Limit Theory [PA Multicross SI]

ltmauve · Feb 22, 2016

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.

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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.

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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.

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AN: Thank you, everyone, for reading the first chapter. Also, thanks to Fusou-senpai for looking over my rough draft.

ltmauve · Feb 26, 2016

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.

ltmauve · Feb 28, 2016

Chapter 3

I put my plan into action. Several dozen of the mini-dox fired at the Jaffa guards, killing them all before they could sound an alarm, or even realize someone was there.. Then, two dozen teams moved towards the structure. Apophis's prototype mothership.

Despite being much smaller than the normal bots, the mini-bots still moved at about 160 m/s, enough to easily close with the mothership before anyone had a chance to realize something was happening.

Which is where they ran into forcefields. SG-1 managed to get around these by using alien armbands to move so fast that they could get through as the shields cycled. I couldn't. I could, however, use my mini-fabbers to flood the forcefield generator with a mist of nanomachines, and break it down. Doing so also gave me the information on how it worked. Meanwhile, another team of mini-fabbers ran to the DHD and Stargate, and began flooding those with nanomachines as well. I didn't have those on "devour" mode, which meant it was going to take a couple minutes to actually get the data. Hopefully, the mission would be over by then.

Meanwhile, the teams inside the ship moved about, nanomachine mist eating away the power conduits to the forcefields. Much faster than eating the whole thing, and it worked just as well. Guards and workers moving throughout the ship were taken unaware by my bots, with their seismic and visual stealth. Only one guard managed to notice them, by the imperfection of the visual stealth. Units appeared as a large blur, which worked at range but up close, they were noticeable. Not that noticing helped him, as my mini-Dox could move fast enough to smash the guy up against the wall the moment he started looking curious about the blur.

Meanwhile, additional teams of mini-fabbers, accompanied by mini-doxes just in case, moved through the ship, taking apart everything. So much data. So much. I didn't even have a second Research Core, and the one I did have was working on a few projects. Inside of three minutes, the ship was clear. I swarmed it with fabbers of all sorts, taking it apart fundamentally. In just under two minutes, the ship was gone.

That… that went far too well. My fabbers blocked off the Stargate, filling it with metal to prevent it from activating. Then in came an Astraeus, which grabbed onto the Stargate while the stairs it was imbedded in were blown apart. The Astraeus drifted forward slowly, until the Stargate was almost touching the DHD. My fabbers then attached the DHD to the Stargate, and my Astraeus lifted both into orbit.

Well, that was all I could do, for now. Aside from working on the Research Cores some more. I mean, I could be making plenty of big honkin' space guns in case Apophis decides to visit, but figuring out this technology is probably more important. Actually, given how little of my economy I can use for T3 production, I can make the big honkin' space guns. Man, O'Neill is the best for coming up with that line. I'm also going to move my Commander body to a different planet, just so any attack on the planet won't destroy me.

Hmm. I didn't want any attack on the planet to destroy my research capabilities either. So, time to start building more Particle Synthesizers, and more Research Cores. Fabbers received orders, and in thousands of places throughout the system, on worlds covered by my metal, they began tunneling into the dirt, or stacking structure on top of structure, or just changing whatever they were building.

Ten minutes later, my Particle Synthesis rate was through the roof. I'd have to designate several T2 storages to each type of particle. Then came the Research Cores, following right after. And by "right after" I meant "about 15 minutes later." T3 stuff takes a while to build. Meanwhile, in orbit, factories produced big honkin' space gun after big honkin' space gun. SSXs, Omegas, Anchors, Artemises. Artemi? Having conquered the system, with three gas giants worth of Jigs, and 29 worlds just covered with economy, meant that when I wanted something done, I could do it.

I fed all the data I had acquired into the Research Cores. Basic analysis first. Figure out how something worked, then ask it to solve a specific problem. This might take a while.

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Well, Progenitor reverse-engineering is not as bullshit as I'd like it to be. It took two hours to reverse-engineer naquadah and trinium. Two hours to reverse-engineer a metal, and see if it synergizes with any of my units.

Still, the results were fairly nice. I could use naquadah to enhance my units, boosting their durability by a factor of 3, with no extra build time if I had naquadah in my resource network. Which could handle distributing both of the new metals, by the way.

Actually, they weren't metals. Apparently, both of them were something along the lines of a quark crystal, with added particles that Humanity had no words for. And there were several different types of naquadah, such that it was only slightly more specific than "crystal."

Trinium, on the other hand, provided a negligible durability increase, but let my units slowly regain health. Now that was interesting. Why did that happen? I dove into my files to find out the reason.

Progenitor units are designed to not be captured. Xziphid technology was inferior to that of the Progenitors, but they were able to field far more. The Commanders were made to reverse that. Of course, Commander-made units were still superior, so the Progenitors came up with a neat trick to prevent capture.

The armor of Commander-made units is not designed to be indestructible. Eventually, everything will fail, and if the self-destruct is destroyed, the unit will be reverse-engineered. To stop that from happening, the armor is designed to fail eventually, at a known point. Any incoming damage is converted to a sort of "heat-charge" that builds up in the armor until it fails. This heat-charge can be monitored easily, meaning the self-destruct can activate exactly when it needs to. It is theoretically possible to capture such a unit, but the Xziphid were unable to capture a single Commander-made unit during the entire war. This also meant that units could be easily "repaired" by spraying nanomachines on them and letting them absorb the heat-charge from the machine.

Trinium caused the heat-charge to slowly leak out of the armor into the environment, where it would break down into ultraviolet light. Not perfectly safe for organics, but no huge risks. It also wasn't very fast. It'd take most units an hour or two to fully "repair," but it was better than nothing.

Of course, this required large amounts of the metals in question, so I designed (by which I mean, I threw Research Cores at it) and constructed several buildings that synthesized naquadah and trinium. Of course, I still had a ridiculous amount of economy left over, which I was using to fill space with big honkin' space guns. Lots of them.

ltmauve · Mar 4, 2016

Chapter 4

The mission timer ticked over from 23:59:59 to 1:00:00:00. My progress on making the system hard to attack was going well. I had come up with a nice facility design that I was using all over the place. A Tower, one kilometer tall and 200 meters at the base. A solid column 90 meters across stretched the entire height of the facility. In it I stacked 5 Particle Synthesizers, 2 Research Cores, 4 Mass Plants, 2 Naquedah Plants, 1 Trinum Plant, some divided storage for the different types of particles and my new metals, bulk storage of my Energies and Metal, and finally some very upscaled Energy Plants. Plenty of economy there.

At the bottom, there were a dozen T2 land factories arranged around the tower. Yes, I had designs for land factories. Their fabricators arms required a bit more metal to build than the spinning rings that the specialized factories used, but since I wasn't von-Neumaning as hard as I could have I figured the flexibility would be worth the cost. In addition, the general-type arms avoided the mech marine problem, letting me take units out without stopping production. Above that, I had another dozen T2 land factories, these ones inverted to build their units beneath them. I used the same gravity cushion that kept aircraft in place while building to hold whatever I was working on in place.

