Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution

TotallyNotEvil · Dec 20, 2015

UberJJK said:
So it's taken a lot of work but I've finally finished ShepQuest Revised Finance V9

Ah, much better.

Now I see the reason for Plan Landfall, spend a trillion credits building 1000 Factory IIIs for the same production as a Space Factory III in half the time, right? That's probably going to go down I'm history as a lot of different "biggest ever" things.

You know, I can just imagine the Illusive Man, the President and half a dozen other old people of various species congratulating us for our First Trillion, by making a surprise party. A "welcome to the club, kid" omake should be written by someone that knows how to write.

UberJJK · Dec 20, 2015

TotallyNotEvil said:
Now I see the reason for Plan Landfall, spend a trillion credits building 1000 Factory IIIs for the same production as a Space Factory III in half the time, right?

Pretty much. It's only really practical on Earth, or if we start building factories on alien worlds, but 30 million production is such a massive boost that getting it ASAP would be a massive advantage.

TotallyNotEvil said:
That's probably going to go down I'm history as a lot of different "biggest ever" things.

Yet another in Revy's long list of contributions to the history books. I bet that in the future there will be a whole series of books, and documentaries, on Revy's achievements.

TheEyes · Dec 20, 2015

TotallyNotEvil said:
Ah, much better.

Now I see the reason for Plan Landfall, spend a trillion credits building 1000 Factory IIIs for the same production as a Space Factory III in half the time, right? That's probably going to go down I'm history as a lot of different "biggest ever" things.

That's exactly it. The only other downsides to the plan that I can see (other than @UberJJK's point that it can basically only be done once) are:

We'd need to be constantly transferring one-time-pads to every one of our 1,000 factory complexes (mitigated by QECs which we're getting next quarter anyway).
We can't build starships on the ground, because reasons. We can, however, build all the individual modules for said starships, so as long as we have enough space factories to keep us well supplied in hulls and assembly space we should be fine.
The colonies might be upset that we're dedicating so much money to Earthside manufacture, and we are. Unfortunately we're kind of stuck doing things on Earth because that's where the people are.

You know, that reminds me: our "Personnel" tab is kind of missing a few entries. Factory workers, logistics, office workers/misc staff, etc. We should be employing a lot more than 4,106 people; we're a heavy manufacturing company that sells actual products, after all, not Instagram.

From what I understand, the "Prototyping Workshop" makes 30 Production per quarter, and could be run by Revy and her parents alone, so maybe we can say that we fully employ 1 person for every 30 Production? Or should it be done per Factory, with each Factory employing a set number of people (5 people per Factory I, 15 people per Factory II, 60 people per Factory III, etc)? Logistics people could be a function of total sales, and maybe misc staff could be a function of the total number of buildings? I admit it's sort of a vanity project, but it could be useful to know exactly how many people are employed directly by PI.

Yog · Dec 20, 2015

Oh, we are definitely going to be in the history books. I mean, our products already are going to touch and directly change lives of every single human alive and yet unborn (peak human). What other person could say they directly affected every member of humanity? Maybe creator of smallpox vaccine. Maybe. But that's pretty much it. I mean, there are people who have never read or were affected by the bible. But there will be literally no human who wouldn't be affected by our treatment.

If our birthday isn't declared a national holiday soon, I'm going to be surprised. In fact, I am surprised we haven't been invited to some party with lots of officials yet.

TotallyNotEvil · Dec 20, 2015

Or we can pick a planet that is conveniently located, but inospitable, show off our terraforming tech, and do Land Fall II: Revenge of the Fallen.

The consensus on QEC was to open a telecom branch of PI, correct? Become the Switzerland of intergalatic communication?

TheEyes · Dec 20, 2015

Yog said:
If our birthday isn't declared a national holiday soon, I'm going to be surprised. In fact, I am surprised we haven't been invited to some party with lots of officials yet.

We might have been, but until we built our Pyndas we've been kind of (justifiably?) paranoid about space travel. When Landfall hits I'm sure everyone from the SA brass to the Terra Firma party will be building statues in our name.

