warhammer 30k pt.4 other half
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
Log #153
The battle for the orks ship is progressing fine, and Palisade is already inside the ship, fighting hall to hall and just kinda melting or ripping any orks he meets in half. So that front seems to be holding fine.
It only took the kid a few minutes to get used to the enhanced strength and reflexes his new armor provides, and it wasn't an hour before he learned how to use all the new and exotic weapons the armor comes with, he seems to be developing an unhealthy obsession with the plasma based rail gun. He is still having a little trouble with the newer drones, but that's mainly because none of them are standardized and all have a different speed and armament.
The kid went through the orks perimeter like it wasn't even there, and he just melted a hole into the ship rather than taking one of the main entrances, it was like an unstoppable object meeting a tinfoil wall.
So now rather than fighting outside where the orks can use their superior numbers against him he is just slowly picking them off while crawling through the tunnels of the ship, and he's making excellent time, which is good as a massive bug force is heading towards the ship, though whether it's for him or the orks is up for debate, and it might just be for both of them.
Balistria was already maintaining a perimeter around the ship to keep the orks from escaping through, so keeping the bugs off the ship till we can steal the useful bits shouldn't be that hard, it will just be expensive, seriously massive disposable drone swarms, great for fights, awful for supply management.
But that whole fight is largely running without my involvement, I have been working on the space elevators with Labyrinthine, or at least getting the foundations of them up and running, we have some anti gravity tech, it's how the bigger drones stay up, but it stops being practical to have it on anything that needs to indefinitely power itself, like anything that uses an engine, it takes 1 pound of engine to get .8 pounds of antigrav, and that's the best ratio for an engine at 600 total pounds, correction, best cost effective engine, I could make an entirely antigrav helicopter or ship, it's just cheaper to use conventional thrust.
That engine weight thing stops being a problem if the engine isnt being lifted though, and since the space elevators touch the ground I can just have a massive terrestrial powerplant to run the antigrav, which coupled with the shields, should prevent the massive towers from ripping themselves in half. Theoretically.
So building massive nuclear reactors, and the facilities to process the fuel for them, it's not really hard to do at this point, and most of my important bases actually have larger ones, but it is enough of a project that I'm helping personally to get it done quicker.
I did find the time to talk to the tree lady before I left though, turns out the galaxy is in a bad shape, and she is still trying to organize her people into anything resembling a cohesive force, and is having significant trouble with that, or at least that's what I understood of the angry rant I got when I walked into the bay, it wasn't directed at me or anything, it was just angry venting.
Still she did give me an answer on the whole "machines you touch do better", apparently machines are alive in this dimension and they like attention, so if you give them attention they work better, and they work significantly better when I do it because they have bits of my soul in them and they recognize me as their creator, and the ones I hand built have more of my soul in them than ones I did not hand make, so they work even better.
Apparently this is a good thing, as it will prevent minor demons from possessing my stuff, even if the bigger ones can still brute force it, apparently I have had the whole soul link thing going the whole time, It's why I know where everything in the factory is and what it all does, The special node in my brain just translates it, it doesn't receive the information.
So yeah, that's a thing, and once again not really a problem and basically exclusively a boon, so yay.
The space battle is still winding down, and it's mostly just cleaning up smaller ships and ork fighters rather than any of the bigger ships, also making sure none of the bigger ships crash onto Nauvis, and production of my space infrastructure is basically fully resumed.
Building some bigger ships is definitely a longer term goal though, my 18 corvettes took days to wipe out that force and it'll be a while longer before I can be sure there aren't any orks hiding around the system. For scraps of metal they are oddly good at hiding.
Log #154
The Battle for the ork ship was a success, and Palisade managed to pull out what looked like the orks ftl drive before rigging the whole ship to detonate and leaving, he got through the whole thing without a single scratch to his new armor and besides needing more ammunition and having broken a fair few of my drones we didn't need to use many resources on the ship front.
The defense against the bugs was an entirely different story, a fair portion of the drone forces were broken before Palisade had finished with the ship and we even lost a fair few vehicles, but Balistraria held back the bug attack long enough for Palisade to get out with the drive so the losses were worth it. It's not like it'll take me more than a day for me to replace all the drones, in fact I had more built over the course of the battle than I lost.
The work on the powerplant is still ongoing, but it doesn't look like anything is going to go wrong on that front, the pipes and reactor shielding are all already up, it's just the actual reactor part that needs to be built.
The expansion of my production facilities is still increasing at an exponential rate, the only places I'm not expanding are the ones near the bugs hives, which while widespread don't actually cover the whole planet, specifically none are within artillery range of any of my outposts, not because I shoot them when they show up either, the bugs just know how far my artillery can't fire.
The packs of bugs still roam within that distance but it does leave me a fair bit of room to expand all my bases now, and the more I expand the more I build, I have even started building facilities dedicated to space infrastructure on the ground, building orbital platforms in pieces that should be able to be shipped into orbit on the elevators, plus a stockpile of space faring drones.
I'm planning to build enough to run the elevator constantly for a few days before cutting back to just a few daily shipments, Basically just enough to fill all the cargo room I built for the elevator before I turn the assembly lines to building terrestrial drones and mining equipment.
There are a few ork outpost still on the surface and the mining ships have found a few more in the asteroid field, If you can call a ship wedged into an asteroid an outpost, so that front will be open for awhile, the bugs have the terrestrial front largely handled, but the space front will be a dedicated effort, it looked like the orks were using the asteroids to repair their ships.
I got up to 25 corvettes before calling that good enough and I started focusing the orbital infrastructure entirely on building more orbital infrastructure, the asteroid belt is rich enough in most resources that I should be able to mine it for the next few dozen years, so building an entire planets worth of space stations should be a matter of time and not supplies.
