Faith in Superior Firepower [Planetary Annihilation Multicross SI]
- Thread starter Faith
- Start date
56 - Terraform
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
56 - Terraform
The vortex of cerulean light deposited me in much the same place it had before - a few feet in the air, although this time it was above a metal panel, not a pool of mud.
Which at least confirmed one thing - the Hub Portal drop-off point would be the same every time. Which meant that I wouldn't need to drag myself through waist-deep mud any more.
Good.
The metal panel on which I was standing was the two hundred metre by two hundred metre slab upon which my entire base was built. Well, the part of my base on this planet, anyway. A couple of Generators, some Storage buildings, an Orbital Launcher, an Airfield, a Teleporter and a Dimensional Gate - which was currently offline but, according to its internal systems, would now lead to the FTL-verse if I ever needed to reactivate it. Perfect.
Now… I was left with something of a predicament. I didn't see much reason to do anything more to the planet - the base I already had was more than sufficient for all I should theoretically need it for - that is, catching me before I land in a pool of mud, and allowing quick access to a Dimensional Gate so I can jump right back in.
For everything else, the now entirely-covered moon and the four hundred and twenty five space stations would be more than sufficient. And that wasn't counting the fact that I had another moon to go and assimilate just a couple of hundred thousand kilometres away.
That all said… my hub world was a swamp.
Swamps suck.
Unfortunately, I lacked some high-power terraformers that would allow me to rapidly change the planet's environment with ease.
However, I did know that my main problem was mud, and that mud was mainly caused by water.
Solution? Remove water, planet dries up, problem solved.
I had no idea how I was going to evacuate the majority of the water from the planet - especially since it didn't even have the decency to cluster up in an ocean where I could easily build, say, an enormous teleporter and use it to dump the water into deep space, or a giant superconductor to pump out huge amounts of heat and evaporate all the water.
Actually, I was pretty sure that would just make the water fall back to the planet as rain, but…
Either way, I wasn't going to be getting rid of the water that easily. I was tempted to just turn the planet into a metal planet, but that would have denied the only pre-existing ecosystem in the solar system, and I figured it would be easier to start with one and modify it than to create an entirely new one on a lifeless moon several hundred thousand kilometres distant from the nearest drop of water.
On the other hand, I did have access to an industrial complex big enough to theoretically build entire new planets. Material concerns were kind of irrelevant, at this point.
Speaking of material concerns.
I quickly spun up the Teleporter to the right of my Commander and made my way to the first moon. Which still needed a name. Also, I made a note to replace the entire floor of the swamp base with a teleporter pad, for convenience' sake.
Once I arrived on the moon, I started giving orders. First, to carefully dig really, really deep down and start building a skeletal frame inside the planet, of the same material everything else I had was made of.
Once that was done, my swarm of angry-locust-like Fabricators would hollow out what was left. A layer beneath the surface, perhaps a couple of dozen kilometres thick, would be solid plating. Below that, Phase Shield Generators, of both varieties, enough to cover the entire planet. And below them…
Resource Cores.
Soooooooo many Resource Cores.
I may not have had access to the blueprints of the in-game Metal Planets, but I was certainly able to make my own.
The approximate radius of the moon was one thousand, seven hundred and fourteen kilometres. Take away sixty four kilometres for the solid plating, and that left me with a core of radius one thousand, six hundred and fifty.
I was never particularly good at maths, but I did know the formula for finding the volume of a sphere - four over three, times pi times radius cubed, - and being a super-advanced super computer helped.
That would give me an area full of Resource Cores with a volume of 18,820 kilometres cubed.
It would take, quite literally, hundreds of years to complete - after all, the Fabricators could only build Cores off of existing Cores, or the skeletal frame, and that would limit them to placing a single layer at a time. Each Core would take ten minutes, and as the project wound to a close more and more Fabricators would have to self destruct, to avoid taking up space needed for MORE CORES.
All that was discounting the time it would take to completely hollow out the planet in the first place, which would be, I assumed, not insignificant.
Even so, eventually, the entire fucking moon would be almost ninety percent Resource Cores. And that was well beyond the point where I had any idea what I was going to do with all the resulting resources.
That should deal with any forthcoming material concerns.
Now, back to the stupid swamp.
And this time, I bought ten thousand Air Fabricators with me.
---
The biggest problem with chewing up an entire planet to turn it into a tropical sanctuary is that it takes absolutely ages.
Even with a near-constant stream of Air Fabricators coming from the moon, my units could only cover so much ground at once.
Admittedly, it was a lot of ground, but still.
What they were currently doing involved tearing apart the ground with nanites and getting rid of the water, sending the component atoms off to the resource storage with everything else. I was lowering the altitude of pretty much everything on the planet, to some degree, whilst also digging out a few larger sections - oceans, basically.
It occurred to me that I would probably need to hollow out the other moon for storage, with the rate at which resources would flow in with two seperate planetary bodies undergoing massive brute-force terraforming activities and a huge heap of Resource Cores being constructed, however slowly.
Of course, hollowing out a second moon wouldn't help that much - I'd still be getting even more resources from hollowing the moon, no matter how many I spent building storage chambers.
I'd have to spend it on something else, as well. Hm.
---
For two days, I'd been watching through a hundred thousand eyes as an ever-deepening, ever-widening pit was dug into the planet. Another fifty thousand or so had been flying across the planet, constructing huge wells and pumps, lined with Teleporter Pads. Now, the whole system was starting to bear fruit.
