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Limit Theory [PA Multicross SI]

Limit Theory [PA Multicross SI]
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Commandering. A lot harder than it looked in game.
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Chapter 1 - Stargate & Index of non-chapters
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    • ltmauve

    ltmauve

    "Excuse me?"
    Location
    Earth
    Pronouns
    She/Her
    So, inspired by @Faith, @Battleship_Fusou, @Drich, @Gideon020, and @TikiTau, I decided to write my own Planetary Annihilation SI.

    Disclaimers:
    Planetary Annihilation is created by Uber Entertainment.
    Other series are property of their respective creators.
    SPOILERS galore for many of the series involved.
    Most of the series involved here will get an AU treatment for canon-welding and author preference reasons.


    Custom paint job of the Berlinetta type, for those who were wondering

    Rachel's Portrait, by me
    Chassis model whut, by me
    Limit Theory AU version of Stargate: Atlantis, by me
    Running lights [1] [2], by suicidejunkie and Terrabrand

    Limit Theory
    Chapter 1    ​

    I woke up. It felt different. Normally, I wake up, and I can't even remember the process. Just boom, all senses active, awake, brain close enough to full power that I can't tell the difference. This was different. I couldn't feel anything. Ugh. I shuddered, or I probably would have if I had a body. Or maybe I did, and I just couldn't tell, because I had no proprioception going on then.

    Then my senses started kicking in, like a computer doing self-tests. Internal sense, proprioception, organ status. Except no, this wasn't my body. Fifteen meters tall, four legs, made of metal, and enough internal components for an army of humans, all reporting green. Then I felt my Mass Plant and Energy Plants kick in. An automated part of the boot altered my resource network frequency, and my internal storages started filling. Then my external sensors kicked in, and I noted my surroundings. A lot of IFF markers, all allied. Covering the planet, and every planet in the system, and all of the artificial structures in the system. Wow. That's a lot of them. I could count them, and did. Except pretty much every planet was actually artificial in nature, completely constructed, with units moving throughout them, not just on the surface.

    I was on my back, in a pod, pointed at a ring filled with a blue glow. A teleporter. Hang on a sec.

    I was a Planetary Annihilation Commander. Four legs, covered with curved armor panels. A spade-shaped head. Each arm covered by a slightly curved armor panel. The Berlinetta type. Not one that I ever got to play with, even if it looked cool. Purple, with white and silver accents. That wasn't a color combination I could get in game. Hmm.

    What the heck was going on? Seriously? Okay, think, what did you do last night? Is this a hallucination? A dream? What the heck? Okay, so this felt very real, a mark against it being a dream, but I could have started feeling things in my dreams and not known it, but-

    My thoughts got cut off by a ping on the teleporter, a "query: ready?" I checked and, okay, that was the system I was going to. Two rocky planets, one covered in lava, with two moons, the other ice-covered with only one moon. A gas giant, with a bunch of moons around it. No asteroid belt. My location was already selected: One of the lava planet's moons, right in the middle of a friendly base. Wait, why am I dropping into a friendly base? I checked the unit situation.

    Oh. Apparently the friendly commander there was getting beaten, having lost orbital control over the planet she was on. Three Helios and several Omega battleships were destroying everything she sent up, while a sizable beachhead had been set up on the other side of a mountain. And I was being sent in to take control of the forces, to prevent the system from falling. Right. Well then. Absolutely no chance of this going horribly wrong.

    I purged my sarcasm for the moment and pinged back a "ready" to control, and the catapult locked to charge. Then all of a sudden the teleporter glitched out. I could tell. My sensors couldn't see in full resolution, but it started sparking, and turned several colors at once. My "instincts" told me it was an error state. I couldn't stop the catapult. No connection to it. It launched.

    ----------------

    After a very disconcerting moment in which all of my sensors told me I was either a small ball bearing or a galactic supercluster, or quite possibly both, I found myself falling towards a planet. A green planet. Very green. Automated mechanisms in the pod were still running, and my velocity shifted just a touch.

    I landed. Or crashed. Actually, both is probably the most accurate term. Whatever. Then I felt a timer start, counting up. Okay, match timers are apparently a real thing for Commanders.

