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Ad Astra ex Lutum

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Blackstar said:
This has left them the only polity partially backed by the Volnay despite arduous protests and embattled on all sides located moderately coreward and anti-spinward. Military socialism has brought them fairly far with the rapid liberation of several planets in the early days, driving forward uplifts based on loans from the Volnay. This has carved out an effective multi-species trait that has overwhelmingly poured resources toward the military to continue the struggle for liberating their territories in the dead zone. According to the documentation presented by the Peoples Republic of Liberty and Mobilization, they have an absolute claim towards the entire dead zone for the suffering of their species at the hands of the Vehnens. After the turn towards socialism, the Volnay loans were repudiated, as any transfer of assets was considered to be giving in to foreign business interests but relations continued.
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Oh boy, that's going to be a fun thing that we'll have to deal with at some point in the future.
 
Manowl said:
Yes, but don't know if this concern about pirates is realistic right now because it doesn't make sense for them to just destroy our stuff for fun especially since it would just put them higher into The wanted list for no gain at all.
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Let's just say that the marginal advantage/disadvantage of having literally zero armed spacecraft versus badly armed spacecraft is sufficient to arguably justify continuing to manufacture them in the full knowledge that they'll be obsolete in a few years, whereas the same is not true for ground equipment.

This is mostly because we already have a vast arsenal of bad ground combat equipment, whereas all our bad space combat equipment was wiped out in the war. If it weren't for that specific situation, I'd be advocating shutting down the OFAC plants too.
 
General_Urist said:
...It took until now for our elves to realize a war can have limited objectives instead of inherently escalating to a total war of annihilation. ...We really are the crazy lads of the galaxy.
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To a certain extent, it does make sense that when your rulers are going to live forever and never forget that they, personally, had to sign a lopsided treaty, you don't go for half-measures and make sure that they'll never be in a position to try and get even over it.
 
Blackstar said:
Dead in the crisis and war that caused the calamity, the Vehnens were the ones who caused the fall and the destruction of the original Volnay empire. The species is believed to be reptilian with short snouts and a body plan overall comparable to those of the Sallies. Habitats are unknown but primarily exist inside the tattered remnants of megastructures of which the most famous is the Dyson swarm in BD 36 which is under a focused program of investigation. Most of the swarm has long been destroyed in part by their very creations but some elements exist with a significant portion of the Volnay battlefleet deployed to contain errant remnants of the calamity.

The species itself rose to fame in the wars preceding the calamity with massive battles for incursions into the sector starting due to the start of construction of a new Dyson sphere along with attempts to seize what was believed to be at the time a precursor Shkadov thruster. This led to several territorial conflicts with the Volnay Imperium that spiraled into a cluster-wide war with worlds in the crossfire burned to ash time and time again. Several great structures were destroyed in the relentless advance of the superior Volnay but the tide was eventually turned. Automated production and entire star systems of mobilized material were able to reverse the gains and continue the war. From there, a critical mistake was made that ushered in the calamity and the end of industrial civilization.

The calamity proper did not come from the war but the means with which it was won. Using their remaining resources and choosing to commit to a final victory, self-replicating wartime machinery was used in greater numbers with simple pre-programmed orders. One of the initial probes that was sent off had a corrupted IFF of some kind, or some error in targeting, leading to the initial cluster surging in, destroying their homeworld and the few colonies that they had established in short order. Following that the rest of the complex fought off any fleets that incurred into their borders, forcing a quiet phase of the war before a sufficient number of naval assets were produced to seize the galaxy. The Ulmea were the first to fall with their march continuing well into the Volnay core worlds, burning any industrial civilization in its wake.

The calamity would last approximately six hundred and forty years after that with automated machinery hunting down any signs of advanced or industrial civilization. Millions hid in bunkers hoping that a stay of execution could be avoided while entire colony worlds rejected any semblance of technology to stay under detection. The former overwhelmingly perished as the machines would not turn off for the full six hundred and forty years, dooming any who attempted to re-establish civilization. From the de-industrialized worlds though, civilization would spring anew and with all of the destroyed bunker complexes a few still survived, waiting for the probes to shut down or leave the local sector. For the part of the manufacturing complex, the day of the final termination order it is believed that every berzerker that received it readily threw itself into local stars, destroying the entire production system in hours.
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Ok, so these aliens made von nueman probes which devastated the whole sector. I wonder if there are any probes still in existence

Blackstar said:
the presence of a built-up and developed world in what they call the dead zone is critical for further expeditions and represents an important port of call for vessels operating in the area. The closest colonies are at least a hundred fifty light years away, with expansion occurring in the last few hundred years.
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Is the "Dead Zone" due to the calamity, or is it due to something else?
 