The minefield Bulwark asked for Is still being built though, even if its slower than the mind would like, but these mines aren't just stagnant things, they have magnets and they can in fact move to intercept ships, so the entire orbit doesn't need to be covered, and a minefield wouldn't stop anyone with both guns and brains, considering you can't hide mines in space without stealth tech.
So my orbital production capacity is set to double with a week, especially now that I already have enough mining drones up there to feed the factories, and I should have 4 times my current production capacity within a month, though there Is a limit to how much I can sustainably produce and maintain, not to mention needing the minds to run all that, the delays in communication and capacity means that I can only really sustain ten times my current capacity before efficiency starts to take a hit, and while automated systems could run throughout the system sans direct control, that seems like a poor idea.
So building a larger station in orbit to handle communication and processing capacity is a must, and once I have doubled my capacity I will have the minds start building the massive station, massive in comparison to anything else I have in space at least, a few of those ork ships will be comparable in size, if not in armament or durability.
And because Palisade wants me to a little bit of the station will be human inhabitable, with a few workshops and bedrooms and a few well armored entrance points, naturally this will be in the exact center of the station, and have its own, technically separate, life support and shielding system, and a hydroponics bay to provide food if the station gets cut off, along with highly armed and armored escape pods that can survive reentry and serve as bunkers after the crash.
The things will crash into the earth, partially bury themselves and deploy turrets to shoot anything near them, just in case the thrusters break or there isn't anywhere safe to land. As long as the things dont land in the ocean they should remain intact through most attacks, and kill anything actually attacking them.
I am installing 4 of them on the station., each with enough food and water to last around a month, and enough ammunition to last around an hour of fighting, we burn through ammo quickly here.
I did talk to the tree lady again, though she didn't actually have much to say, just spent around 30 minutes listening to her complain about how her children were incapable of making a single decent decision and couldn't be left to do a single thing on their own, and apparently most of them could barely hear her or they were ignoring her, she's assuming its the dark gods keeping most of her messages from reaching them though.
I can't say I'm an expert in magic though, so I can't confirm or deny her words.
Palisade was the closest thing to excited he'd ever been, his father was finally allowing him to run an actual mission on his own, not just doing clean up after Balistria had finished the main fight, he wasn't even advising Balistraria in the fight like he got to do every so often, he was actually running his own operation, to take an intact ork FTL drive from the center of an ork stronghold, something in him told Palisade that this was what he was meant to do, he felt the call to fight things like this in his very blood, and after being denied the opportunity to truly push his limits in a true battle he was finally getting a chance to prove himself.
It was only a day before the scheduled attack when Palisade felt his father's presence, and he quickly parsed the message he was sent, his father wanted to meet Palisade at his workshop, Palisade did not often find a reason to go to his fathers workshop, they weren't lacking for room so any joint projects the 2 worked on were done in a shared workshop, one of several scattered throughout the world, but he had gone into the makers main workshop before, and he longed to explore through it again, there was a wealth of finished or partial completed designs that Palisade knew he had never seen anywhere else in the factory, and he longed to find out how they worked.
Still he didn't want to search through his fathers workshop without permission, and he never really had the occasion to ask, so getting summoned to go there just a day before his first true test was just making a good day even better.
It was a fairly long journey to the center of the main factory, and numerous sealed bulkheads lined with turrets had to be opened before you could get inside, the bugs may be able to turn invisible but if one starts drilling a hole the halls can just be flooded with burning fuel to solve the problem, Numerous pressure plates could also trigger turrets if they triggered when no one was on them. And while the traps knew not to fire on him, or he just knew where they were to avoid them, the actual running machines were a different story, drones would move out of his way sure, but belts and inserters would keep moving when he walked by, even if the automated systems would stop for the maker or even start again to move him quicker, and while most of the path to the inner workshop was large enough for Palisade's four meter height to walk through without difficulty, the last stretch of path was decidedly more cramped.
So he's journey to the inner workshop wasn't without a few bumps, even if none left a mark on his armor, But Palisade felt he had made decent time to the inner workshop, only taking around half an hour to navigate through all the defenses from where he was working in one of the outer workshops, he had been doing a few last minute checks for his mission, if something was broken he'd want to know while he still had plenty of time to fix it, and getting his personal tank into his own inner workshop was an impossibility, at least if he didn't remove a few walls.
The inner workshop itself was lined with the toughest armor the maker had, and it wasn't really to keep things out per say, more to contain or minimize an explosion in the actual workshop, though the turrets lining the approach were certainly there to keep things out, still Palisade walked past the turrets with nary a glance at them and strode through the bulkhead as it opened for him.
When Palisade walked into the workshop he was greeted by an odd sight, the maker was standing on top of a large drone, one with a flat surface on its casing, and a drone specifically designed to serve as a floating platform, painting what looked like a massive 6 meter suit of armor with a range of black and bright blue, the armor, or more accurately mech, was absolutely covered in what looked like an exotic variety of weapons, and it's back sported 8 massive robotic limbs, each as wide around as Palisades own armored arm, and each limb was tipped with a variety of weapons, from 2 that just had what looked like laser cutters, to another 2 that seemed designed to throw plasma. It looked like a massive version of the makers own suit, if covered in somehow even more weapons, and using what Palisade recognized as sapphires to serve as the armors point defense laser focus, meaning the armor was covered in quite literally glowing gems.
That barely even scratched the surface of what Palisade could see covering the armor, and he hadn't an idea what the internals would look like, but if the armor could actually use all of those weapons it had to be a work of art on the inside as well.
The door to the workshop finished closing around a second after Palisade had walked through the door, and before his father had even finished turning around to look at him Palisade was already halfway across the room towards the armor, still the maker didn't need to turn around to see Palisade and he greeted Palisade before asking what he thought about his new armor, the makers thoughts were tinged with light amusement as Palisade stopped in his tracks to process the sentence.