    Right. Anyway.

    Alright, this isn't the moon I was going to land on. I did have a built-in deepspace radar, which I activated. Nope. Not even the right system. A terran planet, mainly forested, with three moons. Three gas giants, with twenty moons between them. Another two rocky planets, bare of atmosphere, with two moons each. I couldn't pick up any gravwell signatures, which was good, I guess. No enemy commander with an advantage over me, I guess. But still, this wasn't where I was supposed to be. So… now what? What am I supposed to do now? Umm…

    After a moment of panic, I realized. Build an army, and see what's next. Stay alive until a long-term goal presents itself. I am a Stellar Siege Commander, this is my job now.

    First, cap some metal spots. Also known as Mexes. Were there any nearby? I checked my map. There were three nearby that weren't covered by trees. I started over to the nearest one, ready to place an extractor.

    Wow, I'm fast. As a commander, I was 15 Human meters tall, or about 0.75 Progenitor meters. With a movement speed of 6 Progenitor meters per second, I moved 8 times my height each second. The mex, a good deal distant, was inside my range immediately. My fabricator arm activated, a purple mist of femtotech streaming out. The nanomachines immediately went to work, forming the rough shell of an extractor, before continuing to fill in the interior. In seconds, it was done, and the stealth systems activated. My first construction vanished from practically all my sensors - gravity, electromagnetic, and the few systems that humans would barely be able to describe - and if I didn't have it in the network I would have worried about it being gone. Actually, the electromagnetic stealth wasn't perfect. I could see it right now, but at longer ranges it would be all but invisible.

    Great. Next, I started on a vehicle factory, and set it up to pump out fabbers. Time to get started on a base. I finished the factory, and then moved on to set up some energy plants. And then I stopped when I looked at my list of buildable units, and found two different types of energy plants. Eh?

    Okay, one is labeled as "Nanite Energy Plant," and the other was "General Energy Plant." Right, so this wasn't the same as the game. Despite me looking exactly like what the Berlinetta Commander did in game. So… I pulled my list of what I could build, and looked at the stats. There we go. Fabrication units and factories used Nanite Energy whenever they were using their fabricators. And other units used general energy if they had particularly large energy requirements that couldn't be fulfilled using their small onboard plants. Like my laser weapons, my intelligence units, and any gravwell-equipped units when changing orbits.. Fortunately the half-gravwell drives on my aircraft didn't require any power besides what the internal plant could handle.

    Oh! Radar! I always forget to put that up, and then I always die. Well, not always, but it happens enough. I'm not in a game right now, and I won't go to a loading screen if something shoots me from orbit.

    So with that in mind, I had a plan. The first fabber rolled off the factory platform, heading to the other two mexes. Contrary to what Uber Entertainment wanted us to believe, it did not have hazard stripes. My childhood has been ruined. Okay, not really. But still, I was still disappointed. It's also moved at nearly the speed of sound.

    My units are fast. Geez. Boom-type bots must go what, over mach two?

    The next fabber went to building a bot factory, which would send out combat fabbers to reclaim all the damn trees everywhere blocking me from building my stuff outside the crater. Then I started building out my base. A few air factories, and several bot and vehicle factories. Some T2, but mostly T1 factories. I had sent out a few Hummingbirds as scouts. Surprisingly, they didn't make a sonic boom even moving at five and a half times the speed of sound. Several others were orbiting my base.

    Given that I was now constructing my first set of T2 factories, my mind was left to wander due to the amazing technology known as queuing. Seriously, the queuing in-game was nowhere near as useful as this. I could arrange for every unit I was making to be assigned to some task, including helping units that weren't even made yet. I could make a quick algorithm that determined what all my units would do the moment the factory was done, and would keep doing so.

    Given that, I had time to ponder my situation. First, why the heck was I in a - no, that wasn't right. I was the Commander, and the Commander was also the army. So why was I a Stellar Siege Commander? Was this some ROB plot? I checked my logs. They were timestamped with three different timestamps: my own clock, the mission clock, and what I assume was a base clock. I checked for entries where my own clock was negative - before I was created, or brought online. There were plenty of entries.

