- Location
- Mt. Holly, North Carolina
How about paying the Reapers to work for XCOM through the Pilgrims and giving the Templars actual cheap explosives and fire producing stuff.
Ignition (MTG/Multicross, Planeswalker PC)
- Thread starter Alivaril
- Start date
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- Tags
- fairy tail magi: the labyrinth of magic magic the gathering magical girl lyrical nanoha (magical girl) puella magi madoka magica rwby alternate universe spoilers unreliable narrator earned your happy middle feedback appreciated life slowly gets better metaknowledge is overrated never too much fire setting knowledge not required this can only end well what could possibly go wrong?
- Location
- A single human dimension
- Pronouns
- She/Her
She'd be willing to personally make slightly improved AVs for soldiers, but not to hand over any of the relevant fabricators or technologies. They'd be carefully kept around the previous human upper limit (minus all possible defects) instead of having, say, nanomachine-infused blood and all the shenanigans that allows.
You're pretty sure that, at least, is not a concern. The Lost have some weird fungal mass in place of brains these days; any souls they once had have long since left the building.
- Location
- Germany
I think you're forgetting that XCOM could reverse-engineer the underlying technology and combine them to get the same enhanced result.
So nope, giving out royal enhancements is right out.
And really,
that goes both ways. If the Ethereals capture someone with an Agni retainer or royal vessel, they can "improve their vessel significantly" as well.
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- Location
- Earth
a reason for Jade to learn mindreading
- Location
- A single human dimension
- Pronouns
- She/Her
a reason for Jade to learn mindreading
That might be overkill. A bunch of extra recon drones or the supplies to make them + improved cyberwarfare capabilities would probably do it.
I think that was the idea anyways, given that the body transfer was proposed primarily as a cure for their body dysphoria, not as something to enhance their combat power.
That's not what Alivaril responded to.
So, no artificial vessels, essentially. Operatives who matter are likely at human peak and slightly above already, and it's not like this is in any way useful against the Chosen - if they are on par with us, then the only way to deal with them is ambushes with overwhelming force and pre-accepted massive casualties. Because we are vastly superhuman.
What would Agneystra want to provide to XCOM? Broadly speaking, I don't need an exhaustive list or anything. I merely want to try and think of how this could work. Because of all the tech we can provide, given etherials' mastery of biology and nanotechnology, artificial vessels seem to be one of the lower danger techs for them to grab.
This is a separate issue. Part of the plan Agneyastra proposed is to give XCOM some technological edges. We have been discussing how to do it.
- Location
- Finland
Any change of us leaving some auto factories and harvesters to start building an industrial base in the asteroid belt or somewhere like that?
Not sure if i want to ally with anyone just yet, so doing small trades with a degree of anonymity with XCOM for stuff like armor and weapons while we gain more info and strengthen our position seems like a way to go.
Not sure if i want to ally with anyone just yet, so doing small trades with a degree of anonymity with XCOM for stuff like armor and weapons while we gain more info and strengthen our position seems like a way to go.
- Location
- Earth
[X] Loop around to behind the Hunter, exit the Stalker, fly up, and fill his general area with a Celestial Lance or nine. Unless his flesh is made of solid alien metal, which you sincerely doubt, he should die eventually. As long as you stagger your shots, glowing gold light should block his view of the surrounding area until after you've hit him with yet another Celestial Lance.
Essentially, we could pull original XCOM (with the AI-controlled mars base) against etherials.
Do the Ethereals respect MAD? They have this "gain respect for alliance through combat" thing going on but I don't know if that accounts for threatening the plane with devoid fire or similar. Maybe that's a bit too on the nose.
- Location
- A single human dimension
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Agneyastra would also be willing to provide soldier-vessels to them, but you're a little afraid of what she might do among so many impressionable individuals. You'd have to impress upon her what she wasn't allowed to (try to) do with them.
Considering their utter disregard for negative consequences of their actions, you're not sure they would respect MAD.
Voting is locked.
Ok, I seem to be missing something.
