Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
As I said hoboships.
The DE's weren't much better, as I'm pretty sure most of them are redone hunting ships, re-jigged for minimal psyker usage.
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The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up
- Thread starter Durin
- Start date
The DE's weren't much better, as I'm pretty sure most of them are redone hunting ships, re-jigged for minimal psyker usage.
sabreFather
Dr Pepper is the flavour that I savour
- Location
- Land of Bears and Loggers AKA Oregon
Now pray tell where did I specify that the Craftworld Eldar were the only ones not using Eldar Empire military vessels? Though, the only example of what an Eldar Empire military vessel could (not would, you silly billies and your lack of reading comprehension) be like would be the Blackstone Fortresses, but those are likely Old One or actually built by Vaul, so questionable.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
You didn't I was just posting my thoughts on what the DE's ships, were converted from.
And yeah, very questionable.
- Location
- Berkeley
As for refuting your earlier points, here goes:
- The 'assuming you're right, so what, we don't have any of them so it's not a problem' is wrong because we've been told we could make them and they would be practical. If we could make them and they defied how orbital mechanics in our world work, then that would mean that they don't apply here.
- Those are two Lagrange points (more on these later)—L1 and L2 under most common nomenclature—and the 'only' issues with having our shipyard there would be that you couldn't have minefields and defense stations around it effectively, as the spread needed to have coverage would mean you'd have mines going off in all sorts of odd orbits around either the moon or the planet, made worse by the fact that they're unstable Lagrange points. Some active stationkeeping by the yards in question would also be required. The main issue here is that we were told that the lifts themselves would be vulnerable, not that it would require moving our shipyard into a more vulnerable location (to say nothing of the issue if that would move the shipyard out from 'over' a city).
- If a moon isn't tidally locked it's a different matter, but that just means it goes from obviously and ludicrous impossible for a traditional geostationary orbit (which lets you be 'over' any part of the moon's equator) to merely highly unlikely. The Hill Sphere (which is the formula I used for figuring out the maximum distance of a stable orbit around a moon of a planet) is still fairly small for a moon, and unless it is itself spinning rapidly it's unlikely to be within it. As an aside, if the moon is NOT tidally locked, the Lagrange point cheat for a pseudo-geostationary orbit doesn't work.
- In this point you're either talking about the Lagrange points again or just orbiting the moon. There is nothing stopping you from orbiting the moon in workable orbits. The issue is that none of those keep you 'above' the same part of the moon (a requirement for any sort of spire/elevator). By orbiting the moon you are also orbiting the planet, as the moon is orbiting the planet. The issue is that if you get too far from the moon the forces the planet puts on you and the moon start to diverge beyond the ability of the moon's gravitation pull to compensate for, which causes you to transfer into a different orbit of the planet than the moon's.
- This point is that with the super-advanced reactors we can have our stuff be unstable orbits, which is true. However, as I pointed out, if lift/boosting was free there would be literally no point to an orbital elevator. If we have our shipyards in an unstable orbit, we would need to constantly boost all of our shipyards. Now, a bit of stationkeeping for something on that scale is fine, but to be enough to significantly change what orbits are okay would be far, far more thrust than taking parts up would be. Like, absurdly. All the time.
- You can orbit multiple objects at once—for example, the sun orbits the center of the galaxy, the earth orbits the sun, the moon orbits earth and the sun. The caveat is that effectively each object has a limited area where they are the thing that gets orbited, known as the Hill Sphere, and if you're outside of that you're just going to be orbiting the thing it orbits. Small (relatively speaking) moons around big gas giants do not have a very big Hill Sphere.
My point was not that having the docks in orbit around the moon of the gas giant was impossible, it was that having them in a geosynchronous orbit was, as no traditional stable geosynchronous orbits exist. The shipyards could be placed in a Lagrange Point (which is what the lunar elevator you linked uses), but in addition to mandating exactly what part of the surface of the moon they're 'above', generally speaking the stable members of these points (which would be required for any major defenses to be in place on location) are also far enough away from the moon in question that they would not be 'close' to the moon from a defensive (and to some extent a logistical) standpoint, and the limited size of the relevant points means that mining the approaches would be effectively impossible.
My understanding for how the current setup could work with our orbital mechanics would be if the space docks etc were in a relatively low and fast orbit around the moon, with higher orbits and the like holding defense stations and minefields. Even then you run into some issues with scale, but if you don't look too closely it seems okay. No need for rule of cool until you start talking about orbital lifts/spires from the surface of the moon to the heavily defended shipyards, at which point things start to get quite a bit more complicated.