The water in the ground around where I'd been digging had seeped through the rock and soil, beginning very slowly to pool in the bottom of the vast chasm.
The pumps drew in water from across the planet and teleported it over the chasm as well, creating sporadic moments where hundreds of thousands of liters of water would fall from the sky all at once, and then no more for hours whilst the pumps refilled.
Already, the mass alteration to the environment was having some impact - in areas where there were lots of pipes, plant life was beginning to look quite dry. The fact I was taking water directly from their roots with the power of SCIENCE! probably wasn't helping, in that regard, but… well, it was their fault for living in a swamp.
That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
Besides, thanks to the Bright Foundation I had access to hundreds of different samples of plants which I could grow instead. Nice, pretty, colourful plants instead of the horrible browney grey of the existing plants.
And only some of the Bright Foundation plants turned things into zombies!
---
I have come to realise that this terraforming process is going to take a lotlonger than I had originally imagined.
Simple solution - bugger off and do something else whilst I wait.
But I still had that slight problem of a huge influx of resources. Well, it was a problem insofar as as long as my storage was full, my units refused to mine more - which was fair enough, since they had nowhere to put it.
So I needed to spend resources. Which was something I couldn't do elsewhere, at least until I had enough resources to set up a Dimensional Gate - a rather significant investment of time and resources, all things considered, and one that would put a rather notable delay on my terraforming actions.
My metal counter ticked up to 94% full.
And finally, I had a problem that wasn't really a problem. Namely, I didn't like that I'd had to rely pretty much entirely on stealing existing designs to create new units from.
Ideally, I wanted to be fielding my own units, as much as possible. Besides the NeoAvatar, not a single one of my units was an original design - just a rescaled, retrofitted version of something I'd stolen.
And even then, whilst I hadn't directly stolen the NeoAvatar, I had had files on cybernetics, both from the Federation and the Bright Foundation, open whilst designing it. So that didn't really count, either.
Fiddling around with creating new unit designs of my own would probably be a good way of consuming those vast amounts of resources, too.
Not so much at first, during the prototyping stage, but I had lots of units I wanted to build: interceptors, fighters, bombers, dropships, gunships, air cruisers, new corvettes, new frigates, destroyers, battleships, cruisers, dreadnoughts, carriers...
And even bigger things besides. Heh.
Now, for most people, this would be a dilemma. Stay and make sure my rapidly growing economy doesn't hit a wall and grind to a halt, whilst throwing practically infinite resources at whatever development project I feel like going after, or go and romp around the multiverse?
Of course, most people aren't Commanders.
---
My second Osiris body stepped off the fabricator platform with an automated precision, coming to a halt at the base of the ramp and staring straight ahead.
My currently-disabled mental fork was shunted across the network into the new platform, and the Osiris' systems lit up as the AI Core activated, awakening the copy of my mind within.
The second Osiris suddenly shifted, stepping forward and turning to face my own.
"Damn, girl, you look fine," my robo-clone said, in a terrible impersonation of an african american accent.
Had I been in possession of organic eyes, I would have rolled them.
---
I considered it a rather bad thing that I was already growing somewhat accustomed to the swirling vortex of blue light that represented a bridge between two entirely separate and entirely fictional universes. That such a thing could lose its wonder so quickly…
Then again, the stuff on the other side tended to be a lot more… interesting, than the portal itself.
I stepped forth, the field of azure light wrapping around my imposing metal frame. There was a flash of darkness, quickly drowned out by a steady blue glow, and then, for a time that might have been hours or merely seconds, I hung in an empty void.
And then I emerged, with the grace and elegance of an eagle, drowning in cement.
I fell half a dozen metres onto soft, red ground, that gave way beneath my feet.
It wasn't mud, for which I was infinitely thankful. That said, it also wasn't a beach, which made the presence of this particular terrain type rather distressing, by my standards.
I turned my head skyward, attuned my sensors, found that no one was watching, and sighed.
"I don't like sand…"
The vortex of cerulean light deposited me in much the same place it had before - a few feet in the air, although this time it was above a metal panel, not a pool of mud.
Which at least confirmed one thing - the Hub Portal drop-off point would be the same every time. Which meant that I wouldn't need to drag myself through waist-deep mud any more.
Good.
The metal panel on which I was standing was the two hundred metre by two hundred metre slab upon which my entire base was built. Well, the part of my base on this planet, anyway. A couple of Generators, some Storage buildings, an Orbital Launcher, an Airfield, a Teleporter and a Dimensional Gate - which was currently offline but, according to its internal systems, would now lead to the FTL-verse if I ever needed to reactivate it. Perfect.
Now… I was left with something of a predicament. I didn't see much reason to do anything more to the planet - the base I already had was more than sufficient for all I should theoretically need it for - that is, catching me before I land in a pool of mud, and allowing quick access to a Dimensional Gate so I can jump right back in.
For everything else, the now entirely-covered moon and the four hundred and twenty five space stations would be more than sufficient. And that wasn't counting the fact that I had another moon to go and assimilate just a couple of hundred thousand kilometres away.
That all said… my hub world was a swamp.
Swamps suck.
Unfortunately, I lacked some high-power terraformers that would allow me to rapidly change the planet's environment with ease.
However, I did know that my main problem was mud, and that mud was mainly caused by water.
Solution? Remove water, planet dries up, problem solved.
