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Abrogation (Steampunk)

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Nixeu said:
I was referring to the fact that our staff 'bites' people. We've pointed it out a collective total of three times, but it seems to have only stuck on the third try.
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Actually, now that I go back and read what you quoted, it's not even the single-scout abduction that I was saying we might be able to pull off. I was half-expecting a third Major Convenient Contrivance to crop up that'd condemn the scout so we could feel reasonably moral about executing him and conveniently keeping ourselves anonymous. It's that apparently these scouts are so stupid that they're sending warclocks out scouting, which means we can gank one and use it to make a voice changer, which eliminated the last major difficulty I had with the "abduct a scout" plan.
Nixeu said:
Like...he was just responding to you saying it would bite the guy. And said "neat" like the fact that those who touch our staff without our permission get bit was new.
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The part that's "neat" is that it bites warclocks. That opens up a whole world of WTF and cool applications. Can Skybreaker bite buildings? Can it bite the ground? Can it bite cars or aircraft? How about if the car has arms? How about if it's got cat deco? How about if the car is a tunnel-borer? Can it bite through armor? How much armor? If it can't bite a giant mecha, but someone tries to pick it up using a giant mecha, will it bite the pilot? If so, how well-separated do you have to be before it stops biting? Poke it with a stick? A hand puppet dangling on wires? Hydraulic waldoes? Pneumatic waldoes? Radio-control robot? How about if you drive over it with a car? Tell someone else to pick it up? Would it bite a dragon? If not, how big do you have to be before Skybreaker can't bite you? How can it possibly bite metal hard enough to kill a clockwork without turning squishy baseline humans into chunky salsa? etc.
 
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Vebyast said:
The part that's "neat" is that it bites warclocks. That opens up a whole world of WTF and cool applications. Can Skybreaker bite buildings? Can it bite the ground? Can it bite cars or aircraft? How about if the car has arms? How about if it's got cat deco? How about if the car is a tunnel-borer? Can it bite through armor? How much armor? If it can't bite a giant mecha, but someone tries to pick it up using a giant mecha, will it bite the pilot? If so, how well-separated do you have to be before it stops biting? Poke it with a stick? A hand puppet dangling on wires? Hydraulic waldoes? Pneumatic waldoes? Radio-control robot? How about if you drive over it with a car? Tell someone else to pick it up? Would it bite a dragon? If not, how big do you have to be before Skybreaker can't bite you? How can it possibly bite metal hard enough to kill a clockwork without turning squishy baseline humans into chunky salsa? etc.
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...Well, now I just feel dumb. Missed that. Reading comprehension fail. God, I hate being nearly constantly tired.

Still, that is interesting. I suspect the 'bite' is an analogy. Mention was made about risks of stopping the scout's heart. Normal bites don't usually risk that.
 
Nixeu said:
...Well, now I just feel dumb. Missed that. Reading comprehension fail. God, I hate being nearly constantly tired.
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Sorry. :( I know how that feels.
Nixeu said:
Still, that is interesting. I suspect the 'bite' is an analogy. Mention was made about risks of stopping the scout's heart. Normal bites don't usually risk that.
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Yep. I'd start by thinking electricity, but the information didn't say anything about thick boots or metal clothing, and purely-mechanical clockwork wouldn't notice electricity at all unless we pumped enough juice through to melt something. So my guess right now is that it's some extension of whatever bullshit Skybreaker uses to tear holes in reality in the first place. Not sure how it'd be applied, though - anything like Baleful Teleport wouldn't be at all nonlethal.
 
Vebyast said:
Sorry. :( I know how that feels.
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The physical side of it is somewhat self-inflicted. I've been going out walking a lot, since I got on a particular medication. Mostly because my legs don't hurt for a stupidly long time after exercise, anymore. It's good for me, but it also means I'm not always at my best when looking at things.
Vebyast said:
Yep. I'd start by thinking electricity, but the information didn't say anything about thick boots or metal clothing, and purely-mechanical clockwork wouldn't notice electricity at all unless we pumped enough juice through to melt something. So my guess right now is that it's some extension of whatever bullshit Skybreaker uses to tear holes in reality in the first place. Not sure how it'd be applied, though - anything like Baleful Teleport wouldn't be at all nonlethal.
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A really small rift portal, perhaps? If you can target accurately enough, both humans and clockwork will have empty sections, spaces where a portal could form, theoretically. The lungs could make for a good disabl. Maybe. But, since they're close to the heart, if it misses by a bit...well, it could go bad.
 
