- Location
- Don't know
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- Whats/That
When does the voting period end?
Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest
- Thread starter Neablis
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi
- Location
- A haze of forgetfulness
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Plan: Enriching Exclave Establishment V3
[X][Necron] Take them.
[X][Necron] Take them.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Woohoo! Yeah, that's great, no research changes needed then, the cogitare will be able to build the more efficient ships and refit the two normal ones we're giving now after we leave.
Which just leaves one last thing that might be tweakable:
As some may recall, I was a big advocate for trying to capture the ship - bots were expendable, we could still fall back to shooting it if that didn't work out, and our high maneuverability thrusters make ramming us a harder ask than the orks may expect.
With bait like what Kyle suggests here, we'd likewise be able to make sure they don't go down to Caldereth and instead accept us driving at each other so we're close enough to trade blows with our swords.
The point of saying all that was - neablis said that we'd "probably take losses" if we tried to beat them with a boarding action.
...but, that we could reasonably give it a shot, and get some high quality orkish samples to take back with us, and a ship for the cogitate to study while we're gone.
(I'm assuming we won't be able to take the ship with us, orkish tech being what it is).
But that's all assuming a blank slate plan, which we aren't talking about anymore.
In Enriching Exclave Establishment V3 as it already exists, we're removing one of our more potent boarding options (the teleportarium), and planning to leave behind about half of our bot complement. So capture would be harder, and afterwords some combination of Vita and Caldereth will be understrength compared to what Kyle was initially planning.
Caldereth could help cover for that by just making new bots of their own with some of the factory time, and Vita is going back to denva where hopefully there will be no danger for bots, but the former means slowing down uplift and the latter means if Denva is under seige we're going to have a harder time lifting it.
So on balance, I'm happy with Plan: Enriching Exclave Establishment V3 as it is. I'd be game for trying a capture anyways, but I don't think it's an obviously superior option, given the circumstances.
Yeah, I wouldn't have been opposed to trying to capture the Ork ship, but my thinking was that as we don't actually have Boarding Capabilities researched yet and the Orks are here now, that leaves the teleportarium as our only boarding option. Unless we want to try and "shoot to disable", take out their engines and then just send shuttles full of bots at them until enough get through their point-defence to pull it off.
The main thing though, is that while our bots are extremely good, the close-range combat of boarding is the one area where they're currently weak-ish and I wouldn't be surprised if there are upwards of ten thousand Orks aboard even a frigate. 40k tends towards big numbers of crew. Given we'd be teleporting our bots over in relatively small batches and I'm pretty sure we need the next couple of teleportation technologies to manage anything like precise targeting... Well, maybe it could've been pulled off, but I like our odds just blowing them up with heavy plasma cannons and lances significantly more. It's not like it'll be hard to find more Orks once we're in a better place to capture one of their ships.
Honestly, that trying to lure them into medium range so that we can burn them down with our plasma cannons may inadvertently let them charge in close to try and board us is my most significant concern if we get a low roll on the fight.
The main thing though, is that while our bots are extremely good, the close-range combat of boarding is the one area where they're currently weak-ish and I wouldn't be surprised if there are upwards of ten thousand Orks aboard even a frigate. 40k tends towards big numbers of crew. Given we'd be teleporting our bots over in relatively small batches and I'm pretty sure we need the next couple of teleportation technologies to manage anything like precise targeting... Well, maybe it could've been pulled off, but I like our odds just blowing them up with heavy plasma cannons and lances significantly more. It's not like it'll be hard to find more Orks once we're in a better place to capture one of their ships.
Honestly, that trying to lure them into medium range so that we can burn them down with our plasma cannons may inadvertently let them charge in close to try and board us is my most significant concern if we get a low roll on the fight.
At the end of the day I do not think we need ork samples now of all times and if we ever want them in the future we can get it. Orks are, unfortunately for all other sapient life in the galaxy, very damn common.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...Just realized that since the fight happens immediately and the refit happens later, we'd actually have the teleportarium for the ork engagement. Seems the boarding situation is actually a bit better than I thought at first.
Doesn't change my conclusion that much, but food for thought.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Considering that this is the leading plan, I would like to make a comment about one part of it I've been talking about to other people too:
I don't think we can take granted Cia's Active Psyker Improvement. Not without some sort of additional safety measures like psychic dampening devices and/or Vita's active assistance from that repeatable 50 RP psytech research project. Epsilon Pyromancer trying to learn psychic powers by herself is the kind of stuff that could end up with Cia actually dead, or crippled unless we invest further heavily into medical techs.
So I'm suggesting either passive psyker improvement here, or some sort of write-in crew-action like I have in my plan.
I mean, ultimately, she's still aboard the Spark with psy-shielding and an army of bots. The actual rules for those actions...
I'm not real worried and would rather have her improve quicker, but maybe I'm underestimating the risk?
- Location
- Earth
Could shove 50RP into the Assist Cia's training research, gives her a +10 modifier giving her both a bonus chance to level and reduce the risk.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
I'm not worried about chaos corruption or daemons slipping through. I'm worried about uncontrolled psychic powers of a psyker who is self-learning psychic powers burning her alive. Because Cia already has been noted to regularly suffer from burns while learning, and now she has jumped up a level in the psychic power-scaling and as she levels she is also moving towards more complicated/powerful/risky powers if I've understood things correctly.
@Neablis just to check: Do we have any idea on how risky it is for Cia to currently actively develop her powers when compared to before her level 10 milestone? Or is this too very much "try and find out" kind of deal?
