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The Practice War [Complete]

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So I tried to show a bit more of what being in a Miracle is like on this interlude, but a lot of what I'm trying to explain is by nature impossible to properly conceptualise. Working with forces this far outside of human understanding can be hard to put together satisfactorily in text.

This did, in fact, synergise with your choice to do Phoning Home this round, and I forgot to include that in the turn results. To try to answer the inevitable durability question, every orbital now has shields and a Practiced hull. Oh, and weapons. Many weapons. I'll be free to answer any questions tonight after I get back from work, and I'll start work on the Tombstone Interlude then. That one should (no promises) be the easiest of the three, because it's mostly data-gathering but with some fun surprises.
 
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Can someone tell me what Many Points of Light was? Or did we chain into completing something we didn't have available yet?
 
Pyro Hawk said:
Can someone tell me what Many Points of Light was? Or did we chain into completing something we didn't have available yet?
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Here we go.
Snowfire said:
[] Many Points of Light: The habitats were built with function in mind, with much less thought given to the needs of the human soul and heart. Fixing that will be extremely complex work, but it's possible. [25%, 2 years]
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I don't think we actually chose to allocate Action Dice to this? If I'm right then we just hit two birds with one (Practiced Miracle) rock.
 
This is fantastic. Heavily fortified orbitals mean that not only do we have heavy fixed defenses we can anchor our fleet around for more decisive engagements, but that the Shiplords have to slow and cut their advance to take down any orbitals left in the wake of their advance. If we're feeling really cheeky, leveraging the orbitals to allow us to rotate more of our fleet out for repair as needed should also be feasible.

Even better, if we can get the Shiplords to assume these orbitals are of the same sort they ravaged in the first war, we can pull off one hell of an ambush by baiting them into the teeth of multiple orbitals.
 
I'm wondering what we unlocked via NANOMACHINES, SON! more than anything, considering we only have 2-3 years to get anything running.
 
Tabron89 said:
I'm wondering what we unlocked via NANOMACHINES, SON! more than anything, considering we only have 2-3 years to get anything running.
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Well the biggest thing ought to be a massive increase in the repair-ability of our non-Practiced vessels. I mean, for those familiar with the Mass Effect franchise, unlocking nanomachines should fairly easily give us super-powered omni-gel, pretty much right out of the box. This application is so obvious I don't think it ought to be a separate project, with maybe an upgrade being available to make it possible to recover from anything short of total vaporization of the ship.

Construction speed would be the application I'd think of first: anything that can be physically built right now ought to be an insta-build now that we have nanites to do the job, meaning our limit suddenly becomes how fast we can load raw materials into the ship-builder vat. Later projects could be something like being able to switch weapon loads or even swap weapons on the fly: think Megaman where a vessel can swap between mass-based cannons or missile launchers to a GRASER mid-battle.

After that? Nano-assembly basically lets you manipulate individual atoms on a massive basis, meaning that constructing single-crystal structural materials ought to be completely straightforward. In other words, everything currently being made out of steel ought to be made out of diamond or sapphire crystal instead, with carbon nanotube shock absorbers for flexibility as needed. Something like that ought to be a relatively simple research project away. Later research projects would be to create super-alloys that would be completely impossible without the ability to freely move and bond atoms in three dimensions in real time.

These are just the first three areas of low-hanging fruit I can think of. We're talking controllable Grey Goo here, a Void Secret on the level of FTL portal creation and dragon-level biotech, so the sky ought to be the limit.
 
Karugus said:
This is fantastic. Heavily fortified orbitals mean that not only do we have heavy fixed defenses we can anchor our fleet around for more decisive engagements, but that the Shiplords have to slow and cut their advance to take down any orbitals left in the wake of their advance. If we're feeling really cheeky, leveraging the orbitals to allow us to rotate more of our fleet out for repair as needed should also be feasible.

Even better, if we can get the Shiplords to assume these orbitals are of the same sort they ravaged in the first war, we can pull off one hell of an ambush by baiting them into the teeth of multiple orbitals.
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??? This is not medieval warfare, where a castle has to be stormed. Nobody stops the shiplords from coming in perpendicular to the ecliptic, heading directly for Earth. And if their FTL allows microjumps (might be that I understood Snowfire incorrectly), we are also not going to herd them. Hardened orbitals mean they won't die from a passing shot, killing all inhabitants, and armed orbitals mean if you want to kill them you have to expend effort. Effort better spent at killing the mobile defense fleet.

TheEyes said:
snip.
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Depends on how realistic Snowfire handles nanomachines. Energy transfer, room for a CPU and library, sensors, heat management, bonding strength of the molecules making up the nanomachine versus whatever needs to be manipulated, ...
or PA progenitor 'it happens' on the other end of the scale.
 
