Remove ads

Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

Reader mode
Muramasa said:
[x] Vebyast
-[x] Give Mami warning before performing any grief attacks that could effect her by accident.
-[x] Veto active grief manipulations that leave Sabrina too vulnerable.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'd hoped that stuff like this would be, you know, so obvious that we didn't need to vote for it. Same way we don't vote for things like "remember to not commit suicide" and "don't refer to people using racist epithets". In fact, I'd really prefer to leave those off; I doubt that Firnagzen wants us to be micromanaging obvious things any more than we want to have to micromanage obvious things. That way lies distrust, paranoia, and lengths of rope that are just long enough for us to hang ourselves. In other words, leave the obvious crap to brinapilot, she's better suited to it.
 
Vebyast said:
I'd hoped that stuff like this would be, you know, so obvious that we didn't need to vote for it. Same way we don't vote for things like "remember to not commit suicide" and "don't refer to people using racist epithets". In fact, I'd really prefer to leave those off; I doubt that Firnagzen wants us to be micromanaging obvious things any more than we want to have to micromanage obvious things. That way lies distrust, paranoia, and lengths of rope that are just long enough for us to hang ourselves. In other words, leave the obvious crap to brinapilot, she's better suited to it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Counter argument. Never leave things up to assumptions. You tend to not get what you want when that happens. Sabrina can make mistakes and oversights, to the point im not comfortable leaving the safety of allies to brina pilot.

What comes off as common sense for you doesn't mean others hold the same standard. Better safe then sorry.
 
Don't mind me, just tallying the current vote as I surface from Entanglement pt. 8.

Ya know, one thing I've noticed during my reread is that Sabrina has had quite the small character arc - like all Paragons, she hasn't changed much over the course of the story, instead changing the people around her through the influence of her presence. Sort of like a Moral Black Hole, or rather, a Moral Neutron Star; effecting our comrades with our massive Moral Gravity and dragging them into stable orbits around us, where they can emit some light of their own.

She's in good company for that: It's what Superman and Captain America tend to do. It's what Deku does. Even Skitter has shades of this; although her character arc is too large and her influence a bit too small on her tangent relationships to really qualify.

There have been a couple changes though. Sabrina's less formal with people now - that can probably be chalked up to being better friends with most of the people we meet, but it bears mentioning because it's a soft, natural flanderization of our Drain Bamage. Sabrina's also far more confident than she was early in the thread: If Oriko tried the meeting on the bus with us again, I don't think we would've gone home immediately afterward to check on the apartment. We would have tried to take Oriko down, whether it was really wise or not, and probably by calling in reinforcements, although she did catch us pretty early with that. I think modern Sabrina would have stuck around trying to glean more information for sure though - instead of just sitting silently on a bus, staring at the enemy.

Also, Mumi was always something of a limpet - she latched onto giving us a place pretty quick, although that might be chalked up to Homura. Which is another weird thing - Homura offered us a room with her on day one, which is pretty weird. Maybe worth keeping in mind; it's awfully social for a girl with liquid nitrogen in her veins.

Updates were also a lot shorter. Firn was always pretty good, but he's also gotten way better. :D

