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[Happerry]

Anyone want to design some asteroid mining ships then?

[andrea]

I think we had something earlier in the thread about asteroid mining and forges. This could be a good time, I guess, to improve our production.

[Chiefwaffles]

Design: Athena Industry Control

Looking at the feedback and criticism from the ongoing Athena Hephaestus overseeing, notes from our failed attempt at making Athena completely manage the Hephaestus process, and everything else we've done with Athena has led us to a conclusion: We're ready to give Athena control of our industry.
Not immediately, of course. Athena has to be rather notably modified to do so. That's why this is a design and not an afterthought revision. But she's progressed enough where the design won't be an awkward attempt at creating new industry automation software, calling it Athena, then pretending it's actually Athena all along.

By heavily capitalizing on improvement of Athena's learning capabilities, we can make her just more... flexible. Closer (though still somewhat far from) to how a human works - actively learning new things and incorporating them into how she does things. Instead of just repeating the tactic that has had the highest performance last combat cycle, her process is more akin to "thinking" and thus now more receptive to operation of things that aren't explicitly programmed in.
That's where industry control comes in. Once this has been implemented,  Athena will be given complete control of Ertex's industry. Her robotic efficiency and ability to coordinate will do amazing here. Factories across the globe will work synchronously based on the needs of all of Ertex and its military. Automated transports will move throughout the globe like blood pumping through a body.

Needless to say, the goal of this design is to improve industry output. Having all of Ertex's industries be perfectly coordinated by one governing, learning, non-corrupt system would be amazing for everything we make and do. Sure, the clans may not be happy, but we've found that Aegis units make very intimidating police officers (as long as nobody sees them trying to walk).

TL;DR: Make Athena more (not completely) able to learn in general rather than just in the context of combat and whatnot based on experience with Hephaestus and just about everything else, then give control of entire industry for massive benefits.

Athena Industry Control (1): Chiefwaffles

Based on preexisting tech, lots of potential for what it can do, and paves the way for Athena AGI in the future.

[Blood_Librarian]

Design:Sub-Space level Quantom interactions "Temporis"

Our computational engines have hit a wall in terms of their upper level. Silicon computers augmented with "modern" (Read: Primitive) Quantum computing has to lead us to where we are now, but the next generation is at hand.The quantum-level interactions that we are simulating on a daily basis have lead to a straining point, and it is particularly visible on every Athena Node where data processing is on the bleeding edge of  Ertex Science. As we reach to the point where millions of devices and computers are synchronized together, the technological edge that is required to keep them running in synchronous harmony is quickly becoming insurmountable. Analyzing our historical patterns as well as our failed prototypes has become a past time for our scientists in the laboratories of the Sub-Atom.  Dozens of archived data logs of every single nano-Pattern, along with the heavy particle accelerators that we have committed to the research of quantum-science has come to a startling, Ertex-Shattering conclusion.

Another dimension exists and is accessible by our technology to be exploited.

The first generation of "Temporis" computers utilize advances in pico and below scale matter manipulation to rip a hole into reality and input an entire array of data in the temporarily existing hole, which promptly connects to pre-established hardware to process it. Compared to our most powerful computers of the silicon and traditional-quantum variety, Temporis-Pattern systems are around three percent faster in the processing of quantum patterning and industrial analysis at the cost of being ten times as expensive. However, the possibilities of further exploitation into the possibilities and boundless horizons that the dimension represents cannot be under-estimated.

The first computers of the Temporis Pattern are expected to be large, room-sized affairs, and prototypes are designed to further exploit the access into the dimension to further our knowledge for the next generation of Quantum-Dimension computers, However some scientists are already hopelessly tooling towards making such bulky machines replace modern generation Void-Bound Athena nodes.

Design:Fusion Forge

The Fusion Forge is a massive Materials Foundry with a custom-built fusion reactor attached to a utterly massive fusing chamber in the orbit of Ertex. It's notable for its utterly massive radiators, spanning almost three hundred meters in a circular plane around the Forge, that glow with enough thermal energy to be seen from across the system. The Fusion Reactors primary purpose is to produce the hyperdense metalloid plasma required to create Insulanium, while also powering the particle accelerator that circles the Forge that gives the Insullanium forge needed catalysts for its continued running. Dozens of individual industrial "Forges" on board siphon the resulting Insullanium liquid, and quench it into hardened pieces that can be up to the size of a Ships armor plate, all the way down to a nail and then is automatically loaded into the logistics sector of the station, where it is ferried to where ti is needed..

 This massive object requires a logistic system shipping it the raw materials required for the singular purpose of creating Insulanium equipment. The entire system is designed so that it could be retooled, and if required, can be dedicated to creating certain heavier-then-iron materials in similar amounts of matter as the production of Insulanium(This is a side feature, if required, it can be dropped to make room for its primary purpose.)

In addition, the Forge is designed to be expanded in the future, with the posibility of it becoming the center of space-born manufacturing.

