ejected. Time for the threaded-tar cannon! Give it an effective range of, say, 6 metres, and covers everything in, say, a 45 degree arc in broad-spectrum-opaque goop that sticks and has strong threads through it to prevent piecemeal dislodging(If it can shed entire facings then they earned the win... or repeat gooping)... Should mission-kill a death-bot or a turret's camera... Or you could try to up the range to about 20 metres by having it wrap around an object rather than cover an arc.

Breaking the vault is probably better than making assumptions about its access methods or expecting to steal the whole vault without being tracked. I guess you could try for the ant-bot approach to observing the vault in action, but that has all sorts of issues. Your choice of signal loudness or unit retrieval, the scarcity of actual vault activity, and the obvious hassles of avoiding identification and destruction... Some sort of combination attack of alternating thermite, acid, blast-waves, water-cannon, and watch out for reactive armour... Everything can be broken by something... Really, most things that thermite won't deal with quickly can be handled with some high-explosives followed by a good hosing-down... Just get a series of applicators that all make a hole of the same shape and are loaded with different goodies. 'course, you want a hole you can actually use, which means either a big hole or a small you. Remote articulators tend to be terrible, but that doesn't need to be the case...


Scorpion play-time is still important. But perhaps we can research scorpion brains, and perhaps research their genetics to give natural selection a bit of assistance in terms of developing the natural scorpion cognitive ability. Finding something that would stimulate mental activity would also be nice, but you need to be absolutely certain that their precious scorpion minds has withstand the load. I am sure that just playing with them will get the desired results if we just stick with it though!

P.S.
Well, the good thing about them is that they let you skip over the non-story posts, which is huge when you are in a hurry to catch up, but that is the only way they function, so it can kill off the character. I was thrilled to see them in littlest cheesemaker but then didn't use them because of all the fanart that would have lost its relevance if I just went through the first post's listing of it. I guess it really increases the extent to which the story posts need to stand on their own merits. It is basically useless if you are going to be dropping down references to posts, like "you make a deathray as detailed in Forumitezero's post" because people will need to dig through the posts to see the details of the deathray. On the other hand, not everyone can go through hundreds of replies to catch up so it might get you some more readers... I would say that it is a good thing if you think that your sanity can handle implementation...
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Vote (1) for the Urist scale!
I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
Urist has been forced to use a friend as fertilizer lately.
Read the First Post!

Chiefwaffles

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #403 on: April 26, 2017, 07:02:13 pm »

Just a note that I tend to prefer updating with more than one person posting. Primarily because based on prior experience in games, updating based off of one person's post seems to feel excluding to others. (Sorry to anyone who saw my name in "Recently posted" and thought there was an update!)

And regarding the vault, here are some "hints":
1.) You have plenty of time - this is something to work on in the background if you want to. There are other ways to make money!
2.) This is my fault; I should had made it clearer: You know where the military base the stranger's referring to.
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Quote from: RAM
You should really look to the wilderness for your stealth ideas, it has been doing it much longer than you have after all. Take squids for example, that ink trick works pretty well, and in water too! So you just sneak into the dam upsteam, dump several megatons of distressed squid into it, then break the dam. Boom, you suddenly have enough water-proof stealth for a whole city!

stabbymcstabstab

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Re: You are an Independent Scientist!
« Reply #404 on: April 26, 2017, 07:14:20 pm »

Let's work on Improving the Wireless jamming Device by increasing range, battery life and of course decreasing it's size as much as possible without making it's range useless.
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Long Live Arst- United Forenia!
"Wanna be a better liberal? Go get shot in the fuckin' face."
Contemplate why we have a sociopathic necrophiliac RAPIST sadomasochist bipolar monster in our ranks, also find some cheese.
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