Above that, I dotted the sides of the tower with T2 air factories, using the general-type fabricator arms here as well. In addition, I had laser and flak turrets sticking out of the side, just in case anything managed to get down to the surface. I also put in a series of tubes, one meter in diameter, running throughout the structure. I had designed a spherical fabber to fit through these tube to provide upgrades to the towers when I came across new technologies. I really wasn't worried about damage, given the size of the things, as well as the fact that I took the same methods titans used to distribute their heat-charge to connect nearby towers with them. The entire planet would have a HP bar, and it would be massive.

The roof of the tower could have another T2 air factory, and an octet of Umbrellas.

Or I could just stick another copy of the tower on top if I wanted to. God, Progenitor structural materials were completely nuts. Buildings made out of steel could be, what, several kilometers tall? Well, given the loads on my towers, I could go about a hundred kilometers no sweat. Of course, at the one kilometer mark, I'd have to start adding flaps onto my buildings to compensate for wind. Even Progenitors had to obey the laws of physics.

I was building them on every solid surface, with half a kilometer between them at the closest. And by this time, I had about 10% of the system covered with one layer of them.

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Ka-ding! Research complete! Okay, my alert system didn't make the "Ka-ding" sound when something happened. Still, I could now work with the Goa'uld's sublight drives. Hmm… did I want to design a new unit now using the sublight drive? Actually, why don't I see if it synergizes with any of my current technologies. It'll only take another two days. Not like I'm getting bored or anything, simply watching another layer of towers get put down. Actually, why don't I put a layer of towers underground? Excellent idea.

Well, that took be approximately five seconds to queue up. Clearly that has solved my boredom problem.

"NINETY-NINE BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL, NINETY-NINE BOTTLES OF BEER-" My voice echoed into the complete silence that comes from having a lot of stuff around that has seismic stealth. Wow, I hadn't heard anything in a while. Fuck it, I'm building a zen garden. With birds, and trees, and flowing water, and bamboo, and all that stuff. Scaled to my body, of course. If I'm going to be sitting around, I'm going to do it in style.

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You know what would be really cool? Covering the entire star with solar panels. Well first I'd need triangular solar panels. Then I'd need to get rid of the old solar panels, then put the new solar panels in. Actually, why don't I create precisely-shaped solar panels that will fit together in a perfect sphere? Hmm, I could take the sphere surrounding the star, break it into triangles, break those triangles into more triangles, and then calculate the shape needed for each one of them. I could divide each triangle of the icoshedron into 3, by drawing lines from the center of the triangle to the edges. Then I could take the kite-shaped pieces and break those in half, and just mirror the shapes. I set to work to do some coding. I hadn't done that in a while. The code would cycle through each shape, calculating the shape of each segment. It would then pass this shape to the Research Core, to calculate the exact arrangement of atoms needed for the panel. It then slapped it in front of a box containing the power transceivers and a half-gravwell drive that let it hover above things with gravity.

Oh, and I switched the output folder of the Research Core doing this to a different folder than the ones my main units were in. I didn't want to clog up my build list with billions of solar panel variants. That done, I mentally rubbed my hands and pushed the button.

One light-minute away from the star, scores of fabbers received new orders. They set to work building the newly designed solar panels. Even with the rate at which I was adding to their ranks, they wouldn't stop for weeks.

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It took 40 hours in total for my massive numbers of Research Cores to reverse-engineer the Goa'uld hyperdrive. Given that I only had the small drives used in the tel'taks and al'keshs that had been in the hanger when I raided the base, as well as the partially constructed mothership hyperdrive, I'd say that's pretty good.

According to the simulations, the hyperdrive module I had would be about three times as fast as the Goa'uld drives, at about 0.003 light-years per second. Most of the gain came from me having atomic precision in my manufacturing, while the Goa'uld components were made to a very low standard - about 1 part in 100,000 was impure. To put that into perspective, as an electrical engineering student I memorized the following numbers: 10 to the 22nd is the number of silicon atoms in one cubic centimeter of crystal. Doping is usually done at 10 to the 15th, and the level of impurities in a crystal was usually about 10 to the 13th. Meanwhile, my femtotech nanomachines could pull off "10 to the 0 minus one" impurities.

Of course, that meant calculating the properties of all those atoms. I had this taken care of, thanks to femtoscale-computing bullshit, that, as far as I could understand, used particles that lacked a wave nature. Of course, given that my Matter and Energy Plants straight-up violated the law of Conservation of Mass-Energy, it wasn't anything to lose sleep over. Not that I could sleep anymore. Kinda nice, kinda annoying.

But of course, the entire point of the hyperdrive was to go places. Mainly, Earth. I took my Orbital Fabber design, and took it apart. Increased the size of the Energy Plant, added a hyperdrive, some Mass and Energy Storage, removed the solar panels, and increased the thrust a bit. With that designed checked down to the atom and compiled for building, I shoved it into a queue, and told it to go off.

A moment later, and I watched the hyperspace window open. The hyperdrive was working, and I watched it go… vanish?

What? What just happened? I fumed silently as I pondered this. Oh wait. I pulled up the file describing my economic networks. Yup. My data transmission was only good up to a few thousand AU, while my Energy and Metal transmission only worked up to about 200 AU.

With that snag revealed, I added a relay module to the design, which would allow me to keep in touch with it. Once that design compiled, I sent it off posthaste, and got to the waiting again.

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

Yes, I know this one's late. I'm sorry.

ltmauve · Mar 7, 2016

Terrabrand said:
And in the next one, we will see the Commander restricted to the color purple!

That's me. My true limit is that I can only make units that purple in them.

But enough of that, have a chapter:
----------

Chapter 5

Six days until my hyperspace fabber made it to Earth. I was bored.

I had a guest. A tel'tak, to be precise. A small hyperspace-capable ship of Goa'uld construction, unarmed, but can be equipped with cloaking devices.

So when one arrived in my system, it almost immediately met a solid wave of lasers, plasma-coated railgun projectiles, particle beams, and ion packets.

Almost, because I realized that SG-1 or the Tok'ra had a legitimate excuse for coming here: blowing up the prototype mothership here. Except I already did that.

SInce I had covered 30 worlds with metal, there was little in the way of stealth I could do for that. Heck, covered with metal is understating it. I had added about 30 kilometers to the radius of each planet, using lots and lots of towers. I had also dug a few kilometers into the ground on each one. Or rather, I had an economy 36 kilometers deep. No way I would be able to hide that.

So the tel'tak got the "nanites eat your stuff" treatment. The Research Cores could tell me where the power conduits were. And that they were pretty much pure naquadah. So with the tel'tak disabled, I took a look at who was in the cockpit. A jaffa. Not Teal'c. Not an SG team.

