I would certainly agree with you were he facing another PA commander. But he isn't and he is about to run into a very large amount of new and interesting tech. And he is likely to be upgrading it repeatedly. In a commander VS commander battle every last bit of metal and energy counts because you both produce units at the same rate and from the same templates. It's very easy for an enemy to simply out produce you with a better mix of units and utterly swamp your own forces. Here? He is facing the epitome of shit construction practices. Yes, what they produce is grand. Yes, there are a lot of them. But they literally build it all with slave labor. Taking a bit of a hit to efficiency means he can make things far more flexible. Building in a block based system, at least for the frame itself would massively speed the design process. And of course if he runs across a shape that works particularly well he can just run that through the RnD process to streamline it.
Limit Theory [PA Multicross SI]
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The research cores do make procedural modules. I can directly recreate something I nano-scan, but not adapt it until it has been modularized. Once that happens adding and adjusting it is trivaly easy. The modularization process also checks every module I have in my library to see if they synergize.
For example, I nano-scan the Sangraal. I can now duplicate Sangraals.
However, if I modularize it, I can now make anti-Ascended weaponry with variable yield. I can design anti-ascended missiles or something. I will also have cross-referenced it with every technology in my database, to see if I can say, make an anti-Ascended beam weapon or something.
As for time, reverse-engineering something new takes weeks. Compiling the design for a new unit takes minutes. Designing will probably take less than weeks, unless something is very intricate, because I can just slap down modules.
As for having physical modules, a properly designed unit has the most effective packing possible for its components. Using preshaped modules means I lose out on packing density. Also, fixed module sizes mean I am unlikely to have an optimized module for the task. Instead I will be compromising my requirements.
Metal/time efficiency isn't that important to me right now, seeing as I can out grow anything in the setting (it will in fact be until my 18th world until something that could possibly outgrow PA will appear. And by then I'll have tons of ridiculous upgrades.)
Here are the reasons I won't be going towards that path:
- Many, many joints offend my engineering sensibilities.
- Mounting hardware for modules offends my engineering sensibilities.
- Poor packing of modules offends my engineering sensibilites
- Heat-charge armor is an in-universe explanation for why PA units can keep going until they reach zero hit points, and do not have critical hits(weak points). It is drastically weakened by breaking it into bits.
Relax, I have my own idea for dealing with that. And it's going to lead to a hilarious (I hope) moment with the Asgard (and no, I'm not going to explain that, you'll just have to wait and see.
)Thank you for answering this one for me, though it's season 4.
This is a fan'verse, as you may have noted at the start of chapter 2 Rachel commenting that the Stargate had 45 glyphs.
There are some plot threads that I'll pick out and remove, though most of the changes are merely cosmetic (that is, stuff will look different than canon. This applies to all universes I visit.) I may also change the explanation of how things work in universe to allow canon welding. Also since Stargate knows absolutely nothing about biology, most of those explanations will be changed for my sanity.
Well also Rachel only remembers the gate address of Earth, Atlantis, and Destiny. So if she needed the address for a world with interesting tech that SG-1 has visited, well, she'd have to get the information from the SGC somehow
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Problem... bullet points 1 and 3 are already handled. But I'm almost certain that Seth was handled in early season 3. And the arm bands was at early season 4. SG-1 Season 4 - Stargate Wiki
So, yeah, no free gate and Seth dead.
- Location
- USA
Not technology! Infrastructure! Simply hand humanity things that they already have the technology for, and can already build, but that aren't economical, and simply just infrastructure the whole planet in a really useful way with the best mix of infrastructure on the planet and make cities and habs and places that make doing things like economic activity and bettering themselves and educating themselves easier, in ways that are suuuper durable and super easy to repair and highly local! Using only designs for things that are ALREADY on the planet! Basically, a 'home improvement' project.
Now, it might backfire tremendously (first world always tries to give the third world stuff, but it doesn't always make things better because they don't often maintain things...), but it'd be interesting to try!
The SI is a Self Replicating Von Numann Brutally Efficient Mechanism of War. With a quantum bullshit processor. That is already bored just building up their arrival system with their own tech... What the hell makes you think they'd be patient enough to Corporate and level up industry on backwater Earth that's just learning not to piss and defecate in its own bath water? And I can guarantee that they wouldn't trust just any lackey to do it for them... well, maybe if they can grab Reese before SG-1 does, they might have an acceptable socio-interactive personal platform that could work on it's own, but still that'd be decades at the minimum to pioneer the techs needed just to reach the Earth's current level of clean progress capability.