Vebyast said:
Actually, now that I go back and read what you quoted, it's not even the single-scout abduction that I was saying we might be able to pull off. I was half-expecting a third Major Convenient Contrivance to crop up that'd condemn the scout so we could feel reasonably moral about executing him and conveniently keeping ourselves anonymous. It's that apparently these scouts are so stupid that they're sending warclocks out scouting, which means we can gank one and use it to make a voice changer, which eliminated the last major difficulty I had with the "abduct a scout" plan.

The part that's "neat" is that it bites warclocks. That opens up a whole world of WTF and cool applications. Can Skybreaker bite buildings? Can it bite the ground? Can it bite cars or aircraft? How about if the car has arms? How about if it's got cat deco? How about if the car is a tunnel-borer? Can it bite through armor? How much armor? If it can't bite a giant mecha, but someone tries to pick it up using a giant mecha, will it bite the pilot? If so, how well-separated do you have to be before it stops biting? Poke it with a stick? A hand puppet dangling on wires? Hydraulic waldoes? Pneumatic waldoes? Radio-control robot? How about if you drive over it with a car? Tell someone else to pick it up? Would it bite a dragon? If not, how big do you have to be before Skybreaker can't bite you? How can it possibly bite metal hard enough to kill a clockwork without turning squishy baseline humans into chunky salsa? etc.
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The official Science (tm) of Catgirl. Nyan nyan.
 
@Alivaril: Would the following be viable, if we do decide to gank the army?
  1. Open a linked portal between a point in front of us and a point ~500m above the heads of the army
  2. Lean through the portal
  3. From our new eye-in-the-sky point of view, start opening portals to the void underneath the feat of whoever looks the most leaderlike
  4. Repeat step 3 until we're reasonably certain the Inspired are dead
  5. If the army hasn't dissolved into chaos yet, start opening paired portals under the feat of anyone who looks to be taking charge, with the other end being 500m up; let the rain of screaming bodies demoralize them until they break
  6. Portal into the terrified, routed army, harness their fear and frenzy, and start Surging
 
macdjord said:
@Alivaril: Would the following be viable, if we do decide to gank the army?
  1. Open a linked portal between a point in front of us and a point ~500m above the heads of the army
  2. Lean through the portal
  3. From our new eye-in-the-sky point of view, start opening portals to the void underneath the feat of whoever looks the most leaderlike
  4. Repeat step 3 until we're reasonably certain the Inspired are dead
  5. If the army hasn't dissolved into chaos yet, start opening paired portals under the feat of anyone who looks to be taking charge, with the other end being 500m up; let the rain of screaming bodies demoralize them until they break
  6. Portal into the terrified, routed army, harness their fear and frenzy, and start Surging
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You'll need to be careful with portal alignment so gravity doesn't fling you out one of the portals, but you think that could work, yes. If you do try it, you plan on wrapping both legs around a tree or something similar. Better to be safe than sorry.
 
@Alivaril Just checking, but how far away from ourselves can we open a portal? I know we can teleport about 3km with our portals, but how far does the portal closest to us need to be?
 
Alivaril said:
You'll need to be careful with portal alignment so gravity doesn't fling you out one of the portals, but you think that could work, yes. If you do try it, you plan on wrapping both legs around a tree or something similar. Better to be safe than sorry.
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I'd make the portal just barely big enough to fit our shoulders through, so that getting through completely would take nontrivial effort.
 
I see where you're going with this.

The only problem with that idea is the amount of energy needed to keep that thing flying. In the absence of a compact fusion reactor, IMHO flying designs are unfeasible and uneconomical.
 
EWilanO said:
I see where you're going with this.

The only problem with that idea is the amount of energy needed to keep that thing flying. In the absence of a compact fusion reactor, IMHO flying designs are unfeasible and uneconomical.
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Notably, if we can make it to orbit the energy cost to avoid the ground very quickly becomes zero.
 
es, you'll just have to keep the hull airtight, deal with heat and gravity problems, avoid being shot to death by micro meteors, grilled by solar radiation somehow produce enough food...
And you need energy to move and for station keeping. And reaction mass,if you don't havea reactionless drive.
 