I had no idea how I was going to evacuate the majority of the water from the planet - especially since it didn't even have the decency to cluster up in an ocean where I could easily build, say, an enormous teleporter and use it to dump the water into deep space, or a giant superconductor to pump out huge amounts of heat and evaporate all the water.
Actually, I was pretty sure that would just make the water fall back to the planet as rain, but…
Either way, I wasn't going to be getting rid of the water that easily. I was tempted to just turn the planet into a metal planet, but that would have denied the only pre-existing ecosystem in the solar system, and I figured it would be easier to start with one and modify it than to create an entirely new one on a lifeless moon several hundred thousand kilometres distant from the nearest drop of water.
On the other hand, I did have access to an industrial complex big enough to theoretically build entire new planets. Material concerns were kind of irrelevant, at this point.
Speaking of material concerns.
I quickly spun up the Teleporter to the right of my Commander and made my way to the first moon. Which still needed a name. Also, I made a note to replace the entire floor of the swamp base with a teleporter pad, for convenience' sake.
Once I arrived on the moon, I started giving orders. First, to carefully dig really, really deep down and start building a skeletal frame inside the planet, of the same material everything else I had was made of.
Once that was done, my swarm of angry-locust-like Fabricators would hollow out what was left. A layer beneath the surface, perhaps a couple of dozen kilometres thick, would be solid plating. Below that, Phase Shield Generators, of both varieties, enough to cover the entire planet. And below them…
Resource Cores.
Soooooooo many Resource Cores.
I may not have had access to the blueprints of the in-game Metal Planets, but I was certainly able to make my own.
The approximate radius of the moon was one thousand, seven hundred and fourteen kilometres. Take away sixty four kilometres for the solid plating, and that left me with a core of radius one thousand, six hundred and fifty.
I was never particularly good at maths, but I did know the formula for finding the volume of a sphere - four over three, times pi times radius cubed, - and being a super-advanced super computer helped.
That would give me an area full of Resource Cores with a volume of 18,820 kilometres cubed.
It would take, quite literally, hundreds of years to complete - after all, the Fabricators could only build Cores off of existing Cores, or the skeletal frame, and that would limit them to placing a single layer at a time. Each Core would take ten minutes, and as the project wound to a close more and more Fabricators would have to self destruct, to avoid taking up space needed for MORE CORES.
All that was discounting the time it would take to completely hollow out the planet in the first place, which would be, I assumed, not insignificant.
Even so, eventually, the entire fucking moon would be almost ninety percent Resource Cores. And that was well beyond the point where I had any idea what I was going to do with all the resulting resources.
That should deal with any forthcoming material concerns.
Now, back to the stupid swamp.
And this time, I bought ten thousand Air Fabricators with me.
---
The biggest problem with chewing up an entire planet to turn it into a tropical sanctuary is that it takes absolutely ages.
Even with a near-constant stream of Air Fabricators coming from the moon, my units could only cover so much ground at once.
Admittedly, it was a lot of ground, but still.
What they were currently doing involved tearing apart the ground with nanites and getting rid of the water, sending the component atoms off to the resource storage with everything else. I was lowering the altitude of pretty much everything on the planet, to some degree, whilst also digging out a few larger sections - oceans, basically.
It occurred to me that I would probably need to hollow out the other moon for storage, with the rate at which resources would flow in with two seperate planetary bodies undergoing massive brute-force terraforming activities and a huge heap of Resource Cores being constructed, however slowly.
Of course, hollowing out a second moon wouldn't help that much - I'd still be getting even more resources from hollowing the moon, no matter how many I spent building storage chambers.
I'd have to spend it on something else, as well. Hm.
---
For two days, I'd been watching through a hundred thousand eyes as an ever-deepening, ever-widening pit was dug into the planet. Another fifty thousand or so had been flying across the planet, constructing huge wells and pumps, lined with Teleporter Pads. Now, the whole system was starting to bear fruit.
The water in the ground around where I'd been digging had seeped through the rock and soil, beginning very slowly to pool in the bottom of the vast chasm.
The pumps drew in water from across the planet and teleported it over the chasm as well, creating sporadic moments where hundreds of thousands of liters of water would fall from the sky all at once, and then no more for hours whilst the pumps refilled.
Already, the mass alteration to the environment was having some impact - in areas where there were lots of pipes, plant life was beginning to look quite dry. The fact I was taking water directly from their roots with the power of SCIENCE! probably wasn't helping, in that regard, but… well, it was their fault for living in a swamp.
That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
Besides, thanks to the Bright Foundation I had access to hundreds of different samples of plants which I could grow instead. Nice, pretty, colourful plants instead of the horrible browney grey of the existing plants.
And only some of the Bright Foundation plants turned things into zombies!
---
I have come to realise that this terraforming process is going to take a lotlonger than I had originally imagined.
Simple solution - bugger off and do something else whilst I wait.
But I still had that slight problem of a huge influx of resources. Well, it was a problem insofar as as long as my storage was full, my units refused to mine more - which was fair enough, since they had nowhere to put it.
So I needed to spend resources. Which was something I couldn't do elsewhere, at least until I had enough resources to set up a Dimensional Gate - a rather significant investment of time and resources, all things considered, and one that would put a rather notable delay on my terraforming actions.
My metal counter ticked up to 94% full.
And finally, I had a problem that wasn't really a problem. Namely, I didn't like that I'd had to rely pretty much entirely on stealing existing designs to create new units from.