Athena Industry Control (1): Chiefwaffles
Temporis(1):Blood_Librarian
Fusion Forge(1):Blood_Librarian

[piratejoe]

Athena Industry Control (2): Chiefwaffles, Piratejoe
Temporis(1):Blood_Librarian
Fusion Forge(1):Blood_Librarian

[Blood_Librarian]

I honestly think we should improve our base computer technology or at least expand our industry before we try and "weld" the AI on it again, as I see it, theirs not enough bonus's for it to be worthwhile besides the continued investments into Athena. As I see it, the moment we give Athena control of higher power computers, the benefits will show much more tangibly then just improving it over and over without any significant scientific improvements of its material components. ( IE computer upgrades rather then AI Upgrades.)

With Temporis, it opens the pathway to the utilization of more high-yield computing systems, which is of course beneficial to a burgeoning Artificial Intelligence.

The Fusion forge is an alternative that benefits our industrial capacity and gives us a chance to make a space-borne industry. Something we haven't actually don't any investments on at all.

[Chiefwaffles]

But Athena is limited by software.

Compare it to, say, a video-editing program. You can upgrade your RAM or hard drive or whatever and have the program run faster, but I’ll still do the same exact thing it did before. Just some degree faster. Athena is largely limited by the software - sure, she can be nebulously vaguely “better” with better hardware but she won’t be any more capable than before.

That and giving Athena control of our industry is in no way dependent on hardware. You vastly underestimate the impacts of giving a learning entity with extreme efficiency and coordination control of an entire industry and able to have literally everything coordinate perfectly together.

[Blood_Librarian]

We only spent our extremely powerful design and revision inovations on two things related to industry: Fusion, and Insuallium. We have no type of orbital presence beyond the Kill-Satellites and whatever we launch up there. We have spent a revision/a design on attempting to put our industry to an AI's control before for mixed results.

The benefits of placing an AI over already mostly-automated industrial processes is probably gonna be limited to some improvements to our ability to deploy assets in terms of SP and GP on our home world and moving one things to another as it is likely that we have already optimized everything as humanly possible. Logistics is something that you have mentioned-- coordination control of our industry; Most of that is ground based, presumably in a few centralized factories for speedy assembly and launch that has allowed us to deploy our assets as fast as we have been doing. This is no where as complicated as controlling an orbital-based industry, which would make the Athena Industrial control a valid design. I know for a fact that giving the AI control of the industry will not spontaneously improve it by extreme margins through technological innovation as it would do our jobs better, which I am in the interest of keeping.

An orbital presence massively changes the gambit, as it would allow us to more efficiently use resources from the entire solar system, tapping into asteroids and moons as well as warfare over planets, fully using their wealth in a way that would otherwise be infeasible instead of hammering down on already built resources (Building horizontally instead of vertically, so to speak.)

Not once have we invested resources into expanding a permanent orbital presence beyond the bare minimum required for deploying designs.

The way I see it, an industrial center where we can rapidly create equipment for the express purpose of warfare will rapidly increase our ability to deploy and re-tool our weapons.

Honestly? I think we should design a Aero-Space Fighter carrier before we put our Athena into a industrial control situation.

No matter what we do, Athena will require hardware to run its software, to process information and to declare commands to the equipment it controls. This means that it needs the ability to think via (presumably) cutting edge hardware that is at the very edge of our technological edge, even for industrial purposes. Since we have what can basically be a Proto-intelligence that has been described as able to adapt itself, I can assume it can fill itself out to fill the hardware it is given, and correspondingly compress itself to fit smaller pieces, so to speak. (Smaller/bigger nodes for smaller/bigger equipment unlike a video-editing program that you can edit its settings to use more hardware.) I am also betting that once again, there is gonna be some form of localization as having to wait light-seconds for the extremely powerful hardware in orbit of another planet (Cuttlefishes) to process something is counter intuitive to a fast running lean mean machine. Since our Athena can be described as self-adaptive (unless I am wrong.) having far more superior hardware would mean that it could adapt more of its processing power to higher thought. A Rat cannot think the same thoughts as a monkey because a rat does not have enough brain to commit to such resource intensive things. In this case, having more power-dense hardware in the same amount of space would mean Athena would have more resources to commit to higher thought, as base programs do not require any more power to run when more power is given.

There is no reason not to have a massive computer bank that the Temporis represents to run the vast operations that Athena requires for civilian operations. It doesnt have to be centralized, and a theoretically mass produced Temporis computer could be made over across the entire planet, in orbit and even in combat-machines for the purposes of running Athena in speeds that would beat traditional computers by as much as 1/2 factors.

I am not saying that giving our industry to Athena is a bad thing, I am saying that giving our industry to Athena right now, where it wont have as much benefit as compared to setting up a Orbital Industrial presence or a method to an entirely new field of science.

TL;DR: DO IT LATER ONCE WE HAVE SPACE MINING AND FABRICATION. BETTER BRAINS MEAN BIGGER THOUGHTS.

[Draignean]

Mining Macrites
You know what are great? Minerals. You know what has minerals? Asteroids. It would be totally amazing to take the minerals out of those asteroids, but there's this problem. It's hard to get things into space, and it sucks to keep having to shoot new mining equipment in the space.

