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Scientia Weaponizes The Future

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TaliesinSkye said:
Keep in mind that Scientia is written with a backlog; my writing is fairly ahead of things. (Currently I'm working on chapter 24.) I've also known the rough story trajectory, answers to all the mysteries, and how Scientia ends from the beginning, although there isn't a detailed outline.
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If you ever do a patreon page or simular setup for access to advanced chapters - I'll sign up. I have a handful of authors I support this way for stories I feel are worth it and this one counts.
 
Whamodyne said:
If you ever do a patreon page or simular setup for access to advanced chapters - I'll sign up. I have a handful of authors I support this way for stories I feel are worth it and this one counts.
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That's kind of you. I've had a few offers, but given the way I use my backlog as a space where I can make edits as needed I'm not sure if it would be fair to people who paid for it. It wouldn't be a finished product.
 
TaliesinSkye said:
That's kind of you. I've had a few offers, but given the way I use my backlog as a space where I can make edits as needed I'm not sure if it would be fair to people who paid for it. It wouldn't be a finished product.
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So long as you give appropriate warning that they haven't been fully edited and the final product is subject to change, it should be fine.
 
Pai said:
Wow, that backup team just ended up on the shit list. There in so much trouble. They pushed so much there primary got scared off and took a fucking taxi home.
They failed their assignment end to end.

Edit: Tay really needs to start playing hardball with these idiots and get a lawyer. One that won't disappear on her. And start telling the prt to fuckoff unless they got a warrant. I mean she's fucking loaded now, rich people have entire firms working for them.
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....what?

The PRT is providing her with an armed escort, complete with an armored vehicle, for her protection. And while the replacement team did fail in their assignment, it was along understandable lines--they were prioritizing the usual items after a major cape fight (deal with casualties, get reliable testimony about what happened for both legal and intelligence/performance reasons, keep VIP in a relatively secure location), and not prioritizing the human factor. And, of course, they were a replacement team, and probably not one chosen for the job, but just the closest team available (since it was on such short notice). This team was a group of PRT troopers responding to a sudden cape fight, not a pair of troopers chosen and briefed for the job. On top of that, the only identified witnesses for most of the fight that they had at that moment were an injured Vista, a brain-injured PRT trooper, and another PRT trooper that had not really seen much because she was too focused on driving a damaged vehicle being chased by fucking Hookwolf.

And sue them? She's already stated that she doesn't want to sue them for more than their insurance would cover; she doesn't want the PRT destroyed, especially when she's in no position to offer a better alternative. Going hardball on the PRT all of the sudden because a couple of troopers who had just rushed into the aftermath of a cape fight were rude/presumptuous to her would be incredibly petty and counterproductive.
 
Do you have no sense of scale? Nothing in the earlier bits happened in your view?

They provided nothing. They are not doing a service. Their demanding answers they don't really have any rights to. She was being excessively nice about it instead of telling them to fuckoff and talk to her lawyer.

Don't get me started on new wave. After she has a proper lawyer or dozen should be dropping some reports to the bar. About leaving your client in the open. For someone who had a bunch of law dumped into her head, she's sure not using that right to remain silent.
 
Logos01 said:
Technically this can be done with well calibrated high energy lasers designed to be hydrogen transparent; they'd penetrate deeper into the star to where the heavier elements mainly resided and thus disrupt the convection cell at it's exterior side.
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On a star?

Stars are made of plasma, aka. a thermalized soup of electrons and protons. Since the electrons aren't bound to atoms, they can absorb photons of any frequency; that's why plasma is so utterly opaque. Cold plasma would be a good candidate for an 'energy shield', if you have some way to generate and control it.

If there's a way to get a laser through to the core of the Sun, then I'd like to hear it. Well--

A hydrogen-transparent laser is easy enough; the problem is that the sun isn't made of hydrogen.
 
Baughn said:
On a star?

Stars are made of plasma, aka. a thermalized soup of electrons and protons. Since the electrons aren't bound to atoms, they can absorb photons of any frequency; that's why plasma is so utterly opaque. Cold plasma would be a good candidate for an 'energy shield', if you have some way to generate and control it.

If there's a way to get a laser through to the core of the Sun, then I'd like to hear it. Well--

A hydrogen-transparent laser is easy enough; the problem is that the sun isn't made of hydrogen.
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While stars do not break physics over their collective knee, they do have enough energy and mass to do weird stuff.
The plasma of stars also made up of photons.
 
That was a great chapter. Happy, cute, adorable... and she (almost) has a new conspirator!
I'm curious if others' shards will try to delete their memories if she says too much, or are they listening in eagerly as well?

I have to admit I was half expecting that station to malfunction and blow up, because most of the time I see something like that, it's the project lead who blows up and their vengeful spirit goes back in time so they have a new chance to build cool stuff.
TaliesinSkye said:
vast amounts of atomicly pure raw construction material
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atomically?
 
LostArchivist said:
That was a great chapter. Happy, cute, adorable... and she (almost) has a new conspirator!
I'm curious if others' shards will try to delete their memories if she says too much, or are they listening in eagerly as well?

I have to admit I was half expecting that station to malfunction and blow up, because most of the time I see something like that, it's the project lead who blows up and their vengeful spirit goes back in time so they have a new chance to build cool stuff.

atomically?
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Whoops, thank you for the correction. I'll fix that.

For the origin civilization, that stellar lifter was just the beginning of a long road. We'll be seeing their story over time.
 
Baughn said:
A hydrogen-transparent laser is easy enough; the problem is that the sun isn't made of hydrogen.
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Not so much that the Sun isn't made of hydrogen (it's nearly 3/4 hydrogen to 1/4 helium with just a 2% sprinkling of "metals" - at least at the photosphere. We can only hypothesise about the deeper layers) but rather that the highly excited plasma is a fairly good imitation of a black body emitter so there aren't really any "windows" to speak of for the laser to take advantage of - except at the extreme low and high ends of the spectrum.