So, no, it's highly unlikely that the SI is going to do even some development packaging for SG'verse Earth. Though, query, why are you so sure that an outside context advanced build bot should improve any Earth's capability just because it's there? One thing that should be abundantly clear, is that one doesn't go around intro'ing new techs just because one can/it's fun.
So, no, it's highly unlikely that the SI is going to do even some development packaging for SG'verse Earth. Though, query, why are you so sure that an outside context advanced build bot should improve any Earth's capability just because it's there? One thing that should be abundantly clear, is that one doesn't go around intro'ing new techs just because one can/it's fun.
- Location
- USA
I'm clearly not communicating my concepts across. Let me try another way.
So I'm thinking of an event. One that takes minutes to cover the entire planet, and leaves no one dead. Waves of change, green and blue energies, and... repair and building and healing -force envelop the entire planet in an instant, taking only a few minutes to do their deed. As this happens, inevitable accidents are stopped from happening, as if by a pre-prepared entity with superhuman speed of thinking and acting.
People aren't quite sure what they've done, but when they pick themselves up and look around, they find their planet changed. No new, unknown technologies were apparently deposited on the planet, but it looks like... work, lots of extremely useful, good work, has been done. Like entropy was pushed back.
Buildings are repaired. Bad designs of things improved. Vehicles fixed. Energy, communications, and other infrastructure that was mis-designed originally, or is just showing it's age, improved. Degenerative diseases of individuals improved to 'as healthy as someone like that could reasonably be'; millions of varieties of health problems are wiped out overnight. Superfund sites cleaned up. Proposed infrastructure projects, on the back-burner for years due to being unfeasible, are done. Things of cultural, historic, traditional, artistic, even sentimental significance have fewer changes, sometimes none. People find things cleaned, organized. Landfills have the truly valuable things in them taken out, repaired, and arrayed, and much of the base parts of them put into easily recycle-able components. The basic infrastructure of setting up businesses and government projects and nonprofits and other good works, the buildings and the supplies, is found sitting in warehouses, in standardized ways in appropriate areas. An Arcology is even built in Southeast Asia. The designs seem to fit standards, and to be optimized in a way that ignores 'cost of building or creating or fabricating', instead optimizing for things like beauty, the local culture, efficiency, utility, longevity, ease of maintenance, ease of repairing, breadth of use, etc. etc.
There are even changes in the internet and the information networks. Databases improved. Corruption, war crimes, human rights abuses, brought to light. Good deeds that were ignored, highlighted. Various groups given anonymous tips -- not enough for legal cases, but enough to at least investigate things and get on a path, or to know to look.
The largest changes are in the third world, where decrepit cities are beautified, overhauled, and all of the best ideas of dozens of 'model' and 'green' cities -- many partially built, many only on the drawing board, all with technology that exists or existed on the planet by human hands at one time -- are made real in many parts of the planet. Even vehicles and modes of transportation and furnishings for these areas, as well. Groups and organizations that wanted to achieve a wide variety of good works, and were stopped by a lack of infrastructure, have at least the building parts of their needs suddenly met. It is in the third world where the only truly 'new' technology seems deposited, and it is educational in nature; a form of smart tablet, using no technology that couldn't have been developed with simply millions of dollars and years of investment and development, but no truly 'new' technology, that is capable of helping people self-educate or educate their families, creating customized lessons to help them answer questions and solve problems and learn real skills.
No one knows why this happened, or what caused it, or who. Many say it's an act of god -- and indeed, many new places of worship were built, but they were of an incredible variety of religions, including many that there was a need for place of worship in the area, but no actual location.
Now, this could clearly backfire tremendously, but it seems odd to me that none of the SI's felt compelled by a feeling of, 'oh my goodness, people are dying and suffering and starving and being murdered and have degenerative diseases and are living terrible lives right now and I can now fix it!'
So I'm thinking of an event. One that takes minutes to cover the entire planet, and leaves no one dead. Waves of change, green and blue energies, and... repair and building and healing -force envelop the entire planet in an instant, taking only a few minutes to do their deed. As this happens, inevitable accidents are stopped from happening, as if by a pre-prepared entity with superhuman speed of thinking and acting.
