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The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up

Investigate the Sea?

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random_npc said:
Cranium spiders.

Believed to be related to implantation spider, cranium spiders are far larger and more lethal. Named for their disturbing method of parasitic reproduction, where a spiders legs will sprout from the head of the implanted victim. Cranium Spiders posses 2 psychic powers, a form of parasitic self biomancy used for incubation and a form of selective perception altering used to hide themselves. The second power causes all affected to actively edit the spider from their perception, however this affect will not extend to actions it takes. For example wounds but not their source will be noticed. While the illusion on it's own can be overcome with only some difficulty, the spider is host to a symbiotic fungus(known as the spider blind fungus) whose spores greatly strengthen the illusion through unknown means. Even more disturbing is it's particular form of Biomancy and it's use in the spiders growth. Cranium spiders typically reproduce by pressing an egg coated in a numbing venom to a victims skull. Once implanted the spider will use Biomancy to migrate to the victims brain or spine. Depending on the location it will under go one of two maturation process. In either case once it reaches the site it will begin to grow by using its biomancy to claim "ownership" of the sounding flesh and then reshaping it. While implanted in human victims the spiders will usually show greater ability to coordinate and plan than once "hatched". it is believed is due to making use of the remaining portion of the victims brain. Unusually spiders in human victims will often chose to remain in this state indefinitely, rather than hatching as soon as possible. The reason for this is not presently known, but many theorize that they consider the increased mental abilities worth the disadvantage of a comparatively frail human body. This behavior has not been observed in the wild, where a spider wait usually wait only long enough to spread it's fungal spores around an area before leaving a host.

If the spider takes root in the brain it will begin to replace an ever larger portion of the victims brain, gaining an increasing degree of control over the host. once the spider is fully mature it's legs will begin to fully extend from the hosts skull, to allow easer dispersal of spider blind spores. At this point the host is essentially brain dead, with the spider using limited access to their memories to crudely impersonate them. While not particularly skilled mimics they can usually pass casual inspection from someone who does not know the victim. Spiders that takes root in the spine will not gain control or access to a victims mind for far longer, however they can seize control of the body almost immediately. instead forming their main body along the victims spine, with only the front of it's head reading into the victims brain. In this case the legs will protrude from the victims sides. Spine grown spiders preserve a larger portion of the victims brain, and thus are both more skilled mimics and more able planners. Due to the greater incubation time and difficulty of hiding increased width rather than small head protrusion typically a spider will only grow from the spine when under the protection of another victim. Typically a spine grown spider will act as a leader for a group of cranium spiders. Though such instances are mercifully rare, and in most cases Cranium spiders will remain solitary menaces, though outbreaks are not unknown.


As both the host species and location influence the size of the resulting spider, cranium spiders come in a large Varity of sizes. Ranging from a mere quarter meter leg tip to leg tip, to as large as 4 meters across if implanted in a particularly large host. In combat a spider will rely heavily on it's illusionary powers to enable a lethal first strike, as it's particular form of biomancy is more optimized for making large changes over time rather than combat. While this means they are capable of a surprising degree of long term adaption, in combat they are of little threat without surprise. Typically specimens in 3 meters across or smaller will become pack hunters, with only the largest being solitary hunters. As their invisibility is not fully reliable without the aid of their fungal infection an alert group with rebreathers are usually able to repulse the grown spiders in the when encountered in the wild.



Hey @Durin I made a thing. you mentioned we know about things worse than blink spiders, so I took that as a challenge. If they need some tweaking let me know.
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nice and horrifying, canon
 
Doomed Wombat said:
@Durin
1. Because it came up what is our exact knowledge of the Sanguinor?
2. What does Lin think the Emperor was before he ascended to the GT? As in was he a God, the incarnation of human psycic potential?
3. Does Lin or Ridcully think they could study his attunement to the Blind Seer to figure our how that happened and gain a better understanding of it?
4. I can't remember if this one's been asked, but are the Quartok getting in on this action?


Pretty sure we'd send em off ASAP and as its a six year process I'd imagine the first 1-2 are just getting all the needed organs in place.

Also yeah...Aria is our best physic psyker hunter by a mile.
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1. you have rumors that it exited
2. he was an immortal but not a god
3. possibly
4. no, they dont really have the numbers for an offensive campaign
 
Red Bovine said:
@Durin

1) If we started founding an order of psyker hunters during the very first year of the turn would we be pulling out those deemed the ones most suited before they are sent along with the other battle psykers? Seems like they would be able to ask the people who taught them about their skil levels in certain areas to easily determine that kind of thing.

Also now that you mention it Aria's null zone ability is invaluable and it seems like it should be a top prioty to have her teach it to others as soon as possible incase she is killed off later.
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1. yes
 
@Enjou I have a few critics

1 are you going to do the other lessons learn or not? The city fighting and siege actions.

2 can we Research the Goliath ship since maintenance will become a issue in the future and impact our supply lines.

3 can you change one of Saint Lin actions to preach so that we get that boost for our forces since they are going into a Abomination world.
 