Well then, time for a solid sheet of death for these guys. The many weapons on nearby units, already aiming at the poor ship, let loose.

The tel'tak didn't explode so much as it violently stopped existing. A bubble of plasma formed from the energy of the naquadah reactor inside exploding and the sheer amount of death I sent towards it. However, with the amount of momentum I sent into the ship, the bubble only expanded away from my guns, the edge staying where the ship had been.

There's something intrinsically hilarious about an instant curbstomp. Whether in ground, naval, air, or space combat, when one side pretends to have anywhere near the power of the other is somehow amusing at that level.

I laughed a bit. An explosion that lopsided was the most interesting thing I had happen in a while, a while that was longer than my tenure as commander.

I saved the data into a folder labeled "EXPLOSIONS?!" which is how I always interpreted Mr. Torgue saying that word. Kinda a questioning undertone to it, I always thought.

And then I realized what I just did. I killed a bunch of people. In cold blood. Sure, I should have had this reaction after my massacre of the mothership construction site, but somehow it just didn't sink in. I had just killed three people. Somehow, it meant more than the hundred or so I killed

Alright, they're dead, don't wallow about it, move on. Make some capture bots. Hmm… Do I have the zat designs? Why yes, I do. Time to modularize them and integrate them into some of my mini-bots. And in the meantime, I'll get working on drafting up some hands. I can do that without Research Cores, at least.

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

Ten hours later, and I had my capture mini-bots down. M-bots and C-bots, actually, is what I'm gonna call them. M-bots meaning mini-bots, and C-bots meaning capture-bots.

First, the combat type, called the C-Dox. It used the same frame as my M-Dox I designed earlier.

I changed the weapon around a bit. First, I cut down the size of the plasma cannons. They were complete overkill on this level on combat. Maybe I would need them, in which case I break out the old M-Dox. Huh, I've only used the design once and it's already old? Heh. Still weapons!

On the right arm, I had two smaller plasma cannons and one zat. I'd adjusted the power levels because my AI tends to default towards "There is no overkill, I do not need to reload, so open fire." and I didn't want to kill anyone who got hit with the second shot. Or the third, or the fourth, or the two-hundred and fifteenth.

On the left arm, I had on small plasma cannon and and a zat grenade launcher. I'd taken the system the Uber cannon (actually, it's full designation is Over-Excited Particle Plasma Launcher Cannon, but anywho,) uses to hold its shots together, and used it to make an energy shell that would zat anyone within a couple meters.

Both arms had hands on them. I decided on having two flat fingers and a thumb over something more human. Of course, since hands got in the way of shooting things, I'd mounted them on U-shaped brackets that would let the hands move off to the side and slide up the arms, leaving the barrels free for delicious dakka.

Actually, dakka isn't delicious. I need to get working on a sense of taste - wait, I already put that down on my to-do list.

I also made a fabber version of the capture bot. Identical to the previous mini-fabber, but with the narrower frame and hands added on. That was simple.

C-Dox and C-Fabber, complete.

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

With that accomplished, I moved on to trying to review my logs again. Since I understood precisely none of it last time, I figured I could try again, and see if that worked. Let's see, I don't understand this log entry, this one, that one is referring to my core installation, I think. Wait my core has a serial number. Ugh. Well, add "scrub core serial number from memory" to my to-do list.

Even though I could look through references and records far faster than I could as a human, I was still stuck not understanding those log files. I did find base sensor data for my teleporter… thing. It didn't look like anything I could compare it to, so I did what any good Commander did: throw numbers at it. Specifically, numbers of Research Cores. I wasn't going to devote too much time to it before I was either finished with Stargate's technology (which they had a lot of, by the way) or I had gotten more advanced computer abilities. Or at least more computational ability. Stupid T3 bottleneck.

And with that, I had wasted two out of the six days until my hyperspace fabber arrived at Earth. Well, I did have some breakdowns of Goa'uld weaponry.

Goa'uld plasma weaponry. From the staff weapon to a ha'tak's main batteries, it was the same tech, only scaled. And it wasn't very good. First, it required liquid naquadah to work. I couldn't swap it out for another power source, because it used the decaying naquadah for the plasma medium. That meant having a naquadah plant anywhere I wanted to use the derived weapons.

In addition, it wasn't very good design in any way, and if the person who designed them was still around, I would smack them for signing off on the design. The arc edges used to generate the plasma had shit geometry. Like, I could literally only get a worse result if I reversed the directions my algorithms optimized towards. The field used to launch it was pathetic. I'm pretty sure I could have made a better field design at age seven using what I could get my hands on (which were old TVs.) That all leads to poor energy efficiency, an awful charge time, bad accuracy and range of all kinds, and poor damage.

And while I don't have a way to objectively measure how shit the ergonomics are, I safely assumed they were somewhere between bullshit and elephantshit bad.

The worst part is, they are still terrifyingly good weapons. They're flintlock pistols, but that doesn't stop them from being effective. They will still do a good deal of damage. Just that compared to the longbowmen of the Tau'ri and my own weapons, they are awful.

ltmauve · Mar 10, 2016

Anyway, have a chapter at ya.
---------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter 6.

In a swirl of color, a hyperspace window opened up, and my hyperspace fabber fell into realspace. Not in the Sol system, however. After about an hour of pondering after looking at Goa'uld weaponry, I realized that I should be going von Neuman on nearby systems.
Dice rolls: 5d214[24 + 196 + 133 + 183 + 96]
I had sent out ten such hyperspace fabbers, because I had no clue what I was doing and the fewer people who could have seen me if I messed up, the better. This one was the first to arrive, only taking an hour to travel eleven light-years. And I didn't have an orbital/deepspace radar on it. Or a Nanite Energy Plant. Yup, I'm very skilled at this whole Commandering business.

Okay, time to use crappy sensors to find celestial bodies. Fortunately, I could do that. It would take a while, but I could do it. I killed the rotation of the craft, and waited. Eventually, I would have the data I needed. Having cameras that didn't obey refraction was great, in this circumstance. It meant I could get the resolution an astronomer would kill puppies for from something the size of a grain of rice. Of course, I still required light to hit the sensor, so I had to wait.

Actually, I was close enough that it would be faster to send another fabber with a radar and a Nanite Energy Plant to the system. And the rest of the nearby systems. But the idea is sound for the Sol system.

Once that hyperspace fabber arrived, then I got to work. One world, and… oh, I think that's a ha'tak on the surface there. Okay, going to keep everything underground. Glad I have my ball fabber design.

I brought the two fabbers to the surface of an airless moon, and plop down a mex. Hmm. There's lag. I didn't notice it when the exact timing doesn't matter, but it seems to be about ten milliseconds per light-year, each way.

