Yes. But that will be in a long, long time when we actually have the ability to gengineer on that level, and stuff will happen that will grab our attention in the short term.
Age of Strife
Seeing as the planet seems to be mostly made out of metal as the flora has more metal in it than carbon we wouldn't be lacking in diet to support such a skeleton.
I think we are getting ahead of ourselves though. Should focus on the short term, but if we can keep a normal rate of development and growth (RL world level) we will go vey far in 6000.
If we don't get any major setbacks that set us cumulatively back several thousands of years we could outstrip the IoM in both tech and population.
We could in about 10 years if we dedicated our 100 scientists know how to build advanced clonic facility, 10 more years for how to make cyborgs. It took 60 years from not knowing what DNA in RL is to what we have now with genetic engineered crop, bacteria and animals like goats with spider DNA. If it takes.more.than a century for us to be able to make designer babies that can survive on the biosphere of this planet we are not very good at science.
This is with our limited population and not global support.
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[X] Try to contact Grave Keeper
[X] Hold onto the research for now
[X] Train Soldiers - Selecting the better candidates from the militia, train them up to your standards, creating a squad (10) of Soldiers (Light Infantry). REPEATABLE
[X] Establish a salvage operation in Shattersaw - With the FOB and general cooperation of the population, you can now safely send out teams on long term missions to gather up salvage and resources from the ruins of Shattersaw
[X] Spy Network - While the skillsets are different from police, spies are a kind of investigator and having a network in place could potentially help avoid situations like this in the future
[X] Industrial Fusion Reactor Design 0/300
[X] Research
[X] Hold onto the research for now
[X] Train Soldiers - Selecting the better candidates from the militia, train them up to your standards, creating a squad (10) of Soldiers (Light Infantry). REPEATABLE
[X] Establish a salvage operation in Shattersaw - With the FOB and general cooperation of the population, you can now safely send out teams on long term missions to gather up salvage and resources from the ruins of Shattersaw
[X] Spy Network - While the skillsets are different from police, spies are a kind of investigator and having a network in place could potentially help avoid situations like this in the future
[X] Industrial Fusion Reactor Design 0/300
[X] Research
- Location
- [REDACTED]
[X] Forge stronger diplomatic ties with the 504
[X] Release to the 504 (warn)
[X] Train Soldiers - Selecting the better candidates from the militia, train them up to your standards, creating a squad (10) of Soldiers (Light Infantry). REPEATABLE
[X] Construct fusion reactor - While you already have enough power to run everything as is, if you set up the industrial scale fusion reactor first it would allow you to decommission the solar facility and free up a great deal of room within your curtain walls. Without armoured buildings anything you built would risk damage during a major wind or fire storm, but it would not face near certain destruction constantly like anything out in the forest would
[X] Investigate Shooting - Armin will devote effort to attempting to piece together what happened the day you were shot while the , although answers may never be found
[X] Local Building Materials
[X] Research
[X] Release to the 504 (warn)
[X] Train Soldiers - Selecting the better candidates from the militia, train them up to your standards, creating a squad (10) of Soldiers (Light Infantry). REPEATABLE
[X] Construct fusion reactor - While you already have enough power to run everything as is, if you set up the industrial scale fusion reactor first it would allow you to decommission the solar facility and free up a great deal of room within your curtain walls. Without armoured buildings anything you built would risk damage during a major wind or fire storm, but it would not face near certain destruction constantly like anything out in the forest would
[X] Investigate Shooting - Armin will devote effort to attempting to piece together what happened the day you were shot while the , although answers may never be found
[X] Local Building Materials
[X] Research
[X] Try to contact Grave Keeper
[X] Hold onto the research for now
[X] Train Soldiers - Selecting the better candidates from the militia, train them up to your standards, creating a squad (10) of Soldiers (Light Infantry). REPEATABLE
[X] Establish a salvage operation in Shattersaw - With the FOB and general cooperation of the population, you can now safely send out teams on long term missions to gather up salvage and resources from the ruins of Shattersaw
[X] Census - Armin will have teams take a proper accounting of your population and set up a system to keep it updated, reducing the risk of infiltration. Will have future economic benefits
[X] Improved Local Sap Purification 0/350
[X] research
[X] Hold onto the research for now
[X] Train Soldiers - Selecting the better candidates from the militia, train them up to your standards, creating a squad (10) of Soldiers (Light Infantry). REPEATABLE
[X] Establish a salvage operation in Shattersaw - With the FOB and general cooperation of the population, you can now safely send out teams on long term missions to gather up salvage and resources from the ruins of Shattersaw
[X] Census - Armin will have teams take a proper accounting of your population and set up a system to keep it updated, reducing the risk of infiltration. Will have future economic benefits
[X] Improved Local Sap Purification 0/350
[X] research
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- Location
- That light in the sky with a decaying orbit.