As for the 'most moons' issues, this is the rule. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. The thing is, an exception to the rule is the unlikely outcome. The idea of an orbital lift for our shipyards was not treated as something that a unique confluence of events made theoretically feasible, it was treated as something that could easily be on the upgrade path of any shipyard orbiting something, be it a moon of a gas giant or a planet.
Also, as I pointed out earlier, the Lagrange point approach flat out doesn't work for moons that are not tidally locked, and with the very limited size of the Hill Sphere of a moon orbiting a gas giant combined with the fact that the tidal forces are still going to have increased its rotational period even if it hasn't yet started to reach the point of tidal lock, the odds of a relatively stable geostationary orbit are still damn near nil.
We have not yet reached Shepard Quest levels of MATH! here but the references does start to reach it. I am not sure I am comfortable with it in a setting that has Rule of Cool.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
No instead we brought down our 90% death rate before the age of 5 to a mere 50%, due to having oodles of DAoT tech, millions of psykers and the most skilled humans the Imperium ever got its mitts on.
- Location
- Australia
I thought it was that 50% of people reach adulthood? And even before all that, back when colonisation was getting started and the planet was at its most relatively deadliest, the death rate for rando off-world civilians was a mere 40%.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
As I recall, half the babies die before reaching 5 and then half of the survivors die before adulthood.
And it was predicted that it would have been 90% casualties in the initial colonisation, in fact it was set up with those numbers in mind, we lucked out with Rotbart (and as I recall really good rolls in general) who brought it down to a much lower number, giving us a better start, instead of Dis and maybe a one or two other major cities.
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- Location
- Berkeley
Does it help that my argument was mostly that orbital mechanics is annoying and finicky, and thus should mostly be handwaved away with Rule of Cool?
- Location
- Australia
Hmm...I suppose. Avernus still feels weaker to me than I feel it should be. Wildlife deaths are only ever a statistic, rather than full on wars like they used to be at times. Weather and natural disasters are nothing on their own, despite the Warp-touched nature of the planet. The wildlife is so lax on our military that the only times when we get Munitorum actions for acting against the wildlife is when we're expanding to a new area. They don't even permanently take up a Munitorum action slot. The planet doesn't feel like a war zone, it feels like a soldier farm.
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Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
. Why do you assume they don't take up action slots?My assumption has been that they've always done so, we've just adapted to the point that it doesn't bother us anymore as we are won't to, or we just never noticed because we've always been using those actions in dealing with wildlife, since I dunno about you, but I don't want to spend several turns fighting fighting the Cariflowers like at the start of the quest or a thunda beast migration.
If it feels like it isn't a war, then I'd reassess how you look at it. We are constantly fighting and a good year is where we only loose a billion people and of them 4 million of them are trained combat personnel in power armour. Compare that to the most recent war, where the Trust as a whole only lost a few hundred million people.
Then take into account we only loose that many because the Planet mind has decided this is enough pressure, I don't want to actually kill them, maybe I'll do it later.
If we were under the pressure we are now at quest start we'd be long dead.
I don't get what you want, I'm not even sure how much of our budget is tied up dealing with repairs to our cities and military that require constant maintenance because of the wildlife, we loose hundreds of thousands of tanks in pitched battles with herbivores and we're only as safe as we are because we have turned our cities into literal death traps designed to handle the specific threats of the region which could still be destroyed easily if Magma Wyrms decided to drop by or a single weapon said nah, or a guardian species or anything.
And remember Durin has told us repeatedly we're in the safest regions of Avernus. If you want natural disasters as a real issue, we'll have to go beyond them.
Basically what I'm asking is how would it need to be "dangerous enough" to you, cause honestly you just seem to be trying to argue that there's a problem that doesn't exist.
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- Location
- Berkeley
It's not that wildlife deaths are low, it's that a lot of the wildlife deaths are steady. The millions of professional soldiers we lose each year are those lost in actual military action against the wildlife, and we don't even have a statistic for how many militia members we lose in similar circumstances.
Most of our wildlife deaths just translate into a shift in population growth, because dying to the wildlife is a matter of routine here. With the type and degree of incentives we put towards increasing the population our growth rate would be far higher if a lot of people weren't dying—hell, in modern day Earth there are countries with an annual growth rate over 3.5%, and that's without super advanced tech and government policies attempting to encourage growth. Given that in the last turn our population grew by 1.3% in five years, that's a massive number of people dying. The military's job is to keep defensive breaches from happening and hopefully preemptively handle larger threats, and they take losses doing it, but actually protecting everyone from every danger posed by Avernus is far beyond the scope of what even our military can be deployed to do.