The 6 meter mech suit wasn't the makers new armor, It was Palisades, with a burst of speed that put even his previous dash to shame, Palisade practically teleported to his armor, all the while sending a barrage of questions as fast as his superhuman mind could think, and asking even more as the maker answered those questions at a speed only slightly slower.
Yes the armor was his, yes it was finished, yes he was going to be using it in the battle, yes it did in fact use a plasma reactor to power itself, and yes that plasma could be vented throughout various pipes to serve as a plasma thrower, yes it did in fact have antigrav installed, no it did not have enough antigrav installed to allow flight, yes it did in fact have the newest generation of shield generators, the barrage of questions while numbering in the hundreds only lasted a few dozen seconds real time as Palisade inspected the armor, the thing was covered in a series of intricate lines of a fairly complex metal alloy, one that enhanced a shields effectiveness by 34 percent, and while his personal armor had those same designs the ones on this armor were even finer, without his enhanced eyesight he wouldn't have been able to see them as anything other than a a thin layer of shiny silver glitter, his next question was about those lines, and apparently rather than his own 34 percent increase these even smaller lines added a 52 percent increase.
It was a work of art, a true engine of war, and it was his, Palisade didn't know how long it would take him to build something comparable but it couldn't have taken his father less than a month to build, and not a month working occasionally but a month with no sleeping or eating to produce. Palisade didn't even know what half the weapons on the thing did, even if the descriptions and names from his father gave him some idea.
His questions were interrupted when his father put down his paint and suggested Palisade don the massive armor so they could take it to a testing range, and as that message finished being sent the armor unfolded, letting Palisade see where he would fit.
The journey to a suitable testing area was shorter than Palisades journey in, both because of the shorter distance and the fact that everything seemed to move out of his fathers way, making it significantly easier for Palisade to make it through the tangled mess that made up the inner factory, and his new armor made his reactions noticeable faster, making the few dodges he needed to make an even simpler affair.
Palisade spent 2 hours trying out his new armor, playing with all the new weapons and features, and fighting against a few heavily shielded training drones, when his father called in a swarm of around 50 drones, Palisade recognized them fairly easily, they were the models that patrolled the inner factory, though he didn't know why his father had called the drones into the room, that only lasted till his father sent him another message, he was to take these drones with him on his mission and since he was already in a testing range the maker had decided it would be a good idea for him to get used to using the drones.
Palisade had no problem with that plan, those drones had some of the most advanced hardware either of them could build, and the only reason he didn't use the same standard of equipment for his own drones was that it was a waste for anything at a decent risk of being destroyed, it was better to save the more advanced models for the truly important areas. In fact if he hadn't felt his fathers certainty that Palisade would be taking ALL the drones in front of him Palisade wouldn't of, he'd just take ten of the things to be the center of his own drone formations, But that wouldn't be allowed and he knew it, if his father was anything he was overzealous in protections.
Palisade only spent a few more hours training before deciding to eat and rest before the battle, he didn't often eat in the hydroponics bay anymore, the tree lady always talked, and while the conversation was nice he could only listen to her complain about her torture happy children before he grew tired of it, so a fair few of his meals were in his bedroom, which while it did still have a few plants was not nearly as relaxing as the hydroponics bay used to be.
Still the meals were constantly improving, and there was even meat besides fish now, presumably from a few animals that got to near the mine fields for their own health, or maybe the minds had hunted it down, he didn't actually know.
It was only a couple of hours after his meal and nap that Palisade needed to start preparing for the battle, which largely just consisted of doing a few final checks on his gear and vehicle, which had only actually needed attention once, but the habit wasn't a bad one, nor was it one he would be allowed to drop even if he wanted to.
So with his equipment fully operational Palisade drove his tank, filled with both him and his force of drones, into a convoy of vehicles heading for the orks stronghold, he would be raiding the ship alone yes, but Balistria would still be securing the perimeter.
The ork fortress was thankful on the same continent as the main base, and only a few hours drive away at that, so Palisade didn't need to board one of the larger flyers to ship his vhechal over the ocean, dangling over that death trap wasn't fun even if the plane had a practically negative chance of actually crashing into the water.
As the vehicle convoy got closer to the orks the signs of their presence grew, pieces of scrap metal and destroyed patches of forest littered the ground, and chunks of both ork and bug could be found scattered about, and farther in the distance Palisade could see a cloud of smog rising from the orks encampment.
As the group got into visual range, an opposing group of orks left their encampment, all in a wide variety of vehicles, ranging from bikes to tanks to heavily armored cars. Still Palisade didn't need to do anything about that as the 3 command tanks in the convoy each fired once, not even a moment later the group of ork vehicles erupted into a massive explosion, the nuclear rounds still served well.
The convoy began to fan out around Palisade as he neared the compound, and it was about time for him to break away from it, as the rest of the convoy would be encircling the ork encampment to both draw attention and prevent escapes, and his own tank soon raced past the slower vehicles making up the rest of the convey, which had all vacated his planned route, allowing him to rapidly approach the ship, he didn't plan to slow down.
The orks did fire on his tank, but his own driving meant none of the shots hit, and even if they had nothing fired at him would have breached his armor, much less his even more armored tank. He fired his cannon at a patch of wall and rammed straight through the small hole he had just blown into it, scattering bits of ork and their smaller variants throughout the encampment; he still didn't slow though.
Activating his tanks' frontal laser cutter he drove straight into the side of the orks ship, quickly melting a hole into one of the many hangers that littered the ship, and one that was currently filled with orks, who were boarding vehicles, presumably to go charge the encirclement.