Nixeu said:
Not comparable. The odds that we'll match such a feat anytime soon are slim-to-none. We'd also have been dead, if we weren't indestructible. And I don't think we get that every time we Surge.
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Compact fusion is also not really comparable to twisting space like a pretzel and making it cry for mommy with something the size of a stick.
 
Carrnage said:
Compact fusion is also not really comparable to twisting space like a pretzel and making it cry for mommy with something the size of a stick.
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You missed my point, I think. No, they're not comparable...but that doesn't mean we can do compact fusion, just because we can make a space-bending stick. The two are different sorts of creations. And Skybreaker is very much not indicative of our usual level of creations, because of our parent's manipulation. "Well, we made Skybreaker, surely we can make X" is an incredibly bad assumption to be operating under.

On an unrelated note, I realized something recently. Our Styles are actually going to actively work against building an airship. Airships are already expensive, and the Stubborn part of our Style will increase those costs. Redundant means bigger, heavier, bulkier creations. Usually not a huge issue...except when every single ounce of difference in the weight of the creation means you need that much more lift. Like, say, in an aircraft.

Now, I'm not saying we can't make a flying doom fortress. Simply that it's not going to be easy, and that we're almost certainly going to require a interim base from which to design, and store the materials for, a flying one. Probably a mobile one, since stationary gives up some of our advantages.
 
Nixeu said:
On an unrelated note, I realized something recently. Our Styles are actually going to actively work against building an airship. Airships are already expensive, and the Stubborn part of our Style will increase those costs. Redundant means bigger, heavier, bulkier creations. Usually not a huge issue...except when every single ounce of difference in the weight of the creation means you need that much more lift. Like, say, in an aircraft.
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On the other hand, the key problem with airships is that they're vulnerable. Ours will not be vulnerable. Redundant is precisely what you want when you need something to not fall out of the sky. And Stubborn yields a massive increase in quality and even more durability. A flying fortress won't have significantly greater overhead than anything else we build, and the strengths of our styles significantly favor builds that're usually too fragile to be effective, i.e. airships. Finally, look at this:
Alivaril said:
. You're also capable of doing the same project more than once. Previous projects do not occupy any of your ongoing project slots, even if you're working on them.
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We don't actually have to build an airship. We have to build an anti-gravity module. And then slap it on a house. Then attach a jet engine. Then build another antigrav module, slap it on another house, and rope it to the first one. And so on and so forth as we need space. Then start swapping houses out for our enemies' captured fortresses. Then swap the fortresses out for our own custom-built fortress components.
 
I said armored vehicle, that doesn't need to be a tank. It could just be our armored rolling lab. It's just with how many are arguing that they fear being attacked, I just started from the premise that any ground vehicle we build would need to be armored.
 
Vebyast said:
On the other hand, the key problem with airships is that they're vulnerable. Ours will not be vulnerable. Redundant is precisely what you want when you need something to not fall out of the sky. And Stubborn yields a massive increase in quality and even more durability. A flying fortress won't have significantly greater overhead than anything else we build, and the strengths of our styles significantly favor builds that're usually too fragile to be effective, i.e. airships. Finally, look at this:
We don't actually have to build an airship. We have to build an anti-gravity module. And then slap it on a house. Then attach a jet engine. Then build another antigrav module, slap it on another house, and rope it to the first one. And so on and so forth as we need space. Then start swapping houses out for our enemies' captured fortresses. Then swap the fortresses out for our own custom-built fortress components.
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I suspect a flying fortress would indeed have more overhead than anything smaller. It's inevitable that increasing the number and complexity of the systems involved will increase the amount of work that needs to be put into keeping something running smoothly.

Also, this is another thing I've noticed people doing. I don't expect most of our creations to be anywhere close to Skybreaker in-terms of advancement. Expecting us to make constant, consistent anti-gravity in a steam-punk setting doesn't seem realistic. Skybreaker is most likely an anomaly, not the norm, even for us.
 
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Nixeu said:
You missed my point, I think. No, they're not comparable...but that doesn't mean we can do compact fusion, just because we can make a space-bending stick. The two are different sorts of creations. And Skybreaker is very much not indicative of our usual level of creations, because of our parent's manipulation. "Well, we made Skybreaker, surely we can make X" is an incredibly bad assumption to be operating under.
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I got your point, i just disagree. Skybreaker uses the exact same basic principles as everything else inspired make just at extreme levels, and i don't think prior theoretical knowledge actually is much of a limit as Lorelei can literally ask Inspiration for technical information.
 
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