Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[GlyphGryph]

Both good ideas. Actually, any sort of large "bin" would probably work.

Look, we may be mad scientists, but we don't exactly have a forge - we're not going to be making our own glass cage.

And wire cages are not nearly stylish enough. We could make one, but it would time consuming and not exactly representative of GREAT GENIUS.

And we aren't hurting our provide by being resourceful enough to scavenge the things we need!

[Karnewarrior]

We'd need some steel wire to make a sufficiently resilient cage with suitably small holes so that the rat doesn't get out, that still allowed sufficient monitoring capability. A disused aquarium or a broken microwave oven could make a nice "holding cell".

better yet, a working microwave, and make it a "Temporary holding cell".

Spoiler: In case you didn't get it (click to show/hide)

 Temporary as in the rat is temporarily alive. POP! hehehe.

[Shades]

I vote we liberate a container of some kind, we don't need to waste our time building simple cages when our genius should be applied to more useful tasks.

[IronyOwl]

We really, really don't want to waste valuable materials trying to assemble a rat cage, especially when it needs to be big enough to hold multiple rats. Imagine trying to build a canoe out of formerly usable circuit boards. Go to the junkyard, find materials for assembling a cage or cages. Anything vaguely boxlike that allows or can be modified to allow us to see inside will probably do, but we want our rats to have a fair amount of space to move around in. No good getting claustrophobic rats before we've even done anything to them.

On a related note, I approve fully of ratborgs, but also approve of leveling our skills before trying anything serious. I could understand trying to map a rat's brain, but even that isn't going to be useful until we're ready to begin production, and I think that'll take a while. In the meantime, we should focus on smaller projects to increase our skill and provide minor benefits, not make half-assed approximations of what we want to do eventually.

Finally, come on guys. A proper mad scientist doesn't murder hobos or get into shootouts with security personnel just so he can steal a goddamned stereo or perform amateur neurosurgery, and he certainly doesn't sell his precious robots to whoever will buy them because he's desperate for cash. If we need money, we need to make it properly. At the moment I'd say we should be more concerned with practicing our skills than acquiring funds, partially because skills make those funds easier to acquire. Scrapbots wouldn't sell for much anyway, but a quality spybot or high-powered drugs might.

[Acanthus117]

I think our next project should be a hauler bot, one big enough to carry a good amount of phat lewt.

[Wimdit]

Another trip to the junkyard would be nice, even though it's probably getting close to morning by now so we'd have to wait a while.

In the meantime, we want some way to harvest scrap metal and stuff quietly, or at least some way to stop the guards noticing. I say we fashion a blowpipe, coat thumbtacks with sedatives or possibly sedatives plus reactives, and have at the guards. We have a real lack of high-quality materials here and I disagree fully with the statement about not getting into shootouts.

Some sort of electric trolley with which to carry stuff would also be good, but we don't have a big enough motor...

We need some way to get some money. Can we sell all those hallucinogens we have?

[xtank5]

If we can steal a shopping cart and go to the junkyard tomorrow night, we might make a simple robot that can follow us and carry our stuff, with batteries and motors from the cars.

[Acanthus117]

I think our next project should be a hauler bot, one big enough to carry a good amount of phat lewt.

[IronyOwl]

I agree with the notion of a hauler bot, but bear in mind it would need to be very quiet. We're getting in by slipping past an inept guard, after all. Plus, we're in danger of getting ahead of ourselves again. We've got a live rat under a bucket, we need to get a permanent place to hold it.

There are two problems with having at the guards like that. First of all, we're probably not exactly a crack shot, and trading shots with guards is a task for our limitless minions, not us. Secondly, any overt displays of violence are likely to provoke a response, and even if that's just more guards, it's not really attention we can handle at this point. Worse reactions might lock us out of the junkyard altogether or even try to track us to our lab. This is also the trouble with selling drugs at this point- police and rival drug dealer attention isn't really something we can deal with effectively yet.

I'd approve of a way to get into the warehouse without violence, but I think even knocking the guard out without being seen would arouse suspicions when he woke up. Perhaps we could make a flying bot stealthy enough to sneak in for us?

