Distance Learning for fun and profit...
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
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As an American, I can think of worse options. Particularly considering the number of former DARPA projects that, often within a decade, have filtered into the civilian marketplace.
As long as it's not a weapon or otherwise a danger to U.S. security, there's fairly good odds for DARPA to release a safe, if watered down, version in a fairly short timeframe. Otherwise, we would never have gotten, just to name one example, GPS access as early as we did....
Because as far as any of us are aware, they are the only faction present in this Worm AU that arent stupid, evil, corrupt, or insane beyond the degree they would be normally, and that as bad as they actually are in those regards they are still more trustworthy than any of the other options currently available in the setting.
I'll take baseline humanity's natural proclivity for cruelty, incompetence, poor communication, and stupidity over the insanity of warlocks cherrypicked from the most unstable wretches of the above group magnified by being granted power by malicious and uncaring Elder Things any day of the week, thank you very much.
Jadesteele
Out of my Mind - Back in 5 Minutes
- Location
- half-way between 'Crazy' And 'Eccentric'
Something just hit me (it hurt) and I actually hate to bring it up, but I do hope that T has the GOOD R&D people in her corners - as opposed to the Military Research Team who spend millions on a study on how fast Shrimp could run on a Treadmill (the research footage is actually on youtube - the one set to Yakaty sax is best.)
anyone wondering when NASA is gonna contact gravtech for space 'shuttles' in order to return to the moon and even start visiting/colonising mars? also the staff warning afew pages back against super vegita is why I have my sig set to what it is lols
cryptoam
building an 1980s encrypted protocol
- Location
- in lockdown waiting and bored...
I think that is the case. mp3.1415player 's stories all tend to have a government that is at least somewhat competent.
RE Shrimp Treadmill study:
From what I could tell, I think that was research for the agricultural researchers to figure out how shrimps are responding to certain stressors(bacterial levels on shrimp respiration). That is important for the shrimp industry and could help save a lot of money from losses due to bacterial levels. Also, said treadmill study was fairly inexpensive.
SOURCE: Shrimp on treadmills? Some science only sounds silly | Science News for Students
RE Shrimp Treadmill study:
From what I could tell, I think that was research for the agricultural researchers to figure out how shrimps are responding to certain stressors(bacterial levels on shrimp respiration). That is important for the shrimp industry and could help save a lot of money from losses due to bacterial levels. Also, said treadmill study was fairly inexpensive.
SOURCE: Shrimp on treadmills? Some science only sounds silly | Science News for Students
kelgar04
Knight Watcher
- Location
- Here and no were
As soon as NASA gets read in about the tech they will bound up to GravTech like a golden retriever puppy and just start throwing cash around just to get a few for the jet propulsion lab so they can strap a few onto an air frame for their own tests.
You mean the study on how water quality affects the health of aquatic animals?
Seriously, don't get your understanding of scientific studies from sound bites.
NASA will be contacting GravTech about acquiring Gravity Refrerenceframe Regenerators immediately after GravTech starts testing their spacecraft.
I do not think that cheering because a fellow poster has been banned from the site.
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
I'm pretty sure that's what Project Hawkflight is about. And Gravtec is building their own spaceship as well.
There are issues with this:
1) Government always makes things worse. The scariest words in the world are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"
2) The PRT is part of the government
3) The takeover of one government bureau by another one will result in nothing new, as the old structure will remain in place because the new bureau knows nothing about how things are run. They are merely another level of bureaucracy on top of all the other levels to get through to get a decision.
4) Even if the upper echelon of the old bureau are kicked out, they will still have those loyal to them in the system, and may get even more information than they did before.
5) Those loyalists to the old system will actively sabotage the "new upstarts" for kicking out the people they were comfortable with and may have had information on. (blackmail is an ugly word but a useful fact of government life)
- Location
- Somewhere.
Honestly, the US government is not something I'd trust with this technology IRL either.
However, this is clearly not the IRL US government. Because it doesn't have its head up its own ass and hopefully doesn't have the fucking atrocities in its closet either.
That said, I don't want to start a debate about the ethics of significant AUs of real-world people and groups in this thread, so I'm going to stop talking and hit post.
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
They did. In the laboratories of the DARPA.
Moving the infamous 'container ship sunk in the middle of the mouth of the Bay' was the first public display of the tech.
The showcasing, as it was.
What makes you think they didn't? I mean, the whole point of proving it wasn't tinkertech was having people test it (from blueprints and specs right up to working prototypes) without her present. Thing is, it wouldn't really be that interesting to write about, or affect the flow of the story, so it makes sense to leave it out, just like we don't need to know what Chief Director Costa-Brown pretended to eat for her most recent meal. Despite not being explicitly spelled out though, you can bet both things happened, and were pretty uninteresting (one was "yup, it works when we do it too", and the other was "Yup, body's still time-locked, so I'm going to have to get rid of this the hard way later").