[x] Try to contact Grave Keeper
[X] Release generally (warn)
[x] Train Soldiers - Selecting the better candidates from the militia, train them up to your standards, creating a squad (10) of Soldiers (Light Infantry).
[x] Construct fusion reactor
[x] Investigate Shooting - Armin will devote effort to attempting to piece together what happened the day you were shot while the , although answers may never be found
[x] Local Building Materials 0/200
[x] Research
This is the best options to give us a good foundation for the times ahead. I'd like to turn our FOB more into a trading post rather than salvage op, though. Releasing the research generally will give us a good reputation and ultimately insure more people survive planet wide.
[X] Release generally (warn)
[x] Train Soldiers - Selecting the better candidates from the militia, train them up to your standards, creating a squad (10) of Soldiers (Light Infantry).
[x] Construct fusion reactor
[x] Investigate Shooting - Armin will devote effort to attempting to piece together what happened the day you were shot while the , although answers may never be found
[x] Local Building Materials 0/200
[x] Research
This is the best options to give us a good foundation for the times ahead. I'd like to turn our FOB more into a trading post rather than salvage op, though. Releasing the research generally will give us a good reputation and ultimately insure more people survive planet wide.
3.2
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Try to contact Grave Keeper
[X] Hold onto the research for now
[X] Train soldiers
[X] Construct fusion reactor
[X] Investigate shooting
[X] Local Building Materials
You send out the orders for what everyone is to get up to while you are recovering. Much of your time is spent undergoing physiotherapy or drilling militia into soldiers, with your troops always being forced to meet if not exceed your performance when you go for runs, with the exceed part being more prevalent early on in your recovery and the meet part becoming more and more common as you gain back your strength. When you don't feel well enough to go over the more physical aspects, you often drill the troops in the more theoretical ones, instilling in them the more escoteric ideas of combat.
For the first several months you get nothing from Grave Keeper, your envoys reporting that the abandoned hospital is just an empty structure filled with super creepy sculptures made out of human bones, and the few times they do encounter the crazy old man he just tells them that he's waiting for you specifically. You still send out an envoy about once a week to reiterate your desire to talk anyway, since Grave Keeper never seems to get irritated at all by these requests, which would make you stop. They report that he remains polite and even seems to enjoy the visits in his own crazy way, but that none of your men stay a moment longer than they have to, which is reasonable enough.
A few months in though, the night watch radio operator at your FOB finds a human knuckle bone that has had numbers carefully scribed into it. Looking them over, he finds that they all correspond to the radio frequencies the Dragonflies and the 504 are known to use. You make sure to send a thank you to Grave Keeper upon being informed of this development, to which he responds in his usual manner of wanting to speak with you personally, but he does acknowledge the thanks happily. You're not quite sure what message he was trying to send since you've known about the other groups using radios for a while.
The initial analysis of data goes nowhere fast, according to Armin's reports. Looking over the firearms recovered from the battle shows no obvious signs of malfunction with the three rifles in the .700 calibre like the bullet that hit you. As best Armin can tell, the bullet fired at you was probably intentional. He does however note that he could not get a full match to any of their rifling marks, although that is at least in part because of the way the bullet deformed when it hit you and your armour.