Ideally, I wanted to be fielding my own units, as much as possible. Besides the NeoAvatar, not a single one of my units was an original design - just a rescaled, retrofitted version of something I'd stolen.
And even then, whilst I hadn't directly stolen the NeoAvatar, I had had files on cybernetics, both from the Federation and the Bright Foundation, open whilst designing it. So that didn't really count, either.
Fiddling around with creating new unit designs of my own would probably be a good way of consuming those vast amounts of resources, too.
Not so much at first, during the prototyping stage, but I had lots of units I wanted to build: interceptors, fighters, bombers, dropships, gunships, air cruisers, new corvettes, new frigates, destroyers, battleships, cruisers, dreadnoughts, carriers...
And even bigger things besides. Heh.
Now, for most people, this would be a dilemma. Stay and make sure my rapidly growing economy doesn't hit a wall and grind to a halt, whilst throwing practically infinite resources at whatever development project I feel like going after, or go and romp around the multiverse?
Of course, most people aren't Commanders.
---
My second Osiris body stepped off the fabricator platform with an automated precision, coming to a halt at the base of the ramp and staring straight ahead.
My currently-disabled mental fork was shunted across the network into the new platform, and the Osiris' systems lit up as the AI Core activated, awakening the copy of my mind within.
The second Osiris suddenly shifted, stepping forward and turning to face my own.
"Damn, girl, you look fine," my robo-clone said, in a terrible impersonation of an african american accent.
Had I been in possession of organic eyes, I would have rolled them.
---
I considered it a rather bad thing that I was already growing somewhat accustomed to the swirling vortex of blue light that represented a bridge between two entirely separate and entirely fictional universes. That such a thing could lose its wonder so quickly…
Then again, the stuff on the other side tended to be a lot more… interesting, than the portal itself.
I stepped forth, the field of azure light wrapping around my imposing metal frame. There was a flash of darkness, quickly drowned out by a steady blue glow, and then, for a time that might have been hours or merely seconds, I hung in an empty void.
And then I emerged, with the grace and elegance of an eagle, drowning in cement.
I fell half a dozen metres onto soft, red ground, that gave way beneath my feet.
It wasn't mud, for which I was infinitely thankful. That said, it also wasn't a beach, which made the presence of this particular terrain type rather distressing, by my standards.
I turned my head skyward, attuned my sensors, found that no one was watching, and sighed.
"I don't like sand…"
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Huh, was it Fusou or Gideon who had to deal with all the water on their hub world? Either way, I take it those mentions of how to deal with an ocean are a reference to that SI?
Also, I'd guess on where Faith is, but really, sand? There's how many places where that exists in works where a Commander can make a difference without it being too much of a curbstomp?
Also, I'd guess on where Faith is, but really, sand? There's how many places where that exists in works where a Commander can make a difference without it being too much of a curbstomp?
It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere?
- Location
- North of England
- Pronouns
- She/They
I would rate this insightful if I wasn't contractually obligated to hug all your posts.
- Location
- oregon
is it stargate abydos
Senpai
(Verified Progenitor)
- Location
- Somewhere in the Multiverse
I believe it was already stated, its Red Faction.
Rossum
Not a Cyberman
- Location
- Earth
You know, considering your hub world is a swamp planet and you want to make your own stuff, your robo-clone could start by cataloging the native species.
Build a few million greenhouses, dig up the plants, and put them in pots. Do the same thing with the native bugs and fish and stuff.
Then, if you need any inspiration for ship designs or color schemes, just look at your collection of organic life and see if you can't incorporate lobster claws or weird flower petals in the design. Or make mobile 'queen' fabricators that spawn more air fabricators like some kind of high-tech queen bee that can follow you through the gates.
At the very least, you could pull a Dr. Eggman and build a whole fleet of ships with an oceanic motif, looking like a huge school of fish or a pod of dolphins sailing through space.
Of course, yours would be based on alien fish from a swamp planet that nobody's heard of. Or butterflies. Butterflies are always good for spreading Doom.
Build a few million greenhouses, dig up the plants, and put them in pots. Do the same thing with the native bugs and fish and stuff.
Then, if you need any inspiration for ship designs or color schemes, just look at your collection of organic life and see if you can't incorporate lobster claws or weird flower petals in the design. Or make mobile 'queen' fabricators that spawn more air fabricators like some kind of high-tech queen bee that can follow you through the gates.
At the very least, you could pull a Dr. Eggman and build a whole fleet of ships with an oceanic motif, looking like a huge school of fish or a pod of dolphins sailing through space.
Of course, yours would be based on alien fish from a swamp planet that nobody's heard of. Or butterflies. Butterflies are always good for spreading Doom.
Last edited:
57 - Mars
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
Get out of my notes, gorramnit.
57 - Mars
The red sand seemed to stretch on for miles in every direction, and the relatively short-range sensors on my Commander chassis weren't picking up anything beyond rocks and dust.
In the absence of anything interesting to capture my attention, I turned my frame to the magnetic north and started walking. Each footstep ended with the tip of the Osiris' leg buried in sand, sprays of red dust accompanying every action.
The flats gave way to hills, which proved no more difficult to climb. As I crested the first large hill - one larger than my body was tall, - I stumbled upon what my sensors were identifying as the first usable Metal Deposit on the planet.
Once I actually reached the top of the hill, though, I saw something interesting.
Beyond the hill was a sprawling settlement - a number of sheds, garages and small buildings in a loose set of rings. The approximate centre of the ill-defined township appeared to be the site of some kind of extractor or mining equipment - a huge pylon with a number of pumps and pistons feeding into a small hole in the ground.