sabreFather
Dr Pepper is the flavour that I savour
- Location
- Land of Bears and Loggers AKA Oregon
One of the mistakes Andres is making is that he is conflating our MILITARY Deaths over each turn as being total casualties, when those get subsumed into our population growth, as Reynal said. Another mistake is that he forgets that the info given each turn is an abstraction, as getting into the actual nitty gritty would realistically break us if it was happening in real life. You know, total births + death rates. You recall when we had birth rates in excess of 20% when the Bombardment Cacti bloomed? That is more or less what our base Population Growth would be on literally any other world (sans Deathworlds) due to our efforts on the matter. That attrition reduces it to ~1.3% every 5 years is actually plain horrific. We live because Rotbart was a Tactical Genius inadvertently masquerading as a Master Administrator and went hard ball on colonist survival rather than mission priority. The horrors of Avernus were just as much an OCP for Rotbart as he was for Avernus. Or do you really think Avernus did not do a double take when us ignorant monkeys actually succeeded on something even our Prodigious Ancestors deemed futile?
As for his comments on Catachan, does Catachan haveFully Operational Battle Heavily Armed & Armored Hives built specifically to survive on it? And was it populated from the start by full Army Regiments with minor fleet support and colonists straight from the Kasr's of Cadia? No, it's population started as generic colonists that decided to live out there 80's Action Hero Fantasies and say "Fuck you Death World, we are Catachan now! I shall punch that Centipede-Scorpion-Train thing to assert my Dominance and cajones! HUMANITY, FUCK YEAH!". Not quite the same thing. And that ignores what population growth Catachan now has, combined with what the Administratum and Munitorum were willing to give them.
EDIT: Sorry, Punching things to assert dominance is a reference, no idea why I butchered it.
As for his comments on Catachan, does Catachan have
EDIT: Sorry, Punching things to assert dominance is a reference, no idea why I butchered it.
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Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Well not really decided to live there, more crash landed then couldn't leave.
sabreFather
Dr Pepper is the flavour that I savour
- Location
- Land of Bears and Loggers AKA Oregon
Well, you forgot that their other choices consisted of attempting to repair their ships (and be killed by the wildlife), commit mass suicide, or set up a pure militarized colony (only possible if they had military personnel in the first place). So they decided memetic 1980's action movies would be the
And wtf, why did my tablet autocorrect "basis" to Blackstone Midget Subway!? Caught it before posting, but still.
@Durin so I want to get these right1 we can not make a deal with the Eldar?
2 can we inform the Eldar and get some idea of what would be possible to trade since we do have a informal deal to give each other information that relates to each other, without pissing someone off?
3 would it be possible for Ridicully to divine the local chaos polities and figure out the best way to get them into civil wars?
4 would we be able to convince the Inquisition to start assassinating chaos leaders?
5 is it about time to update the books we had Jane and Rotbart write centuries ago?
2 can we inform the Eldar and get some idea of what would be possible to trade since we do have a informal deal to give each other information that relates to each other, without pissing someone off?
3 would it be possible for Ridicully to divine the local chaos polities and figure out the best way to get them into civil wars?
4 would we be able to convince the Inquisition to start assassinating chaos leaders?
5 is it about time to update the books we had Jane and Rotbart write centuries ago?
- Location
- Australia
He's also said that the presence of sapients are part of what constitutes "more dangerous", thereby implying that if you discount the presence of certain sapients (which you can theoretically effectively do by forming non-aggression pacts with them), there would be even safer areas on Avernus.
Honestly, you gave some pretty good suggestions.
These are functional ways of doing so. A Weapon decides it wants to eat us and then we have to fight Prototype and the Blacklight virus, or the Lizardmen expies decide we're not part of the PLAN and wage the occasional war on us, or maybe some idiots decide to worship a Deep One and then it discovers it likes being worshipped.
Some additional ideas include one of the Peoples' versions of Nagash waking up, or two exceptionally advanced Peoples go to war and unleash psychic WMDs that affect even us despite us being so far away, or we get hit by some crazy psychic plague that targets psykers and we have to go into crisis mode to deal with both it and its effects.
I am not making that mistake. It's still just statistics. At the end of the day, we keep a certain amount of troops at home to deal with attrition, not crises. Theoretically there are things on Avernus that can wipe out Avernite humanity or damage it so severely we have to spend several turns rebuilding, but in practice, only off-world things like Orks and Chaos act in such a capacity. EDIT: Also rogue psykers I guess, but you can lump that in with Chaos.