I mean, she rolls low and has an accident. She rolls low again on Perils and dies in such a way that there's nothing we can do.
That's bad, but passive improvement still has a risk of Perils. Being a psyker just isn't safe period. Per the last update the DCs for active improvement are still nominally favorable so we may as well have her go all out training while it's less risky than it will be later.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
What do you mean "there's nothing we can do"? There is plenty that we can do, you were just pointed out a couple of those things. Passive psyker learning actions have reduced severity of bad outcomes. And we can do things like helping Cia by actively monitoring and participating in her training:
Psychic supperssion/dampening technology:
Because as we've seen again and again, Neablis is the kind of QM who allows precautions to matter. Even against Nat 1s being rolled. Nat 1 is not immediately "you lose," it will still be in the kind of thing that is in the feasible end-results. Just on the very lower-end, but we are still are allowed to mitigate the consequences with preparations against those said consequences.
So, for example, if Cia were to set herself severely on fire with her psychic powers, that can't be put out with normal measures like extinguishers or even dunking her into a pool of water... Maybe it would be a good idea for her to have a psychic hood that mitigates the manifested fire to "only" life-threatening third-degree burns, instead of Cia just turning her body into a pile of ash instantly.
And if in this scenario Vita was actively monitoring her the whole time, it could be that she noticed Cia's powers growing uncontrolled, and managed to warn her to pull back at the last second. Which could be the difference between Anexa complaining about having to take time away from studying something more interesting to learn about large-scale skin-crafts for burn victims, or again. A pile of ash sitting where our psyker previously was.
Of course, having both would be even better. So yeah, as I said at the beginning of this post, we are not exactly helpless against bad rolls.
EDIT: many immediate typo corrections. I should probably go to sleep
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Just a quick note that modern data suggests those two are inversely correlated, which if true in 40K does give an interesting reason for the empire to have deliberately lower tech words, or worlds where the population has low access to tech. (Feral and/or hive)
We have a medbay. Imho, this reads a bit like people insisting that we need machine spirit chaos resistance despite the whole point of adding a machine spirit to a machine is to make it chaos resistant.
I expect the risk difference to be marginal.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
I don't want to start a conversation about politics, so I'll just say that correlation isn't causation here - and the societies of the imperium and the Stellar Ascendency are wildly different enough from modern day earth that we probably shouldn't expect the iconic inverse pyramid anywhere soon.
I disagree on this, actually - I think passive improvement is probably better until we make psychic dampeners for her safety.
Going from 1d100 worst of two to 1d100 flat for her perils roll is nothing to sniff at.
I mean, given our current resources, and the resources we've had for the entire time we've had Cia aboard, that she might botch a few rolls in a row and spontaneously incinerate herself has been a theoretical possibility in every use of her powers thus far.
I don't think the risk is too high in this case, and I think that what you've got her doing in your plan is an extreme waste of her time (Putting her in charge of security on the Necrons equates to having her spend five years on "put them in the cells, have bots outside the cells, have the bots destroy them in the wildly unlikely event they wake up and start attempting to get out of the cells), but I'm not really opposed to switching over to passive improvement.
We've got one other person voting for the plan who would support that, if anyone else thinks it's a good idea or at least no one opposes, I guess I'll edit the plan again.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
The way I look at it we've only really got one data point, so we don't know if being wildly different matters or not. We can't even really say there is correlation.
I suppose you could look at each country as a data point, but given modern economic and cultural integration I don't think it's possible to set up sufficient controls.
Getting psytech has always seemed a bit high of a cost to me for the one user we have. I hope to pick up a bunch of small c crew at Denva to unlock the other discipline techs and incentivize us to get more psytech. Would also give Cia something else to do, she can train the other psyker.
If we really need more people we can always research cloning + some more biotech and mass create new people. Mind you that would be a 4+ turn investment as we would need to raise all those people. The juice may not be worth the squeeze, ethical questions aside.
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Couple of days from now. When I'm ready to start writing, essentially.
Riskier than it was before, but not terribly so. You've already taken the primary precaution against it - which is an (expensive) psychically shielded lab for her to practice in. At this point it might end up wrecked rather than damaged, but she's not yet at the point where a mistake will spread damage outside of it.
You're pretty sure, at least.
This plays into my understanding of hives - industrializing societies go through an "S-curve" of population size, where high mortality & low food availability keeps populations low. Families have 10-15 children and 2-3 live & successfully start families of their own. Then basic sanitation & advanced agriculture removes those blockers and population surges, but people continue to have 10-15 children for a bit. Now 8-14 of them survive and start families, and the population explodes.
Then a couple generations later the culture adjusts, family planning and birth control become a thing and people start to have 1-3 children, ~2 of which start families of their own, and population stabilizes at a much higher level.
I think that Hives are specifically designed to freeze a human society in that intermediate exponential phase, where there's enough infrastructure to prevent mass mortality, but not enough to slow down population growth rate. In other words, they're human-factories. It jives rather well with the Imperial mindset.
- Location
- USA
Dont forget that a ton of Hives are barely functional Golden Age arcologies. There is rarely anything purposeful about their current states.
Also of note, recent demographic trends have shown that at a certain point both rates can invert. Nowadays the vast majority of the planet has a below replacement birth rate, we're looking at a substantial reduction in the human population over the next century if things continue as they are.
Also of note, recent demographic trends have shown that at a certain point both rates can invert. Nowadays the vast majority of the planet has a below replacement birth rate, we're looking at a substantial reduction in the human population over the next century if things continue as they are.