Most notably, not a single one of the buildings were intact. Roofs were torn loose, walls were collapsed, windows shattered across the street. Rubble, debris and vehicle wreckage lined the street, and the entire place was covered in about two feet of sand. It looked like someone had loosed a dozen maniacs with rocket launchers, and then buried the whole place in sand after the fact.
Obviously, there was not a single living thing in range of my sensors. I made my way down the hill into the settlement, looking around for any sign of where I might be. The general architecture seemed somewhat familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. It was all fairly generic sci-fi, anyway, and so honestly not that much help.
"Seems as good a place as any," I vocalised, to no one in particular, before spraying a cloud of nanites at the central mining equipment.
As the tower was rapidly disassembled, I twisted slightly and sent out another burst of nanobots at the nearby ruins of a shed, an Energy Generator literally rising out of the sand in an ominous manner as the nanobots begun their work.
---
It wasn't until I and half a dozen Fabricator Bots had already assimilated a good chunk of the settlement that I hit the metaphorical pay dirt, buried under the literal dirt. Well, sand..
Most of the computer terminals I'd found - or the remains of them, anyway, - had been so badly damaged as to be almost entirely unrecoverable - what little I could retrieve was so damaged, so fragmented, as to be useless, even to the hypertech computers that made up my brain..
This computer, though, seemed in much better shape. For one, it had been hidden underneath the floor for whatever reason, protecting it from the sandstorms that had evidently wrecked this place over the years. Secondly, the building it was hidden in had seemingly been skipped over by whatever force had levelled the majority of this settlement in the first place, keeping it shielded from shrapnel and blast damage.
Long story short, I found a computer that wasn't busted. Once it booted up (and I'd hooked it into my power network so it could continue to operate), I took a look inside.
And boy, what a doozy.
According to my logs, this was a small colony named Hemsville, founded circa 2125, and abandoned later the same year due to the majority of the people present - the families of EDF forces, for the most part, - heading out for more fortified locations in light of what was apparently being referred to as the Second Martian Revolution.
So, Red Faction, then. According to the timestamp on the documents, that was fifty years ago. The Second Martian Revolution, I was fairly certain, referred to the events of Red Faction: Guerilla. Fifty years after that… was that the movie, or Armageddon?
Based on heavily ionized atmosphere, I hazarded a guess that the Martian terraformers weren't currently operating. Which made this… sometime after the first mission of Armageddon. Hopefully, prior to the bit with all the giant, acid spitting bug monsters.
Hopefully.
So, Red Faction for dummies: A bunch of douchebags try to be typical tyrannical douchebags to the Martian people. Cue revolt. I think there was some mad science involved, or something. Unethical experiments and such. Whatever.
Meanwhile, some stuff happens on Earth that leads to another revolt, that names itself after the first because why not. I couldn't remember if there was any direct relation between the two besides the name, but it didn't really matter since that was well in the past.
After a few decades, douchebags return to Mars, in force. Many people die. Cue revolt. Memetic space asshole smashes stuff with a hammer. Many more people die. Some cool weapons are thrown around, like Singularity Bombs and Nanites, but there's not a lot else that's particularly exciting.
I think the movie fell sometime after Guerilla in the timeline, but I wasn't actually entirely sure, having never seen it. It probably had some stupid plot about memetic space asshole's grandson's long lost sister or some shit like that.
Finally, a different group of douchebags come along and blow up the Terraformer, the one thing allowing people to live on the surface of Mars. Everyone runs underground. Memetic space asshole's grandson is tricked into unleashing a bunch of giant acid spitting bugs. Memetic space asshole's grandson kills the bugs. The end.
Kinda generic and boring, when you think about it, but it was hard to care with the promise of so many delicious technologies up for grabs. Red Faction, being a game prized for its awesome destruction engine, had a lot of fun toys for me to steal.
Now I had a rough idea of what I was looking at, I could set some goals.
Number one - kill the Mars bugs. Those guys were assholes. They also had a really silly weakness, but for the life of me, I couldn't remember it. Citric acid? No, that was the Zerg… eh. Whatever.
Number two - steal all the cool toys. Because cool toys.
Number three - fix Mars' atmosphere, since the Terraformer clearly wasn't up to the task.
Now, if only I had some bullshit pseudo-magic atmospheric terraformers…
---
The third objective was far-and-away the easiest of the three to complete - I could do the entire thing without stepping underground once, if I didn't mind waiting ages for my Fabricators to fly around building Cores every half kilometre or so. If I wanted to only fix the atmosphere in the inhabited areas, that would be much faster, but it relied on me knowing where the inhabited areas were and none of them were in my sensor range.
On the other hand, I was fairly certain it wouldn't be entirely necessary. If I could just find the existing Martian terraformer, and fix it (stealing the shiny technology in the process) that would achieve the same result, and probably a fair bit faster to boot.
I constructed and then sent out a group of Fireflies to search for the facility on the surface, followed by a wave of Air Fabricators whose purpose was to spread Metal Extractors and Sensors across the surface. Whilst they did that, I turned my own attention underground.
Assuming this was sometime during Armageddon, but after the terraformer fell, I could have had anywhere between five years and about five seconds before the Plague got out.
Which meant I needed to find those underground settlements, pronto. Unfortunately, I doubted my fifteen metre frame would fit in the tunnels - even the larger tunnels, for vehicles to pass through, would probably be too small for the Osiris.