So what we need, clearly, is a form of mining equipment that makes more mining equipment. Enter the macrite. Not too much smaller than a cuttlefish, the first generation parent macrites are constructed with two goals in mind. The first is mining and limited refining. Equipped with sensors and high-powered lasers, the macrites are designed to search out high yield asteroids, and burn them into small shards suitable for ingestion. 'Ingestion' is handled by a high power arc furnace, which is designed to convert ores into pure (or mostly pure) chunks. These chunks are then welded into balls by exterior arms, and pushed towards a stable orbit around Ertex where they can be picked up at our leisure.

Not all minerals mined are pushed back to Ertex, however. A portion is always saved back to serve the Macrite's second purpose: self-propagation. Each macrite is outfitted with the internal blueprints to create a macrite of larger scale. The greater scale not only simplifies the engineering required to self-build, but also allows for increased volumes to be handled as time goes on- and for macrites to reach leviathan bulk after several hundred generations. Granted, materials and internal facilities may not always be able to handle the same sophistication, and several generalized patterns are allowed for less effective, or even sterile, macrites so that technical difficulties in the construction systems, or complications with acquiring rare materials will not be as critical.

[Draignean]

Athena Industry Control (2): Chiefwaffles, Piratejoe
Temporis(1):Blood_Librarian
Fusion Forge(1):Blood_Librarian
Mining Macrites (1): Draignean

[Chiefwaffles]

Athena Industry Control (1): Piratejoe
Temporis (1):Blood_Librarian
Fusion Forge (1):Blood_Librarian
Mining Macrites (2): Draignean, Chiefwaffles

[Detoxicated]

Haha i love how we are creating even more contraptions no Sane human would construct.  First an AI that has literally control of alnost all Aspects of life now self replicating robots to Mine objects in space...

Athena Industry Control (1): , Piratejoe
Temporis(1):Blood_Librarian
Fusion Forge(1):Blood_Librarian
Mining Macrites (3): Draignean, Chiefwaffles, detoxicated

[piratejoe]

Athena Industry Control (0):
Temporis(1):Blood_Librarian
Fusion Forge(1):Blood_Librarian
Mining Macrites (4): Draignean, Chiefwaffles, detoxicated, Piratejoe

Don't worry, Mandatory pampering thanks to our glorious AI overlord Athena will happen...eventually.

[NUKE9.13]

Mining Macrites
You know what are great? Minerals. You know what has minerals? Asteroids. It would be totally amazing to take the minerals out of those asteroids, but there's this problem. It's hard to get things into space, and it sucks to keep having to shoot new mining equipment in the space.

So what we need, clearly, is a form of mining equipment that makes more mining equipment. Enter the macrite. Not too much smaller than a cuttlefish, the first generation parent macrites are constructed with two goals in mind. The first is mining and limited refining. Equipped with sensors and high-powered lasers, the macrites are designed to search out high yield asteroids, and burn them into small shards suitable for ingestion. 'Ingestion' is handled by a high power arc furnace, which is designed to convert ores into pure (or mostly pure) chunks. These chunks are then welded into balls by exterior arms, and pushed towards a stable orbit around Ertex where they can be picked up at our leisure.

Not all minerals mined are pushed back to Ertex, however. A portion is always saved back to serve the Macrite's second purpose: self-propagation. Each macrite is outfitted with the internal blueprints to create a macrite of larger scale. The greater scale not only simplifies the engineering required to self-build, but also allows for increased volumes to be handled as time goes on- and for macrites to reach leviathan bulk after several hundred generations. Granted, materials and internal facilities may not always be able to handle the same sophistication, and several generalized patterns are allowed for less effective, or even sterile, macrites so that technical difficulties in the construction systems, or complications with acquiring rare materials will not be as critical.

Mining Macrites (Very Hard): (4+3)-2=5: Average
Self-replicating machines. What could possibly go wrong?
The first generation Mining Macrites are of a reasonably simple design. They are based on the Cuttlefish hull, albeit with major modifications, and equipped with two 'Mining Lasers' and an arc furnace. A basic AI (less intelligent than Athena, at least) enables them to autonomously seek out, mine, and process minerals throughout the system. This will increase our industrial capacity considerably, although there is room for improvement given that the resources usually still need to be retrieved from orbit and processed on Ertex itself.
So far, so good. But we didn't stop there.
Taking up about a quarter of the Macrites is an array of fabricators and construction drones, as well as a large computer that manages them. This self-replication unit will gradually construct a new Macrite, connected to the old. Once it is complete, it detaches, and goes its merry way. These second-generation Macrites are expected to have some minor flaws, and possess simplified systems, but should still perform acceptably. Third generation Macrites are projected to be 'sterile', but still functional.
To have the Macrites actually create new designs proved overambitious.

We have released the Macrites into the wild, although their navigation will avoid areas where Quillian forces may be present. The first shipments of resources are coming in, and have already boosted our industry to the tune of 2SPP and 2GPP. We can expect this to grow over time as the Macrites replicate (specifically, increase by 1SPP and 1GPP every two years, to a max of 6/6).
Having more of the solar system be under our control will expand the range of our Macrites; for every world we control, an additional 1SPP/1GPP will be available.


It is now the Revision Phase of SY107.

[Detoxicated]

Pretty decent for a start.