I barely have enough metal for a Nanite Energy Plant going down next to the mex. With the local economy stable, I ordered a tube for a bunch of ball fabbers to go in, then the ball fabbers themselves. The ball fabbers immediately get to work, digging down and spreading out. Meanwhile, the hyperspace fabbers - okay, I need a name for these. Pioneers? Sure, good enough. Meanwhile, the Pioneers moved about the planet, digging holes and stuffing extractors in them over every bit of metal they could find. They wouldn't cover the planet quickly, it was just to give the ball fabbers more resources to work with as they went full von Neuman on the moon.

I gave them an hour to go in an approximately straight line, laying down extractors wherever possible, and then told them to do the same on another moon. And while I'm at it, why don't I have them do the rest of the moons in the system? Well, one of them is right next to the ha'tak, and I would prefer not to have to deal with it until I can flood it with c-bots, m-bots, or a sheet of death.

Okay, I'm a bad person for thinking about the sheet of death. Not every problem is a nail, and I have a lot of tools besides hammers.

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

In the second system, I noticed no energy signatures. On the other hand, I had only noticed the ha'tak in the previous system, and not the Stargate the was inevitably at least near it.

So, this place might not have a Stargate, or it might have some alien tech on it that will summon chtullu if I get too close. I'd want to build up before that happens.

So, "build_custom_366 yes yes no all -1 30." A planetary assimilation protocol of my very own. It built land factories (which could actually build air units, thanks to the fabricator arm design.) only, leaving 200 meter holes in the fill every 1500 meters. Why? Because then I was going to start building my Towers in those gaps. Once I had fabbers running off the ramps, I grabbed the Pioneers and told them to get started on the rest of the system. The moons of the Earthlike planet would be last. And then I would take a good, hard look at the planet itself.

Systems 3, 4, 5, 7 and 10 had no earthlike bodies in them. I wasted precisely zero time in spamming "build_custom_366 yes yes no all -1 15" on all the solid bodies, followed by "build_jig yes yes yes all -1" on the twenty-seven gas giants distributed between the systems.

Systems 6, 8, and 9 were like system 2: An earthlike body and no noticeable power sources. So, I left the area around the earthlike planets alone, and covered everything else in economy. I'd get to checking each planet once I had warships of my own and had a good look through the SGC's planet listing. I did want to know if they'd already looked there, and if there was a "push here to destroy universe" button I needed to avoid hitting… and also reverse-engineer.

I was halfway through waiting to get to Earth, and I needed something to do. Hopefully some progress had been on the research.

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

Well, I now had a 100 kilometer Tower stack every 500 meters on every one of my planets. If I wanted to make them any taller, I would have to add gravwell generators to the sides at some point. Alright, why don't I just add a-

Hang on, hang on. Alright, depending on where I put the gravwell generator, the final radius of the planet once I built to 200 kilometers would be different. So if I made sure that I made all the gravwell generators at a radius of 100 meters, I could get a bunch of planets exactly the same size. Hmm, that should work. I would need a 60 meter generator, but that wasn't a problem.

Actually, the extra mass I had already added onto moons and planets had altered the orbits slightly. Because of this, the orbits were dropping. I'd need Halleys or something to alter the orbits.

While I was doing that, why not rearrange the star system? First, I needed an empty Research Core. As long as I had the modularized design properties for something, I could redesign it fairly well.

After snagging a core after a group of them finished, I sent it a request for a smaller Halley. The actual one, not the one in-game, was a kilometer across, and used a lot more energy. They did, after all, alter an entire planet's gravity to propel it. I didn't care about the number of them I needed to make, I just needed to be able to put them inbetween Towers.

And with that, I began the work for rearranging the system. First, what is it going to look like once I'm finished? Well, I'll stop building towers when each world has a radius of 7,500 kilometers. And since I'm planning on doing some underground modifications on each of the worlds, they'll all eventually be the same mass.

So with those parameters, I come up with a pretty nice solar system. The three gas giants are moved out to 32 AU, into the same orbit, but with 120° between each one. Then I'll have 5 orbits with 6 planets each, each one at half the distance to the star as the previous one.
Once I got the new Mini-Halley working and installed onto some of the towers, I started the move. I'd need to shepherd the gas giants into their new orbit using their own moons, so those would take probably the good part of a year.

But still, time to get moving. Gravwell generator at the 100 kilometer mark for each planet, Mini-Halley above it. Each one is mounted directly below the factories of the next Tower above it.

Barely five minutes later, I feel a rumble throughout every one of my units, even through the seismic stealth. Gravity on each world shifted, flowed, and then reduced as I drove their orbits as I wished. A twenty minute burn, then I'll stop. Apparently, actual Commanders have to worry about their Halleys taking the planet with them when they get destroyed. Something about the gravitational interference when one of the Halleys gets knocked out.

Of course, that isn't a problem when there's only one Halley. Maybe I should build a single giant Halley at the core of each planet? Tossing the idea at the Research Core that I still hadn't returned to reverse-engineering duty, I pondered it.

When it spat back that I could do it with a 500 kilometer Halley, I mentally grinned. Long-term solutions are the best.

ltmauve · Mar 14, 2016

Well, I decided to change "Build Energy" to "Nanite Energy" because hey, it makes it a bit more clear what it is and how it's used, I think. Also nanites can be used for other things than building.

Also, have a chapter!

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

Chapter 7

It had been a week since I started, but I had finally gotten all of the tech I captured reverse-engineered, refined, and implemented in modular form.

First, my Vengeance fighter. About 15 meters long, with swept-forwards wings, even sharper than those on the 302. Narrower, as well. Thrust was provided by a dual-mode gravwell/gravwave engine that used something similar to the Death Glider engine. Twin lasers mounted for general use, as well as a multi-ordnance bay that could launch cluster bombs, anti-air missiles, torpedos, or tactical missile warheads as a big, heavy bomb.

Second, since I did have the cheap gravwave technology, I decided to make an aerospace fabber. The Gull aerospace fabber looked like the advanced air fabber, but I scaled it up a bit, bulked out the body a bit, and made the front wing a bit narrower. The fabricator head was hung on an arm that extended beneath the craft while in space, but tucked the emitter into the nose of the craft while in atmosphere.

I upgraded the Omega with the new gravwave drive technology, made far better with atomic-precision manufacturing. Then I added a hyperdrive. What else? I added shields, which had been improved to be about five times stronger than their Goa'uld counterparts, and changed up the weaponry. I removed the anti-ground cannon, and then repositioned the anti-orbital guns to the middle of the ship so that they would have better firing arcs. A multi-ordnance bay was added to the front. I also stripped off the solar panels and fins that they had, and instead added some plating to the underside. Because seriously, those offended my engineering sensibilities.