As far as I understood (and it seems I might be understanding wrong), royal grade vessels are vastly superhuman. Tough enough to withstand antitank weaponry, fast enough to dodge bullets (instead of aim dodging), and strong enough to tear apart gun barrels without physics-breaking special effects. Ie order(s) of magnitude better in all departments than RL human limits.
You said that Agneyastra would only be willing to provide peak human level vessels. Now, you are saying about soldier grade vessels. I undesrtood it that soldier (ie combat) specialized vessels would need to be at least in the same area of power level with royal grade ones to be effective.
So, if you don't mind me asking:
1) How superhuman is Jade's vessel and is that representative of Agni royal vessels?
2) What is considered "peak human" by Agneyastra?
3) What are soldier vessels and how do they compare to royal vessels and peak human vessels?
Because I am a bit confused, and I apologize for that.
- Location
- A single human dimension
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I apologize. I used "soldier grade" to refer to the vessels Agneyastra was willing to provide to XCOM soldiers and Skirmishers. They're identical to the previously mentioned "approximately peak human" vessels.
Agneyastra considers "peak human" to be what individuals could have achieved with a lifetime of near-perfect nutrition and exercise with no major genetic deficiencies interfering and a couple beneficial traits helping.
Agni-grade vessels would have to aim-dodge bullets, but their reflexes and intelligence tended to be good enough to allow doing so. It's the slower Linker Core attacks that they can dodge outright.
Chosen vessels are more durable and faster than Agni ones, but have inferior dexterity and thought improvements. They're also much slower to heal. When you include physics tinkering, Chosen are also physically weaker than Agni vessels and their unarmed attacks would do a fraction of the damage.
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Ah, ok. I was overestimating reaction speeds, it seems, using scaling based on how tough and strong the vessels were shown to be (unless I am overestimating that too?)? If I understand it correctly right now, Agni vessels are fast, but (agni durability / human durability) >> (agni reaction speed / human reaction speed). Am I correct?
Also, it seems a bit strange, and the reaction speeds might be a soul limitation, rather than a mechanical limitation of the body. I mean, for pure signal processing I would guess reaction time to be in the tens, at most hundreds of nanoseconds, so the issue should be with processing, and it's probably on the soul side.
If that's the case, then we are probably not using our vessel's mechanical capabilities to anywhere near their full extent, and haste effects will make us vastly more dangerous.
Also, "peak human" - real life peak human? Or anime style peak human? And, if anime (it's most likely anime, I know), what kind? Because, well, MGLN humanity is likely different from XCOM humanity at least, unless, again, some active meddling. Agni population likely had genetic work done, as did many other populations in MGLN plane, over the course of many, many civilizations. MGLN Earth humans likely had genetic tweaks from various past civilizations interacting with them.
We should actually check how genetics of this Earth's humanity compares to genetics of MGLN Earth's humanity. These are the only two Earths we can compare easily (because damn Kyuubey), and that's relevant information. ideally I'd like to visit some graves of historical figures known to have existed on both Earths (the younger the better) and compare their genetics. Then, if those match, compare genetics of people who are not famous, in case only few figures were "anchored" over the copying process. It should tell us at least something about the copying process.
- Location
- A Table Near You
1) Unless Jade can accurately Planeswalk to an asteroid, this would entail a very long flight in the Stalker.
2) We wouldn't want to set up a harvesting operation on the one plane with aliens advanced enough to detect it and destroy it.
3) Sidereal's planetary operations are far more efficient; it'd be easier to just ferry key supplies from Remnant through Agneyastra's subspace.
Agreed. Would welcome warm relations with the resistance if it happens, but it's better to stay focused on short-term objectives.