Enjou said:
I want Ridcully supporting the Valinor Campaign in the first year through his divinations, since that's when we'll be finishing their orbital defenses and we'll preserve more of our fleet with his help. Cheating on the Well's engines after that. Fanning the Flames to keep the Orks busy for a bit longer after that. Then, FINALLY starting Immaterial Resonance, because I know we've wanted to start that forever but haven't had the time.
Xavier will lead the Battle Psykers through the campaign. He's the best option for it.
Aria will equip the Black Irons with the Banishment runes, which will help the campaign. Then she can assist with the campaign itself.
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Not sure how useful banishment for the Iron Guard would be considering that Durin confirmed that most of their elites including psykers were taken out during the earlier campaign to kill Lin so don't think demon summonings are going to be anywhere near as much of an issue. Your plan also has Aria take to the field during the 5 year. Thinking that if we put her to found the order not only would we have psykers trained specifically to counter other psykers including summoning but just have aria participate two years later.
 
HanEmpire said:
My intuition was that having extra-fragile Battlecruisers fitted with close-range weapons and slowing it down would make for a truly useless ship-class. But I'll concede to your math-fu.
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Ragnarok Cannons aren't close range. They're actually optimized for mid-range, but are quite good at all ranges.

random_npc said:
my god, you appear to have tamed the armor equation. if you don't mind me asking, could you give me an idea of how much armor is needed to seriously impact the damage of a nova cannon? I've been eyeballing it but having an idea of how limiting ap 8 is would be nice. I've been trying to work out how feasible a task force of NC ships would be for trying to attrite down heavy vessels, but I have no idea how armor really works in this system.
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Did some charts for you:
Anything 4 armor and below takes 100% damage, which includes all escorts, light cruisers, stealth cruisers, and most escort cruisers so I left those off the charts mostly except the full range one.

Worth noting that the only ships we've seen above 13.5 are Command Battleships and Battlebarges, so most of the superheavy chart is of limited importance.
 
Andres110 said:
Can you change this to Slow and Steady? Slow and Steady is the option for starving hive worlds, which is what we said would happen during the High Council meeting. We should keep to our word.
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It's estimated to take 10 years for a Hive World to run out of food, and 1d8+9 is very likely to go over that - presuming the Hive World is the last one on our list to attack, it's quite possible they'll be running out of supplies by then. It also wasn't explicitly promised, but we can ask about it.

@Durin
1. Would there be any political consequences to going Middle of the Road instead of Slow and Steady?
 
Enjou said:
It's estimated to take 10 years for a Hive World to run out of food, and 1d8+9 is very likely to go over that - presuming the Hive World is the last one on our list to attack, it's quite possible they'll be running out of supplies by then. It also wasn't explicitly promised, but we can ask about it.

@Durin
1. Would there be any political consequences to going Middle of the Road instead of Slow and Steady?
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1. no, it is understood that your words in the High Council Meeting were a preliminary plan
basically the only way to suffer political consequences in this are to either make sure that the casualties are not from among your forces or to not deploy men, ships or psykers.
 
inverted_helix said:
Anything 4 armor and below takes 100% damage, which includes all escorts, light cruisers, stealth cruisers, and most escort cruisers so I left those off the charts mostly except the full range one.

Worth noting that the only ships we've seen above 13.5 are Command Battleships and Battlebarges, so most of the superheavy chart is of limited importance.
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my god, it's a spreadsheet class! I didn't think they existed outside of to boldly go. but all joking aside, thank you so much. I hadn't even realized armor was effective at less than the AP value. that's really helpful for showing why Nova cannons are not OP despite having such high damage compared to other spinal mounts, the damage drop-off as armor rises is nuts.

Though a taskforce of fast ships with nova cannons would be fucking amazing against orks. They'd be hitting hulks at nearly full force, only get a bit of a debuff against the largest size hulk, and they'd be doing good damage against everything terror ship sized or smaller. They would be good for hulks and stripping away escorts. at extreme range against soft targets, a nova cannon is almost as good as a Ragnarok cannon. Though if we're rolling out Ragnarok cannon battle cruisers it still may be worth it to go for the better gun, since I doubt the gun is the main cost of the ship.

Though I do wonder if we could use a hyper reactor to jam a Nova cannon into a fast cruiser the way we can jam a Ragnarok cannon int a battlecruiser? that would make for a rather deadly and weird force of harassing cruisers. Cruiser wolfpacks that can volley nova cannons would be a hell of a trick.
 
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random_npc said:
my god, it's a spreadsheet class! I didn't think they existed outside of to boldly go. but all joking aside, thank you so much. I hadn't even realized armor was effective at less than the AP value. that's really helpful for showing why Nova cannons are not OP despite having such high damage compared to other spinal mounts, the damage drop-off as armor rises is nuts.

