Except it wouldn't really? If we blow him up before he sees anything, they won't have any information beyond "giant explosion, no chemical residue so likely energy weapon based rather than just mines". If we give XCOM parasite droids they'll just assume its some new XCOM weapon until we give them reason to think otherwise.
Anywhere without significant Advent presence? It's a big planet.
I'd have some pretty significant questions about the Culture, since I wasn't aware they're a murderous tyrannical hegemon, but I'm not sure I trust your analysis of the situation at this point. Moving on.
First up, from what I can tell the 'torture' was more in the sense of destructive testing on captured aliens, which is still reprehensible but has actual concrete benefits (ie, we now know what our prototype plasma gun does when it hits a Muton square in the chest) and makes sense as something a desperate organization might do in order to accelerate their progress on achieving technological parity with the existential threat breathing down their necks. After all, torture is utterly useless as an information-gathering tool, and the vat-grown mockeries the Ethereals use to fight their battles for them are too indoctrinated and/or too lobotomized to yield any sort of useful data, regardless of the method used to try and obtain it. XCOM did horrible things in the name of protecting innocent civilians and the culture and society of humanity as a whole, understanding that their actions were reprehensible but vital for the survival of their species ("Vigilo, confido" roughly translates as "I am watchful, I am necessary").
That is assuming we can kill him before he senses us, the Ethereals don't have some kind of scrying effect to monitor their experiments and that the vessels can't sense magic at all.
Alright.
Comments? In my binaries?
Mapping their brain by deliberately inducing pain and recording the responses is a bit closer to torture than you're implying. Additionally, we know what Dr. Vahlen does when she's free to research without XCOM: Alien Rulers.
If they teleport the corpse back and the only thing remaining are objects made from alien alloys, that hints at them being our weakness.
You might want to reread the update on their motivations. The Eldrazi are a threat to the entire plane. Fighting for the survival of your entire species is pretty much the same XCOM is doing. The Ethereals are just doing it on a larger scale.
Mom might have hacked the programmer's PC to get the source code?
Jade is pretty sure they used cardboard-covered steel targets, but the same idea remains the same. As previously mentioned, Jade will give XCOM credit for genuinely believing what they do is necessary. She just doesn't like it and is too uncomfortable to look too closely at what they did. She knows it was insanely painful, involved sliced skin, and decided to stop looking at that point.
Dur hur, I'm gonna plug in a new value here and run debug on it, then I'm gonna do it over 200 times! I minored in chemistry so I find this tedium fascinating!As an aside, Jade is pretty sure this remains accurate, along with a small side dose of longing. Humans-turned-troopers-turned-free-soldiers don't completely recall their past lives and are impossible to recognize, remembering just enough blurry fragments to have a vague idea of what they gave up in their misguided attempt to serve a supposedly benevolent government.
Jade is pretty sure they used cardboard-covered steel targets, but the same idea remains the same. As previously mentioned, Jade will give XCOM credit for genuinely believing what they do is necessary. She just doesn't like it and is too uncomfortable to look too closely at what they did.
From what Agneyastra can tell, the humans are just as clueless about how the turret code is read — not only is it not on binary, but uses untranslated alien lettering. They just found and adjusted a few portions based on heavy trial and error, then added comments to those portions in their own language.
EDIT: If the above makes any programmers in the playerbase cringe and ask "Why," you're one step closer to understanding how the aliens keep their relatively unsecured code secure.
Not...quite. It was more along the lines of putting electrodes in brains to stimulate recall, then a method of recording their thoughts was used to display those memories as images, IIRC. Painful and cruel, to be sure, but not done out of anger or from a misplaced need to get back at the aliens. Someone who does something like that is doing a pretty f*cked up thing, but the lack of malice and the stakes involved means they are unlikely to be doing it again after the war is over. They saw a problem to be solved, and solved it.
Vahlen herself knows she needs a counterbalance, lest she let her drive to make discoveries and creativity get the better of her. I think the stakes involved may have loosened her inhibitions. And yeah, it is pretty close to torture. Fully agreed. But again, life-or-death situations tend to soften inhibitions. Those tend to reinstate themselves pretty quickly after the situation passes.
Here's the thing, I'm not actually sure that's feasible. I mean, it's implied even ADVENT's food infrastructure is at least partially built on dead humans ("ADVENT BURGERS ARE PEOPLE!"). Trying to purge all the negative aspects of ADVENT is probably going to be equivalent to tearing much of it down and starting from scratch anyway. To say nothing of how much of the political, economic, and military system involves mind-control. A benevolent ADVENT contains so little ADVENT as to be almost indistinguishable from tearing it down, IMO. Like, aside from some of the industrial and scientific infrastructure, and the actual housing and cities, ADVENT is so rotten we might as well toss it out.
Sounds about right.
But that should make it less secure and more prone to bugs.EDIT: If the above makes any programmers in the playerbase cringe and ask "Why," you're one step closer to understanding how the aliens keep their relatively unsecured code secure.
Jade is sure that's just an inane conspiracy theory. ADVENT keeps much of their extensive, artificially-sunlit farming complexes beneath the city centers.
Security by obscurity isn't very effective, but it makes sense when Ethereals specifically pose a challenge to humanity.From what Agneyastra can tell, the humans are just as clueless about how the turret code is read — not only is it not on binary, but uses untranslated alien lettering. They just found and adjusted a few portions based on heavy trial and error, then added comments to those portions in their own language.
EDIT: If the above makes any programmers in the playerbase cringe and ask "Why," you're one step closer to understanding how the aliens keep their relatively unsecured code secure.
You mean that bunch of interplanar entities that got attracted BY the Ethereals? Specifically by them being utter and total dickheads? as of update 36.0.1
Fair enough. They probably have better uses for human bodies. I maintain, however, that it'd be impractical to keep much of ADVENT's political and bureaucratic system going without the mind-controlling totalitarian state aspect. Taking over ADVENT and removing the morally objectionable parts would entail a great deal of work. Keeping the architectural, industrial, agricultural, and medical infrastructure around is probably non-controversial, unless it's made to do something horrible, even with much of the Resistance. Stealing the Ethereal's tech is something they've all engaged in to some degree, I think.
But she was able to scan Earthland magic organs well enough to reproduce at 400 meters before.
Oh... Oh... That gives me an idea! Of what to give etherials to break their research teeth over: a simple radio transmission. It doesn't need to contain anything. It could be simply Jade singing something, or even saying something as simple as "Hello World". Released into the world over wordlwide radio transmission (quite easy to manage).
Ah. The character sheet phrases it as "fairly good sensor capacity within 400 meters", which we all thought implied more than just outlines – especially since the 10m scans were repeatedly called "near-omniscience" or "semi-omniscience".
Resistance bases are the only place we can find soul scanners, and the vote explicitly limits looting to non-essential technology. We won't just strip them of their defenses.
Can do, but Jirachi47 would need to adjust her vote as well.
The vote is deliberately designed to minimize the chances of the first thing, and we have no evidence of either of the latter two, and fairly decent evidence against (none of their tech makes use of it, and XCOM catches them flatfooted) so there is no reason to consider it.
You mean the stuff they use as armor anyway? Oh no! They could make thicker armor.