A few days after the incident with Grave Keeper, Armin reports in from Shattersaw that something funny is starting to emerge from the investigation. He has been trying, to the best of his ability with limited equipment, to replicate the incident, and he has discovered something curious. The pattern of your injuries demonstrate a bias that strongly suggests that the bullet impacted at a slight angle - downwards and from the right side of your body to the left. While he originally figured that you had simply been twisting about a bit, every last eye witness report says that you were marching straight forward towards the front entrance when you were hit. He has been trying to work out where the shooter could have been, and he's run into the problem that unless he does some fairly radical fudging, the ballistics of the weaponry just don't work. Even with the shooter being at an elevated position he can't get a proper trajectory match.
The closest match for the right-to-left direction he can get is if the shot came from the far edge of the barricades, but those aren't close enough for the downward trajectory. He's now starting to think that the shot came from outside the Dragonfly lines, carried over their barricade by its parabolic trajectory. The implications are troubling indeed. He also admits that even if he's wrong on the range, the part of the barricade the shot came from is unlikely to have been an intentional shot from the Dragonfly lines, it was too far out from where their commanders were positioned that day. None of the Dragonfly troops had ear mics on them, so there was no way for an order to have been given to someone that far out without people noticing and action being taken. Again, every account stated that there was no warning on the shot being fired, which was one of the biggest reasons your troops were so enraged.
You wish you could be of more help, but you were hit so hard that you have no memory of being hit, and the eyewitness accounts are much more distant and scrambled, especially since many of your troops were staying out of sight to avoid spooking the Dragonflies as much as possible.
The Dragonflies used two radio frequencies for communication, one short range and one long range, and they never rotated them because their radio had an encryption system on it... that between your military radios and the computers at Greengraft you had broken fairly early. The 504 used a variety of channels that they switched up and always spoke in coded language on, which meant that even though they were broadcasting in the open they were harder to listen in on than the Dragonflies. You had ways of scanning a broad spectrum, but the radio operator had found that one of the numbers inscribed on the knuckle bone that had been left behind was at a frequency they didn't know about so he had added it to the monitoring list.
The first night he had done so, during the Dragonflies evening transmission to their home base, he had picked up a weak signal that had started up shortly afterwards. It read, "Consultant inquiry on headhunting opportunities," and had been followed shortly after by "Hiring freeze in effect."
You didn't know what the first line was about exactly, but it used the same corporate buzzword speak that the 504 often used for their codings, and the second line was a 504 radio phrase for "Stop talking!"
You feel a pit in your stomach. You don't have all the facts, but what you do have is starting to make a frightful amount of sense. You had scared away a sniper shortly before you arrived, and while people with guns keeping a lookout on the bases in Shattersaw was nothing that noteworthy, you started to wonder what might have happened if you had not found him and forced him away before you went out to parlay. What might have happened if someone shot the commander of the Dragonfly forces as you were approaching, their guns pointed in your direction.
Armin found it. He found the most likely spot for the shooter for the ballistics to match up. A half collapsed building that has a line of sight on the open space you had been approaching from that goes over the outer edge of the original Dragonfly barricade. It would have been a hell of a shot to pull off, but even if it wouldn't have looked totally right the angles were such that someone on the ground would likely attribute the flash as having come from the Dragonfly lines, especially in the confusion after the fact.
The spot was also in a location your men didn't scout out because it was behind where you would have drawn the Dragonfly lines. It couldn't have been the first gunman your men scared away, he went in the wrong direction and he couldn't have got around your troops, so it had to have been a second gunman, who had infiltrated past the Dragonfly patrols already.
Two skilled gunmen, two targets. You, and likely the commander of the Dragonflies. During a tense parlay one, or better yet both of them gets shot, and suddenly both are blaming each other and opening fire.
Suddenly a powerful military group - often associated with supporting the previous political order - who had said that they were going to attempt to parlay with a group apparently run by nobles - the embodiment of the previous political order - has every reason to not want to talk to the first group. They also likely injure each other... except that you brought SAWs and tightly drilled militia with you.
You may never find the person who fired the shot that hit you, but you are quite certain you know the will behind the trigger: the 504, the people with the most to gain from you fighting with the Dragonflies.