Captainwolf said:
Ok, so these aliens made von nueman probes which devastated the whole sector. I wonder if there are any probes still in existence
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An endlessly self-replicating killing machine that's adapted to keep fighting through almost anything, while capable of explosive growth if given sufficient raw materials and a little time? Nah there can't be any of those left around, anyways on a completely unrelated note our population of immortal supersoldiers has quadrupled in the past 40 years and there are no physical constraints on continuing to quadruple every few decades forever as long as we have starch vats + some electricity.
 
Chimeraguard said:
Oh boy, that's going to be a fun thing that we'll have to deal with at some point in the future.
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Not only that, but the arrival of both the map and the interstellar politics have me thinking about the spaceship purchases.

Specifically this bit, about how the dead-zone is huge, and the CLP needs a forward base for exploitation:
according to them, the presence of a built-up and developed world in what they call the dead zone is critical for further expeditions and represents an important port of call for vessels operating in the area. The closest colonies are at least a hundred fifty light years away, with expansion occurring in the last few hundred years.
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With that in mind, it feels like there's three options, though I still feel like probably only one should be picked for budget reasons.

- Purchase a set of military ships in the event the Peoples Republic of Liberty and Mobilization (or someone else, but probably them) decides to act quickly.
- Purchase one of the sets of supply and merchant ships to get in on the ground floor for expansion and exploitation in the local area.
- The courier remains as a cheap add-on purchase to ensure we're not totally grounded. It's not the most efficient purchase, the old merchantmen give more hull per buck, and the light cruisers are on par but it is still the cheapest overall. Sort of a bet nothing is going to go full speed while having something around in case it does anyways.
 
I overall agree with Plan Winning The Peace Cheaply, but I've elected to make a version that swaps out the courier ship for HEA mills. That's it, that's the only change. While the courier ship comes with manuals for the manufacture of its parts, it sounds like it was a extremely limited production design that was made purely for testing FTL and fusion drives. I don't think its quite as important to grab right now though with the extremely limited budget we'll have for procurement and the complete lack of shipyards, while the HEA mills can be built immediately should it work and will bring us closer to parity with HEAs very rapidly.

[]Plan Winning The HEAs Cheaply
-[]Formally Resign
-[]Civilian Recommendations
-[]Hard Cutbacks
-[]Four Million Army
-[]Stay on Reduced Benefits
-[]Peacetime Army
-[]Domestic Competitiveness Programs
-[]Technical Jobs Programs
(Leaves 3800B Or for infrastructure and procurement, ignoring civgov deals)
Forex (-350B Or)
-[]Refined Material Sales
-[]Cryptographic Currency Program
-[]Mass Media Sales
-[]Foreign Student Funding
-[]Hire Technical Professionals
-[]Hire Professors
-[]Textbook and Database Contracts
-[]Next Generation HEA Powder Mills
Space Infrastructure (-1500B)
-[]Orbital Launch Ring
-[]Re-Establishment of Orbital Shuttles
-[]Restart Orbital Cleaning Efforts
-[]Recolonization of the Inner Moon
-[]Establishment of Orbital Manufacturing
-[]Restoration of Satellite Networks
Groundside (-1800B after civgov deals)
-[]Expanding Trade Infrastructure
-[]Curach Garrison Program
-[]Department 4 Consolidation
-[]Department 6 Expansion
(Trade and Security)
-[]Civilian-Military Partnerships
-[]Expanded Military Scholarships
-[]Formalized Tech Transfers
-[]Superconductor Plants
-[]Inertial Fusion Test Facility
(Competativeness)
-[]Optical Computing Programs
-[]Dedicated Military-Electronics Plants
-[]Next Generation HEA Plants
-[]Pre-Construction of Orbital Components
-[]High Throughput CNT Production
(Jobs Program)
-[]Expansion of Inventory Management Systems
(More automation lmao)
 
SuperHeavy said:
More importantly who or what sent out the self-termination order to a swarm of killbots that even the race that created them could turn off?
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Could be, conceivably, that the clock just literally ran out. Maybe someone pre-coded them with an "in case of going on a total fucking rampage and being unstoppable, jump into the nearest star after a span of time long enough that it couldn't possibly matter to the war effort if the war is still going on in any normal sense."
 