TotallyNotEvil said:
Or we can pick a planet that is conveniently located, but inospitable, show off our terraforming tech, and do Land Fall II: Revenge of the Fallen.

Depends on @Hoyr; right now we're limited to existing cities for our factory sites, which makes sense because cities have a lot of logistical infrastructure that we don't want to have to build ourselves if we don't have to. After Landfall we're actually going to have a hard time finding places for large-scale factory drops; we'll probably need to focus almost exclusively on space factories from then on, which means we're about to become really interested in how much it costs to shave quarters off of build times; was it supposed to be 1.5x cost per quarter shaved off?

TotallyNotEvil said:
The consensus on QEC was to open a telecom branch of PI, correct? Become the Switzerland of intergalatic communication?

I know I personally would rather be the Cisco of intergalactic communication instead of the Verizon, though we might want to operate our own small-time telcomm too. Allowing any single player to become the gateway to all secure comms in the galaxy strikes me as a really bad idea.

UberJJK · Dec 20, 2015

TheEyes said:
You know, that reminds me: our "Personnel" tab is kind of missing a few entries. Factory workers, logistics, office workers/misc staff, etc. We should be employing a lot more than 4,106 people; we're a heavy manufacturing company that sells actual products, after all, not Instagram.

Pester @Hoyr about that. Although personally I just figured they are abstracted away into the cost of maintaining the Factories. I mean even a Factory I costs eight million credits per year to maintain.

Speaking of maintenance:

TheEyes said:
one complication of the new equipment maintenance rules is that our total non-manufacturing expenses for this quarter come out to 3,335 million, compared to 2,017 million profit. Most of this comes from the fact that our 7 starships, worth 130.6 billion, require 2,286 million in quarterly maintenance

It's worth noting that our 7 starships aren't actually doing anything yet so it's kinda unfair to factor their expenses into comparing our non-manufacturing income/expenses. I imagine that starting next quarter, after seeing just how devastating our Lite Laser Pyndas are in combat, we'll start seeing some lucrative mission contracts appearing for them.

From a profit perspective they are actually quite an amazing investment. For the other PMCs out there a military grade Frigate has a manufacturing cost of 46.3 billion credits and hence a quarterly maintenance cost of 810,250,000cr, assuming they have the same sort of maintenance rate as we do. A Lite Laser Pynda meanwhile only costs 345,438,257.5cr/quarter to maintain, 42.6% the cost of the PMC's Frigate, which means they are guaranteed to either make significantly more profit on their missions or seriously undercut the competition.

Hell with that sort of difference we can undercut and make more profit. For example on a billion credit mission a rival PMC would make ~190 million, less other expenses, while we could charge 800 million, lower then they can compete with, and still make over twice as much (~450 million), less other expenses.

TotallyNotEvil · Dec 20, 2015

TheEyes said:
I know I personally would rather be the Cisco of intergalactic communication instead of the Verizon, though we might want to operate our own small-time telcomm too. Allowing any single player to become the gateway to all secure comms in the galaxy strikes me as a really bad idea.

Hey, if they want QEC coms, they can research their own or play (and pay) by our rules. Not like it impedes the current methods.

Hazard · Dec 20, 2015

Note that PMC maintenance is probably cheaper, on account of not running cutting edge technology.

UberJJK · Dec 20, 2015

TheEyes said:
I know I personally would rather be the Cisco of intergalactic communication instead of the Verizon, though we might want to operate our own small-time telcomm too. Allowing any single player to become the gateway to all secure comms in the galaxy strikes me as a really bad idea.

Problem is that QECs are a natural monopoly, even more so then most utilities, so competition is only going to cause problems for the customers. For example imagine being a Space!Verizon user and unable to connect to any websites or call any friends who use Space!Comcast.

Ideally the governments of each race would establish and maintain QEC networks for their own people with an exchange in neutral territory, like the Serpent Nebula, but that is unlikely for a number of reasons. So PI is going to have to do it.