Fortunately, the EDF who'd abandoned this place had been kind enough to leave some vehicles of their own behind. Damaged, torn up and dilapidated vehicles that were fifty years or so out of date, but vehicles none the less. Thanks to my NeoAvatars, I would be entirely able to operate them, once I repaired or rebuilt them..
It was a fairly simple matter to find some of the less-damaged vehicles and figure out exactly what was supposed to go where - and there were enough samples around for me to cross reference that I didn't have much trouble putting the pieces together.
Once I had the complete, undamaged designs for the boxy jeep-like vehicle, I ordered my Fabricators to start assimilating the wrecks for scrap. The truck in front of me began to glow green as the nanobots tore into its body, ripping it apart at the molecular level.
I opened up my design subroutine and started fiddling.
I know, I said I was going to design my own vehicles more, but that was kind of the point of leaving behind a second instance on my Hub world. And besides, I didn't have any equivalents to infantry APCs in my tech base already, so having something to work off, at least the first time, was helpful.
First off, update the materials. Armour, chassis, axles, everything metal was replaced with Progenitor grade alloys. The engine was harder to replace - the Progenitor vehicles with wheels had separate engines for each wheel, which allowed more power and control at the cost of energy expenditure.
After a few subjective hours of trial and error testing, I managed to rig up one of the Progenitor motors to the axle in a way that caused the car to operate like a normal goddamn car, with only a slight, three hundred and seventeen percent improvement in terms of engine output.
I also replaced the small power cell in the back of the truck with a much smaller, but infinitely more efficient Progenitor equivalent, freeing up a lot of room where the fuel cell once resided. I filled that in with a multitude of sensors - whilst I couldn't fit every kind of sensor I possessed into the truck's boot, it would still probably have a bettor sensor net than pretty much everything else on the planet.
That finally sorted, I moved on to the cabin of the vehicle. Seat fabric, internal computers, lights, air conditioning - all stripped out and replaced.
I mounted a greatly miniaturized Core under the dash, providing an infinite air filter for the vehicle. The unit's AI core occupied the rest of the space under the dash, allowing fully autonomous driving if no one happened to be at the wheel.
Underneath the seats was a small Phase Shield generator - only two layers. I wasn't sure how well an individual layer would hold up against the acid spit and brute force I'd likely be facing, but either way even if they did break through the shields, I had a lot more faith in the Progenitor armour for protection. The shields were pretty much only a curiosity.
Wait, did Red Faction vehicles have shields? Might be something to look into.
Finally, I altered the exterior lines, replacing the sharp, angular look with smooth, arcing curves. The turret on top - a small, rather pathetic light machine gun, - was swapped out for a Progenitor grade laser turret, modified to be capable of firing the same high-intensity infrared beams as the Fire Beam.
Finally, for shits and giggles, I mounted a rocket pod on the back, facing skyward - an artillery option, basically. I was sure at some point, in some universe, I'd find a use for a rocket/mortar system on my… well, it wasn't really an APC, because it only had two seats, but… whatever.
That all done, I disabled the design subroutine and requisite mental overclocking, only a couple of seconds having passed as I worked.
So now I had a way of getting around in the tunnels, I just needed to find them.
Just as I finished thinking it, one of my Fireflies reported a vehicle convoy on the edge of its sensor range - a few trucks and jeeps escorting a pair of large, four legged walkers.
Hm.
The Firefly turned slightly, moving to investigate.
57 - Mars
The red sand seemed to stretch on for miles in every direction, and the relatively short-range sensors on my Commander chassis weren't picking up anything beyond rocks and dust.
In the absence of anything interesting to capture my attention, I turned my frame to the magnetic north and started walking. Each footstep ended with the tip of the Osiris' leg buried in sand, sprays of red dust accompanying every action.
The flats gave way to hills, which proved no more difficult to climb. As I crested the first large hill - one larger than my body was tall, - I stumbled upon what my sensors were identifying as the first usable Metal Deposit on the planet.
Once I actually reached the top of the hill, though, I saw something interesting.
Beyond the hill was a sprawling settlement - a number of sheds, garages and small buildings in a loose set of rings. The approximate centre of the ill-defined township appeared to be the site of some kind of extractor or mining equipment - a huge pylon with a number of pumps and pistons feeding into a small hole in the ground.
Most notably, not a single one of the buildings were intact. Roofs were torn loose, walls were collapsed, windows shattered across the street. Rubble, debris and vehicle wreckage lined the street, and the entire place was covered in about two feet of sand. It looked like someone had loosed a dozen maniacs with rocket launchers, and then buried the whole place in sand after the fact.
Obviously, there was not a single living thing in range of my sensors. I made my way down the hill into the settlement, looking around for any sign of where I might be. The general architecture seemed somewhat familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. It was all fairly generic sci-fi, anyway, and so honestly not that much help.
"Seems as good a place as any," I vocalised, to no one in particular, before spraying a cloud of nanites at the central mining equipment.
As the tower was rapidly disassembled, I twisted slightly and sent out another burst of nanobots at the nearby ruins of a shed, an Energy Generator literally rising out of the sand in an ominous manner as the nanobots begun their work.
---
It wasn't until I and half a dozen Fabricator Bots had already assimilated a good chunk of the settlement that I hit the metaphorical pay dirt, buried under the literal dirt. Well, sand..