The tanks myriad of weapons soon made questions of what the orks were doing moot though, as only seconds after Palisade had breached the hanger every ork and vehicle in the bay was destroyed, quickly sending his drones to go guard the hangers entrances, both from and into the ship, Palisade drove his tank into the middle of the hanger, then had it go into fortress mode, which devoted power from movement and navigational systems to its shield and weapons while also driving anchors into the metal of the hanger, before exiting the tank.
It was time to actually board the ship proper, and while his tank could probably cut its way to the ftl drive, doing that would probably cause some ork engineering thing to detonate the ship, probably because a laser into the ships fuel lines would be bad for it.
As Palisade strode towards the nearest door deeper into the ship he sent his drones into it, and while it was sealed shut, the drones had no trouble cutting through the metal, and he directed his new drones into cutting the orks inside into little pieces.
By the time Palisade actually made it to the hallway every ork in it was dead, and the drones were a door ahead of him, while he did move faster than the drones it just didn't take long for the drones to clear out a hallway, especially on without any cover for the orks to hide behind, so while he could charge in ahead of his drones he didn't need to.
A few orks came out of side passages while he passed, but the both his and his armors senses had seen them through the walls, and the drones he had guarding his flanks handled them before they could do anything, he was quite literally just jogging through the ork ship, and hadn't actually seen a living ork yet.
He was just beginning to think he had over estimated the things when a group of larger orks charged his flank, ignored his drones weapon fire even as it carved chunks out of them, and then crushed the few drones that didn't manage to get out of the surprisingly fast creature's way.
Palisade, not wanting to destroy the drones in the room by just launching a grenade into it, used his armors railgun to shoot 2 of the orks in the head with the same round, which proceeded to bore through 6 floors and out the haul, leaving a trail of melting metal and ork in it wake.
Palisade made a note that the railgun should be used more sparingly before reaching through the new hole and crushing one of the orks with his fist; the last ork fell to one of the drones as it held still, seemingly in shock.
As Palisade resumed his jog he made another note, the moment he thought the orks were not a threat a group of more capable orks showed up, and he filed it in the same folder his father used for "things that prove reality exists solely to spite me", that folder was getting alarmingly large.
It was as Palisade reached his fifth minute of exploring the ship that he noted a problem, he didn't actually know where the orks ftl drive was, he assumed it would be in the center of the ship, near the bridge, to keep the whole thing safe. But the ship didn't seem to have any maps, or even any signs labeling anything, and while he entertained the idea of capturing an ork to ask, he didn't speak ork, or really care to do that in the first place.
The ship was only so big, and if he followed the pipes he would probably find the engineering section eventually.
This proved to be an excessively optimistic outlook after the 2nd hour of searching, and the entire time more orks kept throwing themselves at his drones, he was even needing to use his armors weapons more often as the bigger ones kept coming, they even came more often the deeper he went, which was probably a good sign.
The only true snags besides the search time had been when the orks would detonate or collapse part of the ship on him and his drones, but his armor had enough lasers to melt his way out, and most of the intact drones could do the same.
It was near the end of his second hour of searching that he found the engineering bay, full of orks who had more metal bits than the other variants, these ones did fairly better against his drones than their less metallic allies, and Palisade actually started leading the charge, melting any of the things before they could cause to much annoyance.
It wasn't hard to actually find the FTL drive once he was in the engineering bay either, it was literally just in the center of the bay, wired into dozens of power cables and seemingly held in place by welded bits of scrap metal, still it was what he had boarded the ship for, and he set his construction drones to cutting the thing out.
While his combat drones hunted down any hiding ork variants, and his construction ones pulled out the drive, Palisade set to his secondary objective, blowing up the ork stronghold, and considering he was in the middle of the places engineering bay that would not be a difficult task.
Taking only a few minutes to find the most explosive looking section, a sparking bit near both a reactor and a fuel tank, Palisade set down his high yield nuclear bomb, when this thing went off the only thing left of the orks ship would be a few bits of scrap metal scattered around a fair few kilometers.
By the time Palisade returned to his construction drones they already had the drive extracted, so Palisade strapped the thing to his back and started jogging out, the trip out would be significantly quicker.
A combination of the fact that the majority of orks in his section of the ship were dead, and the fact that he now knew where he was going and wasn't even following most of the hallways, melting a shortcut is much safer to do when you already have the things you want out of the ship, meant that it was less than 10 minutes before Palisade had everything loaded into his tank and had melted a new hole out of the ships hanger.
He spared a glance for the encirclement, which was being attacked on both fronts, by a massive 40 meter bug on one side, and by a small army of ramshackle vehicles on the other, before he began driving for the less contested half of the encirclement.
He watched through his tanks rear sensors as the massive bug was swarmed by thousands of drones, before it released a massive burst of electricity, dropping half of the drones attacking it before it reached out with a claw to bat four tanks into the air, before a large explosion knocked the bug on its side, where it crushed a fair few of its smaller brethren.
In comparison the orks were largely being ignored, with only a few hundred drones being sent to deal with them, and while that fight didn't look close to ending it wasn't really his problem, Balistraria could handle it on her own just fine.
As he left the encirclement a few of Balistraias faster tanks peeled off to join him, if anything large attacked they would distract it while he ran, not his favorite plan but those larger bugs didn't seem to know when or how to die.
Palisade had made the journey home safely, before depositing the drive in his workshop before heading to his room to eat another meal, he had been out of the base for seven hours and it was roughly dinner time.
A few hours after his meal Palisade managed to open the ftl drives casing, inside was what looked like a collection of slagged circuitry, nothing like what the orks typically called circuitry, which made sense because the ftl drive did not look ork made, and what looked like tape and fuel filling the rest of the casing.
The tool Palisade was holding bent in half under his grip.