Given that Revy is a known philanthropist one of the things we could do to help smooth over any concerns about possible abuse would be to simply run the network at cost, or slightly above, since we'd be making a killing off other QEC related applications like military communications networks, drones, long range probes, FTL sensors, ect anyway.

Hazard · Dec 20, 2015

The nature of patents don't exactly help either. Although there's nothing that says Revy can't offer major telecom providers the hardware and otherwise stay out of the business.

TheEyes · Dec 20, 2015

Hazard said:
The nature of patents don't exactly help either. Although there's nothing that says Revy can't offer major telecom providers the hardware and otherwise stay out of the business.

Ooh, that's another question: to patent or not to patent. I mean on one hand the Reapers already have this tech, so that's not such a big deal, but I rather doubt that Cerberus does yet, and they'll probably pick it up even if we do the secret military kind.

Another problem is that I really, really doubt that the SA will let us export this tech; that could be a problem in itself since we're talking about a fundamental communications technology.

Okay, on a completely different note, spreadsheet updated with a "Quarterly Planning Scratchpad" sheet. Everyone mind taking a look, seeing if there's anything else that needs to be added/changed? What else do you think would be helpful for planning out a new quarterly production plan?

TotallyNotEvil · Dec 20, 2015

On the other hand, it's the kind of thing that's fantastic for business.

I suggest we let it sit tight behind our blackboxing. Patenting will lead to all militaries eventually making their own copy. Even military secret patent (which would make it a military secret) is bound to leak.

I say we go Space!Verizon, keep ourselves neutral and just so happen to have monopoly to a new, essential service.

GulibleLeprecon · Dec 20, 2015

Ramble said:
Is there still gonna be Grunt in this quest?

Canonically he is born within a decade? Also depends on what do we do with genophage in the meantime.

TheEyes said:
Yeah, my background is even further away than yours, but the whole thing is awfully interesting just from the bits that can be found online. It looks like you might be able to use a series of 10-100 femtosecond-scale laser pulses to progressively ionize a waveguide through an atmosphere if your laser is both fast and powerful enough, and use this ionized waveguide to accurately fire a laser with a far smaller spread than the diffraction limit would normally suggest, essentially doing something similar to our TIR trick but with a Gaussian beam of laser-pumped plasma instead of using space magic to mess with the index of refraction of empty space. But would any of that actually work in practice, or would you run into previously unknown physics that derails the whole thing, like what happened with the National Ignition Facility at LLNL? Who knows?

Goddammit, why did I forget about this effect. Okay, as soon as we go below Rydberg wavelength (about 91 nm) we start ionizing molecules in the air. And free electrons/ions are scattering light much, much better - Rayleigh scattering is a dipole effect, and they are strongly suppressed compared to scattering on a massive charged particle. So we get an insanely powerful light bulb along the path and can kind of forget about lasers being invisible. But at the same time we get a kind of optical fiber and benefit from internal reflection.

UberJJK said:
So it's taken a lot of work but I've finally finished ShepQuest Revised Finance V9

A few questions:
Citadel contract states that from next quarter the minimum citadel arc-reactors go from 50,000 to 5,000,000. This seems reasonable, but wasn't mentioned in quest, right?
Why is well-armed naval space increases the cost by 25%, but a well-armed space station by 250%? Why such a difference?
I believe I've seen this figure somewhere: how much production per quarter does SA fleet spend on building new ships? Can we estimate total SA's, Citadel and galactic production?

UberJJK · Dec 20, 2015

GulibleLeprecon said:
Citadel contract states that from next quarter the minimum citadel arc-reactors go from 50,000 to 5,000,000. This seems reasonable, but wasn't mentioned in quest, right?

It hasn't been mentioned in any of the updates but it was something Hoyr said in a GM post. Unfortunately it was like months ago, around when we started construction, so i can't find it right now.

GulibleLeprecon said:
Why is well-armed naval space increases the cost by 25%, but a well-armed space station by 250%? Why such a difference?