Anyway, Vote Tally!
Adhoc vote count started by Firnagzen on Oct 25, 2017 at 7:58 PM, finished with 127484 posts and 11 votes.
  • [x] Standing vote: Keep your team and allies updated
    [x] Standing vote: Keep an eye out for traps or enemy reinforcements
    [X] Notify everyone
    -[x] Ask for small reinforcement - Sayaka, Saki - and coordinate pincer.
    -[x] Note possibility of decoy, trap, or enemy team
    -[x] Describe assailant, ask for information
    [x] Hail your opponent. Identify yourself, ask her to stop, find out what she wants, etc.
    [x] Pursuit.
    -[x] Survival - MOF+Fog should enable nap-of-the-earth flying. Maintain distance in case it's a trap. Decoy MOFs, play with the intensity of the utility fog. Grab any metal scrap you fly over and forge a non-magical shield.
    -[x] Track - hose her down with trackable ribbon fragments, fast-setup grief sensors, magic sense, mark one eyeball, Mami probably has some tricks or is just that good, etc
    -[x] Harass - Flash-blind with lasers, microwave and coherent-acoustic emitters to distract, tangle bullets (mami rifle or grief launching), etc
    -[x] Set up - Take an opportunity (dazzled, stunned, she goes inside and we can fly right over her) to get front and push the chase in another direction. Don't let her lead you around by the nose.
    [X] Notify everyone
    -[X] Hostile contact in industrial district. Red-colored Anti-magic beams. Long range. If anyone knows a girl with those powers, now's a good time to speak up
    -[X] We want all teams to remain in search pattern EXCEPT for Sayaka and Saki, who we request back-up from. Tell them to keep their eyes open too - this may not be the only hostile in the area.
    [X] Tell Mami to build her wings and glide to ground - we need to split up
    -[X] Jump out. Use the smallest amount of grief possible to keep us airborne - and non-witchy camo if we can spare the attention
    -[X] Remotely operate the MOF and have the Obrez on standby nearby, in case we get hit by AM.
    -[X] Wide laser beam set to "Temporarily Blind". Pulse it in the direction the shot came from, to help suppress them
    -[X] Prepare more lethal lasers in case they aren't dissuaded by the stunbeams.
    [X] Harass the enemy, but do not engage unless forced to
    -[X] try to corral them away from the more populous areas, to reduce casualties.
    -[X] Await reinforcements from Sayaka/Saki, then apprehend the threat
    -[X] Attempt to get positive ID on the hostile actor and ascertain if she's alone or not.
    [x] Standing vote: Keep your team and allies updated
    [x] Standing vote: Keep an eye out for traps or enemy reinforcements
    [X] Notify everyone
    -[x] Ask for small reinforcement - Sayaka, Saki - and coordinate pincer.
    -[x] Note possibility of decoy, trap, or enemy team
    -[x] Describe assailant, ask for information
    [x] Hail your opponent. Identify yourself, ask her to stop, find out what she wants, etc.
    [x] Pursuit.
    -[x] Survival - MOF+Fog should enable nap-of-the-earth flying. Maintain distance in case it's a trap. Decoy MOFs, play with the intensity of the utility fog. Grab any metal scrap you fly over and forge a non-magical shield.
    -[x] Track - hose her down with trackable ribbon fragments, fast-setup grief sensors, magic sense, mark one eyeball, Mami probably has some tricks or is just that good, etc
    -[x] Harass - Flash-blind with lasers, microwave and coherent-acoustic emitters to distract, tangle bullets (mami rifle or grief launching), etc
    -[x] Set up - Take an opportunity (dazzled, stunned, she goes inside and we can fly right over her) to get front and push the chase in another direction. Don't let her lead you around by the nose.
    -[x] Give Mami warning before performing any grief attacks that could effect her by accident.
    -[x] Veto active grief manipulations that leave Sabrina too vulnerable.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Muramasa said:
Counter argument. Never leave things up to assumptions. You tend to not get what you want when that happens. Sabrina can make mistakes and oversights, to the point im not comfortable leaving the safety of allies to brina pilot.

What comes off as common sense for you doesn't mean others hold the same standard. Better safe then sorry.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
My vote specifies "fast-setup", takes care to avoid all but the simplest of pure-physics effects, repeatedly mentions maintaining evasive actions and alertness, and even proposes low-tech suggestions or handing tasks off to Mami if we're still not being efficient enough. Past that, we leave the implementation up to Brinapilot. You will note that I don't instruct Sabrina to not run into walls. You will note that I don't remind her that not getting hit is a good idea. I also don't tell Sabrina how to organize that pincer movement, nor do I suggest a search pattern or any mental patterns that would help her avoid tunnel vision so she can follow the directions about coordination, updating allies, or watching for traps. I don't suggest any way to handle hailing our opponent other than saying to do it and what our goals are with that action. I barely specify anything, in fact, past the high-level goals and some illustrative examples to show Brinapilot the available possibilities in case none of our listed options are perfect. There are a million things that we could micromanage in this vote. Why don't we do any of them? All of those are just as important, and just as likely to be screwed up, as what you're worrying about here.