AN-
yes I could take a break, but I could also post this, the usual after chapter jokes will be written tommorow after I have most my brain back.
there are no red lines under what I wrote so it good, leave review
The battle for the orks ship is progressing fine, and Palisade is already inside the ship, fighting hall to hall and just kinda melting or ripping any orks he meets in half. So that front seems to be holding fine.
It only took the kid a few minutes to get used to the enhanced strength and reflexes his new armor provides, and it wasn't an hour before he learned how to use all the new and exotic weapons the armor comes with, he seems to be developing an unhealthy obsession with the plasma based rail gun. He is still having a little trouble with the newer drones, but that's mainly because none of them are standardized and all have a different speed and armament.
The kid went through the orks perimeter like it wasn't even there, and he just melted a hole into the ship rather than taking one of the main entrances, it was like an unstoppable object meeting a tinfoil wall.
So now rather than fighting outside where the orks can use their superior numbers against him he is just slowly picking them off while crawling through the tunnels of the ship, and he's making excellent time, which is good as a massive bug force is heading towards the ship, though whether it's for him or the orks is up for debate, and it might just be for both of them.
Balistria was already maintaining a perimeter around the ship to keep the orks from escaping through, so keeping the bugs off the ship till we can steal the useful bits shouldn't be that hard, it will just be expensive, seriously massive disposable drone swarms, great for fights, awful for supply management.
But that whole fight is largely running without my involvement, I have been working on the space elevators with Labyrinthine, or at least getting the foundations of them up and running, we have some anti gravity tech, it's how the bigger drones stay up, but it stops being practical to have it on anything that needs to indefinitely power itself, like anything that uses an engine, it takes 1 pound of engine to get .8 pounds of antigrav, and that's the best ratio for an engine at 600 total pounds, correction, best cost effective engine, I could make an entirely antigrav helicopter or ship, it's just cheaper to use conventional thrust.
That engine weight thing stops being a problem if the engine isnt being lifted though, and since the space elevators touch the ground I can just have a massive terrestrial powerplant to run the antigrav, which coupled with the shields, should prevent the massive towers from ripping themselves in half. Theoretically.
So building massive nuclear reactors, and the facilities to process the fuel for them, it's not really hard to do at this point, and most of my important bases actually have larger ones, but it is enough of a project that I'm helping personally to get it done quicker.
I did find the time to talk to the tree lady before I left though, turns out the galaxy is in a bad shape, and she is still trying to organize her people into anything resembling a cohesive force, and is having significant trouble with that, or at least that's what I understood of the angry rant I got when I walked into the bay, it wasn't directed at me or anything, it was just angry venting.
Still she did give me an answer on the whole "machines you touch do better", apparently machines are alive in this dimension and they like attention, so if you give them attention they work better, and they work significantly better when I do it because they have bits of my soul in them and they recognize me as their creator, and the ones I hand built have more of my soul in them than ones I did not hand make, so they work even better.
Apparently this is a good thing, as it will prevent minor demons from possessing my stuff, even if the bigger ones can still brute force it, apparently I have had the whole soul link thing going the whole time, It's why I know where everything in the factory is and what it all does, The special node in my brain just translates it, it doesn't receive the information.
So yeah, that's a thing, and once again not really a problem and basically exclusively a boon, so yay.
The space battle is still winding down, and it's mostly just cleaning up smaller ships and ork fighters rather than any of the bigger ships, also making sure none of the bigger ships crash onto Nauvis, and production of my space infrastructure is basically fully resumed.
Building some bigger ships is definitely a longer term goal though, my 18 corvettes took days to wipe out that force and it'll be a while longer before I can be sure there aren't any orks hiding around the system. For scraps of metal they are oddly good at hiding.
Log #154
The Battle for the ork ship was a success, and Palisade managed to pull out what looked like the orks ftl drive before rigging the whole ship to detonate and leaving, he got through the whole thing without a single scratch to his new armor and besides needing more ammunition and having broken a fair few of my drones we didn't need to use many resources on the ship front.
The defense against the bugs was an entirely different story, a fair portion of the drone forces were broken before Palisade had finished with the ship and we even lost a fair few vehicles, but Balistraria held back the bug attack long enough for Palisade to get out with the drive so the losses were worth it. It's not like it'll take me more than a day for me to replace all the drones, in fact I had more built over the course of the battle than I lost.
The work on the powerplant is still ongoing, but it doesn't look like anything is going to go wrong on that front, the pipes and reactor shielding are all already up, it's just the actual reactor part that needs to be built.
The expansion of my production facilities is still increasing at an exponential rate, the only places I'm not expanding are the ones near the bugs hives, which while widespread don't actually cover the whole planet, specifically none are within artillery range of any of my outposts, not because I shoot them when they show up either, the bugs just know how far my artillery can't fire.
The packs of bugs still roam within that distance but it does leave me a fair bit of room to expand all my bases now, and the more I expand the more I build, I have even started building facilities dedicated to space infrastructure on the ground, building orbital platforms in pieces that should be able to be shipped into orbit on the elevators, plus a stockpile of space faring drones.
I'm planning to build enough to run the elevator constantly for a few days before cutting back to just a few daily shipments, Basically just enough to fill all the cargo room I built for the elevator before I turn the assembly lines to building terrestrial drones and mining equipment.
There are a few ork outpost still on the surface and the mining ships have found a few more in the asteroid field, If you can call a ship wedged into an asteroid an outpost, so that front will be open for awhile, the bugs have the terrestrial front largely handled, but the space front will be a dedicated effort, it looked like the orks were using the asteroids to repair their ships.
I got up to 25 corvettes before calling that good enough and I started focusing the orbital infrastructure entirely on building more orbital infrastructure, the asteroid belt is rich enough in most resources that I should be able to mine it for the next few dozen years, so building an entire planets worth of space stations should be a matter of time and not supplies.