Counterargument: While having Taylor producing various world-changing inventions is useful, it would be a lot more useful to have her producing specifically what is needed to solve the 'Scion is going to kill us all' problem rather than tinkering with whatever catches her fancy. That requires either briefing her on the situation or having her under the direction of someone who has been so briefed. Cauldron, however, are (for various reasons, both good and bad) every bit as reluctant to let that information out of their control as DARPA is about Taylor's identity.
You have a lot more faith in elected officials than I do.
Actually, in a typical fight, the first warning they get is when a kaiju shows up and starts blowing things up. Armsmaster's predictive software which gave them an hour's warning before the Leviathan fight in canon was a new and game-changing develpment, and that was the first time it had been available.
Wrong. Contessa asked for a path to kill Scion and got no answer, because Eden had limited PtV to block questions about Entities. She then tried asking for a path to gather an army to fight him with, and found that she could path that, proving that while they couldn't use PtV to find a guaranteed plan to win, they could come up with their own ideas and then use PtV to implement them.
Fanon, of course, holds that that conversation between Contessa and Doctor Mother represents the totality of Cauldron's strategic planning. Fanon is stupid, and ignores that said conversation constituted the first 60 seconds of Cauldron's 30 years existence in favour of assuming that because we were not explicitly shown their later strategic councils, they must have just been blindly following the path.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
The girl specifically rephrased things as "how do you kill a powerful monster", and got "with an army, here's how to make one". At which point she began to create the first power granting vials. That plan hasn't really changed since it was first formed.
She was able to path it only after Doc Mom suggested the method. And, yes, they then started creating the first vials. I didn't say that wasn't the plan, just that there's no evidence that their plan 'hasn't really changed since it was first formed'.Worm Interlude 29 said:
- Location
- Sydney
To be fair it is an okay plan compared to the others;
- regular humans are equivalent to ants
- attempts at space flight might trigger attack by Zion even if they manage to successful build a spaceship
- build anti-endbringer weapon for use against him - probably tried
- distracted him long enough for him to run out of energy before everything is dead - probably what they were aiming at consider some of there comment of number of earths left which kept changing
Oh, I agree. I'm defending them here. They made a number of questionable decisions*, and a lot of decisions that were reasonable given the information they had but turned out to have been wrong in the end, but overall, they were handed a nigh-impossible task with incalculable stakes, little information, and no good options, and they did a damn sight better than I would have.
* I say 'questionable' rather than 'bad' decisions because we do not have enough information to know that they didn't have a good explanation; e.g. the fact that I cannot for the life of me think why they thought the Nemesis program was a good idea doesn't mean there isn't one.
serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
Lol what is this, someone quoting Reagan on this forum? Governments work pretty damn well the world over, particularly when they are not being run by idiots whose primary motivation is to break down the government so that they can be racist monsters in peace.
cryptoam
building an 1980s encrypted protocol
- Location
- in lockdown waiting and bored...
I was lurking over at SB and found this post.Yo, as is the greeting of the youth of a while back.
Been busy for a couple of days so haven't had time to reply to all this yet. Lots of people going in lots of directions, many of them wrongI won't reply to every question individually as I'm a little busy still, but I'll see if I can cover some of the common ones.
OK. Firstly Cauldron.
Cauldron are not, in my opinion, the good guys. They're not completely the bad guys either, but they're certainly a group that while it might have started with good intentions, has remarkably little true competence in the areas they've chosen to involve themselves in. Many of the decisions they canonically took were idiotic and counterproductive, and mostly their plan was 'Try random shit and see if it works.' Experimenting with a dead alien to give people superpowers to fight the still alive alien partner of the first one while almost exclusively leveraging the dead aliens own abilities to that end is... not well thought out. Sure, they were desperate, but they were also a bunch of people with zero training in almost everything they did and they're ultimately relying on their own Parahuman abilities, and those of a woman who I doubt had experience in most of the things she's doing.
Leaving anything else aside, Shard powers are specifically designed to promote conflict, as in actual battle. This is not conducive towards maximizing survival rates, for a start. PtV, as well as being a huge Deus Ex Machina, is not only deliberately limited, but a tool of the very entities they're trying to use it to eliminate and it's not unreasonable to assume it's not going to be biased towards making that easy. And of course, if they never ask the right questions, they're not going to get the right answers
Yes, some of the things they've done have probably helped out. Many of them definitely have done the exact opposite, and they don't seem to realize this, which makes them highly suspect in my eyes. And they have severe tunnel vision too, of course, as to them everything is a Parahuman problem which needs more Parahuman Dakka to solve.
Costa-Brown is also not a nice person, and in my view is nowhere near as smart as she thinks she is. A good, smart person, for example, wouldn't have deliberately provoked a known very dangerous girl by trying to make her think she was killing her friends and ended up dead with lungs full of insects as a result. That alone tells us that she's a fuckwit in many ways.
There are lots of other things that could be said about all of them but they've been said before so I won't bother doing it again.
