Deterministic Chaos: An Unraveled Tapestry Quest
- Thread starter MJ12 Commando
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi Fantasy
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Long Range because as it has been already said, likely avoids further damage piling up in the long run. And Crimson Philanthropy for the shenanigans that a wandering group of peace-endorsing hypocrites will have. Though this being a group of hypocrites with beeg guns. Which having a functioning top-end Dragon AV amonst their forces attests to. Anyway, they just seem interesting and fun for me, nothing deeper.
[X] Long Range
[X] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy
[X] Long Range
[X] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
[X] Long Range
[X] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy
We have not come here to do war crimes. We have come here to do hypocrisy, a completely different matter.
[X] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy
We have not come here to do war crimes. We have come here to do hypocrisy, a completely different matter.
- Location
- in the trash
I think the long range/short range vote is a probably a build vote rather than a tactics one (these pirates picked the wrong fight so they're all fucked anyway). So you might want to ask yourself what kind of fights you want to see rather than which is the most optimal choice.
Short range obviously indicates we have more knife-fight capability than is normal for a stealth voidcruiser, so we have the capacity to literally be the equivalent of a knife wielding assassin teleporting behind people to leave knives in their back. More attritional because short range weapons typically lack one shot capability, but we would have the self repair systems and defences for it and people are probably less prepared against this type of threat because most voidcruisers don't have the necessary capability to pull this kind of tactic off.
Long range is... the traditional stealth AV build, where our preferred method of attack is a sudden alpha strike with precharged long cycle weapons. If we kill in the first volley, great. If not, we have bad endurance in a prolonged engagement because our weapons have really long cycle times and cost a lot to fire (Wave cannon shots: 0/1 est. recharge time 1 month/2.5x10^6 seconds).
Short range obviously indicates we have more knife-fight capability than is normal for a stealth voidcruiser, so we have the capacity to literally be the equivalent of a knife wielding assassin teleporting behind people to leave knives in their back. More attritional because short range weapons typically lack one shot capability, but we would have the self repair systems and defences for it and people are probably less prepared against this type of threat because most voidcruisers don't have the necessary capability to pull this kind of tactic off.
Long range is... the traditional stealth AV build, where our preferred method of attack is a sudden alpha strike with precharged long cycle weapons. If we kill in the first volley, great. If not, we have bad endurance in a prolonged engagement because our weapons have really long cycle times and cost a lot to fire (Wave cannon shots: 0/1 est. recharge time 1 month/2.5x10^6 seconds).
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- Location
- in the trash
actually mj i have a really important lore question
the empire probably redefined the metre so that c = 300000000 m/s exactly (or some other nice clean number that doesn't have to be rounded off), didn't it
because that sounds exactly like the sort of thing they would do
(also they'd obviously call their system of measurements Imperial Metric or just Imperial, not to be confused with certain other measurement systems that are incredibly heretical)
the empire probably redefined the metre so that c = 300000000 m/s exactly (or some other nice clean number that doesn't have to be rounded off), didn't it
because that sounds exactly like the sort of thing they would do
(also they'd obviously call their system of measurements Imperial Metric or just Imperial, not to be confused with certain other measurement systems that are incredibly heretical)
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Yes, that is definitely something the Empire would do in the pursuit of having even, intuitive numbers.
Anyways, if you want background information on the setting, either in generalities or specific sector things, just ask the question here, I'll try to answer with what your character knows.
(you will probably get a name and something of an appearance soon)
(you will probably get a name and something of an appearance soon)
- Location
- boundless optimism
[X] Long Range
[X] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy
ONCE THE ROCKETS COME UP
WHO CARES WHERE THEY COME DOWN
DIRECT ALL COMPLAINTS TO THE COMPLAINS OFFICE
[X] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy
ONCE THE ROCKETS COME UP
WHO CARES WHERE THEY COME DOWN
DIRECT ALL COMPLAINTS TO THE COMPLAINS OFFICE
prometheus110
Join Cayman-Global & be part of the 1E-9 percent!
- Location
- La Ballena City Raft
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Who are the major factions in the sector and what are their rankings in terms of 'has their shit together'?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Long Range
[X] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy
Given the nature of our Dragon-Tech ship, computing power and the such is easier to replace/fix than damage, I believe.
The faction doesn't really matter to me, so I'll approval vote the leader.
[X] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy
Given the nature of our Dragon-Tech ship, computing power and the such is easier to replace/fix than damage, I believe.
The faction doesn't really matter to me, so I'll approval vote the leader.