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sabreFather
Dr Pepper is the flavour that I savour
- Location
- Land of Bears and Loggers AKA Oregon
@Nurgle there is a loophole that would let us contact the Eldar about your #1 and #2, as the Trust's Constitution was written under the assumption such a thing would be done by ambassadors, not a near-transcendent Seer. But, unless we want the rest of the Trust to flip their shit at us, we should not do so and instead bring it up to the Council meeting to decide upon. And #2 does count for that, because believe it or not, the Trust is not made up of individual nation-planets that are aligned for mutual protection, but is instead a singular legal polity.
EDIT
@Andres110 All that is an abstraction. If Durin focused on it, then we would be more insular than Niefelheim as we the PLAYERS would be prioritized there rather than anything else, including "an unimportant ork Waagh hitting the Dorfs" as we would literally put it. After all, the Quest is focused on the Avernus Colony. Everything else is us NOT being ignoramuses focused solely on our little rock.
EDIT
@Andres110 All that is an abstraction. If Durin focused on it, then we would be more insular than Niefelheim as we the PLAYERS would be prioritized there rather than anything else, including "an unimportant ork Waagh hitting the Dorfs" as we would literally put it. After all, the Quest is focused on the Avernus Colony. Everything else is us NOT being ignoramuses focused solely on our little rock.
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- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
1. not without passing it thought he council
2. not without pissing some people off (a bit high handed)
3. he could try
4. yes
5. soon
Ok that changes things than. Alright we still divine the things we originally wanted the 1
secret weapon of the Tzeench
2 geenseed and the connection it has between space marine and Primarch to Emperor
3 at least one flaming action
4 than divine the local chaos polities and find out what factions exist in them.
secret weapon of the Tzeench
2 geenseed and the connection it has between space marine and Primarch to Emperor
3 at least one flaming action
4 than divine the local chaos polities and find out what factions exist in them.
- Location
- Australia
That seems more like a research project rather than a divination project and falls under the Varangian Guard's purview.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Decided no. Needed to yes.
As for how that's possible...auto corrupt is weird.
Not quite sure how that works. My recollection was that he stated that there are significantly more dangerous regions outside of where we are on Avernus, we're just in the safer regions. There are more sapient in other regions, and we maybe able to create non aggression treaties with them.
Others we may not, like those termites you created.
@Durin
1. Since you're here, did you say that the existence of significantly more dangerous zones was contingent on the aggression of the other sapients?
1. A weapon already decides it wants to eat us every few decades we just can't do **** about it. Its kilometres underwater somewhere, and we have no idea where that is and its an alpha plus (albeit a weak one, but weak alpha plus is still fold space like a pretzel strong.)
2. Those are not diseases those are end game crises. Your idea of what a constitutes a reasonable disease is weird even Nurgle can't pull that kinda crap on a regular basis. I'm not saying I don't think Avernus doesn't have those somewhere, but it just doesn't seem like the kinda thing that would be wondering around infecting things at random, especially in the highly regulated Avernus. Maybe the PM uses it to clean a region that's failed, just dumps the Blacklight equivalent, dissolves everything into biomass for reuse.
3. If the Lizardmen decide we're not part of the PLAN then that's the World Mind's job to get em doing that. Though how they'd cross the sea in large enough numbers to be a threat...eh maybe they've got a dino for that. I doubt it though which I will elaborate on in a sec.
4. Pretty sure we kill idiots like that waaaay before they become an issue, though I somehow doubt a deep one would give a crap.
5/6. This also relates back to four. On the Nagash point its entirely possible that that is happening right now, but we'd never know, similar to the two races going to war, because from what little info we have the Planet Mind doesn't like things from one region messing with other regions. Think of each region like a laboratory, we know that the Everglades laboratory has something that should destroy all of Avernus (the Life eater fungus), but while we can remove it from the everglades and use it elsewhere, it will never grow anywhere, but the Everglades. My point is that more than likely the biggest chance of having something from another region affect another in a major way (thus changing whatever experiment are in there) is only if the Planet Mind allows it.
7. The last one's a pretty good, event I don't want it to happen, but I wouldn't mind getting a hold of that disease for study.
However, these are all events on a lesser, but similarish scale to the Daemonic incursion, so what I think you're really asking is why are not getting more events like that? Cause none of these are related to the wildlife, not really.
So?
How do I put this...we're not important on Avernus. Like at all.
Just because there are things that can wreak our face, doesn't mean that they can and will. I very much doubt we're even a major project for the World Mind, if we were we'd likely be experiencing a lot more crap thrown at us.
Also fundamentally there seems to be a difference in how we enjoy these things. When I hear that we've lost nearly 10 million men in pitched battle with a thundabeast herd and then even more to the next 12 herds, I personally start filling out the blanks, but you...I dunno, would you have preferred to have commanded the engagement that lost them?
We have to divine it first before Lin can research it.