    Not that I could understand this shit. At all.

    Well, what's a girl to do I guess? Well, not worry about it for now. I'm good at that.

    Moving on from my logs, I found placement algorithms for various situations. Alright, run "build 40 40 20 yes yes yes all 3000 15". That would cover everything inside three Progenitor Kilometers (or 60, if you're a human) with a mix of vehicle, bot, and air factories, sprinkled throughout with defensive structures, teleporters, radar, and economic buildings. Delicous, delicous production. Okay, it probably wouldn't taste very good, but I doubted I could taste right now.

    Well that's a depressing thought. I will have to remedy that. Then I will be able to eat food again and enjoy it! Just like when I… I reached out for my memories of human life, and found them blurry. Indistinct. Generalities, but no specifics. I couldn't even remember my name. What was it?
    Alright, I've always been horrible with names. Now I forget my own. Time to pick a new one. Hmmm… Rachel? Well, it did sound nice. And for a last name, hmmm… I wasn't sure yet.

    ----------------


    In the meantime, my body and my fabbers got to work, beginning to lay down structure after structure. Factories, energy plants, storage, flak turrets, lasers, and an occasional umbrella. Oh! Defensive turrets can be stuck on top of storages and energy plants. You couldn't do that in-game. Excellent.

    Do I want to send up an orbital launcher yet? It'd reveal my location to any enemies to drop a nuke right on me. Actually, maybe I could set up the launcher elsewhere, and then get to covering the whole system in metal. Right. I queued some Kestrels and Hummingbirds to escort a few air fabbers off to some location far away. Given that the planet was about 1800 kilometers in diameter, it'd take me about three hours to make it a quarter of the way around the planet. Only go for an hour, I guess? I need more scouting power. I sent orders, and more and more Hummingbirds began leaping off air factories before zipping away at near hypersonic velocities. I was going to need to map out the planet, and while using spacecraft might have been faster, I didn't know if that would bring attention onto me.

    Actually, any decent commander would have plenty of orbital by now. If I was facing an established opponent, I would know it. I changed the convoy's course to a clearing that was significantly closer. It would still be able to be hit by a nuke and my main base would be unaffected. I started constructing a nuclear launcher platform as well. If my opponent shows their location, I can just drop a nuke on their heads. It might not take out the Commander, but it would at least destroy something.

    The convoy would reach the location in about five minutes. Meanwhile, my base would take several times that to finish. I pondered what to do next. Unit improvement? I considered what units I had. Maybe put the Gil-E's railgun on a Kestrel, give it a much greater vantage point for shooting stuff? Hmm, how to do that? If I look at my units, take it and… okay, how do I edit designs?

    I checked each and every design to see if I could edit it. Nope, nope, nope, noooooope, nopity nope. Oh. This blueprint.

    Research core. Allows a commander to modify designs and reverse-engineer captured technology.

    Apparently, I offload the work to these. And I can't make it. It requires… something besides metal? Hmm, particle types? More differences between the game and actually being a Commander? Fun.

    So if I wanted to modify my units, I'd need a Particle Synthesizer and a Research Core. And Oh my that is a fuckton of metal needed. Yeah, not doing that until I take over the system.

    By that time, my Orbital Launcher had finished its first Hermes probe, which went began sweeping the planet the moment it reached orbit. It started sweeping the planet, spiralling around where it had launched from. Meanwhile, another Hermes launched, instantly kicking itself out of orbit around this planet and towards the nearest of the gas giants.

    My base was just about finished when my Hermes detected something on this planet. Something Unknown.
    I stopped pondering what to do next and looked at the data. A large facility, pyramidal, with some sort of ring around it. I didn't recognize it at all. There was a second structure. Oh. Ohhhh. OHHHHHHHH.

    A dark metal ring, standing upright on some steps, with some red plastic-like materials on it. In front of the steps stood a small plinth, of the same material.

    A Stargate, and its DHD. I was in the Stargate 'verse.