And even if you explained things to them, you don't see the Dragonflies just accepting a "Sorry we wiped out one of your garrisons and took the largest supply of agricultural output around from you" as an apology, even if you wanted to get on their good side. Your people don't like them, consider them traitorous, slaving scum, and from the reports on the living and working conditions in the farms you're inclined to agree. But if you fight the 504 over this, the only people who will gain will be the Dragonflies, who are already apparently massing for an attack that you might need the 504 to repulse.
Damn it.
Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it!
What do you do?
[X] Hold onto the research for now
[X] Train soldiers
[X] Construct fusion reactor
[X] Investigate shooting
[X] Local Building Materials
You send out the orders for what everyone is to get up to while you are recovering. Much of your time is spent undergoing physiotherapy or drilling militia into soldiers, with your troops always being forced to meet if not exceed your performance when you go for runs, with the exceed part being more prevalent early on in your recovery and the meet part becoming more and more common as you gain back your strength. When you don't feel well enough to go over the more physical aspects, you often drill the troops in the more theoretical ones, instilling in them the more escoteric ideas of combat.
For the first several months you get nothing from Grave Keeper, your envoys reporting that the abandoned hospital is just an empty structure filled with super creepy sculptures made out of human bones, and the few times they do encounter the crazy old man he just tells them that he's waiting for you specifically. You still send out an envoy about once a week to reiterate your desire to talk anyway, since Grave Keeper never seems to get irritated at all by these requests, which would make you stop. They report that he remains polite and even seems to enjoy the visits in his own crazy way, but that none of your men stay a moment longer than they have to, which is reasonable enough.
A few months in though, the night watch radio operator at your FOB finds a human knuckle bone that has had numbers carefully scribed into it. Looking them over, he finds that they all correspond to the radio frequencies the Dragonflies and the 504 are known to use. You make sure to send a thank you to Grave Keeper upon being informed of this development, to which he responds in his usual manner of wanting to speak with you personally, but he does acknowledge the thanks happily. You're not quite sure what message he was trying to send since you've known about the other groups using radios for a while.
Rolled 28 + 36 = 64
????
????
The initial analysis of data goes nowhere fast, according to Armin's reports. Looking over the firearms recovered from the battle shows no obvious signs of malfunction with the three rifles in the .700 calibre like the bullet that hit you. As best Armin can tell, the bullet fired at you was probably intentional. He does however note that he could not get a full match to any of their rifling marks, although that is at least in part because of the way the bullet deformed when it hit you and your armour.
Rolled 71 + 36 = 107
????
????
A few days after the incident with Grave Keeper, Armin reports in from Shattersaw that something funny is starting to emerge from the investigation. He has been trying, to the best of his ability with limited equipment, to replicate the incident, and he has discovered something curious. The pattern of your injuries demonstrate a bias that strongly suggests that the bullet impacted at a slight angle - downwards and from the right side of your body to the left. While he originally figured that you had simply been twisting about a bit, every last eye witness report says that you were marching straight forward towards the front entrance when you were hit. He has been trying to work out where the shooter could have been, and he's run into the problem that unless he does some fairly radical fudging, the ballistics of the weaponry just don't work. Even with the shooter being at an elevated position he can't get a proper trajectory match.
The closest match for the right-to-left direction he can get is if the shot came from the far edge of the barricades, but those aren't close enough for the downward trajectory. He's now starting to think that the shot came from outside the Dragonfly lines, carried over their barricade by its parabolic trajectory. The implications are troubling indeed. He also admits that even if he's wrong on the range, the part of the barricade the shot came from is unlikely to have been an intentional shot from the Dragonfly lines, it was too far out from where their commanders were positioned that day. None of the Dragonfly troops had ear mics on them, so there was no way for an order to have been given to someone that far out without people noticing and action being taken. Again, every account stated that there was no warning on the shot being fired, which was one of the biggest reasons your troops were so enraged.
You wish you could be of more help, but you were hit so hard that you have no memory of being hit, and the eyewitness accounts are much more distant and scrambled, especially since many of your troops were staying out of sight to avoid spooking the Dragonflies as much as possible.
Rolled 33
????
????