Should I rename it? Yes. Much as it would be funny for the Tau'ri to realize that the Omega was only a corvette, it wouldn't make sense.Well, I had come up with some ship designs before. Audux. And since the Audux was only 60 meters, compared to the 5.2 km of the prototype mothership, it would definitely be a corvette. Audux-class corvette, finished. But I needed bigger ships, and for those I would have to start from scratch.

For the basic shape, I started with a widening wedge, made out of overlapping panels similar to the Omega's solar panels. A blocky tower that sloped back was mounted in the middle, both on the top and the bottom. These held the 56 Vengeance-class fighters that were the standard escort. In all it was 800 meters long, painted white with purple lines running down it. Kind of small, but I was going to be making up any difference with numbers.

Down the entire length of the ship ran a particle accelerator. Its normal firing mode was taking flash-forged pellets of neutronium the size of atoms and flinging them using gravity in a swift beam of death. It should be able to punch clean through a ha'tak's shields and have about 20% of the energy left over while using only its onboard energy, based on what I had found on the prototype mothership. With additional energy in the Resource Network, it could fire even harder. It could also fire pretty much any type of particle that I could generate, so that was additional versatility added right in.

For secondary armaments, I had added a dozen 80 meter railguns on each side, independently turreted. Capable of firing plasma, solid shot, or plasma-coated solid shot, they could take out an Omega in one hit. I added several dozen plasma, railgun, ion packet, and laser weapons of the 10-meter scale for corvettes, I then lightly dusted the hull with flak and tiny lasers for point defense. I also added massive multi-ordnance bays for launching huge numbers of missiles at things, as well as two nuclear missile launch tubes.

I also stuffed it with plenty of shields, a slightly upscaled Mass Plant, a large Nanite Energy Plant, and several General Energy Plants, enough to run at a significant surplus. There were also small naquadah and trinium plants. It also had enough fabrication ability to make one Vengence fighter a second, which took most of the generated mass. I'd also given it an internal tube network for ball fabbers for repair and upgrade.

I called it the Skylord-class cruiser.

I also had a carrier design ready to go. The same basic shape as the Skylords, but longer, at 1200 meters. It was also slightly narrower. Instead of having the two small hangers of the Skylord, I had one hanger running the length of the ship. Well, less a hanger and more a series of racks for holding Vengeances. Or, since I had decided to put a standardized clamp point on the Vengeance, whatever I felt like putting that same clamp on. Both the racks and fabricators could slide up and down the length of the ship, well, the racks needed to be empty and folded up. This meant I could empty all 560 Vengeances in just over 72 seconds, in a carefully coordinated series of launches that had taken me, the Commander, about half a day to work out.

It also possessed the same economic capability as a Tower, meaning I could use it to help me set up shop in a new system. I called this the Beacon.

There was a third class of ship I developed, called the Stormfront. The same shape, size, economic capability, and same ridiculous cost as the Beacon. But it had a different role, that I'll explain later.

I would probably want a ship that was nothing but gun, but for right now these designs should work well enough.

I took 100 Skylords, 10 Beacons, 10 Stormfronts, and 1000 Audux, and their complement of ten thousand, six hundred Vengeances, and formed them into a fleet.

That should be enough to deal with the one ha'tak in the first system I colonized. I loaded my commander body into one of the Stormfronts, and the fleet aligned for hyperspace.

A massive window in reality opened, nearly seven kilometers across, rippling with every color of light, from all the way up in the ultraviolet range down to the microwave part of the spectrum. I saved the image in a folder labeled "cool with 16 'O's."

Then I passed through, and entered hyperspace.

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

After an hour of fretting in hyperspace, wringing my manipulator arms because I didn't have hands, my fleet exited hyperspace. Right behind the gas giant of the system, where a lot of Vengeances hung out, like a school of fish. A school of Vengeances, I decided, was the official group term for them. I hardly needed the Beacons here, but I did want to have a lot of fighters. Not that numbers would likely be a problem. Because I had already launched all of the fighters that I had carried through hyperspace, using the local economy to make more. And more and more. 180 additional fighters per second, from my fleet. The bases in the system were going to rapidly run into the problem that space around them is limited, which means there is a finite amount of Vengeance that can fit into a space. My fleet activated their gravwell drives, knocking every ship and fighter out of orbit of the gas giant, and into a course that wouldn't go anywhere. If that was all I was doing. However, given my vast impatience with the rate at which things were going, I was going to thrust along the way.

ltmauve · Mar 18, 2016

Chapter 8

-------------------------
Hades
-------------------------

Hades was not in a good mood. Cronus had decided that he was going to be ruling over this backwater world until it bowed and scraped properly. By this point, the village near the Stargate had already been depopulated in order to instill fear in the others. It had not worked, and while normally he would simply pacify the people, he lacked the troops needed to do so, and Cronus would not let him get more.

He understood all too well what the plan was. First, make him look weak, as he could not pacify a single planet. Then, eliminate him. Or, better yet, get one of his siblings to eliminate him. If he tried to get more troops, Cronus would call him out on the violation of their treaty. Of course, Cronus had renegotiated the treaty after he had found out Hades had been supporting Her'ur in his takeover attempts, and had forced him into it. If he had simply called him out, Hera and Poseidon would have sided with him.

Right now, he was putting a beam of pain into one of the jaffa leaders, who had failed to acquire the tribute he required of a mining town. He noticed something out of the corner of his eye: four blue beams stretching down from the sky. He stopped bothering with the jaffa; he had more important things to deal with, most likely.

"Jaffa Cree! Get a report from the watchmen!" He shouted at a nearby jaffa.

"It will be done, my lord." The jaffa answered smoothly, and left the throne room of his ha'tak. He could not even get enough tribute to make himself a proper temple on this world.

It was not even another moment before another runner entered the room, almost out of breath.
"My lord!" He almost shouted, bowing his head.

"What is it?" Hades asked.

"The chappa'ai, my lord! It has been sealed! Some sort of purple mist that turned into steel!"

"What?" This was… "Sound the alarm! We are under attack!"

"My Lord!" Two of the jaffa left at once. He could hear the horns. Three long notes, indicating that the chappa'ai was under attack.

Then suddenly, the sky darkened, from a shimmering blue to a dark shadow, with purple lights moving throughout it. A rumbling of the ground built up.

"Attention those who serve the false god! Lay down your weapons, and you will be spared! Resist, and you will be destroyed!" A voice boomed out. A woman's voice, one he did not recognized. It was not deep, as a Goa'uld's was. It was a human voice.

Hades slowly approached the window. Whoever did this would pay for it. He looked up, at the darkness. It was… death gliders? No, not exactly, but so many small craft that the sun was blotted out. He looked down at the ground. Were those… fully armored soldiers?

------------------------
Rachel
------------------------

I had decided to disable the stealth on my units. When people are confronted with an invisible enemy, they don't know their chances. I hadn't realized that. So, showing them they were outnumbered 500-to-1 and climbing was the best way to prevent anything stupid from happening. And how did I get 500,000 C-bots on the ground, one might ask?