People aren't quite sure what they've done, but when they pick themselves up and look around, they find their planet changed. No new, unknown technologies were apparently deposited on the planet, but it looks like... work, lots of extremely useful, good work, has been done. Like entropy was pushed back.
Buildings are repaired. Bad designs of things improved. Vehicles fixed. Energy, communications, and other infrastructure that was mis-designed originally, or is just showing it's age, improved. Degenerative diseases of individuals improved to 'as healthy as someone like that could reasonably be'; millions of varieties of health problems are wiped out overnight. Superfund sites cleaned up. Proposed infrastructure projects, on the back-burner for years due to being unfeasible, are done. Things of cultural, historic, traditional, artistic, even sentimental significance have fewer changes, sometimes none. People find things cleaned, organized. Landfills have the truly valuable things in them taken out, repaired, and arrayed, and much of the base parts of them put into easily recycle-able components. The basic infrastructure of setting up businesses and government projects and nonprofits and other good works, the buildings and the supplies, is found sitting in warehouses, in standardized ways in appropriate areas. An Arcology is even built in Southeast Asia. The designs seem to fit standards, and to be optimized in a way that ignores 'cost of building or creating or fabricating', instead optimizing for things like beauty, the local culture, efficiency, utility, longevity, ease of maintenance, ease of repairing, breadth of use, etc. etc.
There are even changes in the internet and the information networks. Databases improved. Corruption, war crimes, human rights abuses, brought to light. Good deeds that were ignored, highlighted. Various groups given anonymous tips -- not enough for legal cases, but enough to at least investigate things and get on a path, or to know to look.
The largest changes are in the third world, where decrepit cities are beautified, overhauled, and all of the best ideas of dozens of 'model' and 'green' cities -- many partially built, many only on the drawing board, all with technology that exists or existed on the planet by human hands at one time -- are made real in many parts of the planet. Even vehicles and modes of transportation and furnishings for these areas, as well. Groups and organizations that wanted to achieve a wide variety of good works, and were stopped by a lack of infrastructure, have at least the building parts of their needs suddenly met. It is in the third world where the only truly 'new' technology seems deposited, and it is educational in nature; a form of smart tablet, using no technology that couldn't have been developed with simply millions of dollars and years of investment and development, but no truly 'new' technology, that is capable of helping people self-educate or educate their families, creating customized lessons to help them answer questions and solve problems and learn real skills.
No one knows why this happened, or what caused it, or who. Many say it's an act of god -- and indeed, many new places of worship were built, but they were of an incredible variety of religions, including many that there was a need for place of worship in the area, but no actual location.
Now, this could clearly backfire tremendously, but it seems odd to me that none of the SI's felt compelled by a feeling of, 'oh my goodness, people are dying and suffering and starving and being murdered and have degenerative diseases and are living terrible lives right now and I can now fix it!'
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Largely because most of the SIs are nano-tech based, with very few involving organic information, much less technology (because their tech is literally that much better than organic based tech) So, there's no method of "saving lives" where medical issues are a concern. As for the rest of it, they'd just look at it and shrug, going "meh, to backwards to upgrade without going beyond what they can self reproduce. And not worth the hassle of the idiots killing themselves when they realize they have better weapons. Oh look something conveniently shiny some place completely else than this death ball, with which to hold my attention and forget about stupid organics that kill themselves." It short its apatheticism. Partly because they're a "logical thought machine now" and partly because most authors writing these particular kinds of SIs really don't give a shit about murderous asshole humanity.
To paraphrase Tommy Jones in MIB; A person is smart, intelligent, capable of reason. People, crowds, humanity, is only as smart as the dumbest individual in the group, is only as brave as the most cowardly craven fool in the mob, and is only as altruistic as the greediest, murderous bastard in the populace (usually the person leading the rest of them) Give a person great technology, and they'll do wondrous, heroic even, things. Give people technology, and they'll only use it to find new ways to kill each other with.
All the authors that write SIs, write SIs with this basic tenant at heart. Give a person free energy, and they'll use it to lead people to lazy post scarcity existence; give a populace free energy, and they'll destroy their world before you finish explaining how to use it.