    ---------------------------
    AN: Thank you, everyone, for reading the first chapter. Also, thanks to Fusou-senpai for looking over my rough draft.
     
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    • Intriguing, a good first chapter, and a lot of potential. I like this. :)
     
    Orez Lanrete said:
    Reads Posters title under their name "verified Kohai"
    Congratulations Fusou! You're now officially a Sempai with a Kohai.
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    The PASI Author Web is just a mess of Sempai-Kohai relationships, at the moment. It's kind of silly.

    On a note about the story, it's an interesting divergence from the usual methodology of Commanders; A) pulling resources out of nowhere, and B) designing new things for every little purpose.

    Watched.
     
    Its the Candian Forest! Run!

    With that sillyness done, looks promising. I'm glad the base building got skipped, and looking forward to the tech you'll pikc up from the ancients
     
    TikiTau said:
    Oh god it's a BACON Commander, isn't it? xD
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    No. Actually, it's me deciding to deal with the scaling issue. I chose 20,000:1 for the planetary scales, and from that I decided 20:1 for terrain and speed. Because seriously, 35m/s =~ 80 mph. In other words, the fastest units barely move at highway speeds. Justified in-story as "Progenitor Meters" and then I'm using human units for the rest of the story, because otherwise I would confuse the audience.

    Faith said:
    On a note about the story, it's an interesting divergence from the usual methodology of Commanders; A) pulling resources out of nowhere, and B) designing new things for every little purpose.
    Click to expand...
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    *looks at chapters already written*
    *sweats nervously*
     
    Looking good so far. That makes...Two PASIs created within an hour of each other.
    We really should make a map of it at some point. Drich is everyone's sempai.
     
    Chapter 2
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 2​


    I studied the data my probe sent me of the Stargate. Definitely not the prop they always kicked in the show. For starters, it had 45 glyphs, rather than the 39 in the show. But that was still almost definitely a Stargate. How the heck did that happen? Probably the teleporter error. I'm in another freaking dimension, or whatever. Which meant I wasn't going up against another Commander. I could take my damn time about building up. Fabbers crowded around where I queued the Particle Synthesizers and got to work.

    I ordered several Hummingbirds and a few Bumblebees and Hornets to the Stargate. The probe currently in orbit would park over the Stargate, the next probe that was being built would cover the rest of the planet.

    Now what was the structure? Hmmm. It was definitely Go'uld in construction.

    Which meant blowing it up was perfectly acceptable. Probably. But I wanted to capture it and reverse-engineer everything inside. I didn't have FTL besides the teleporter, and hopefully this facility had something hyperdrive-equipped in it. Now to do that, I needed some smaller units. The Dox and my bot fabber were about 5 meters tall. I needed something that was 2 meters to go through the facility and capture it. Then I would blow it up anyway, since I'd have made something better in the meantime, that the Go'uld couldn't use. I ordered an air fabber over there, to build some bot factories. Then once I had my miniaturized Doxes and fabbers, I'd swarm the place with them.

    So I needed my Research Core done. I ordered a few Particle Synthesizers laid down. Only one at first, then the Research Core started while the fabbers move onto another one. I put down a dozen Metal Storages for all the new particle types I was making, as well. The rate at which I could build what could be called "T3" would depend on my rate of particle synthesis, which meant I had to be making all these big, expensive Particle Synthesizers.

    So now I had to wait, while I pondered what to do now. I mean, should I help the Humans/Tau'ri/Migardians or whatever they're called? Yes, obviously. So how to do that? First, get FTL technology. I'd also need an avatar to interact with people though. Oh! SG-1 had one planet that could make androids that looked exactly like the team. I could use that to start with. I kept wracking my mind for memories of Stargate SG-1, and eventually came up with quite a list of what to do. Tech I needed to get, tech I didn't need but would be nice to have, people that needed saving, people who needed to be killed, events that needed avoiding, whatever I could think of.

    Of course, this all depended on where in the timeline I was. If it was post-season ten, and this was some backwater Go'uld doing whatever, I wouldn't be able to affect anything. And even if it was before canon, or the movie, I wasn't sure I could make the greatest difference. I let out a lot of internal sighs between discovering the Stargate and when my Core came online.