Baughn said:
Cold plasma would be a good candidate for an 'energy shield', if you have some way to generate and control it.
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Not so much really. It's the temperature that's keeping the plasma from recombining into neutral atoms. If it was cooled while being kept compressed enough to block photon transmission then you'd quickly end up with a mix of neutral hydrogen and helium - and very quickly molecular hydrogen once the temperature approached something we'd recognise as "cool" let alone "cold".
 
Aelfhe1m said:
Not so much that the Sun isn't made of hydrogen (it's nearly 3/4 hydrogen to 1/4 helium with just a 2% sprinkling of "metals" - at least at the photosphere. We can only hypothesise about the deeper layers) but rather that the highly excited plasma is a fairly good imitation of a black body emitter so there aren't really any "windows" to speak of for the laser to take advantage of - except at the extreme low and high ends of the spectrum.
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Yes, that was his point.

Aelfhe1m said:
Not so much really. It's the temperature that's keeping the plasma from recombining into neutral atoms. If it was cooled while being kept compressed enough to block photon transmission then you'd quickly end up with a mix of neutral hydrogen and helium - and very quickly molecular hydrogen once the temperature approached something we'd recognise as "cool" let alone "cold".
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That's why he added the big caveat. As we understand it a cold plasma would stop being a plasma, but if you could find a way to make one anyway it would have interesting properties.
 
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TaliesinSkye said:
As we understand it a cold plasma would stop being a plasma, but if you could find a way to make one anyway it would have interesting properties.
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It would probably qualify as a new state of matter (maybe "supercritical plasma") but, yes I agree the properties would likely be very interesting and probably contain at least a few surprises.
 
TheBiggerFish said:
They only delete trigger visions, as far as I know.
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I heard somewhere that Lisa kept getting her realizations about them deleted when she tried investigating them, but I can't recall if that was mentioned as something from canon or if it was from a different story to the one being discussed in that thread!
 
LostArchivist said:
I heard somewhere that Lisa kept getting her realizations about them deleted when she tried investigating them, but I can't recall if that was mentioned as something from canon or if it was from a different story to the one being discussed in that thread!
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I think it must have been another fic, by the end of canon Taylor and the others knew quite a bit about the entities.
 
TaliesinSkye said:
I think it must have been another fic, by the end of canon Taylor and the others knew quite a bit about the entities.
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He might be referring to this actually, from chapter 12.

TaliesinSkye said:
I waved dismissively with my off hand. "I'm angry, but you're more of a kid who's made some bad choices than a genuinely bad person. And I can cut you some slack because your power's been mucking with your head, telling you to create conflict by saying the wrong things."

Tattletale's eyes widened at that, first in surprise and then in a wince of pain. Did she try to turn her power on itself and it didn't work out? Unsurprising, if so. That would be the first thing I'd do to lock it down before sending it out if I were Scion.
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Oh, that. Nah, that's not a shard tinkering with her memories. The shards do sometimes have other limitations, either to protect the entities or protect the user. Lisa is an exception, but as an example most Thinkers can't use their power on the Endbringers, Scion, or Eidolon. (Who probably wound up with whatever shard would have tagged Eden as Eden for the purposes of the Thinker immunity, but that's just a pet theory.)
 
TaliesinSkye said:
Oh, that. Nah, that's not a shard tinkering with her memories. The shards do sometimes have other limitations, either to protect the entities or protect the user. Lisa is an exception, but as an example most Thinkers can't use their power on the Endbringers, Scion, or Eidolon. (Who probably wound up with whatever shard would have tagged Eden as Eden for the purposes of the Thinker immunity, but that's just a pet theory.)
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Yeah. I honestly think he got Eden's unrestricted Administrator shard.
 
TaliesinSkye said:
Oh, that. Nah, that's not a shard tinkering with her memories. The shards do sometimes have other limitations, either to protect the entities or protect the user. Lisa is an exception, but as an example most Thinkers can't use their power on the Endbringers, Scion, or Eidolon. (Who probably wound up with whatever shard would have tagged Eden as Eden for the purposes of the Thinker immunity, but that's just a pet theory.)
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Yeah. I was just pointing out where he might have got that idea from, which you've cleared up with this answer.

In canon I believe short-term amnesia is common in trigger events as the Entities put it in as a safety measure.
 
Come to think of it, I'm not sure if shards can tinker with memories after the fact. The trigger visions seem to put them into some sort of a state where they just aren't making memories, like hypnotic drugs do. Retroactively erasing memories in a selective way is really hard. Even Imp's power doesn't do that.

There is that Cauldron cape that wipes people, but that seems to be all or nothing.
 
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TaliesinSkye said:
Come to think of it, I'm not sure if shards can tinker with memories after the fact. The trigger visions seem to put them into some sort of a state where they just aren't making memories, like hypnotic drugs do. Retroactively erasing memories in a selective way is really hard. Even Imp's power doesn't do that.

There is that Cauldron cape that wipes people, but that seems to be all or nothing.
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sounds more like a mental block rather than true removal of memories.
 
TaliesinSkye said:
Come to think of it, I'm not sure if shards can tinker with memories after the fact. The trigger visions seem to put them into some sort of a state where they just aren't making memories, like hypnotic drugs do. Retroactively erasing memories in a selective way is really hard. Even Imp's power doesn't do that.

There is that Cauldron cape that wipes people, but that seems to be all or nothing.
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They can't. As I said, the Entities put that measure in place for when a connection is properly formed during a trigger event.

Shards are used to collect and store data. Giving them a deletion feature would be counter-productive.
 
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