Next, what's going on with precogs? It's complex, and quite a lot of the various factors have been guessed by several people already. Partly it's Taylor's external knowledge from completely outside the local frame of reference all the Shard simulations work on, knowledge that is not only in some cases totally novel to them, but that is continuously changing. This is screwing their simulations hard and causing all sorts of errors. The goalposts keep moving and rendering the calculations invalid, requiring everything to be redone over and over, and essentially randomizing the results. There is also the minor problem of quite a lot of the knowledge she is learning or deducing that is specifically locked out of Shard databases as far as allowing the hosts to know about it, as it's dangerous to Entities and therefore something they don't want getting out.
Added to that is that she is in fact coming up with things that the Entities don't know. Her subspace theories are more advanced than the limited subset of them that the Shards rely on. In essence she's working at a lower level than they are, on a general solution to a problem they have a few specific narrow routines to handle.
Basically she's using a unified field equation (which at this rate she may come up with) and they're using Newtonian physics
Now, given time, and a lot of effort, and the right Shards getting involved, they might well get around some or all of these problems. But it's not an instant fix for them and the Thinker of the pair isn't around to actually Think. Not that Entities really are all that hot on the thinking side of things anyway, in my view they're actually pretty bloody stupid. Idiot savants to put it accurately
Tinker tech, then, next.
Well, either Tinker tech is magic, or it's not. If it's not magic, it has to be using some form of physics, unless you subscribe to the idea that all Tinker tech is actually entirely nonfunctional decoy hardware and all the effects of it are purely down to powers. That's a reasonable interpretation aside from the fact that some Tinker stuff can be duplicated, as Dragon does, and insight from studying it can lead to minor breakthroughs in normal tech. So I choose to take that to mean that all Tinker tech is in fact real technology, tech that's been stolen from other alien species the Entities have genocided, and then is nerfed in critical areas by the relevant Shard to make it nearly impossible to duplicate.
Taylor is smart enough to work out what something is doing, at least as far as the examples she's found go, and from that figure out how it's doing it based on the existing hardware, deriving the missing sections from her own knowledge. She thinks at the moment the problem is that Squealer, and possibly all Tinkers, don't really know what they're doing and are clumsy and inefficient to boot
Something of a perfectionist is our Taylor.
Finally, for now, the PRT is not well liked by other agencies for a number of reasons. At least some of those are because it tends to just turn up and jump in with anything Parahuman related in a way that causes problems for everyone else in their opinion. Rivalries between TLAs are a thing, and the PRT is the agency no one really likes very much. So the military is quite happy, in fact almost ecstatic, to have a situation they can legitimately keep the PRT out of with the full backing of the US Government. And are being a bit smug about that...
And at the same time, Cauldron are so used to getting their own way, and so stuck on the idea that only Parahumans can do clever things and fight Parahumans, that they're falling victim to their own mindset, sunk cost fallacy problems, and arrogance.
This may come back to haunt them...
But any more will need to be in the story
Edit: Also remember that this is fan fiction. Which by definition means it's not canon. As a result things will be different, which is kind of the point
Don't get overheated about a story, basically
TLDR:
In fic (here) Cauldron are not necessarily bad or good., just not that competent(points in the quote above).
Precogs are fucked by the continual input of data from outside and phenomena that they (Entities) do not understand fully.
Tinker tech is alien tech that has been sabotaged/downgraded so that it can not be used effectively against the Entities. Taylor reverse engineers said tinkertech and recognizes the principles(method of operation) that is used and recreates missing/downgraded components via her knowledge.
PRT screwed themselves over due to continually sticking their oar into other federal agencies work. Now that said federal agencies have something that does not fall under PRT's remit, they are going to block every attempt by the PRT to gain jurisdiction over GravTec and Taylor.
Also remember that this is fanfiction and not everything will follow canon(or be like canon). If it was, mp3.1415player would not be creating this fanfic for us to enjoy.
PS: LINK to SB post
EDIT: Autocorrect is dumb.
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DoctorNobody
The Doctor is In(sane).
"Hi!" Said the oddly accented voice over the line, yelling over the sound of sirens at his or her end. "I'm Taylor, first time caller, long time viewer. I'd like to ask Professor G'th'sxyt if I can combine today's lessons on using artificial gravitational distortions for one-way light magnification and with the lesson on antimatter generation to improve power-output by an order of magnitude?"
"Glad to hear from you Tah'Le'R. To answer your question, it's quite easy in principle, though in practice, there would be substantial engineering hurdles to doing so safely and reliably."
"Oh that makes perfect sen..." the voice is cut off by the sound of an explosion, strange alien screaming, and battle.
"Is everything okay?" The Professor asked.
"Yeah, we're just having a bit of an issue with a giant monster," the caller replied. "So... um, if safety and reliability wasn't my most immediate concern on constructing my giant laser beam?"
"Well, first thing first, then," the G'th'sxyt said, rubbing it's jaw-plates in thought. "You'll want to remember you're ABC's of antimatter handling. A, Always Be Careful. B, But Nothing, Always Be Careful. C, Careful, Always Be It! D, Don't Forget to Be Careful. E,...."
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