Though a taskforce of fast ships with nova cannons would be fucking amazing against orks. They'd be hitting hulks at nearly full force, only get a bit of a debuff against the largest size hulk, and they'd be doing good damage against everything terror ship sized or smaller. They would be good for hulks and stripping away escorts. at extreme range against soft targets, a nova cannon is almost as good as a Ragnarok cannon. Though if we're rolling out Ragnarok cannon battle cruisers it still may be worth it to go for the better gun, since I doubt the gun is the main cost of the ship.
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AP only completely bypasses up to half of AP armor. Beyond that armor gets increasingly effective. At AP = Armor it's about 35% damage. Nova Cannons are almost certainly the most effective spinal gun against orks though because orks simply don't have as high an armor rating as other fleets we've seen (as NC have the highest damage and lowest armor pen compared to other same size spinal guns). Keep in mind in most cases armor pen is way lower than a nova cannon though and most of the time ships are getting significant damage reduction from their armor. Even our cruisers usually have ~80% damage reduction from armor against the enemy attacks on average.

Ragnaroks are better than Nova Cannons because they have 2x the base damage (72 vs 36) and a bit more armor pen (12 vs 8). But that's not really a fair comparison because Ragnarok cannons are a different size bracket of weapon. Ragnaroks are basically scaled up Nova Cannons. At extreme range Nova Cannons have better accuracy though (60% vs 35%) so against low armor targets at extreme range NCs can almost close the effectiveness gap.
 
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inverted_helix said:
At extreme range Nova Cannons have better accuracy though (60% vs 35%) so against low armor targets at extreme range NCs can almost close the effectiveness gap.
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yep, nova cannons hit at 21.6 at max range to the Ragnarok cannon's 25.2. Though if the enemy makes it to long a Ragnarok cannon 57.6 damage to Nova cannons 34.2, and I can see that coming up at least a few times. It would come down to cost in the end though and given the smallest chassis that mounts a nova cannon is a heavy cruiser to the Ragnaroks battlecruiser I doubt whatever the ship is called will cost much more than a Chevalier heavy cruiser. So if we're building a task force around spinal mounts* we're probably going to want to build Ragnarok cannons.

what I'm interested in is seeing if we can do the same thing with the nova cannon that we did with Ragnarok cannon. We're going from fitting 1.5 Ragnarok cannons on a battleship to one on a battlecruiser, going down 3 weight classes. If we could fit a nova cannon on a Cruiser using a hyper reactor then the math changes. eyeballing the costs we'd be getting maybe 1.5 nova cannons per Ragnarok cannon, so they would be a more cost-effective form of long-range harassment.


* an idea I've been kicking around since I started dabbling in the math around the naval rules. Spinal mounts let a force hit way above its weight class at extreme range. Something that would be quite useful for wearing an enemy force down over time. so a fast reaction task force will be able to do more than lurk at the edge of the system until more reinforcements arrive.
 
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Weren't we going to get a chance to upgrade the Ragnarok Cannon from the same series of upgrades we got from the Well's KE weapons? That might make the Ragnarok Cannon perform substantially better within its specialization relative to our other types.
 
I have just uncovered an appreciable amount of information from a lexicanum page.
Percipre - Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum
Here are some things I found out.
1. Large machines called Terraforming Engines are Dark Age tech and were used to terraform worlds.
2. Tech priests can be planetary governors. The planetary governor of Percipre is Magos Biologis Hessayon, for example.
3. There is something called the Collegia Biologica.
4. Biological technomancy exists and is used to produce massive crop yields from limited space. (Presumably amongst other things.)
5. The above implies that Technomancy is not solely the purview of Librarians, but also the Mechanicus.
6. Ultra Intensive Horticulture (yes, with capitalisation) over tens of thousands of years is capable of incidentally producing weeds and diseases resistant to the most lethal of Imperial toxins. Nerve gas bombardment is typically enough to take care of them, but some need to be destroyed with flamers and plasma weapons.
7. Even on a planet whose only purpose is to grow plants and crops, there is only war.
This has led to the abandonment of large segments of the network as infestation by hostile xenoforms (including pests such as Pyrrusian Dire-Slugs or Catachan Bind-Weed) has made permanent habitation of these areas impossible. Teams armed with flamers and defoliants regularly cleanse such areas, though the strains grow back with aggressive speed and tenacity.
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Some agri-servitors retain or regenerate enough personality to rebel against their overlords. They constantly launch raids to disrupt the Grand Horticulturalist's regime and liberate their fellow servitors.
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Constant fighting occurs between followers of rival Bio-Magi as they attempt to steal or disrupt other factions' crops. More mundane conflicts between Percipre's inhabitants also occur regularly, such as grizzled chem-poisoned veterans of the pest control fronts arguing with farming aesthetic specialists over whether it will be possible to hold the southern beds long enough for certain rare flowers to bloom.
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As a critical resource producer, Percipre is vigorously defended by the planets it supplies, from both Xenos raiders and rival Imperial factions who covert the wealth it generates. There are also a number of dug in AT guns and heavy-stubber nests to be found throughout the greehouse complexes, often ominously positioned around an entrance to a long-neglected area.
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