The answer is that we shouldn't be trying to micromanage to that degree, nor with that mindset. Asking "What if we fail to specify this minor detail" guarantees that vote-crafting is driven by fear and that failures are answered with vicious scapegoating and vitriolic finger-pointing, leading to stress and rage and toxic thread climate. For that reason alone we have been instructed by the QM to provide more general votes and to let Brinapilot handle the details. And beyond that, micromanagement isn't effective. For all my recent annoyance about vote-points that seem to have been missed, when Brinapilot does execute on something, she tends to do so more effectively than we ever could. She can act based on the information that's available to her senses where we're stuck with what the words of the story convey to us, she can act on a moment's notice instead of having to wait for a full round of voting, and in many cases - social interaction being a large one - she's just plain better than we are.

So no. I reject the position that we should "never leave things up to assumptions". I think that we need to spend our time and our sanity efficiently and sustainably and that fear-driven micromanagement is one of the least efficient and most stressful things we can spend our scarce intellectual resources on.
Godwinson said:
Then it's a good thing Veb's vote specifies "fast-setup" for grief sensors, isn't it?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
And even if that doesn't work, there's a reason that it's just one of several totally divergent alternative approaches that I'm suggesting for the task.

To flesh out "fast-setup", while I'm thinking about it - the hyperspectral scanners we built earlier were high-performance monsters, spectacular sensitivity way up and down the EM spectrum with high resolution and a wide field of view. We don't need any of that. We want a couple frequencies of infrared for "night vision" and thermal tracking (maybe try to pick up footprints?), throw in a second array for microwaves around the 100MHz band that'll penetrate walls, both with just enough resolution and FoV for us to keep a lock on our target as she maneuvers. Needing four or five fewer OOM on the sensor count won't do much, we're already leaning on parallelism hard, but the reduction the number of types of sensors we're building - three or four instead of a full spectrum - is a dramatic complexity reduction and should cut the time significantly.
 
Last edited:
Vebyast said:
To flesh out "fast-setup", while I'm thinking about it - the hyperspectral scanners we built earlier were high-performance monsters, spectacular sensitivity way up and down the EM spectrum with high resolution and a wide field of view. We don't need any of that. We want a couple frequencies of infrared for "night vision" and thermal tracking (maybe try to pick up footprints?), throw in a second array for microwaves around the 100MHz band that'll penetrate walls, both with just enough resolution and FoV for us to keep a lock on our target as she maneuvers. Needing four or five fewer OOM on the sensor count won't do much, we're already leaning on parallelism hard, but the reduction the number of types of sensors we're building - three or four instead of a full spectrum - is a dramatic complexity reduction and should cut the time significantly.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I wouldn't exactly count on even a low-resolution mechanical 'camera' with no color differentiation being viable to assemble under combat conditions. The complexity is still very significant, and the time constraints are very tight.
 
Godwinson said:
I wouldn't exactly count on even a low-resolution mechanical 'camera' with no color differentiation being viable to assemble under combat conditions.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Agreed. Given how fast meguca move, even four or five seconds would need an opening, and I'm not sure it's the most useful thing we could do with five free seconds. That much time would probably better spent on something like popping up so Mami can fire off some tanglers or flying ahead to take control of the trajectory. I'm mostly providing it as a long-shot, on the chance that practice and lower specs make it more viable than expected. Or in case our quarry isn't as high-performance as we're worrying about and Brinapilot is focused more about traps and setting up a safe pincer than she is about maintaining contact and not getting shot.

Or Brinapilot could come up with something that operates on totally different principals - for example, I bet we could use the utility fog to build a pretty nice sonar with almost zero actual setup. Dunno how good range would be, though. Single-beam LIDAR units pointed at windows and rooftops to pick up vibrations from meguca-speed movement, which should be significant even if she's not roof-hopping?
 
