So, a little bit of an expansion. But there is no option to jump to an alternate Earth. Sadly their only known living means of doing that died in the fight with Scion. Furthermore, the option to 'escape' to someplace else is difficult at best, impossible at worst. Suffice to say, even if I didn't make it obvious, but trying to get something like a colony ship into orbit is pretty much a lost cause. The machines have the ability to engage targets at suborbital altitudes, but engaging targets beyond that is not beyond its capability as well.
Suffice to say, its fight or die, and there is no Project Zero Dawn to save anyone because this isn't a 'consume all biomass then shut down once fuel runs out', because the energy sources of the machines is different compared to the Faro Plague thanks to Taylor putting alternative energy sources into the wild sadly.
Being fair, looking at what this Iron Plague
is...
It seems to be the Faro Plague 2.0,
Militarised. Or in simpler terms, the Faro Plague was created from fundamentally Paramilitary designs optimised to carry out and protect Biofuel Harvesting Operations. Just ones in a world that can be quite violent, if not to the Cyberpunk standard.
This? This came from a Major World Power going all in on industrial, scientific
and military robotics to equalise things. Which means the Iron Plague is probably constructing full on automated factory complexes to more efficiently mass produce robots. It's building server hubs and scientific facilities to innovate engineering improvements, though thankfully it's probably not doing scientific experimentation which means if something doesn't come up from the natural methods of iterating upon known knowledge then the Iron Plague is unlikely to discover it (aka it's heavily lacking in Blue Sky research capability, that was probably a later development goal).
And most dangerously of all, it's got the
full design complement for an All-Aspects Automated War Doctrine. Admittedly, especially considering it's from the Soviet Design Heritage, one that's light on aerial designs but that's likely made up for via 'deploy enough coverage of enough anti-air and nothing flies' which is particularly shown in how all nuclear warheads are being intercepted no matter what type. Unless nuclear artillery shells are making it through, just not having enough impact by the severe restrictions on warhead yield that comes with that deployment method?
Which actually means that orbit probably is 'safe' to deploy. It's just orbit is also such an absolute warzone between 'humanity' and 'Iron Plague' that the reason you can't manage a colony ship is not that nothing can be deployed to orbit... It's that the things you'd need to deploy beyond orbit to construct a colony ship just can't be hardened enough nor protected enough with a ground-launch design to survive reaching the 'safe' construction zone.
Most likely also side a side element of 'we can't spare the launch capacity from ensuring that the Iron Plague doesn't achieve orbital dominance and
especially doesn't sneak it's own constructors through to the moon to start building there to launch the material to build the colony ship'. And this is not helped by the fact parahuman powers are very limited once you leave the atmosphere, before factoring in the maximum range limitation.
So those, which are likely to be one of the more potent 'edges' humanity has even in a Post-Scion world changing how that functions... Well, aren't available.