Most of the computer terminals I'd found - or the remains of them, anyway, - had been so badly damaged as to be almost entirely unrecoverable - what little I could retrieve was so damaged, so fragmented, as to be useless, even to the hypertech computers that made up my brain..
This computer, though, seemed in much better shape. For one, it had been hidden underneath the floor for whatever reason, protecting it from the sandstorms that had evidently wrecked this place over the years. Secondly, the building it was hidden in had seemingly been skipped over by whatever force had levelled the majority of this settlement in the first place, keeping it shielded from shrapnel and blast damage.
Long story short, I found a computer that wasn't busted. Once it booted up (and I'd hooked it into my power network so it could continue to operate), I took a look inside.
And boy, what a doozy.
According to my logs, this was a small colony named Hemsville, founded circa 2125, and abandoned later the same year due to the majority of the people present - the families of EDF forces, for the most part, - heading out for more fortified locations in light of what was apparently being referred to as the Second Martian Revolution.
So, Red Faction, then. According to the timestamp on the documents, that was fifty years ago. The Second Martian Revolution, I was fairly certain, referred to the events of Red Faction: Guerilla. Fifty years after that… was that the movie, or Armageddon?
Based on heavily ionized atmosphere, I hazarded a guess that the Martian terraformers weren't currently operating. Which made this… sometime after the first mission of Armageddon. Hopefully, prior to the bit with all the giant, acid spitting bug monsters.
Hopefully.
So, Red Faction for dummies: A bunch of douchebags try to be typical tyrannical douchebags to the Martian people. Cue revolt. I think there was some mad science involved, or something. Unethical experiments and such. Whatever.
Meanwhile, some stuff happens on Earth that leads to another revolt, that names itself after the first because why not. I couldn't remember if there was any direct relation between the two besides the name, but it didn't really matter since that was well in the past.
After a few decades, douchebags return to Mars, in force. Many people die. Cue revolt. Memetic space asshole smashes stuff with a hammer. Many more people die. Some cool weapons are thrown around, like Singularity Bombs and Nanites, but there's not a lot else that's particularly exciting.
I think the movie fell sometime after Guerilla in the timeline, but I wasn't actually entirely sure, having never seen it. It probably had some stupid plot about memetic space asshole's grandson's long lost sister or some shit like that.
Finally, a different group of douchebags come along and blow up the Terraformer, the one thing allowing people to live on the surface of Mars. Everyone runs underground. Memetic space asshole's grandson is tricked into unleashing a bunch of giant acid spitting bugs. Memetic space asshole's grandson kills the bugs. The end.
Kinda generic and boring, when you think about it, but it was hard to care with the promise of so many delicious technologies up for grabs. Red Faction, being a game prized for its awesome destruction engine, had a lot of fun toys for me to steal.
Now I had a rough idea of what I was looking at, I could set some goals.
Number one - kill the Mars bugs. Those guys were assholes. They also had a really silly weakness, but for the life of me, I couldn't remember it. Citric acid? No, that was the Zerg… eh. Whatever.
Number two - steal all the cool toys. Because cool toys.
Number three - fix Mars' atmosphere, since the Terraformer clearly wasn't up to the task.
Now, if only I had some bullshit pseudo-magic atmospheric terraformers…
---
The third objective was far-and-away the easiest of the three to complete - I could do the entire thing without stepping underground once, if I didn't mind waiting ages for my Fabricators to fly around building Cores every half kilometre or so. If I wanted to only fix the atmosphere in the inhabited areas, that would be much faster, but it relied on me knowing where the inhabited areas were and none of them were in my sensor range.
On the other hand, I was fairly certain it wouldn't be entirely necessary. If I could just find the existing Martian terraformer, and fix it (stealing the shiny technology in the process) that would achieve the same result, and probably a fair bit faster to boot.
I constructed and then sent out a group of Fireflies to search for the facility on the surface, followed by a wave of Air Fabricators whose purpose was to spread Metal Extractors and Sensors across the surface. Whilst they did that, I turned my own attention underground.
Assuming this was sometime during Armageddon, but after the terraformer fell, I could have had anywhere between five years and about five seconds before the Plague got out.
Which meant I needed to find those underground settlements, pronto. Unfortunately, I doubted my fifteen metre frame would fit in the tunnels - even the larger tunnels, for vehicles to pass through, would probably be too small for the Osiris.
Fortunately, the EDF who'd abandoned this place had been kind enough to leave some vehicles of their own behind. Damaged, torn up and dilapidated vehicles that were fifty years or so out of date, but vehicles none the less. Thanks to my NeoAvatars, I would be entirely able to operate them, once I repaired or rebuilt them..
It was a fairly simple matter to find some of the less-damaged vehicles and figure out exactly what was supposed to go where - and there were enough samples around for me to cross reference that I didn't have much trouble putting the pieces together.
Once I had the complete, undamaged designs for the boxy jeep-like vehicle, I ordered my Fabricators to start assimilating the wrecks for scrap. The truck in front of me began to glow green as the nanobots tore into its body, ripping it apart at the molecular level.
I opened up my design subroutine and started fiddling.
I know, I said I was going to design my own vehicles more, but that was kind of the point of leaving behind a second instance on my Hub world. And besides, I didn't have any equivalents to infantry APCs in my tech base already, so having something to work off, at least the first time, was helpful.
First off, update the materials. Armour, chassis, axles, everything metal was replaced with Progenitor grade alloys. The engine was harder to replace - the Progenitor vehicles with wheels had separate engines for each wheel, which allowed more power and control at the cost of energy expenditure.