In orbit, my Stormfronts hovered, pointing their sterns toward the planet below. At their sterns, was mounted a ring, with a bouquet's worth of long, slender, panels rotating around it. The Stormfront was a dedicated troop transport, with the Helios's teleport projection system mounted on it. Given the Stormfront was ten times the size of the Helios, the projection system was twenty times the size of the original. The longer panels folded flat across the hull of the ship while not in use, but now they were dropping even more troops on the surface.

Though given Goa'uld arrogance, stupid was still likely to happen. Given that I had was moving units inbetween soldiers and civilians as fast as I could, which was really freaking fast. No, really, I could toss people across the room simply by having a unit run into them. They wouldn't get up after that, even if they survived.

With the villages nearby pretty much secure, I now had to worry about the ha'tak. Which, contrary to what the show told me, was actually four-sided and had the sticky-out bits. Given that there were four of them instead of three, they were pretty close to having a full disk there.

Anyway, now I had to rush it without the benefit of stealth. Given that the guards were starting to react once I sealed the Stargate, I decided that a bunch of panicking zealots was not good for civilian survival.

Apparently, neither were panicking egomaniacs, as a bolt of fire came from the ha'tak overlooking the village, blowing most of it up with one shot. That was, what, 140 civilians?

Fuck. Fuckity Fuck Fuck. Do these guys have no sense of self-preservation? I blotted out the fucking sun, and they still fight back. I should have anticipated this, but since I didn't even anticipate the guards panicking, I guess I suck at thinking about how non-video game people will react. Even people playing a video game will act differently.

But that's enough thinking about that. Focus. My school of fifty thousand Vengeances moved like fish, opening a hole for a predator to go through. And one of my Skylords fired its spinal cannon. Given the economy I was operating on, I could have fired right at the limits of the cannon's materials. But I didn't. I didn't know how much energy would be lost to the atmosphere, but with the power available I could have easily set everything in at least a dozen kilometers on fire.

At the target, it sliced through the unshielded mothership like nothing, cutting the 3.5km ship in half in single burst. The ha'tak hadn't raised its shields. It would have only delayed the outcome, regardless. My beam continued through the ship into the ground.

Then the reactor exploded. The shockwave destroyed everything nearby. My units, the DHD, the people. Everyone who hadn't died from the shot? Dead. Fires started in the nearby forest, and quickly started raging out of control.

Fuck. Fuck the Goa'uld and their stupid god complexes. Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck.

I needed to get those fires put out, before they burned everything and everyone around them to ashes. Walls and firebreaks.

I had advanced bot fabbers laying around this system somewhere. Found 'em. I dropped them at the edges of the towns, and started putting down walls.

Three seconds in. Embers were blowing over the walls. Put another layer of walls on top, or something else? Another layer of walls wouldn't help. Trample the fire? I did have a lot of feet.

Every single one of my C-Doxes started running towards the source of the fire. They'd pop eventually, but it would hopefully give us time. Meanwhile, my C-fabbers grabbed everyone around, and started moving towards whatever large structure would hold everyone. Jaffa, civilian, I didn't care. My bots rammed through walls to get people inside faster. Houses inside the village were now burning. Fuck.

Most of the people were almost in, though. Meanwhile, my fabbers went to work. Purple mist started flowing from their arms, up towards the ceiling, and towards the wall. A wireframe filled out. I was going to coat the building in solid steel. That ought to hold for long enough for me to come up with a better plan.

ltmauve · Mar 21, 2016

Chapter 9

Alright, this village was probably going to hold out. Time to do the next one. Once again, my units started flowing, and I dragged everyone into the largest building there. Much less chaotic, and I even made it with 30 seconds before the fire got there. That was enough time for me to get the walls and ceiling coated. Done. Onto the next one. Alright, it's under control, that was ten times easier than I expected. Of course, this entire invasion is going ten times worse than I expected.

How to put out a fire? Well, I couldn't ask Google. Well first, my thousands and thousands of Vengeances were doing absolutely nothing. Let's get them out of the way. With their stealth re-engaged, I ordered them into orbit.

I was going to need some water. How about a teleporter? Okay, a scaled-down teleporter underneath a hummingbird, stripped of weaponry. My Research Network responded in under a minute. And for picking the water up, a submarine with the same size teleporter on the front. Please remember to check that the teleporter won't break at high pressures. This was going to take a minute.

In the meantime, I needed to build that plane, and I didn't have an air factory with its wonderful gravity cushion. Time to MacGyver it. I took a dozen of my C-Doxes and had them stand in a grid, and put their hands over their heads, flat. Then my full-sized fabricators started up, putting the new design into reality, directly on the hands of the C-fabbers.

I was also going to need that submarine underwater. I grabbed one of my Skylords and pointed in the direction of the nearest ocean.

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

Meanwhile, in the shelters I'd whipped up in a panic, people were starting to panic. No, they were already mostly there. I'd never been good about people's emotions in the first place. I was horrible at recognizing them, and even more horrible at using that information to act appropriately.

I had one of the C-fabbers step forward in each place.

"Please remain calm." I spoke through it. "The destruction of the false god's ship has resulted in widespread fire. We are taking containment measures now."

The panic sort of subsided. A bit. Wonderful.

Also… everyone was sweating. The temperatures in the shelters were rising. So, I was going to need even more water.

---------------
Inside the Skylord barreling towards the planet, I had already built two very strong heat shields. I had a dozen fabbers on the lower hanger deck, ready to implement the design for the submarine the nanosecond it came into this system.

*Ka-Ding*

I had added the sound to research alerts. I was bored. I think I preferred being bored

It took 7 seconds to construct the first sub, between the Skylord's built-in fabbers and the ones crouching on the hanger deck. 7 seconds too many. I launched the submarine straight from orbit. The Skylord was designed to launch nuclear missiles. Now this one was launching something a lot more important. In another 7 seconds, another one followed. With the heat shield, the next one would take ten seconds. 3 seconds more. Too many.

The first submarine landed. Or maybe crashed. Or probably both. That's how a Commander's army rolls, I guess. The heat shield gave up the ghost, some of the impact going to the submarine. The teleporter kicked in, connecting to one of the planes I had flying around. Water streamed out, bursting into steam. I adjusted the speed of the plane, making sure the water was coming down fast enough to quench the flames. Fortunately, the subs were fast, meaning I was getting a lot of water.

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

Okay, got "getting water for humans" set, time to make some and have have my bots hand them out.

I started tossing them out to the civilians first. When a few jaffa tried to grab the bottles, I had a couple of C-Dox grab them and pin them to the wall, the glowing red sensors in their heads staring right at them.

"Please do not do that." I stated simply, through each spokesbot.

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

Finally, my infrared sensors revealed the fire going out.