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meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Besides other AVs which I understand are rare post-Collapse, what kind of opponents and threats we might expect most commonly, and in what kind of numbers usually?
Well a good question to ask in this situation would be how automated typical AVs systems are and uh often are said systems sentient (as in smart enough to have feeling and questioning it operators actions...).
Major Ravel Sector Players
There's the Riven-Gridley Octarchate, which is a large regional hegemon that happens to also have access to a mostly stable high-end pre-Collapse hyperintelligence. They're the most dominant power right now and have started throwing around their weight significantly more, in particular making claims on salvage rights that others find unreasonable and deploying military force to enforce those claims, although as a result they've caused increasing pushback amongst the other great powers. The border skirmishes and raids are getting significantly larger and better-organized, which means a bull market for mercenaries. Nevertheless, being underneath the Octarchate is hardly some dystopian hellscape so smaller powers often enough are willing to join with them - which often leads their neighboring rivals and foes to seek aid from another major party, which is driving the escalating conflicts. The Octarchate make use of various corporate military lineages in their combat technology - in fact, the "Octarchate" name is because they were a merger of surviving corporate branches and local offices from eight different Empire-era megacorporations. Octarchate government is a stakeholding democracy in two senses - first, your stake (i.e. your investment) into the polity gives you more of a voice, and second, your stake (i.e. how much a decision affects you) also gives you more of a voice in the decisions that occur in the Octarchate. Because of the sheer number of votes which take place for the Octarchate, the vast majority of their citizens have proxies - duplicate electronic versions of their minds - which exist only to filter out and respond to polls and votes.
The Polytechnica are an Elite-dominated meritocratic oligarchy which basically provides security guarantees in exchange for soul-pledges and resource tithes, which means that they have a cumbersome quasi-feudal organization - lots of small powers bound to them via treaties and cooperation agreements but self-sovereign and given of significant maneuvering room. They tend to be aesthetes and value individual excellence and expression, which makes their military forces somewhat less coordinated than they would be on paper - they're not plug-and-play because of extensive customization, which they handle by virtue of putting significant amounts of computing power and thinking into coordinating individuals and being individually capable. As the skirmishing between their vassal states and the Octarchate becomes larger in scope and scale, their relative advantage in small-unit engagements is rapidly diminishing, although their access to numerous Elites means that they're a very tough conventional force to crack.
The Zerelian Holdfast are a largeish polity which had the mixed luck to be largely surrounded by a cloud of berserkers - which gave their predecessors in the Silence-era significant incentive to pool military and productive forces together to keep from being crushed under the tide of replicating weapons. Like almost all post-Collapse polities, they are heavily multiracial and multiethnic, but because of their origin within the sector and their cultural and religious ties the desert-dwelling reptilian kabilae make up a plurality of the population of the Holdfast. The Holdfast believe that a weapon you can't afford to lose is a weapon that you can't make good use of, so they tend to make use of a smorgasboard of whatever they can license-build with the immense amounts of salvage and industrial/computational power they possess. The Holdfast are actually a supranational union between a lot of smaller governments, with a government structured in a way which results in them having formal political movements (contrasted with, e.g., the Octarchate's different "moods" and the twists and turns of the Polytechnica's political nobility).
The Penitence is a restructuring of surviving FORCE and THRONE assets who have been trying to restore sector order and government on the backs of Empire ideology, significant amounts of pre-Collapse caches, and their military might. The Penitence is a crusading order/battlegroup, organized along military lines although with significant lower-level officer autonomy, with various task forces having free rein to manage their day to day operations as they see fit. Unlike the Polytechnica, who seek worship and cultural subordination/assimilation, they care a lot less about what you do and more about how you do it, in Empire form. Penitent law works similarly to Empire conflict-arbitration, in which the permissible use of force is limited by the scope and scale of the issue people are fighting for and peace agreements are strongly enforced. Given the relative scarcity of resources in the post-Collapse, though, this means that a lot of Penitence-signatories end up using invariant technologies for conflicts, and non-invariant conflicts rarely see anything more than drone and commando assets being deployed.
There are also numerous second-tier and below powers, which don't have quite the necessary level of productive and logistical capacity or the technological sophistication to maintain more than a few Elements, which are large AV task forces. However, they often have sufficient military might to make them too thorny to simply ignore, and thus can significantly influence how the Big Four behave given the right circumstances. Below these second- and third-tier powers are polities which lack the size or technological libraries necessary for sectoral relevance. Polities limited to synthesizing stable exotic matter (S-tech) are generally ineffective against powers which can take full advantage of Architecture to dynamically change relevant physical metrics, and polities limited to technologies not reliant on programmable space and exotic matters (I-tech, or invariant technology) are even more out of luck, because things like antimatter bombs and fusion rockets are of extremely limited use against even drones or commandos.
