So, this is from Academia Nut's (Dead)
Sci-Fi Quest which seems to take Star Trek influence in terms of ideals. I realize Secret Drives are kind of already this but I wondered if non-Secret Alcubierre Drives could be developed, as Uju's concern over the potential 'And then the Secret stopped working right.' button the Shiplords seem to have echoed in me. If nothing else, progressing along the tech tree there.
Running on surprisingly simple technology for what it does, the Dark Energy Manipulator allows for the alteration of local space-time, which at this level of development allows for the construction of simple reactionless drives. While a single configuration has been shown to work, initial models show that this configuration is extremely inefficient and there is remarkable room for improvement. However, while the technology is simple, the underlying physics is not, and determining a new stable configuration has proven fiendishly difficult. It is currently estimated that the computational modelling required will encompass much of the entire planet's capacity of supercomputers to achieve within a reasonable time frame.
Main Keel - A simple design, this uses a single massive linear accelerator to establish a linear dark energy gradient parallel to its axis. While not the most sophisticated design, it is projected to be extremely energy efficient and robust in comparison to other proposals. Projected Pros: High Endurance, Relative Simplicity. Projected Cons: Lower Speed, Poor Maneuverability.
Nacelles - While overlapping fields have already been shown to interfere with each other, initial models show that precise alignment of two fields should produce a complex interaction between them that would create an exponentially greater spatial distortion than a single field on its own. While a this would also require a much higher input of energy, it is also projected that the velocities achievable would also be much higher. Projected Pros: High Speed, Decent Maneuverability. Projected Cons: Lower Endurance, Delicate Construction
Crescent Wings - Instead of orienting the accelerator parallel to the axis of travel, if given a curve to produce self-interaction effects from the tips, it could be oriented perpendicular to travel. While this configuration would definitely be slower than linear designs, it would also be able to reorient much faster. Projected Pros: Extreme Maneuverability. Projected Cons: Lower Speed, Poor Endurance.
Torus - The curved accelerator design taken to its logical conclusion, a toroidal design would produce extreme self-interaction effects in the center of the ring. While this would negate much of its capacity as a reactionless drive, the center could become a point of pinched space-time that could replicate the interior of stars, producing an efficient fusion reactor. Better yet, the external fields could be used to funnel interstellar gas into the pinch point, producing a Bussard ramjet. Projected Pros: Power Source, Unlimited Endurance. Cons: Abysmal Speed and Manueverability
The rest is from Red Flag's Quest again, mostly their descriptions of how tech and superweapons work.
Red Flag: What it does is it displaces the effects of force carrier particles. A photon fired in Solar can exert its effects in Tempestus. It has a limit on volume, and it can't do anything like copying Null or the Oracle's time travel or a C'tan's quantum field reality warping.
Comment: Description of a mirror-like superweapon that uses quantum nonsense to 'duplicate' ships, allowing them to affect people on the other side of the galaxy without being harmed by anything not either fellow quantum nonsense, or Practice-esque. These somehow afflict the real deal using the link, which frustrates the creator of the superweapon because he didn't really grok emotions before he made himself into a monster.
Red Flag: It's definitely better actually for the Lizardmen to take after the Seraphon, and have unused casting capacity be used to resurrect lost troops. Infantry and monsters can be resurrected indefinitely as long as there are enough Slann around to memorize them, including spawning new Slann to have them peruse the records and take over for one that died. Once they're out of battle, you can assume that they will resurrect to the full memory capacity of the Slann that they have available.
Comment: Essentially, they record every detail and the memories of someone/something, and then use that to resurrect them with Practice-esque nonsense. Sort of like the Stacks in Altered Carbon. Though, these guys are actually unknowing manifestations of unreality seeping into reality from the layer of conceptual nonsense where all the concepts that don't or can't exist are, so I'd be unsurpised if Practice couldn't pull this off. Real glad conceptual cancer isn't a thing with Practice. Otherwise...
Red Flag: On another note, consider what death is for the Chaos Gods. Metaphysically, we might think of most beings as having an outward self - made up of references to them, facts about their existence, etc - and an inward self, comprised of personal experiences and such. This is true even for something as weird as the New Devourer, to which you only theoretically exist unless she's eating you, and then you only theoretically existed.
True death then is defined as a reduction in a being's metaphysical significance via the erasure of the inner self. No more experiences for you. The references to you continue to exist, but they are static, and less than what you were back when you had both references and experiences.
Now a Chaos God is just a bundle of self-promoting simplistic concepts. It has no experiences, only references. When a Chaos God dies, you just tack 'dead' onto its references, and oh hey look, that's more than you had before. Since death is supposed to be a reduction, let's apply it until we get it right, except the dead-times-a-million Chaos God that we have is now metaphysically even bigger than what we started with. This process just continues like a black hole collapsing indefinitely past its event horizon, just dying and dying, losing more and more when you had less than nothing to begin with.