The minefield Bulwark asked for Is still being built though, even if its slower than the mind would like, but these mines aren't just stagnant things, they have magnets and they can in fact move to intercept ships, so the entire orbit doesn't need to be covered, and a minefield wouldn't stop anyone with both guns and brains, considering you can't hide mines in space without stealth tech.
So my orbital production capacity is set to double with a week, especially now that I already have enough mining drones up there to feed the factories, and I should have 4 times my current production capacity within a month, though there Is a limit to how much I can sustainably produce and maintain, not to mention needing the minds to run all that, the delays in communication and capacity means that I can only really sustain ten times my current capacity before efficiency starts to take a hit, and while automated systems could run throughout the system sans direct control, that seems like a poor idea.
So building a larger station in orbit to handle communication and processing capacity is a must, and once I have doubled my capacity I will have the minds start building the massive station, massive in comparison to anything else I have in space at least, a few of those ork ships will be comparable in size, if not in armament or durability.
And because Palisade wants me to a little bit of the station will be human inhabitable, with a few workshops and bedrooms and a few well armored entrance points, naturally this will be in the exact center of the station, and have its own, technically separate, life support and shielding system, and a hydroponics bay to provide food if the station gets cut off, along with highly armed and armored escape pods that can survive reentry and serve as bunkers after the crash.
The things will crash into the earth, partially bury themselves and deploy turrets to shoot anything near them, just in case the thrusters break or there isn't anywhere safe to land. As long as the things dont land in the ocean they should remain intact through most attacks, and kill anything actually attacking them.
I am installing 4 of them on the station., each with enough food and water to last around a month, and enough ammunition to last around an hour of fighting, we burn through ammo quickly here.
I did talk to the tree lady again, though she didn't actually have much to say, just spent around 30 minutes listening to her complain about how her children were incapable of making a single decent decision and couldn't be left to do a single thing on their own, and apparently most of them could barely hear her or they were ignoring her, she's assuming its the dark gods keeping most of her messages from reaching them though.
I can't say I'm an expert in magic though, so I can't confirm or deny her words.
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Palisade was the closest thing to excited he'd ever been, his father was finally allowing him to run an actual mission on his own, not just doing clean up after Balistria had finished the main fight, he wasn't even advising Balistraria in the fight like he got to do every so often, he was actually running his own operation, to take an intact ork FTL drive from the center of an ork stronghold, something in him told Palisade that this was what he was meant to do, he felt the call to fight things like this in his very blood, and after being denied the opportunity to truly push his limits in a true battle he was finally getting a chance to prove himself.
It was only a day before the scheduled attack when Palisade felt his father's presence, and he quickly parsed the message he was sent, his father wanted to meet Palisade at his workshop, Palisade did not often find a reason to go to his fathers workshop, they weren't lacking for room so any joint projects the 2 worked on were done in a shared workshop, one of several scattered throughout the world, but he had gone into the makers main workshop before, and he longed to explore through it again, there was a wealth of finished or partial completed designs that Palisade knew he had never seen anywhere else in the factory, and he longed to find out how they worked.
Still he didn't want to search through his fathers workshop without permission, and he never really had the occasion to ask, so getting summoned to go there just a day before his first true test was just making a good day even better.
It was a fairly long journey to the center of the main factory, and numerous sealed bulkheads lined with turrets had to be opened before you could get inside, the bugs may be able to turn invisible but if one starts drilling a hole the halls can just be flooded with burning fuel to solve the problem, Numerous pressure plates could also trigger turrets if they triggered when no one was on them. And while the traps knew not to fire on him, or he just knew where they were to avoid them, the actual running machines were a different story, drones would move out of his way sure, but belts and inserters would keep moving when he walked by, even if the automated systems would stop for the maker or even start again to move him quicker, and while most of the path to the inner workshop was large enough for Palisade's four meter height to walk through without difficulty, the last stretch of path was decidedly more cramped.
So he's journey to the inner workshop wasn't without a few bumps, even if none left a mark on his armor, But Palisade felt he had made decent time to the inner workshop, only taking around half an hour to navigate through all the defenses from where he was working in one of the outer workshops, he had been doing a few last minute checks for his mission, if something was broken he'd want to know while he still had plenty of time to fix it, and getting his personal tank into his own inner workshop was an impossibility, at least if he didn't remove a few walls.
The inner workshop itself was lined with the toughest armor the maker had, and it wasn't really to keep things out per say, more to contain or minimize an explosion in the actual workshop, though the turrets lining the approach were certainly there to keep things out, still Palisade walked past the turrets with nary a glance at them and strode through the bulkhead as it opened for him.
When Palisade walked into the workshop he was greeted by an odd sight, the maker was standing on top of a large drone, one with a flat surface on its casing, and a drone specifically designed to serve as a floating platform, painting what looked like a massive 6 meter suit of armor with a range of black and bright blue, the armor, or more accurately mech, was absolutely covered in what looked like an exotic variety of weapons, and it's back sported 8 massive robotic limbs, each as wide around as Palisades own armored arm, and each limb was tipped with a variety of weapons, from 2 that just had what looked like laser cutters, to another 2 that seemed designed to throw plasma. It looked like a massive version of the makers own suit, if covered in somehow even more weapons, and using what Palisade recognized as sapphires to serve as the armors point defense laser focus, meaning the armor was covered in quite literally glowing gems.
That barely even scratched the surface of what Palisade could see covering the armor, and he hadn't an idea what the internals would look like, but if the armor could actually use all of those weapons it had to be a work of art on the inside as well.
The door to the workshop finished closing around a second after Palisade had walked through the door, and before his father had even finished turning around to look at him Palisade was already halfway across the room towards the armor, still the maker didn't need to turn around to see Palisade and he greeted Palisade before asking what he thought about his new armor, the makers thoughts were tinged with light amusement as Palisade stopped in his tracks to process the sentence.