Simon_Jester said:
Could be, conceivably, that the clock just literally ran out. Maybe someone pre-coded them with an "in case of going on a total fucking rampage and being unstoppable, jump into the nearest star after a span of time long enough that it couldn't possibly matter to the war effort if the war is still going on in any normal sense."
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What worries me is the text mentions specifically that their was a "final termination order". Maybe that is hardwired list of internal orders as a failsafe but it doesn't quite fit. Why destroy yourself and not simply power down, that's wasting all those potential post-war spaceframes? And why such a random number of years before hitting the big self-destruct button?
 
SuperHeavy said:
What worries me is the text mentions specifically that their was a "final termination order". Maybe that is hardwired list of internal orders as a failsafe but it doesn't quite fit. Why destroy yourself and not simply power down, that's wasting all those potential post-war spaceframes? And why such a random number of years before hitting the big self-destruct button?
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They are killing machines not thinking machines if the orders are to land on the nearest Sun then they can't exactly disobey.
 
SuperHeavy said:
What worries me is the text mentions specifically that their was a "final termination order". Maybe that is hardwired list of internal orders as a failsafe but it doesn't quite fit. Why destroy yourself and not simply power down, that's wasting all those potential post-war spaceframes?
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Because if, hypothetically if, this was a contingency, it'd be a contingency only intended to activate i a very specific situation.

If somehow everything went wrong and no Vehnen entity was in any position to control the automatic weapons, the things would eventually immolate themselves up rather than turning into a berserker plague capable of destroying the galaxy... long after it would have long since ceased to matter to the Vehnen.

Presumably, the Vehnen had other measures in place to reassert control more conventionally, and they all failed. It is not certain, but is far from impossible, that when the proto-berserkers were being designed, someone had the rather altruistic foresight to hardcode in something that would keep them from completely wiping out all life in the galaxy if they somehow got out of control.

And why such a random number of years before hitting the big self-destruct button?
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Notably, it might be a random number of years to us, but a very significant number to the Vehnens. We don't know from the information available either the length of their preferred standard year, or their numbering system.

We might set an automated system to self-destruct after, say, 1000 years, but to an alien species that might be 1192 years and 73 days, an arbitrary number picked for no readily apparent reason.

Manowl said:
They are killing machines not thinking machines if the orders are to land on the nearest Sun then they can't exactly disobey.
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Yes, but that's not the question; the question is where the order came from. Because either it was pre-coded into them ("if your central command node receives no orders from any Vehnen entity for X centuries, self-destruct"), or someone found a working system capable of issuing the self-destruct code directly.

Hm. I wonder how the Cube fit into all this. We may never know now, I suppose.
 
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Well considering my worst case I hope you are right and some anti-Ted Faro in the company that built these left a kill switch in the operating system.
 
Simon_Jester said:
What's your worst case?
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A hyper-intelligent power was able to do something even the creators of the kill swarm couldn't and did not act until they had pruned the local space. A power with even more time to advance as societies rebuild from almost nothing, with an end goal of ensuring their dominate position by any means necessary. More of an endgame boss of the Fermi Paradox type of problem.
 
Can imagine that it could have been some old code that was required by law to be included in anything that could automatically make more of itself, like our paranoid elfs are likely to do the same.
 
SuperHeavy said:
A hyper-intelligent power was able to do something even the creators of the kill swarm couldn't and did not act until they had pruned the local space. A power with even more time to advance as societies rebuild from almost nothing, with an end goal of ensuring their dominate position by any means necessary. More of an endgame boss of the Fermi Paradox type of problem.
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This would invite the question of why this notional hyper-intelligent power ever bothered to turn the berserkers off at all, since said berserkers clearly posed no threat to them. Why not just let them rampage to "keep the lawn mowed," as it were?
 