Basically it's like if the CrossyCross account was deleted from Spacebattles, but instead of actually being deleted it just creates a DeletedCrossyCross account. The admins try to delete the original account again, which just creates a DeletedCrossyCross2 account. The attempt to delete the second account simply creates a DeletedDeletedCrossyCross account, and an attempt to delete that creates a DeletedDeletedDeletedCrossyCross account.
Also if you normally spend say, 1 hour per day on spacebattles, you are now forced to spend that amount of time on each of your new accounts, which can only reply to each other. Soon you will have more than 24 accounts, and there's only 24 hours in a day, so you'll have to steal hours from tomorrow in order to make your account quotas, eventually causing the universe to freeze on the date.
Stratum Aetheris is the layer of potential events. This is the layer that Warp travelers travel through, because this layer can be used to navigate to the potential event of being at your destination at this particular time. Daemons can reach up here but don't originate from here, and here the Gellar Field can keep them out. Tyranid synapse communication goes through this layer.
Stratum Profundis is the layer of potential narratives. For example, Skulltaker is a badass Bloodletter who chopped off the head of the first thing he saw the moment he was born, and ran up a kill streak 888 skulls long before Khorne made him Executioner. The realms of the Chaos Gods extend up here, along with their Daemons. Racial gods like Asuryan and Kadmon are also here, the Hive-Waaagh is here, and the Waaagh!! and War!! fields store their racial knowledge here.
Stratum Obscurus is the layer of concepts, or more specifically, the potential for these concepts to continue existing. The Chaos Gods are here, and there are lots of others beside them that are passive because they lack the ability to self-perpetuate due to not being based on the emotions or actions of psychic beings. Gork and Mork in their activated states also exist here. If the New Devourer achieves universal dominance, then her Hive-Waaagh will reach into this layer, and begin to devour any concepts that are not compatible with a universe made out of nothing except her. This will also cause her to forget about them in her solipsism. Whatever a star is, it probably only hypothetically existed.
And finally in our cosmology, there is a last one called Stratum Nihilus. This is the Qlippoth, but it kind of incorporates a negative of all of the Warp's layers too. All concepts, narratives, events, objects, forces, etc that cannot exist, which number infinitely more than those that do exist, are here.
Comment: So, uh, do the Uninvolved have to worry about this sort of thing? Because they explicitly don't know what's going on with Practice, which suggest conceptual inviolacy is not necessarily applicable to them. Back to tech... and sanity.
Red Flag: A virtual power grid applies this idea to transmission, where the power transmission can form new grids and circuits as needed. This technology starts to appear with the AdMech, whose units have electoo circuits that conduct extra power. More advanced units will have these circuits be made of semi-liquid superconductors, which can flow around to make new or more connections on demand. This is how an AdMech unit can be boosting its gun one moment, and then shooting lightning out of its skin the next when a Magos gives the order. Iron Men as well as the most advanced AdMech Arks can do this with plasma 'wires' that transmit power and can reconfigure almost instantly since they're gaseous.
The most advanced stage of this would be things like Krork holeum matter, which can be used to dope basically any substance into something that transmits power. Eldar Wraithbone and derivatives work similarly, and can act like almost any kind of matter. The Iron Men never achieved Astrallects during the DAoT, but an Astrallect's processors are also its reactors (allowing it to be a much bigger portion of the unit than the processor of an Anakim or Zenith, and also making it closer to a C'tan), and rather than using external systems to contain the plasma, instead uses monopole structures inside the plasma to generate containment fields.
And then you have various odds and ends from the hypertech factions. Necrons can transmit power across interstellar distances using quantum entanglement; an AdMech Magos examining a Necron Warrior once noted that there was no power generation built into there, and the power just appeared from somewhere. The Dragon is of course also able to do this, and additionally knows how to store energy in the zero point energy field and extract it later. New Devourer is a perpetual motion machine, but still has reactors or collectors to generate extra power, which she transmutes to psychic power that she then distributes to other parts of the Warforme through her Hive-Waaagh. Beast units have power as long as everybody thinks that they do.
Comment: So, with the Third Secret plodding along, how hard would it be to make Lightless Circuits apply to energy transmission?
Red Flag: Volkite particle beam weapons that set off muon-catalyzed fusion inside a water-containing target, monopole weapons that scatter monopoles inside a target which will continue to annihilate nuclei.
Comment: I would be completely unsurprised to learn an Emitter could pull this.
Red Flag: Okay, so it seems like B-balls are the type of Q-ball that convert matter into antimatter, and in doing so can store double the mass of the converted baryon, mostly in the boson field while only increasing its own mass by a little bit. This energy can later be dumped out in the form of either mass or radiation. This should be how embedded war C'tan feed themselves, and is how a lot of Necron and Dragon superweapons are powered, and lack of mastery of Q-ball mechanics is why Necrons can't reproduce them easily. The black hole part of the Speranza's main gun can also be explained as this, which goes well with the statement that it uses dark matter.
Comment: Probably non-viable because of the indiscriminate nature of antimatter, but still.
And that's everything for now. This is getting pretty long anyway.