It's finally over. Time to get dealing with this mess now. I threw down a small teleporter in each village.

I also started making a holding facility. Time to deal with the jaffa. Let me see, modular prison design. This… this will take too long. A simple grey room, with a teleporter leading into it. Actually, several teleporters. Throw it down somewhere on the planet, and start sending in the jaffa. It would take me a few minutes to get a fabber over there to build it, but it wouldn't take that long to build.

That being taken care of, I needed to handle the civilians. There were about a thousand or so that were still alive. I dug into my sensor records to see how many people were killed. I fucked up here. Five hundred and twenty-one.

Five hundred and twenty-one people dead because I assumed that a Goa'uld would be sane and accept fear. Well, time to get started on caring for the rest. I needed to feed them. I sent some fabbers, now with full stealth systems engaged, to some of the intact villages to capture their food supplies. I would be able to replicate them. I would also need to be able to give them a place to live long-term. But I probably had a week or so to do that.

In the meantime, they probably needed to be taken out of the hastily-built shelters I had put up hours ago. Let me see, the largest village had a hundred and five people alive.

So a room to hold 120 people was what I needed. I made 30 "rooms" with 4 beds in each. Not having actual bed designs, I just used a slab of foam. Each room was just the beds, along with a door. Actually, could I make a curtain? I did have mesh to protect my units' joints, so maybe by changing the density and composition I could get something?

For composition, I did have lightweight plastics. And altering the weave's density was in the parameters. Hmmm… lights! I forgot lights. Humans need light to see. Just because I don't (and doesn't that seem odd for me to say, what with my identity as a human.) doesn't mean I should neglect it. I fact, I really shouldn't.

Oh, and humans also have other needs. Should arrange something for that as well. Right, and I need to take of that for my temporary holding area as well. I double-checked the designs. That should work.

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

Several minutes of waiting and work later, I was done. Time to implement this. First, I took the jaffa that I had left pinned against the wall with a couple of killbots staring at them, and marched them out of the shelter towards the teleporter. Then I took several more bots, and marched them in.

"Those of you who served the false god, follow them." My spokesbot gestured to the entered bots. After a moment, some of the jaffa stood. Those that didn't I grabbed roughly and dragged them into line behind those standing. Once I had a line in front of the teleporter, I took C-Fabbers and started spraying the jaffa with nanomachines. Reclaim their clothes, their weapons, anything not organic. Then I fabricated jumpsuits for them, in plain white.

Then I took the jaffa I had to drag around, and tossed them through the teleporters. Inside the temporary holding room. Once I saw that all of them had gotten away from the exits, I had the bots gesture to the standing jaffa to follow them through.

The civilians were all easier. None of them were resisting, and by that point it the sun was setting on the horizon. I hadn't really thought about that for the past week, given that I didn't sleep, didn't need light to see, and really didn't need my body to actually do that much.

That was a depressing thought.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Author's note
I'm not that pleased with this chapter, and might rewrite sections of it later. It's just.. ugh.

ltmauve · Mar 25, 2016

Chapter 10

Okay, that clusterfuck was finished. Food procured via nanomachine fabrication, everyone secure, and the system is getting reinforced. Villagers are all tucked away for the night, so I don't have to worry about that.

And finally, finally, my first hyperspace fabber finally exited hyperspace. Six days. Hopefully in the right system. It had no orbital/deepspace radar, and I didn't want to wait more after sending another one. I would, however, be stuck for about five hours while I waited for enough data to find Earth. And that assumed I was in the right system. I had no idea if the address for Earth that I remember worked in this universe with a 45-glyph Stargate and 4-sided ha'taks.

Well, time to get to work solving my problems while I waited.

First, I needed to be able to evacuate a combat zone. I started with my small teleporter. About the size of a Stargate, it was also cheaper than the full teleporter. But, I couldn't just drop it in. It required a small amount of reclaiming to anchor it. I'd need something I could drop from orbit and have it stable enough to be useable. To do that, I modified the base, letting it fold out a bit more. Also, a safety protocol to shut down the teleporter if it started tumbling.

Now I needed somewhere to put civilians. I took the Beacon's hull, and removed everything. I re-added thrust, power, and hyperdrive. Then I laid down decks. I'd need to circulate air, handle waste, and create food. Those were more complicated than I was used to. Perhaps I should try modularizing those?

Once I finished making the ship habitable for about five thousand people, I added a few dozen teleporters to the ship, four per deck. That should do it.

One Exodus-class evacuation ship blueprint completed.

Alright, what next? I needed a long-term solution for my prisoners. A prison, obviously. But I no clue how to make one. Well, I could at least design a door. Both physical and energy barriers were going to be used. And I was going to be using, in addition to heat-charge armor, solid armor. Progenitor solid armor was really only used for wall segments, since heat-charge armor had no weak points. The mesh under joints could take just as much damage as meter-thick plating, assuming they were on the same unit. The meter-thick sections just gave more capacity for heat-charge to build up before failure.

The door had three pairs of forcefields and solid doors. I had a more efficient version of the corridor forcefields from Apophis's mothership at my disposal, so I put down those. Directly behind them were the doors, 45 centimeters thick, with interlocking ridges on the inner edges. I'd been sure to set them up so that there wasn't a straight slit through the door. The closest door to the cell had a window in it, letting me, or anyone else, speak to the prisoners without needing to open all the doors.

I also made each cell an individual unit, so if someone tried something, I could just eject the cell and blow it up. And if the safeties in my units detected someone messing with the hardware, the cell would simply self-destruct.

That was all I could do for now, without having any ideas how to make a prison complex. I suppose I'd be able to get information on that from Earth, but I had to wait for that.

What else to do? Well, queue up some ships for my colonized systems. Let's see, currently I'm using… none of my economy for units. While I'm pumping out thousands of ships.

Okay, time to change that. I currently have 10.4 trillion Towers. I'm pretty sure I can make more ships than this. In fact it would take two hours to make one ship for every star in the system. So, time to ramp up my production a bit. And not just my upscaled orbital factories I hacked together.

But seriously, 10.4 trillion Towers. That's around a thousand times the population of Earth. Given how sparse the rest of the galaxy was in population, it was probably closer in magnitude to the population of the galaxy than the population of Earth.

I was going to need a better fabber for making ships, though. I took a 400-meter-long slab of fabricators, and added a drive unit, docking ports on the end, and some arms so they could form Star Trek-like shipyards. I queued up a set of these Fabrication Slabs, and then started developing the queue for putting a ship in every solar system. With my hyperspace speed, it would take about 9 months to cover the galaxy, but my only other option was to wait.

My rate of Tower production dropped drastically as my units scrambled to execute the orders. But having a slower growth rate means nothing compared to watching every single star system in the galaxy. Eliminating the Goa'uld was probably going to require that level of coverage.