The 6 meter mech suit wasn't the makers new armor, It was Palisades, with a burst of speed that put even his previous dash to shame, Palisade practically teleported to his armor, all the while sending a barrage of questions as fast as his superhuman mind could think, and asking even more as the maker answered those questions at a speed only slightly slower.
Yes the armor was his, yes it was finished, yes he was going to be using it in the battle, yes it did in fact use a plasma reactor to power itself, and yes that plasma could be vented throughout various pipes to serve as a plasma thrower, yes it did in fact have antigrav installed, no it did not have enough antigrav installed to allow flight, yes it did in fact have the newest generation of shield generators, the barrage of questions while numbering in the hundreds only lasted a few dozen seconds real time as Palisade inspected the armor, the thing was covered in a series of intricate lines of a fairly complex metal alloy, one that enhanced a shields effectiveness by 34 percent, and while his personal armor had those same designs the ones on this armor were even finer, without his enhanced eyesight he wouldn't have been able to see them as anything other than a a thin layer of shiny silver glitter, his next question was about those lines, and apparently rather than his own 34 percent increase these even smaller lines added a 52 percent increase.
It was a work of art, a true engine of war, and it was his, Palisade didn't know how long it would take him to build something comparable but it couldn't have taken his father less than a month to build, and not a month working occasionally but a month with no sleeping or eating to produce. Palisade didn't even know what half the weapons on the thing did, even if the descriptions and names from his father gave him some idea.
His questions were interrupted when his father put down his paint and suggested Palisade don the massive armor so they could take it to a testing range, and as that message finished being sent the armor unfolded, letting Palisade see where he would fit.
The journey to a suitable testing area was shorter than Palisades journey in, both because of the shorter distance and the fact that everything seemed to move out of his fathers way, making it significantly easier for Palisade to make it through the tangled mess that made up the inner factory, and his new armor made his reactions noticeable faster, making the few dodges he needed to make an even simpler affair.
Palisade spent 2 hours trying out his new armor, playing with all the new weapons and features, and fighting against a few heavily shielded training drones, when his father called in a swarm of around 50 drones, Palisade recognized them fairly easily, they were the models that patrolled the inner factory, though he didn't know why his father had called the drones into the room, that only lasted till his father sent him another message, he was to take these drones with him on his mission and since he was already in a testing range the maker had decided it would be a good idea for him to get used to using the drones.
Palisade had no problem with that plan, those drones had some of the most advanced hardware either of them could build, and the only reason he didn't use the same standard of equipment for his own drones was that it was a waste for anything at a decent risk of being destroyed, it was better to save the more advanced models for the truly important areas. In fact if he hadn't felt his fathers certainty that Palisade would be taking ALL the drones in front of him Palisade wouldn't of, he'd just take ten of the things to be the center of his own drone formations, But that wouldn't be allowed and he knew it, if his father was anything he was overzealous in protections.
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Palisade only spent a few more hours training before deciding to eat and rest before the battle, he didn't often eat in the hydroponics bay anymore, the tree lady always talked, and while the conversation was nice he could only listen to her complain about her torture happy children before he grew tired of it, so a fair few of his meals were in his bedroom, which while it did still have a few plants was not nearly as relaxing as the hydroponics bay used to be.
Still the meals were constantly improving, and there was even meat besides fish now, presumably from a few animals that got to near the mine fields for their own health, or maybe the minds had hunted it down, he didn't actually know.
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It was only a couple of hours after his meal and nap that Palisade needed to start preparing for the battle, which largely just consisted of doing a few final checks on his gear and vehicle, which had only actually needed attention once, but the habit wasn't a bad one, nor was it one he would be allowed to drop even if he wanted to.
So with his equipment fully operational Palisade drove his tank, filled with both him and his force of drones, into a convoy of vehicles heading for the orks stronghold, he would be raiding the ship alone yes, but Balistria would still be securing the perimeter.
The ork fortress was thankful on the same continent as the main base, and only a few hours drive away at that, so Palisade didn't need to board one of the larger flyers to ship his vhechal over the ocean, dangling over that death trap wasn't fun even if the plane had a practically negative chance of actually crashing into the water.
As the vehicle convoy got closer to the orks the signs of their presence grew, pieces of scrap metal and destroyed patches of forest littered the ground, and chunks of both ork and bug could be found scattered about, and farther in the distance Palisade could see a cloud of smog rising from the orks encampment.
As the group got into visual range, an opposing group of orks left their encampment, all in a wide variety of vehicles, ranging from bikes to tanks to heavily armored cars. Still Palisade didn't need to do anything about that as the 3 command tanks in the convoy each fired once, not even a moment later the group of ork vehicles erupted into a massive explosion, the nuclear rounds still served well.
The convoy began to fan out around Palisade as he neared the compound, and it was about time for him to break away from it, as the rest of the convoy would be encircling the ork encampment to both draw attention and prevent escapes, and his own tank soon raced past the slower vehicles making up the rest of the convey, which had all vacated his planned route, allowing him to rapidly approach the ship, he didn't plan to slow down.
The orks did fire on his tank, but his own driving meant none of the shots hit, and even if they had nothing fired at him would have breached his armor, much less his even more armored tank. He fired his cannon at a patch of wall and rammed straight through the small hole he had just blown into it, scattering bits of ork and their smaller variants throughout the encampment; he still didn't slow though.
Activating his tanks' frontal laser cutter he drove straight into the side of the orks ship, quickly melting a hole into one of the many hangers that littered the ship, and one that was currently filled with orks, who were boarding vehicles, presumably to go charge the encirclement.