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MTB said:
Depends on how realistic Snowfire handles nanomachines.
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If Snowfire is at all sane, he will quitely keep the detailed stuff far in the background, and not think about it too hard. I'm here for the story, so little details like "How does the industry work?" really are best ignored.

Conservation of detail is your friend in an epic space opera like thing. It's about the story, and all the other stuff is frame work towards that. Of course, than you have the issue of "what story is it?"

That deserves an entire dissertation though, to be truthful...
 
You've also got to recognise that it's Nanotech from a Secret of the Void... Which suggests it's closer to the PA 'poof, it's there' than 'One More Die'... though the fact we know there's degrees of understanding of the Secrets means that might start at 'Anything can be made to regenerate' and eventually learn enough to reach 'poof, it's done'...
 
No no no. Clearly, what has happened is that we have shrunk down the entire solar system. We gain an extra year of preparation as a very confused tribute fleet tries to locate it.
 
MTB said:
??? This is not medieval warfare, where a castle has to be stormed. Nobody stops the shiplords from coming in perpendicular to the ecliptic, heading directly for Earth. And if their FTL allows microjumps (might be that I understood Snowfire incorrectly), we are also not going to herd them. Hardened orbitals mean they won't die from a passing shot, killing all inhabitants, and armed orbitals mean if you want to kill them you have to expend effort. Effort better spent at killing the mobile defense fleet.
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Except there sort of is, assuming Fog of War in space is in effect (which given the massive spy network we gutted, it should be) having Payless comms on all our orbitals mean we can have our orbitals lit up like Christmas trees and if any one of them picks something up, the entire system will know.

Combine that with FTL comm time coordinated long range missile strikes or hiding various ships in the presence of orbitals means they have a lot of incentive to try and flush out all our orbitals, all of which are armed and armored enough to make that painful and time consuming.

When those seemingly pointless hardpoints can provide hilarious amounts of awareness and pose a nebulous threat zone you can't be sure of, they become a lot more of an issue.
 
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I'd use disposable EW-platforms for the X-mas tree effect (if we can spam them in high enough numbers and they are more efficient than more ships), not cities.
Let's see what our war minister thinks.
 
MTB said:
I'd use disposable EW-platforms for the X-mas tree effect (if we can spam them in high enough numbers and they are more efficient than more ships), not cities.
Let's see what our war minister thinks.
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We already have the orbitals, and upgrading them makes them that much more useful. I am not against building new unmanned platforms, but I think ships will be more useful due to mobility.
 
spikethehobbit said:
We already have the orbitals, and upgrading them makes them that much more useful. I am not against building new unmanned platforms, but I think ships will be more useful due to mobility.
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Definitely if our simulations show it's more efficient. If it's not, let's built throw-away platforms. To seed the Solar system we'd need at least a few millions, however, so, might be not practical.
 
MTB said:
Definitely if our simulations show it's more efficient. If it's not, let's built throw-away platforms. To seed the Solar system we'd need at least a few millions, however, so, might be not practical.
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Very much so, especially if you're trying to make decoy stations that are 'loud' enough to be mistaken for populated stations. Depending on the types of sensors the shiplords have, you might need to duplicate everything from electromagnetic signatures to gravitational mass to life signs, which is sure to be a tall order.
 
TheEyes said:
Very much so, especially if you're trying to make decoy stations that are 'loud' enough to be mistaken for populated stations. Depending on the types of sensors the shiplords have, you might need to duplicate everything from electromagnetic signatures to gravitational mass to life signs, which is sure to be a tall order.
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Straight up jamming might be easier. The jammers themselves are easy to spot if it works, which means they can also double as bait.
 
Snowfire said:
Federated Solar Navy

First Fleet

Capital Component
3 Squadrons (27) Dauntless class
4 Echelons (12) Tower class

Auxiliary Component
First, Second and Third Task Forces
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You know @Snowfire , looking at where we are now I'm not sure if we should be wildly optimistic or super worried.

You gave us a lot more ships than I thought you would. I though you would give like 1-3 Dauntless classes per selection with a 2 year build time per selection and a cap at like 10. I mean we are building giant capital ships for the first time in Earth history, with a brand new space industry and a low number of trained potentials to crew them. A slow build speed and low cap would be expected.

But now, assuming a normal tribute fleet with 8 ships, we have the numbers to fight them 3-1 with ships in reserve. That's not even counting our other ships, our magical girls and our space stations. Assuming our dauntless class is about 70% as powerful as each of their ships our odds look amazing.

But then I realize, since we never did "Our enemy before us" we have no set ship number or ship type for our enemies. You could literally throw anything at us.

So the question is, should you keep the enemy number low and give us a curbstomp battle to reward our preparation?
Or should you up the enemy forces to keep up the challenge and punish us for never asking that question...?

I'm honestly not sure which choice would make the story better :confused:??

Not really a question just some musings
 
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