cross analyze information they've gathered in the decade since with the resources of three craft worlds? using information they had shared with their allies about their doom and comparing it to our records to try and guess it's origin in quest?
That seems like something that our ships should be doing by default when we send them off for five years to find a lost craftworld. If we tell them "go find Nacretinei" they're not going to completely refuse to talk to the people who last knew where they were, or at least I'd hope not. There isn't really any kind of diplomatic coordination here- nothing that involves our craftworld or its peoples or industries beyond providing guidance to an expeditionary fleet trying to accomplish its objective. We certainly don't want them to be running back halfway across the galaxy to confer with us before making decisions or talking to people.
Pretty sure we will get a mandatory vote for the retrofit action.
Like it was for the refit votes before.
Ah, that's useful to know if true. Thanks. I'd still be interested in the plan writer's vision even if we don't have to follow it, though.
Hmm. Can we make military deployments contingent on what our Seers scry?
I'm willing to set aside the Witchblade research and Bladedancers to do the scrying, but this seems like something we might want a military force reacting on ASAP.
I don't see why we wouldn't be able to. We've got five years of turn, even if it takes a year to finish the scrying and send the fleet out with whatever we learn that seems like a reasonable course of action.
also, the QM weighed in on this to inform us that meeting need AP follow up. maybe Nacretinei gets that this turn, maybe they get it next turn. either way, it's something Mechanis confirmed. even if we had given them their own timeslots day three it would have amounted to a modest boost at best to the follow up diplomacy.
Can you find where this comment from Mechanis happened? While I recall it being said that follow-ups would be available, I haven't been able to locate anything which stated that Nacretinei needed
diplomatic follow-up; my impression was that was more of a Stel-uit sort of thing. And logic would seem to indicate that 1) that quest needs to move very quickly, and 2) sitting around in meeting rooms talking about the problem is not the kind of movement it requires.
My worry is that if they were possible to find by Scrying their allies would probably already have done so (the Webway is heavily warded, so real time Scrying may blocked), and Scrying the past or future for clues about where they were or few future clues about their likely fate that we hope to reverse engineer risks drawing a giant bull's eye on them for Kairos.
My expectation would be that at minimum we should be able to past-scry for whatever location they went into the Webway, since at that point they're in realspace, and after that it's a question of flooding the area with as many scouting fleets as possible to locate them. Based on how far the craftworlds on our maps are moving each turn, they're comparatively slow, but not only is their radius of potential travel growing all the time, with the Webway constantly shifting the longer we wait the less useful that starting point will be. If the branch they took gets broken off entirely behind them locating them that way might be futile- and as you say, Webway scrying is very difficult to impossible.
So the right move to save them if at all possible is to scry/talk/whatever to get a last known location, then shove a double handful of fleets into the Webway there and look as hard as we can, without delay. If we let this sit another turn or two they'll just be gone and next time we see them they'll have had their vision of doom fully come to pass.
Kairos probably knows they're in trouble already- as you said, their allies will have been scrying for them- in which case, I'm not sure that giving him an additional point or two of intelligence to work from will meaningfully increase our danger. The ability of any Chaos entity to act is limited, even in the Webway, but he'll certainly be trying something. We will need to come armed for a fight regardless since we've probably got proto-dark eldar to deal with, so having a bunch of demons
and dark eldar doesn't necessarily change our course of action.
I think we need this confirming. I don't think this locks us out of tech we don't take, but if you're right, it's something to think about.
I had made that assumption based on how past Seeker actions have worked- we do not, for example, have a standing research action to develop fusion lances; they disappeared off our research list when we chose not to research them at the same time as our other plasma options. Similarly, if we do any haywire research at all, anything which isn't part of that research is probably going to go poof. But if we don't touch a research category it'll probably stay static until we do.
The main thing is that I'm not sure that we need Haywire tech that much. We have lots of other useful tech in comparable categories (anti-vehicle and ani-infantry), but the spins offs from a perfect grav gun and a high end weapon for elites that doesn't use exotics make be very handy.
I mostly want scrambler fields (as a very useful utility item), which I think you do as well which is why it was still on your list. Neural shredders and haywire guns I think we can do without since they're, as you say, just another way to kill things that we can already kill. But I do want haywire bombs, because they're a payload instead of a weapon, which means that they're going to add utility and breadth of options to good weapons that we'll be using anyway (missiles, grenades, etc.). Since I expect us to be using missiles and grenades regardless of our decision on haywire, researching haywire bombs feels to me like it's a straight upgrade to that future expected weapons system instead of simply researching yet another weapon option to compete with the plethora that we already have.