The Dragonflies used two radio frequencies for communication, one short range and one long range, and they never rotated them because their radio had an encryption system on it... that between your military radios and the computers at Greengraft you had broken fairly early. The 504 used a variety of channels that they switched up and always spoke in coded language on, which meant that even though they were broadcasting in the open they were harder to listen in on than the Dragonflies. You had ways of scanning a broad spectrum, but the radio operator had found that one of the numbers inscribed on the knuckle bone that had been left behind was at a frequency they didn't know about so he had added it to the monitoring list.
The first night he had done so, during the Dragonflies evening transmission to their home base, he had picked up a weak signal that had started up shortly afterwards. It read, "Consultant inquiry on headhunting opportunities," and had been followed shortly after by "Hiring freeze in effect."
You didn't know what the first line was about exactly, but it used the same corporate buzzword speak that the 504 often used for their codings, and the second line was a 504 radio phrase for "Stop talking!"
You feel a pit in your stomach. You don't have all the facts, but what you do have is starting to make a frightful amount of sense. You had scared away a sniper shortly before you arrived, and while people with guns keeping a lookout on the bases in Shattersaw was nothing that noteworthy, you started to wonder what might have happened if you had not found him and forced him away before you went out to parlay. What might have happened if someone shot the commander of the Dragonfly forces as you were approaching, their guns pointed in your direction.
Rolled 65 + 36 = 101
Success
Success
Armin found it. He found the most likely spot for the shooter for the ballistics to match up. A half collapsed building that has a line of sight on the open space you had been approaching from that goes over the outer edge of the original Dragonfly barricade. It would have been a hell of a shot to pull off, but even if it wouldn't have looked totally right the angles were such that someone on the ground would likely attribute the flash as having come from the Dragonfly lines, especially in the confusion after the fact.
The spot was also in a location your men didn't scout out because it was behind where you would have drawn the Dragonfly lines. It couldn't have been the first gunman your men scared away, he went in the wrong direction and he couldn't have got around your troops, so it had to have been a second gunman, who had infiltrated past the Dragonfly patrols already.
Two skilled gunmen, two targets. You, and likely the commander of the Dragonflies. During a tense parlay one, or better yet both of them gets shot, and suddenly both are blaming each other and opening fire.
Suddenly a powerful military group - often associated with supporting the previous political order - who had said that they were going to attempt to parlay with a group apparently run by nobles - the embodiment of the previous political order - has every reason to not want to talk to the first group. They also likely injure each other... except that you brought SAWs and tightly drilled militia with you.
You may never find the person who fired the shot that hit you, but you are quite certain you know the will behind the trigger: the 504, the people with the most to gain from you fighting with the Dragonflies.
And even if you explained things to them, you don't see the Dragonflies just accepting a "Sorry we wiped out one of your garrisons and took the largest supply of agricultural output around from you" as an apology, even if you wanted to get on their good side. Your people don't like them, consider them traitorous, slaving scum, and from the reports on the living and working conditions in the farms you're inclined to agree. But if you fight the 504 over this, the only people who will gain will be the Dragonflies, who are already apparently massing for an attack that you might need the 504 to repulse.
Damn it.
Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it!
What do you do?
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well well, does anyone feel that 504 just got a nice price hike added to their totals?
cokerpilot
Here comes the rain.
Huh I was right.
How about we the Dragonflies a message in an area where we know they patrol to let them know what the 504 did.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, sure would be a shame if we "accidentally" started shipping them tainted food, no?
504 are likely former rebels and dissidents or might even be combatants in the whole starbomb debacle - agents on the ground, spotters, etc. They most likely want us dead just as much as the Dragonflies, but are more than willing to use covert ops, propaganda, etc.
I do not see a reason however to condemn the population of either Dragonflies or 504 to mass retaliation. We ought to try and win this free for all by subsuming whatever these two groups have into our own and taking the leadership into our employ or having them on trial, or taken out if need be.
And we should make sure our resident mad psyker is not going to go worshiping Warp Entities. We know the only real way to deal with them is to disperse them via a general purpose naval laser battery blast.
I do not see a reason however to condemn the population of either Dragonflies or 504 to mass retaliation. We ought to try and win this free for all by subsuming whatever these two groups have into our own and taking the leadership into our employ or having them on trial, or taken out if need be.