Look at the cost of the two station types:
Space Factory I - 10 billion
Small Space Station - 1 billion

I chose those two in particular since they are the same size rating (8). As I'm sure you can see the factory cost 10x as much as the space station. So in reality arming both costs exactly the same (2.5 billion) but that figure is just a higher percentage of the base cost for the cheaper space station.

GulibleLeprecon said:
I believe I've seen this figure somewhere: how much production per quarter does SA fleet spend on building new ships? Can we estimate total SA's, Citadel and galactic production?

There were some old, as in dating back to the origonal GM Auks, numbers in the fleets tab but in general they've been kinda discarded as not fitting well with how the quest's universe has develop.

So for now we don't really have any numbers other then the alliance likely spending trillions on new ships each year.

Ramble · Dec 20, 2015

About what size is a small space station anyway?

TheEyes · Dec 20, 2015

GulibleLeprecon said:
Goddammit, why did I forget about this effect. Okay, as soon as we go below Rydberg wavelength (about 91 nm) we start ionizing molecules in the air. And free electrons/ions are scattering light much, much better - Rayleigh scattering is a dipole effect, and they are strongly suppressed compared to scattering on a massive charged particle. So we get an insanely powerful light bulb along the path and can kind of forget about lasers being invisible. But at the same time we get a kind of optical fiber and benefit from internal reflection.

On one hand I don't think you need to worry about Rydberg wavelength, or anything else related to atomic spectra: with the amount of energy we're pumping out you'll ionize the air through simple thermal absorption. On the other hand, you're right that we're turning about 10% (or more, if we use a higher frequency laser) of our coherent, colineated beam into a giant multi-megawatt broadband omni-directional light bulb, shining in every direction.

Man, physics is weird.

Ramble said:
About what size is a small space station anyway?

According to our "General" tab, about 3-4 times the size of a normal office building.

TotallyNotEvil · Dec 20, 2015

TheEyes said:
into a giant multi-megawatt broadband omni-directional light bulb, shining in every direction.

Sounds like GLORIOUS SOLAR BULLSHIT, so it can't be that bad.

TheEyes · Dec 20, 2015

TotallyNotEvil said:
Sounds like GLORIOUS SOLAR BULLSHIT, so it can't be that bad.

No, no, it's better than that. Now that we know about this whole filament propagation thing, we don't need to worry about laser safety, or blinding everyone in a 1 km radius of our ground-based GARDIANs thanks to our Class 1,000 lasers, since the plasma channels will direct all the colineated light to the target and not into the surrounding area. Well, we still have to worry about what the target site will look like, because nobody knows what the physics there will be like, even in theory, but at least we don't need to worry about the atmosphere.

The thing is, we already know what a gigawatt of energy passing through a column of plasma-fied atmosphere looks like; we see it during every thunderstorm. In other words: a megawatt/gigawatt-class laser, firing through atmosphere, is a lightning bolt gun.

GulibleLeprecon · Dec 20, 2015

TheEyes said:
On one hand I don't think you need to worry about Rydberg wavelength, or anything else related to atomic spectra: with the amount of energy we're pumping out you'll ionize the air through simple thermal absorption. On the other hand, you're right that we're turning about 10% (or more, if we use a higher frequency laser) of our coherent, colineated beam into a giant multi-megawatt broadband omni-directional light bulb, shining in every direction.

Hmm, I don't think there's any real thermal absorption going in there. There's two things that may happen to photon: it's either captured, exciting the atom, or it's scattered. If we don't have ionized atoms the main scattering is Rayleigh scattering, which is due to dipole moment of atoms. The absorption due to discrete atom spectra give you spectral series, which are blurred due to atom movement.

TotallyNotEvil said:
Sounds like GLORIOUS SOLAR BULLSHIT, so it can't be that bad.

Well, the problem is we can forget about invisible man after the first shot.

TheEyes said:
No, no, it's better than that. Now that we know about this whole filament propagation thing, we don't need to worry about laser safety, or blinding everyone in a 1 km radius of our ground-based GARDIANs thanks to our Class 1,000 lasers, since the plasma channels will direct all the colineated light to the target and not into the surrounding area.