Important note: Neph was on the fence between freezing and intervening before the war ends, vs just letting the war resolve itself:
Recently, I've gone from being slightly in favor of freezing + intervening, to (tentatively) against. XCOM offering a juicy plane to focus on instead was part of that, but it's mostly because I noticed Jade really doesn't like thinking about the war, and that the 'third aspect'—whatever it is—seems all too happy to assist:
First two quotes feature Jade's thoughts being gently nudged away, while the last shows Jade pointedly not mentioning the possibility of freezing Thedas, despite Neph presenting it as an equally viable option. In summary:
- Neph is on the fence about intervening in Theda's war
- The 'third aspect' is strongly against
- Jade herself doesn't even want to think about it
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I'd like to note that Stalker is only rated for nine hours in vacuum, and even if this is a strictly life support issue, which can be overcome with Agneyastra's storage capability, it's still not a dedicated space vessel.
How does he prevent us from observing PMMM humans' genome? Do you think he meddled with it?
No, it inflicted enough trauma on Jade and created the situation on Earth that results in Jade very much not wanting to visit.
I thought that's more or less resolved with her knowing that Kyubey is under mind control now. We even had a precog dream about visiting PMMM.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Okay, so apparently that's the metaknowledge that everyone else has been working off of. Every time Alivaril told someone to stop leaning on metaknowledge I thought he was pointing at the plane's info-post, which didn't have anything in it to suggest that the resistance organizations were anything other than a bunch of terrorists that were so fractious that they couldn't even keep themselves from blowing each other up.
Yes, with this new information, I'll change my opinion: We can probably work with XCOM. I still think that we should loop in other planes for research support, especially Remnant and MGLN for their respective specialties, but we at least don't need to treat XCOM as an outright enemy.
Yes, with this new information, I'll change my opinion: We can probably work with XCOM. I still think that we should loop in other planes for research support, especially Remnant and MGLN for their respective specialties, but we at least don't need to treat XCOM as an outright enemy.
This smells like a monoculture, and monocultures are points of leverage. What's Agneyastra's position on engineered bioweapons? How much trouble does Jade feel like she'd have to go to to burn this out globally? Would there be any value in ending all the zombies in the first place?
- Location
- Finland
1. Not really, the point with automation would be that once you throw it in orbit it can be left on it's own.
2. Point. Just how heavy presence do ethereals have outside earth orbit in the solar system?
3. Not sure on this. I was thinking orbital weapon platforms and space ships, do we have the capacity for those?
We definitely need trumpeting this and trumpeting this over and over and over again: any research, any at all, in order to even approach anything like "fully effective output" would have to have several planes cooperating. We already know that MGLN is under a plane-wide apparently undetectable, persistent memetic block that prevents certain topics from being thought about, and certain discoveries from being made. We know that the whole of our accessible planes is a training tool for young planeswalkers (which, incidentally, indicates to me that we are playing on a pre-mending level for the overall universe of the quest). It is reasonable to think that any and all planes have those little quirks / blocks. And those are important.
Personally, I think that the best solution, as far as research goes, would be to establish two or three research centers (say, Remnant, MGLN and some other plane), staffed with AIs initiated in all the available planes.
On the topics of research, I think for the applied research, artificial vessel improvement should be the first topic - we have a number of things to bring together that could and should result in a qualitative leap forward in terms of our capabilities. And it might be possible to do before JS incident. Fanalis DNA (we should have gotten it from when we healed the fanalis in Magnostadt, and can probably get more) + MELD + Hunter's body (if we defeat him now) + What Agnis had when looked over through a perspective of an AI not restricted by "no immortality" restriction (which had to cripple a ton of development paths) + advanced materials from various planes... We should have something here.
For the fundamental research material science is probably going to take the top spot for the moment. Magi gold (and I think they had some other special materials?), elerium and alien alloys, titan's blood if we do a short hop to Thedas to buy it (can be argued for and against), dust all have special properties and could probably be exploited.
For esoteric research - Earths. We have four Earths now (PMMM, MGLN, XCOM, GG). This is nearly half the planes we have access to, and in most of those it's the "center of the universe". It is obviously important and special. At least for two planes (PMMM and XCOM) it should have all indications of being humanity's origin point. The similarity of histories implies some sort of synchronization going on. Investigating it somehow should be important for the longest term planning.