To paraphrase Tommy Jones in MIB; A person is smart, intelligent, capable of reason. People, crowds, humanity, is only as smart as the dumbest individual in the group, is only as brave as the most cowardly craven fool in the mob, and is only as altruistic as the greediest, murderous bastard in the populace (usually the person leading the rest of them) Give a person great technology, and they'll do wondrous, heroic even, things. Give people technology, and they'll only use it to find new ways to kill each other with.
All the authors that write SIs, write SIs with this basic tenant at heart. Give a person free energy, and they'll use it to lead people to lazy post scarcity existence; give a populace free energy, and they'll destroy their world before you finish explaining how to use it.
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
Really? And here I thought I just didn't have the technology in my databases to support any kind of biological civilisation due to the fact that I'm literally made for war first, civilisation building second. Thanks unknown philosopher, your rationalizations have revealed to me the true nature of my SI.
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Stripes
Genre-Savvy Anti-Nihilist
- Location
- Nizhniy Novgorod
I would have, personally, just parked Big Ass Ship in highly noticeable for everyone orbit over Earth and watched inevitable crapfest
At Season 4, local iteration of "The Masquerade" is still in effect, if i am not mistake. How, is whole another question.
At Season 4, local iteration of "The Masquerade" is still in effect, if i am not mistake. How, is whole another question.
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Because, to quote another SI, that way ends with:
Even if Rachel were interested in being a god, she would be fairly disabused by her ability to not set things on fire after her first adventure.
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
Join the club. I got voted in and then they made themselves useful to me.
- Location
- USA
Well, yea, much of the tech-base isn't there to start in the SI's, them being optimized for war. But, for most of them, the means to learn all the know-how, technology, expertise, judgment, knowledge, and skill present of these early 21st century earths is there, right? They could do a hard takeoff of their mental capabilities if they wanted? Personally, in that situation, I'd feel... quite belligerent at ROB if I didn't have all the other useful mental and construction and biological and other capabilities that I should probably have at this tech level, and would've been trivial for a civilization that made me to include...
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- Location
- Arizona
Itmauve, I'm actually a bit annoyed that you and I had a similar idea for a restriction, specifically the Command Range one. Ah well, it's a realistic restriction, so it's not surprising you used it.
I'm actually curious though, do you have a source for the relay module, or are you just using ProgenitorBS to hand wave it away?
Lastly, how do PA units react when they leave control range? Do they self-destruct, continue last order, shut down? Cause I have a feeling that missing Fabber might be coming back in the future, and it won't be friendly.
I'm actually curious though, do you have a source for the relay module, or are you just using ProgenitorBS to hand wave it away?
Lastly, how do PA units react when they leave control range? Do they self-destruct, continue last order, shut down? Cause I have a feeling that missing Fabber might be coming back in the future, and it won't be friendly.
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ahh oh well. And because of the relays I don't have a hard limit on where I can put bases. Just where I can fight from.
The relay module is just me adding things that should be in the techbase but wouldn't be in the game (for example, the Particle Synthesizers, Research Cores, and Mass Plants. It also includes larger storages and Energy Plants.)
LT!PA units will self-destruct when out-of-range by default (which is what happened to the fabber.)
There's only so many different restrictions we can come up with for Commanders before it starts getting ridiculous.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
And in the next one, we will see the Commander restricted to the color purple!
Chapter 5
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's me. My true limit is that I can only make units that purple in them.And in the next one, we will see the Commander restricted to the color purple!
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.
. . . What?
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
Just like that, I have a new idea.
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'd honestly forgotten about that. I used a similar concept in a free form Pacific Rim roleplay quite a while ago, though it was plasma coated Gatling coilgun rounds
It doesn't make any sense, though? A plasma is a super-excited gas, you can't really coat a thing with it. Now, if the plasma was inside the railgun rounds, in the sense of a rail-accelerated plasma bomb, that would work and make sense.
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What I thought was either the outer coating turns into plasma from friction, the round moves fast enough that it creates plasma from the atmosphere, or it releases it from the inside of the round, which would have a generator.
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Neither do pure plasma rounds, but those are a thing. I got the idea from Drich-senpai, who described the Artemis orbital railgun platform as firing a slug coated with plasma to explain the appearance of the shots in-game.
And you could make a plasma weapon if you could find a plasma that had a very high surface tension. Not that it would happen in the real world, but hey, clearly the Progentiors, Ancients, Asgard, and countless other races figured out how to do it.