Last edited:
Vebyast said:
Agreed. Given how fast meguca move, even four or five seconds would need an opening, and I'm not sure it's the most useful thing we could do with five free seconds. That much time would probably better spent on something like popping up so Mami can fire off some tanglers or flying ahead to take control of the trajectory. I'm mostly providing it as a long-shot, on the chance that practice and lower specs make it more viable than expected. Or in case our quarry isn't as high-performance as we're worrying about and Brinapilot is focused more about traps and setting up a safe pincer than she is about maintaining contact and not getting shot.

Or Brinapilot could come up with something that operates on totally different principals - for example, I bet we could use the utility fog to build a pretty nice sonar with almost zero actual setup. Dunno how good range would be, though. Single-beam LIDAR units pointed at windows and rooftops to pick up vibrations from meguca-speed movement, which should be significant even if she's not roof-hopping?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We'd need to have much higher grief fog saturation before tactile-sonar becomes viable, to get spacing between them that's smaller than the wavelength of the return signal.
 
Vebyast said:
Or Brinapilot could come up with something that operates on totally different principals - for example, I bet we could use the utility fog to build a pretty nice sonar with almost zero actual setup.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Okay, while Brina reworking things a bit or not steering herself into a trap is one thing, I think this example is expecting far too much flexibility from her.

Ultimately, it is up to us to choose the direction of what we choose to do. An untested, unprecedented project like grief-fog sonar should not be expected unless it's an explicit part of the vote.
 
We had to scale our grief down below visible-light wavelengths for it to vanish completely, recall - our particles are the size of medium-sized molecules and we're carrying around roughly 1e26 of them. Saturation isn't exactly an issue. :p
The Phoenixian said:
Okay, while Brina reworking things a bit or not steering herself into a trap is one thing, I think this example is expecting far too much flexibility from her.

Ultimately, it is up to us to choose the direction of what we choose to do. An untested, unprecedented project like grief-fog sonar should not be expected unless it's an explicit part of the vote.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Probably. I'm just throwing out suggestions here! :p
 
Godwinson said:
Then it's a good thing Veb's vote specifies "fast-setup" for grief sensors, isn't it?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
?

I was hoping for opinions on the viability ot making Grief Eyes mid battle.

You already touched on the capabilities of the Grief eyes, so going back to creation time:

Firnagzen said:
Alright, then. You'll fall back on the same trick you used yesterday: a carefully balanced array of arrays of nanoscale cantilevers sensitive enough to feel the dance of photons. It's not sight; it's not wired into your visual cortex. It's more like someone drawing on your skin with a million tiny little pins, each one a photon twanging a tiny, tiny bar of Grief.

It's not much harder to shrink the arrays a little so you can see in the visual spectrum. Without active Grief, you don't have the carefully designed lensing arrays, but you make do with parallel constructs in the same way a long baseline radio telescope array might work. Besides, this gets you stereoscopic sight, which is useful.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You push the extents of your Grief manipulation. Physicists would kill for the kind of fidelity you can achieve, absolute control moulding out millions of tiny, tiny structures on a nanoscale level. Millions of tiny levers, small enough to be deflected by individual photons of light, whirl into existence, arranged in a circular disc: a camera built on mechanical principles, with the kind of impossible precision only you can achieve.

A monochromatic light source is easy, one emitting a clear, coherent infrared light just as much. The lens array coalesces into existence, stinking of Witch. Neither of those are new to you, after all, you'd created both lasers and clear windscreens before.

You don't need esoteric magical effects to create a damned near to perfect spectroscope. You could create a gamma ray tomograph, but apart from the problem of irradiating everything around you with harsh radiation, it seems likely that Kuroki hasn't been here for a while. You'd rather look for traces of her presence, a trail to follow.

Sensitivity... just so. You hold your hand out, feeling the images as the lever array bounces with photons, like an image drawn on your skin with impossible fidelity. Of course, it's kind of nonsensical without a computer to crunch equations, but the right arrangement of lens and aperture performs effective integration over the frequency domain, boiling down to something recognisable, if not entirely legible.

All you need to do is, hunt for shapes in the image. You don't need absolute frequency resolution.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I remembered the description being somewhat lenghty, and while the first time we made a Grief tracked (for Kuroki), it is so, the second time it was a matter of two paragraphs, and it makes me feel maybe Sabrina could make Grief eyes mid combat.