    Of course, I was also checking on my economy from time to time. I had T2 air fabbers flying all over the planet, capping all of the metal spots away from the Stargate. My orbital launcher, the moment it had gotten a few probes for each celestial body out, had begun pumping out orbital fabbers, which had constructed plenty of orbital defense and infrastructure, below the horizon from the Stargate. And when my probes had finished checking each planet and moon, dozens of fabricators left orbit to turn the worlds into solid metal. They did so. They covered each of the moons and the two other rocky planets with T2 economy. And some defenses. I also had plenty of orbital fabbers and factories orbiting the sun close in, pumping out lots of solar panels. Lots of them. And at the range I was putting them at, they were getting a ridiculous amount of power. Execellent.

    My Research Core finally finished, and I immediately fed it the specs - the Dox, but only two meters tall. Weapons, speed, and health to be decreased as needed. Within a minute, I had a blueprint. Interestingly, it had to give it a "head" in order to get the scaling to work.

    I told the core to put ten of them on one factory plate, so I could make ten of them at once. Done in under a second. Instantly the dozens of factories near the Stargate sprung to life, hundreds of mini-Doxes finished in seconds. Another few rounds, and I had an army, a thousand strong. I also had a design for a smaller bot fabber. I cranked out a round of those, and then looked over my sensors to plan the assault.

    Oh. That's what this place is. Oh, oh oh! This is gonna be awesome! Plus I'm still decently early in the timeline that I can help a lot. A lot. Well, the SGC might disagree with me a bit, but then again killbots don't get exploding tumors. Or open jars of energy-eating monsters. Alright, planning, planning, planning. I could see all the corridors and the guards. Well, "see" implies using visible light, which was nowhere near what I was using, but language. Meanwhile, I set up some artillery further back from the Stargate. One barrage near it should be enough to bury the gate without destroying it. Actually, they can withstand an asteroid impact. A direct asteroid impact. Not much to worry about with a few shells of neutronium.

    So, no worries about them dialing out and getting help. Actually definitely no worries, since I'd probably destroy the DHD doing that. Okay, keep the artillery, just in case, and as long as I capture the DHD I should be able to make another one. Alright, let's keep going. I had enough mini-Dox to shoot everyone outside at once. Then I would create groups of five - four mini-dox and one mini-fabber, and send them out in teams to capture everything else. I looked through the network of corridors, noting where each of them was, and how the patrols were moving through them.

    I plotted out an approach for several dozen teams to breech at once. Multiple entrances, including the hanger doors, and then an approach that would take them nearest the patrols as fast as possible, to neutralize them. Being able to track someone's movements of the past hour or so was really useful. And the way the data was presented to me was much better than the chronocam that the game had. Trails instead of having to look through time. Much easier. Now that I've planned everything out, time for this to go horribly, horribly wrong.
     
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    • SG1 is probably not going to like you, given their experience with replicators.

    Gonna have to be extra friendly :p
     
    ... give jack a tiny pistol that can transform in to a alucard sized hand gun that can take down gliders that aught to be a good friendly present
    "finally finally i have my big honking space gun" :)
    so far love this definitely gona be watching
     
    Suryn said:
    So does this mean SG1 is on planet right now?
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    Honestly, that would have been the most horrifying hilarious way for this to go wrong.
    But no.
    Arafell said:
    SG1 is probably not going to like you, given their experience with replicators.

    Gonna have to be extra friendly :p
    Click to expand...
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    I think I'll be creeping them out in a different way.:wink:

    Also, my mind skips around a lot while thinking about what to write.
    So here's something from far in the future of the fic.
    Any unit made by a Commander should be able to be used as an improvised artillery shell. If not, you've done something wrong.
    Click to expand...
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    ltmauve said:
    I'm going to take it close. It's not happening in Stargate, or the next world, and I'm not telling you which unit gets the treatment.

    This kinda counts as chan-ish behavior. You should put some words in there.
    And no, that's not the mechanism for this.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I'm going to end up using twelve kilometer space battleships as the main rounds in a plan I have, so its fine
     
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