Noumero
Omit Needless Words
- Balefire Bomb: Eh. It's a rune with a local esoteric effect, whose esoteric nature makes it difficult to scale up/project far from the rune given the current roadblock on the wormholes. Usefully deploying it requires solving the problem of luring Akatsuki members towards a humming glowing chakra-dense obvious trap – and if we think we can somehow do that, we can instead just research a Very Big Explosion rune.
- Esoteric attack vectors, IMO, are only worth researching if they're either:
- Global, such as "erase person X from existence" or "sic a hunter-killer eldritch abomination on person X".
- Portable: i. e., if they're in a seal-not-rune format (though a rune can be used to manufacture the seal, e. g. Hot Pockets).
- ... Because leaning into the esotericness primarily makes sense if you're planning to fight the Akatsuki, rather than assassinate them in a way they can't react to. And that's a valid approach: develop some ridiculous esoteric weapons, give them to our essies, attack the Akatsuki head-on.
- But if the weapon isn't portable, and isn't suitable for an impossible-to-react-to alpha strike, and is local in effect? Then its esoteric nature does nothing to help it: the Akatsuki just won't approach it.
- Esoteric attack vectors, IMO, are only worth researching if they're either:
- Telescope Rune: Seems easy and might help with lasers, cool.
- Spatial Twister: Another local esoteric-effect rune. See the Balefire Bomb complaints.
- Hotbang: Seems good to me, lasers are still the most promising approach yet.
- Do we need to make the rune component explicitly interface with the seal component? Suggestion: make the seal store light over a long period of time. If that's doable, we can just build the Archimedes' Death Ray runes, and "manually" fill the seal up.
- Also, note that an individual light-storing seal doesn't actually need to contain enough light for a megawatt laser. We can fill up e. g. a hundred such seals, then just blow them all up simultaneously in front of the Telescope Seal. The effects add up linearly, so...
- Chakra Attenuation Rune: A local esoteric-effect rune. See above.
- TR50: A local esoteric-effect rune. See above.
- I'm feeling a fair bit better about this specific local esoteric-effect rune, because (1) I'm reasonably sure it's doable given the TR>100's successes, and (2) it'd almost definitely work to kill the Akatsuki.
- ... If we can solve the near-impossible problem of luring the Akatsuki to it, again. Which it still doesn't address.
- MS9/MS10: Eh, throw it in, I guess. Who knows, maybe Minatosealing will turn out to be Just That Powerful.
- Runic Drag Rune: A local esoteric-effect rune. Basically a worse and more uncertain version of TR50.
- Draconic Decay Explosive: A local esoteric-effect rune. See above.
- Icarus Rune + Atmospheric Collapse: The Akatsuki members that are the actual problem (Itachi, Kisame, Konan) most likely would be able to counter @Inferno Vulpix's suggested tactic using some bullshit jutsu, since it lets them react to the attack and it's not something utterly esoteric.
- @MMKII painted a tactics-heavy large-scale fight against the Akatsuki in which stacking these sorts of effects might be helpful, and I sort of see it too... But no, I don't think it works. We don't actually have the firepower to face them head-on, and there's not going to be another BotG anyway: the Akatsuki aren't stuck defending a static target that we're threatening to destroy, if they face heavy prepared-ground resistance they'd focus on escaping then slowly whittling the defences down over days/weeks.
- I don't see this sort of prolonged combat as winnable.
Telescope Rune + Hotbang variants are part of what I currently view as the only currently promising tech tree, so I'm in favour of those.
I'm not optimistic towards MS9/MS10, but it seems worth it to throw in.