[Acanthus117]

You got a point, IronyOwl...

I like the idea of giving the stealthbot a tranq dart... but we need a powerful enough pneumatic thingymajigger ta work it.

[Dyjeccu]

..I knew we should've taken programming as a secondary school.

We would have missed out on being multidisciplinary. For a slightly slower start-up, which will pass, we are guaranteed a Zomborg army. Nothing in the 'verse can stop us.

Help skill-ups: More bots to program, or drastically retool Ankle-biter.. Rat-catcher or Spy-bot or Lab-helper or Distraction-bot or Hauler-bot or whatever all require new programming.

[GlyphGryph]

Rat can live in bucket under lid now. We will attempt to befriend it and earn its trust. It will be our Rat Prime and master breeder. We still need to catch one of opposite gender though.

Anyways, if we want to get better access to the junkyard, we need to find out more. Take the laptop to a local computer cafe and find out everything we can about the security guards there.

[Acanthus117]

..I knew we should've taken programming as a secondary school.

We would have missed out on being multidisciplinary. For a slightly slower start-up, which will pass, we are guaranteed a Zomborg army. Nothing in the 'verse can stop us.

Help skill-ups: More bots to program, or drastically retool Ankle-biter.. Rat-catcher or Spy-bot or Lab-helper or Distraction-bot or Hauler-bot or whatever all require new programming.

A hauler bot wouldn't be hard to program. It's like DF. Hauling is a brainless and simple job that any dorf can do. It can even be remote controlled. The problem is keeping quiet.

[xtank5]

We could always try bribery with hallucinogens, but that might arouse suspicion.

So, we have determined that we could just keep the rat in an over-turned bucket with (small) air-holes and a weight (metal bars) on top.  We also want to make some kind of follow-me-bot that can carry our

phat lewt.

Then we also need to devise a way to sneakily and non-violently enter the warehouse.  Maybe we should see if there are any other places to get junk for parts. 

I'm pretty sure we want to go to the library to read up on our disciplines and maybe we can take out a few books to study at home.  If we have to register for a library card, try to get a free one and use a not-so-obviously fake name.  We also want to see if we can use a public terminal to read up on programming and see what we can learn on the Internet.  Maybe we could try to get free parts off of Craigslist? 

We should also go dumpster-diving to see if we can get some cardboard for enclosures and stuff.  Plexi-glass and super-glue would be good for a more permanent rat cage. We might want to get a watch.  We should also go to Walmart or something and steal a shopping cart or two from the parking lot.

>Remember you have money in a college fund.
>Remenber what junkyard is like during the day.

[Pandarsenic]

You take some time to reminisce - the rat isn't going anywhere.

Your college days were good at first - a step away from the boring monotony of high school, so boring, so mundane for a genius like you. Everything had been so uninspired, so meaningless.

And then you went to college and all too soon it was more of the same. You lost patience with all of them, how they were so slow and so... so inferior!

You made a robot in one of the engineering labs one night. It was a marvel of engineering. Your favorite professor discovered you, gently sent you back to your dorm to sleep, and next morning claimed it as his own work.

You activated its self-destruct, severely injuring him, and disappeared. Nobody knew where you went.

You... you would make your own way. As your own man. Guided by the light of your own genius.

Unfortunately, the next two years had consumed most of your savings; you retain only a small fund - 300 dollars - stored in a bank under a fake identity. You mostly use it for food.

You'd become somewhat familiar with the junkyard in those years - you'd always expected you'd need to loot it eventually. It was a part of relatively small, privately owned scrapyard business - owners of cars too damaged to be worth repairing and unable to continue functioning would pay them to tow the cars, and the cars would be stripped for any worthwhile parts and sold as their component pieces, which were stored in the warehouse until sales time. That scrapyard had all of about eight employees, but you preferred looting the already-stripped cars, because then harvesting what their inferior intellects couldn't repurpose felt less like stealing.

It wasn't really stealing, in fact. Those parts would've gone to waste without your contributions.