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Ad Astra ex Lutum

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Well, the island defence could have gone better. Doesn't seem to be going great. At least armour production is decent enough, and we rolled a pretty good orbital fighter project. We need to stall a lot more, based on how the combat looks.
 
The Plan rolls are just modifiers to the actual combat rolls IIRC. They don't determine how literally all of the fighting has gone. It's not great, but it's manageable.
 
Chimeraguard said:
The Plan rolls are just modifiers to the actual combat rolls IIRC. They don't determine how literally all of the fighting has gone. It's not great, but it's manageable.
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Yeah, but given the disparity a bad roll can mean a lot of damage. It would mean making an exploitable mistake during operations, at the very least.
 
Manowl said:
If they use a asteroid then a lot of industry and people will be gone and what will be left it's the hardened survivors that will prepare for anyone trying another invasion.
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This is true, but "less surviving industry" also means "a lot less guns pointing at you." Much of the reason the aliens are having trouble is that we have a global industrial base that can churn out very large amounts of equipment, much more than could be sustained just off the productive capacity of the places they're invading.

Of course, our 3D printing tech makes us less dependent on global supply chains than many species would be, but I can easily imagine someone deciding to overlook that and invade anyway. And we'd still be pretty badly handicapped.
 
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VonVonson said:
Looks like tech has outdated both our military and our whole industrial base lmao.
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Vi'Talzin said:
I love seeing our entire industrial park becoming immediately outdated in one fell swoop lmao
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Was it really that revolutionary? Yeah we got superconductors and supercapacitors that let us save electricity and match alien hax lasers, but we still need normal manufacturing to put it all together. That "diamondoid" stuff meanwhile does sound like a miracle material... but it requires orbital manufacturing, and our access to that is limited right now.
 
General_Urist said:
Was it really that revolutionary? Yeah we got superconductors and supercapacitors that let us save electricity and match alien hax lasers, but we still need normal manufacturing to put it all together. That "diamondoid" stuff meanwhile does sound like a miracle material... but it requires orbital manufacturing, and our access to that is limited right now.
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The superconductors (mostly) work up to 70degrees Celsius they will enable radically higher energy industrial processes for us
 
The superconductors are absolutely revolutionary for pretty much every single high-energy industrial process, obviously direct power generation and transmission is the first sector that will want them but really any industrial process that involves putting a lot of energy into stuff will call for superconductors once the supply exists. It's not just saving electricity, it's allowing us to do things that were previously physically impossible because the power lines would turn into plasma if we tried.
 
Crazycryodude said:
The superconductors are absolutely revolutionary for pretty much every single high-energy industrial process, obviously direct power generation and transmission is the first sector that will want them but really any industrial process that involves putting a lot of energy into stuff will call for superconductors once the supply exists. It's not just saving electricity, it's allowing us to do things that were previously physically impossible because the power lines would turn into plasma if we tried.
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Well that and it's synergizers pretty well with the fusion crits. Like would definitely open up the parth to book starship troopers style power armour or at least mechas.
 
Power armor is demonstrably a thing in this setting since even the trash enemy infantry have it and a super heavy version might look kinda like Starship Troopers, although yeah mechs are probably not happening.
 
GAWR said:
Well that and it's synergizers pretty well with the fusion crits. Like would definitely open up the parth to book starship troopers style power armour or at least mechas.
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Well, mostly not for either, the issue with those applications is that you need aneutronic fusion for power armor and almost entirely aneutronic fusion for vehicle applications. The issues come with the particular fusion reactions they would be expected to use and the sheer confinement strength necessary at such a small scale. Fusion loves to scale up, and bigger reactors are easier, more stable, and more capable in a near-exponential fashion. Small reactors conversely are some of the hardest and require some of the most intensive confinement pressures to maintain the several keV plasma in confinement at pressures suited to sustained reactivity. Because you need a fusion gain ratio of like two to even get significant harvesting, much less efficient energy harvesting from the process.

Where this hits even harder for the small applications is the neutron release from the reactions. Something like a mech or tank might be able to tolerate the occasional neutron leaks from DD side-chains in a D-He3 reaction, but that also then requires He3 and pumping and filtering the atmosphere of a gas giant as basic infrastructure. For power armor where no neutrons can be tolerated, this leaves the p+B11 reaction as the "easiest" viable path towards having onboard fusion which is a Lawson Criterion 500 reaction that is challenging to achieve at any significant rate. Either application is also well, not helpful compared to something like a metallic hydrogen fuel cell as you are never going to need that much-sustained power in a vehicle, especially if you are acting with close support from a larger craft more capable of carrying a fusion reactor.
 
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