No idea, this was a worst case scenario for the situation where the killbot swarm existed and is shut down by a malicious party.
 
[]Balanced Militarization
[]Formally Resign
[]Civilian Recommendations +10T Or
[]Hard Cutbacks -1T Or
[]Two Million Army
[]Return Pre-War Standards (1.5m cost per soldier * 2m army = -3T Or)
[]Maintain Combat Readiness (1m cost per soldier * 2m army = -2T Or)
[]Establishment of LDO Infrastructure(+500B Or)
[]Technical Jobs Programs (+800B Or -400B Net)
[]Refined Material Sales -200B Or -100B Maintenance, +40B XCU
[]Expansive Material Sales -500B Or -200B Maintenacne, +80B XCU
[]Cryptographic Currency Program -100B Or, +50B XCU
[]Mass Media Sales -50B Or +?B XCU
[]Itzcuih Class Courier Craft -25B XCU
[]Ehecatl Class Light Cruisers -50B XCU
[]Next Generation HEA Powder Mills -20B XCU
[]Hire Military Experts -10B XCU
[]Textbook and Database Contracts -25B XCU
[]Foreign Student Funding -15B XCU
[]Hire Technical Professionals -5B XCU
[]Hire Professors -20B XCU
[]Orbital Launch Ring -500B Or
[]Re-Establishment of Orbital Shuttles -100B Or
[]Restart Orbital Cleaning Efforts -150B Or
[]Recolonization of the Inner Moon -200B Or
[]Establishment of Orbital Manufacturing -400B Or
[]Restoration of Satellite Networks -150B Or
[]Redundant Anti-Orbital Batteries -250B Or
[]Curach Garrison Program -100B Or
[]Department 4 Consolidation -150B Or
[]Department 6 Expansion -100B Or
[]Superconductor Plants -600B Or
[]Optical Computing Programs -450B Or
[]Dedicated Military-Electronics Plants -300B Or
[]Next Generation HEA Plants -250B Or
[]High Throughput CNT Production -200B Or
[]Pre-Construction of Orbital Components -200B Or
[]Expansion of Inventory Management Systems -100B Or

250B Or Remaining, 0B XCU Remaining

So, got A Plan here that tries to balance industrialization and tech growth while keeping the military small but well funded and with some funds left over to potentially do some minor procurement actions. Technical programs + expansive materials sales should ensure plenty of jobs to cushion the rapid demobilization. Big spending on getting back to orbit and heavy ForEx to purchase cruisers and the courier ship, along with technical & educational assistance. Military maintains their combat readiness to get the most out of the military experts and keep our combat bonus ticking up, at least until the orbits are more secure.

I admit to preferring a more infra-heavy plan but this is here as a alternative that doesn't just completely defund the military (outside of being a jobs program) for 5-10 years.
 
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SuperHeavy said:
No idea, this was a worst case scenario for the situation where the killbot swarm existed and is shut down by a malicious party.
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Well, there's worst case and then there's worst plausible case.

Worst plausible case, I'd say, is that whoever shut the berserker swarm down actually didn't drop it all into a star and is sitting on the rest to use as weapons at some future date. But by now it's been so long that if they were going to do that, they'd probably have made their move.
 
If there was a Hi Tech kill everything else not us civilization then there would be no quest because they would have seen the commotion from the big galactic objects blowing up and clean up the leftovers.
 
Well, all we really know about the Cube's creators is what we might infer from the severed cyberneticized heads they left behind in it:

The heads themselves are both more and less alien than expected with a slightly tougher exterior skin surface and an altered bone structure. The jaw is distended and shorter than a conventional elf jaw with a tooth structure that would indicate it as herbivorous. Further, the remaining elements of the face are, while significantly, decayed, identifiable as something of an extended snout. The dried-out structures from vacuum exposure have limited any retrievable DNA but the largest notable anatomic feature is an arguably malformed skill, as several elements are not fully integrated, indicating either extreme youth or entirely different life processes. Little is left of the neural cortexes due to the dehydrating effect of space but they are still comparatively intact with overall similar if differently localized brain structures.

Knowing what we know now, it should be possible to figure out whether the skull and facial structure we found in the Cube remnants bears any resemblance to any known Galactic species, living or dead.

@Blackstar , any comment on this?
 
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