And we should make sure our resident mad psyker is not going to go worshiping Warp Entities. We know the only real way to deal with them is to disperse them via a general purpose naval laser battery blast.
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jwolfe_beta
Semi Genre-Savvy Overlord
- Location
- Canada
We could give 504 the sap research but don't tell them about the side effects. From what I understand they don't have the medical capabilities to treat the problems.
Then when people that aren't part of the 504 taht they share teh sap with start having issues it's all on us.
jwolfe_beta
Semi Genre-Savvy Overlord
- Location
- Canada
True. Maybe just keep them at a distance and insure that whatever we come up with they never get?
- Location
- Cyberspace
Welp, I at least half-suspected the results of a successful investigation. We're definitely not sharing anything good with the 504.
Although, to be honest, considering who's in charge over there (those asshole nobles) and their stated goal (regional domination), I'm not going to cry over the mistake.
We shall keep quiet... for now. But there will be a reckoning once things tide over. A bit of meticulous documentation kept of the investigation to help convince our populace to support an aggressive move if it comes to that (or to try and pull other allies away from the 504/a faction of the 504 to defect out of fear of what you'll do).
Stay vaguely friendly with any emissaries, but they don't get anything from us but smiles and empty words until we have the space to enact suitable punishment. We should also funnel material (particularly seeds) out of the farm region and elsewhere we have back home.
EDIT: We should also ensure that the 504 takes the brunt of the counterattacking, of course.
Although, to be honest, considering who's in charge over there (those asshole nobles) and their stated goal (regional domination), I'm not going to cry over the mistake.
We shall keep quiet... for now. But there will be a reckoning once things tide over. A bit of meticulous documentation kept of the investigation to help convince our populace to support an aggressive move if it comes to that (or to try and pull other allies away from the 504/a faction of the 504 to defect out of fear of what you'll do).
Stay vaguely friendly with any emissaries, but they don't get anything from us but smiles and empty words until we have the space to enact suitable punishment. We should also funnel material (particularly seeds) out of the farm region and elsewhere we have back home.
EDIT: We should also ensure that the 504 takes the brunt of the counterattacking, of course.
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Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
For now, we have to play nice with the 504. We really don't have a choice right now. We need them against the Dragonflies, but once the Dragonflies falls... I mean, it won't be easy, but this is kind of the only thing we can do.
Although, giving the 504 the sap, or letting them find it without having them know about the side-effects could be a good way to kick back at them. Hmm... Which again could backfire, but it's worth thinking about.
Although, giving the 504 the sap, or letting them find it without having them know about the side-effects could be a good way to kick back at them. Hmm... Which again could backfire, but it's worth thinking about.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Incidentally, the "Moment of Truth" was a roll for effect, namely whether or not the shot would connect in such a way to trigger a shoot out between you and the Dragonflies.
Even with a 99 you would have still been conscious, if wounded. I was not expecting a 100.
Even with a 99 you would have still been conscious, if wounded. I was not expecting a 100.
Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
Man, the dice really loves screwing with us.
I don't blame it.
I don't blame it.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Is it too late to change our policy with the Sap release? I think this is a nice, perfectly deniable way of getting back at them for that spot of dickery.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yes, it is a free action to release the information so you can change your mind easily enough.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Heh.
Even have it be straight up "Oh hey, we have this Sap here that you can use to supplement your rations with", then infobomb them, and then when they bitch? "Huh, you seemed so professional and intelligent, I thought you'd have noticed the high lead content? I mean, we could have clarified, but Darn, I was in traction for months thanks to a mysterious sniper round, and we were just far too busy afterwards."
Even have it be straight up "Oh hey, we have this Sap here that you can use to supplement your rations with", then infobomb them, and then when they bitch? "Huh, you seemed so professional and intelligent, I thought you'd have noticed the high lead content? I mean, we could have clarified, but Darn, I was in traction for months thanks to a mysterious sniper round, and we were just far too busy afterwards."
On the other hand... Was it them? Nobody knows...
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
If it Wasn't them, the culprit responsible was doing a Damn fine job keeping their head down. There aren't many people out there who had enough warning, and enough skilled snipers to set up that killing field.