I don't think it's the time for it right now, but there was an idea to make Grief eyes that could see through things, right? Yet Another Thing We Haven't Done, I know, but that would help when our sensing range fails.
 
Or we could just do laser flashbangs and directed sonic attacks and have the enemy rolling on the ground in (harmless) pain while we casually float down and pick her up in our big, strong grief arms.

Or Saki could tell us she totally knows this girl and make peace in 5 seconds completely invalidating this entire argument. :p
 
I guess that's true. Does that mean we aren't taking her on a trip to the stratosphere too, since we haven't taken Mami to space to see some Most Beautiful Things yet?
 
Firnagzen said:
"It's... a strange feeling," Mami muses quietly.

"What is?" you ask, smiling at her.

"All this," Mami says, waving her hand in a gesture that encapsulates the entirety of Asunaro. "I... I got Kazumi back. She doesn't... she doesn't think less of me. And her friend got attacked, so we're here. It's not our fight, but we're here because we should be, for our... friends?"

"Yeah," you say, tightening your hug round her. You lean over, pressing a gentle kiss to the crown of Mami's head. "Here we are."

"Here we are," Mami agrees, tilting her head back to smile at you.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

We didn't discuss this much, given the obvious tactical side of things taking up our attention, but can I just mention this? Major SAN progress for Mumi.
Adhoc vote count started by Firnagzen on Oct 27, 2017 at 5:46 AM, finished with 127525 posts and 13 votes.
  • [x] Standing vote: Keep your team and allies updated
    [x] Standing vote: Keep an eye out for traps or enemy reinforcements
    [X] Notify everyone
    -[x] Ask for small reinforcement - Sayaka, Saki - and coordinate pincer.
    -[x] Note possibility of decoy, trap, or enemy team
    -[x] Describe assailant, ask for information
    [x] Hail your opponent. Identify yourself, ask her to stop, find out what she wants, etc.
    [x] Pursuit.
    -[x] Survival - MOF+Fog should enable nap-of-the-earth flying. Maintain distance in case it's a trap. Decoy MOFs, play with the intensity of the utility fog. Grab any metal scrap you fly over and forge a non-magical shield.
    -[x] Track - hose her down with trackable ribbon fragments, fast-setup grief sensors, magic sense, mark one eyeball, Mami probably has some tricks or is just that good, etc
    -[x] Harass - Flash-blind with lasers, microwave and coherent-acoustic emitters to distract, tangle bullets (mami rifle or grief launching), etc
    -[x] Set up - Take an opportunity (dazzled, stunned, she goes inside and we can fly right over her) to get front and push the chase in another direction. Don't let her lead you around by the nose.
    [x] Standing vote: Keep your team and allies updated
    [x] Standing vote: Keep an eye out for traps or enemy reinforcements
    [X] Notify everyone
    -[x] Ask for small reinforcement - Sayaka, Saki - and coordinate pincer.
    -[x] Note possibility of decoy, trap, or enemy team
    -[x] Describe assailant, ask for information
    [x] Hail your opponent. Identify yourself, ask her to stop, find out what she wants, etc.
    [x] Pursuit.
    -[x] Survival - MOF+Fog should enable nap-of-the-earth flying. Maintain distance in case it's a trap. Decoy MOFs, play with the intensity of the utility fog. Grab any metal scrap you fly over and forge a non-magical shield.
    -[x] Track - hose her down with trackable ribbon fragments, fast-setup grief sensors, magic sense, mark one eyeball, Mami probably has some tricks or is just that good, etc
    -[x] Harass - Flash-blind with lasers, microwave and coherent-acoustic emitters to distract, tangle bullets (mami rifle or grief launching), etc
    -[x] Set up - Take an opportunity (dazzled, stunned, she goes inside and we can fly right over her) to get front and push the chase in another direction. Don't let her lead you around by the nose.
    -[x] Give Mami warning before performing any grief attacks that could effect her by accident.
    -[x] Veto active grief manipulations that leave Sabrina too vulnerable.
Click to expand...
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top