Yes, but on the flipside, the sort of damage that you take in close-range knifefights is generally significantly more superficial and easier to self-repair than the stuff that happens if you get unlucky with a LRM or a voidcaster or something of that nature. It's not just about the quantity of damage, but the quality of damage sometimes.
well that depends on your perspective of superficial I get the feeling this is a setting where Casaba howitzer is considered as workable point defence, hell I won't be surprised if some in the setting decides to make a Casaba version Phalanx CWIS .
- Location
- England
As I-Tech, Casaba Howitzers as we'd understand them today are completely and utterly useless on the playing field the Harbinger of Mourning operates on. So no, they're not a workable point defense, but it's due to the technology being far too weak to do anything to anyone relevant.
I mean the Casaba Howitzers developed during the cold war era is useless, what about Casaba Howitzer analogues developed in this era with access to advanced meta materials and literally reality warping tech.
- Location
- England
Then you're stretching the concept greatly. What even is a Casaba-Howitzer analogue in a warfare paradigm where the very concept of propellant is all but outmoded? Is it just energy beams? Because we probably sort of have those I guess, although not anything reminiscent of actual plasma due to it being insufficient.
Geez I just chose Casaba-Howitzer as something that's generally portrayed in sci-fi works (including those on this very site) as powerful reduced to a relatively minor role as a joke, please don't be so hostile about it.
An AV is basically a mobile violation of physical law that happens to be folded into the shape of a war machine, but also exists in a milieu where people have actual souls which are actual, tangible things written into the operating system of the local universe. The technology underlying an AV's systems and capabilities is so advanced that there's no real way to answer your question about "how automated typical AV systems are" because there isn't all that much of a functional difference between "crew" and "systems" at this point. You could have an AV which has a physical presence that is literally just a shell, with all the real systems being distributed around a hundred thousand crewmembers with highly upgraded souls that can support self-sustaining reality engines in their software and basically use code rather than solid exotic matter for weapons, defenses, and transit functions. In fact, the Claviharp is very daemonlike in nature, with a lot of its components anchoring self-sustaining, self-executing Dragon codebases.
The other thing to note is that in the Empire, and even post-Collapse, sapience is actually quite cheap. You can make something sapient with pure invariant technology, and with invariant quantum computers and optronics, you can make it sapient with a very small, highly efficient form factor. When you combine it with the fact that neural programming exists and people have quite a lot of practice with it, the question of sapience is also largely moot because something can be capable of striking up a conversation with you and having emotions and yet it might be well-designed enough that it won't actually question legitimate imperatives in its field of operation.
The difference between your long-range missiles having nonsapient utility-maximizing hunter-seeker algorithms, uploaded kamikaze pilots who trained for their minds to be copied into a trillion missiles, and sapient missile intellects is really very academic here.
Part of any real AV's comprehensive defensive suites - including the lower-end ones you're facing - are systems for selective interaction with and arbitrary deflection of electromagnetism, so energy-transfer weapons are extremely limited in their usefulness. This is why information warfare is a critical component of an engagement - you have to reach in and find a vulnerability that lets you turn the other guy's defenses off unless your weapon is based off of space-warping systems and/or is literally inimical to ordered laws of physics. That said, lower-end AVs and drones often make use of invariant systems for power (either compute or energetic) and structure (since they will generally be using a warp bubble to transit and thus the actual force on them is effectively 0 ). Although using exotic-matter and field doping/reinforcement greatly amplifies their survivability, if you can use information warfare to crack their actual defenses you can style on them by teleporting an antimatter bomb into their envelope or something.
(The warp drive itself, which is why AVs and drones can fight at superluminal speeds, already makes it nearly impossible to use weapons like Casaba howitzers because you need penetration aids to crack it anyways).
So basically an AV is a Space ship in the same way LANCER's NHP is an AI, a higher-dimensional being forced into a physical space via exotic technology, or in our case the unholy love Child of Getter emperor and a Romulan warbird.
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- Location
- England
I'm not trying to be hostile. When I ask what a Casaba-Howitzer analogue that's meaningfully rather than arbitrarily so even looks like, I'm not doing so to piss in your cereal, it's an actual legitimate question. Because I certainly don't know what that'd look like! I'm fresh out of ideas there, and so I was curious if you had any.