The tanks myriad of weapons soon made questions of what the orks were doing moot though, as only seconds after Palisade had breached the hanger every ork and vehicle in the bay was destroyed, quickly sending his drones to go guard the hangers entrances, both from and into the ship, Palisade drove his tank into the middle of the hanger, then had it go into fortress mode, which devoted power from movement and navigational systems to its shield and weapons while also driving anchors into the metal of the hanger, before exiting the tank.
It was time to actually board the ship proper, and while his tank could probably cut its way to the ftl drive, doing that would probably cause some ork engineering thing to detonate the ship, probably because a laser into the ships fuel lines would be bad for it.
As Palisade strode towards the nearest door deeper into the ship he sent his drones into it, and while it was sealed shut, the drones had no trouble cutting through the metal, and he directed his new drones into cutting the orks inside into little pieces.
By the time Palisade actually made it to the hallway every ork in it was dead, and the drones were a door ahead of him, while he did move faster than the drones it just didn't take long for the drones to clear out a hallway, especially on without any cover for the orks to hide behind, so while he could charge in ahead of his drones he didn't need to.
A few orks came out of side passages while he passed, but the both his and his armors senses had seen them through the walls, and the drones he had guarding his flanks handled them before they could do anything, he was quite literally just jogging through the ork ship, and hadn't actually seen a living ork yet.
He was just beginning to think he had over estimated the things when a group of larger orks charged his flank, ignored his drones weapon fire even as it carved chunks out of them, and then crushed the few drones that didn't manage to get out of the surprisingly fast creature's way.
Palisade, not wanting to destroy the drones in the room by just launching a grenade into it, used his armors railgun to shoot 2 of the orks in the head with the same round, which proceeded to bore through 6 floors and out the haul, leaving a trail of melting metal and ork in it wake.
Palisade made a note that the railgun should be used more sparingly before reaching through the new hole and crushing one of the orks with his fist; the last ork fell to one of the drones as it held still, seemingly in shock.
As Palisade resumed his jog he made another note, the moment he thought the orks were not a threat a group of more capable orks showed up, and he filed it in the same folder his father used for "things that prove reality exists solely to spite me", that folder was getting alarmingly large.
It was as Palisade reached his fifth minute of exploring the ship that he noted a problem, he didn't actually know where the orks ftl drive was, he assumed it would be in the center of the ship, near the bridge, to keep the whole thing safe. But the ship didn't seem to have any maps, or even any signs labeling anything, and while he entertained the idea of capturing an ork to ask, he didn't speak ork, or really care to do that in the first place.
The ship was only so big, and if he followed the pipes he would probably find the engineering section eventually.
This proved to be an excessively optimistic outlook after the 2nd hour of searching, and the entire time more orks kept throwing themselves at his drones, he was even needing to use his armors weapons more often as the bigger ones kept coming, they even came more often the deeper he went, which was probably a good sign.
The only true snags besides the search time had been when the orks would detonate or collapse part of the ship on him and his drones, but his armor had enough lasers to melt his way out, and most of the intact drones could do the same.
It was near the end of his second hour of searching that he found the engineering bay, full of orks who had more metal bits than the other variants, these ones did fairly better against his drones than their less metallic allies, and Palisade actually started leading the charge, melting any of the things before they could cause to much annoyance.
It wasn't hard to actually find the FTL drive once he was in the engineering bay either, it was literally just in the center of the bay, wired into dozens of power cables and seemingly held in place by welded bits of scrap metal, still it was what he had boarded the ship for, and he set his construction drones to cutting the thing out.
While his combat drones hunted down any hiding ork variants, and his construction ones pulled out the drive, Palisade set to his secondary objective, blowing up the ork stronghold, and considering he was in the middle of the places engineering bay that would not be a difficult task.
Taking only a few minutes to find the most explosive looking section, a sparking bit near both a reactor and a fuel tank, Palisade set down his high yield nuclear bomb, when this thing went off the only thing left of the orks ship would be a few bits of scrap metal scattered around a fair few kilometers.
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By the time Palisade returned to his construction drones they already had the drive extracted, so Palisade strapped the thing to his back and started jogging out, the trip out would be significantly quicker.
A combination of the fact that the majority of orks in his section of the ship were dead, and the fact that he now knew where he was going and wasn't even following most of the hallways, melting a shortcut is much safer to do when you already have the things you want out of the ship, meant that it was less than 10 minutes before Palisade had everything loaded into his tank and had melted a new hole out of the ships hanger.
He spared a glance for the encirclement, which was being attacked on both fronts, by a massive 40 meter bug on one side, and by a small army of ramshackle vehicles on the other, before he began driving for the less contested half of the encirclement.
He watched through his tanks rear sensors as the massive bug was swarmed by thousands of drones, before it released a massive burst of electricity, dropping half of the drones attacking it before it reached out with a claw to bat four tanks into the air, before a large explosion knocked the bug on its side, where it crushed a fair few of its smaller brethren.
In comparison the orks were largely being ignored, with only a few hundred drones being sent to deal with them, and while that fight didn't look close to ending it wasn't really his problem, Balistraria could handle it on her own just fine.
As he left the encirclement a few of Balistraias faster tanks peeled off to join him, if anything large attacked they would distract it while he ran, not his favorite plan but those larger bugs didn't seem to know when or how to die.
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Palisade had made the journey home safely, before depositing the drive in his workshop before heading to his room to eat another meal, he had been out of the base for seven hours and it was roughly dinner time.
A few hours after his meal Palisade managed to open the ftl drives casing, inside was what looked like a collection of slagged circuitry, nothing like what the orks typically called circuitry, which made sense because the ftl drive did not look ork made, and what looked like tape and fuel filling the rest of the casing.
The tool Palisade was holding bent in half under his grip.
AN-
yes I could take a break, but I could also post this, the usual after chapter jokes will be written tommorow after I have most my brain back.
there are no red lines under what I wrote so it good, leave review