After a few subjective hours of trial and error testing, I managed to rig up one of the Progenitor motors to the axle in a way that caused the car to operate like a normal goddamn car, with only a slight, three hundred and seventeen percent improvement in terms of engine output.
I also replaced the small power cell in the back of the truck with a much smaller, but infinitely more efficient Progenitor equivalent, freeing up a lot of room where the fuel cell once resided. I filled that in with a multitude of sensors - whilst I couldn't fit every kind of sensor I possessed into the truck's boot, it would still probably have a bettor sensor net than pretty much everything else on the planet.
That finally sorted, I moved on to the cabin of the vehicle. Seat fabric, internal computers, lights, air conditioning - all stripped out and replaced.
I mounted a greatly miniaturized Core under the dash, providing an infinite air filter for the vehicle. The unit's AI core occupied the rest of the space under the dash, allowing fully autonomous driving if no one happened to be at the wheel.
Underneath the seats was a small Phase Shield generator - only two layers. I wasn't sure how well an individual layer would hold up against the acid spit and brute force I'd likely be facing, but either way even if they did break through the shields, I had a lot more faith in the Progenitor armour for protection. The shields were pretty much only a curiosity.
Wait, did Red Faction vehicles have shields? Might be something to look into.
Finally, I altered the exterior lines, replacing the sharp, angular look with smooth, arcing curves. The turret on top - a small, rather pathetic light machine gun, - was swapped out for a Progenitor grade laser turret, modified to be capable of firing the same high-intensity infrared beams as the Fire Beam.
Finally, for shits and giggles, I mounted a rocket pod on the back, facing skyward - an artillery option, basically. I was sure at some point, in some universe, I'd find a use for a rocket/mortar system on my… well, it wasn't really an APC, because it only had two seats, but… whatever.
That all done, I disabled the design subroutine and requisite mental overclocking, only a couple of seconds having passed as I worked.
So now I had a way of getting around in the tunnels, I just needed to find them.
Just as I finished thinking it, one of my Fireflies reported a vehicle convoy on the edge of its sensor range - a few trucks and jeeps escorting a pair of large, four legged walkers.
Hm.
The Firefly turned slightly, moving to investigate.
Riddle78
Reality nibbler.
- Location
- CFB Middle of Nowhere on the Trans-Can
That armoured car is my waifu. I don't care if it's a car; It's checking all of my boxes for vehicle design. I've never played Armageddon,so this'll be an interesting ride,for me.
Also,we REALLY need to visit Cave Story. Intelligent AI taskmasters that won't go all "CRUSH,KILL,DESTROY,SWAG!" on us are important.
Also,we REALLY need to visit Cave Story. Intelligent AI taskmasters that won't go all "CRUSH,KILL,DESTROY,SWAG!" on us are important.
- Location
- Arizona
I agree and disagree.
Armageddon was actually a fair game, you just can't assume it's a clone of Guerilla's gameplay. It's a decent shooter, if too focused on you against alien bugs.
In terms of story, it was a bit Meh. Nothing too noteworthy about it.
But, and this is especially important in terms of this story, Armageddon has much better tech to acquire than in Guerilla. In Guerrilla, the best thing Faith could have gotten would be rare samples of nano- and singularity- tech. In Armageddon, they aren't common, but they are definitely not as rare as before. Red Faction (the group) Engineer's are implied to each have their own nanoforge, and its accompanying abilities. The marauders have mass-produced nano-rifles, there's plasma type weapons all over the place (Not sure how useful to Faith, but I remember having a fun time with them in the game), and as mentioned, there's a version of shield tech somewhere.
And if Faith is anywhere near Drich's writing capabilies (or asks Drich for help), then Faith could expand the bug aliens from being a nebulous source of nano-tech research, to actually being able to study them and gain benefits.
(To clarify, It is explicitly said that all Nanotechnolgy came from this one dude studying the aliens, which are supposed to somehow incorporate nano-tech and crap into their bodies. It's very unclear...)
[@Faith, I mean no offense to your writing skills, it's just that there's so little plot details on the bug aliens, and Drich has proven she/their skills at expanding little-detail-things into lotsa-detail-things.]
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
Preeeety much this. Guerilla was a lot more fun in terms of being a game that I could sit down and play for days, but in the six or so hours it took me to clear Armageddon and the Path to War DLC (Casual Difficulty, because I'm a scrub) I had an absolute ton of fun playing with some of the more exotic weapons, like the Shard Cannon, the Singularity Cannon, the Napalm Laser, and Best Gun.
Yeah, there's a fair bit of vague crap about the Plague in the game, and a lot of extrapolating and stuff could be done in the name of SCIENCE!!! for fun results. Something I may look into doing, at some point. At least some samples are going to be captured alive.
On a semi-related note, I swear, you people need to stop looking at my notes. I mean, I locked them in a lead-lined, anti-scry enchanted safe and buried it in a river of molten lava, and that just seems to have made people even more determined!
And I take no offence, because I know my writing skills could be better and I know Sempai Prime is far better at writing than I am. *shrug* Besides, it's the internet. Getting offended because of some words on a screen is dumb.
now only if more people were as wise on you on that kind of thing.
- Location
- United States
Remember the Evil Overlord List.
5. The
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
That's what I did the first time. Didn't help. Maybe if I put the lava covered, lead-lined, anti-scry safe inside the safety deposit box...