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

Once I verified that my Pioneer Mk. 0 was in the right system and I had the location of the Earth, I had the fabber make a short jump towards Earth, and wound nearly right on top of it. I set the fabber to go towards the moon, and waited. Again.

Once the fabber reached the moon, I had it plop down an extractor and a downsized energy plant, since I didn't have the resources to do a full-sized one. Agonizingly slow, given the lag involved. Once that was done, with my resource problem patched, I fabricated a Gull, then a drop pod around it. With that, the aerospace fabber moved off under its own power, breaking out of the moon's gravity well and towards Earth. Meanwhile, I directed my fabber to construct a one-meter tube, and the small fabber bot that moved through it. Once that happened, I moved the hyperspace fabber off, towards another mex. Time to von Neuman, though not as hard this time.

And now, the result of me being bored for three days comes to light: "build_custom_367 yes yes no all -1 30." A subterranean planetary assimilation protocol. I'd come up with designs for having underground facilities that could deploy units, and more importantly, do it and remain fairly undetected. For that, I used doors disguised as the surface to conceal my factories, teleporters, and unit cannons.

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

The Gull finally reached Earth, the drop pod melting away under the heat as my fabber hit the atmosphere from accelerating almost all the way down from the Moon. And then it broke up. Well, my impatience certainly bit me in the ass.

Well, good thing I have my unit cannons. I set them to continuously produce Gulls and send them to Earth. All over it.

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

Eventually, my first wave of Gulls had safely reached the atmosphere. With that done, I immediately began taking samples of dirt. Also grass and flowers, trees and stone, pretty much everything. Got to get that garden done.

I had left a big hole in my "covering planets in towers" operation. A giant chamber, two kilometers high and three hundred across. Now I began designing the garden that was going to fill it.
--------------------------------

Now, how get the SGC's data? My fabbers moved closer to Cheyenne Mountain, while I pondered the question of how to get my hands on all the data of the SGC without killing anyone. While asking might give me some data, it wouldn't be anywhere near what I wanted. And of course, using my crazy speed wasn't an option, since the distance meant I had so much lag. Okay, it was fifteen seconds of lag. Not enough to impact my economy, but still enough to ruin any attempt at micro. So, how to do this? Well first I need my map of the base. I needed to find the computer room, and then capture it all. Possibly capture some of the physical tech samples as well. And then go to Area 51, and capture stuff there. So. Getting into the base. My sensors had mapped out the base. Now time to see if I can find the computer rooms just from looking at the sensor data. Nope, I can't. The only entrances to the base are the elevator shafts, some air vents, and some access tunnels, and all of those are monitored. I can't get a unit in through those. So, digging, I guess?

So, make a ball fabber and tube, and count on my seismic stealth to handle not getting noticed. As the fabber worked its way down through the earth, I looked at the sensor data again. Cooling! The computers the SGC would use generate heat. Therefore, they needed cooling, and I could trace that cooling. So, air ducts are here, here, plenty over there. That looks good. Alright, my ball fabber adjusted its course towards the vents. Once there, I had it fabricate another fabricator, much smaller, on the end of a cable. A long cable. Then I had a frame run around the cable, so I could bend it as I wanted. With that, I began snaking the tiny fabricator through the ducts. I could walk people through this duct, no problem. Then I ran into a problem. A fan.

I should mention I'm not really a big fan of air cooling.

After a simple reclaim command, no trace of anyone putting the fan in remained. With that, my fabricator-on-a-rope moved further into the base, with hopefully no one the wiser. Considering my stealth, it was likely that was the case. If it wasn't, self-destruct, and remove all evidence. Eventually, my fabber reached what was hopefully the computer room. Back at my base, I almost laughed at loud. Those computers were old. So darn old.

Well, it was probably only the year 2000, 16 years before my last human memories. Time to get looting. Nobody moving nearby.

I reclaimed a hole in the air grate, then snaked the fabricator head into the room. Capture, I commanded it. A purple mist of femtotech flooded the room, going into everything. The hard drives were very easy for me to read by landing nanomachines on their surfaces. Yoink! Alright, time to leave a monitoring device, repair the grate, and bugger out of here. Actually, several monitoring devices, most likely.

One in the cement of the ceiling, as a backup. Then one on each network port in every one of the servers. Oh, and all of them should be featureless. No sense in letting the SGC know it was me who has control over all their computers. Well, not actually control, but I do have full network information.

And with that, time to leave, and destroy all evidence. Except for the bugs. But yes, there must be no trace that I was there. Except also the missing fan. That's not going back.

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

Alright, what else do I need to look for? I consulted my list, as my Gulls moved out, towards the areas of interest.

My Gulls, accompanied by the occasional Firefly, wandered over large grids, looking for some very specific things. In Antarctica, Montana, Glastonbury Tor, Egypt, Honduras, Area 51, the grid tightened, raw data compared to previous passes for additional accuracy and precision. Of course, some of those were larger areas than others. Fortunately, I can just throw numbers at the problem until it goes away. It may not be a hammer, but it's at least a rubber mallet.

And now that the search has started, time to look at the SGC's files. I don't have a great information warfare package, but having the raw data is good. Once people send in their passwords, I'd be just fine. And look at this, someone is sending in a password. Or rather, they sent it in 15 seconds ago. Stupid lag. But smart password. It's 16 characters, completely random. But it doesn't matter because I have physical access.

Hmm, who sent in the password anyway? Captain Carter. Well I guess I know who starts her day at 5:42am in the morning. So let's see, what do we have? A gate listing? Yoink. Mission reports? Yoink. Personnel roster? Leave it. Database of all captured techs? Oh very yes. Yoink.

So the world I just liberated was Nasya, the world where Carter got taken over by a Tok'ra. Apparently it fell to Cronus after that, according to information from the Tok'ra. But I don't think that was Cronus on the world. I could check the head tattoos of the jaffa with someone, I guess.

No information on the rest of the worlds I've colonized. Oh well. Not what I'm particularly looking for. Ah, here we go. Altair. Avatar bot, here I come. 16.77 light-years from Earth. I can deal with that. Barely an hour or two, once I launch the Pioneer. And I should have had one ready, just in case. Super great at Commandering.

Cimmeria's address was in the listing, as well. Should I go? Yes. I don't think the Asgard could, or would, put any sort of resources into fighting me. Plus, if I tell the truth, or at least most of it, I can get away with it fairly well. I don't want to have to fight with them, since they could probably take me even when I'm built up by tele-ganking me or something. Well, they might not be able to come up with that one, but the Tau'ri would.

12 days. Well, if I do end up making contact, the lag might be a problem. Hmm. Well, I'll send off the ships now, and make my contingencies as they travel.

Well, that's done. Now time to wait until I get all the technology on Earth. It seems I have a lot of waiting while I'm doing this.

Limit Theory [PA Multicross SI]

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