Eh, that's a bold statement: the internal reflection is not total, although if it's something like 10% loss we will be dealing with something like a gigawatt lightbulb. It can be blinding if you aren't far enough. Of course the power is spread along the entire trajectory - but still you can forget about stealth after first shot.

Chargone · Dec 20, 2015

On QEC:

Anyone using US telcos/cable companies/ISPs as anything other than "what not to do" should be fired. Ideally out of a MAC. Into a Reaper.

Also, i propose that we include "Don't be Comstar" (Commstar?) In what ever bit of documentation makes it closest to an invioable law of reality. (A step more fundimental than those petty laws of physics we so enjoy making go cry in a corner.)

TotallyNotEvil · Dec 20, 2015

GulibleLeprecon said:
Well, the problem is we can forget about invisible man after the first shot.

Of course we can forget about invisibility after the first shot, there won't be anyone still capable of sight in the surrounding area! It's so brilliant!

Wilgar · Dec 20, 2015

TotallyNotEvil said:
It's so brilliant!

Ba-Dump-Tss.

TheEyes · Dec 20, 2015

UberJJK said:
It hasn't been mentioned in any of the updates but it was something Hoyr said in a GM post. Unfortunately it was like months ago, around when we started construction, so i can't find it right now.

It had to do with market saturation stuff; from what I remember there was a ruling that we basically can't sell more than 5,000,000 Arc Reactors per quarter at Citadel prices (eg. that insane +400% markup over material cost), though I suppose we could probably double that volume if we could somehow sell to the Terminus too. It works out for us because that's exactly half of the Production that our new Space Factory II, coming online next quarter, churns out.

Discussion seems to have started way back here.

Although... @Hoyr, now that we have Gen II, with the ability to downscale our reactors to smaller, more end-user friendly power levels, does that let us sell even more Arc Reactors, since we can also compete with that Dark Energy reactor that the Asari are putting out? Or... wait, maybe not; we'd need to patent our Gen II design to do that, and then the Reapers would get that too, so maybe not.

Oh, and something we're missing from the V9 spreadsheet is the updated Sagitta/Hydra costs. Last entries in that discussion were:

Hoyr said:
Lets say they cost 10cr or so and maybe 3e-5 production should it ever matter? The do use a micro-repulsor IIRC.

Makes Hydras cheaper at 1,760,000cr/7pr?

Edit: Oh and officially set Plums to 25,000cr/0.05pr. Even if the ratio offends me.

TheEyes said:
I'm thinking that 100cr/3.5e-4, or even 200cr/7e-4 makes more sense for Sagitta, and 25,000cr/.07pr for Piliums. Combine with a 550,000cr/3pr ablative shell for the vanilla Hydra and a 1,500,000cr/12pr shell for the Hydra-10K, and you have:

2,000,000cr/7.2pr for Hydra -- a good number, IMO, because if we want to retcon then we just say we bought twice as many Hydras as we said we did last quarter
16,000,000cr/54pr for a Hydra-10K

Hoyr said:
I got ~10 from a pilum down scale (1/15)3, though 50 works from other perspectives I tried.

AS for power we'd be looking at <700kW power draw (probably a bit lower but don't have time for math). Which... maybe... possible for a very short time, but it be very impressive.

Or, in terms of our new Finance Doc:

Product

Cost (Credits)

Cost (Production)

Minimum Markup

Minimum Sale Price

Sagitta Micro Missile	(10)	3.00E-05	181%	18
Sagitta (alternate TheEyes price)	(100)	3.50E-04	195%	195

Missiles
Hydra Cluster Missile	(4,000,000)	17.000	215%	8,590,000
Hydra 2174-Q3	(1,760,000)	7.000	207%	3,650,000
Hydra (TheEyes Alternate)	(2,000,000)	7.200	197%	3,944,000
Hydra 10K (TheEyes Alternate)	(16,000,000)	54.000	191%	30,580,000

Emizaquel · Dec 20, 2015

How much would it cost to get a replica millennium falcon as a personal yacht?

(sorry, am still on TFA high)

Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution

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