??? The power plant shouldn't be that big. Assuming Elerium generator, you would only need a generator .2 liters big to power it for a cubic meter. Supposing that the entire thing had the average density of Plutonium, it would weigh less than 4 kg, and I'm fairly sure it's lighter than Plutonium.
The SPECIFIC Gamer quest
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Alright, but you also need a respirator because you're also stopping the air you need to breathe from moving.
Except we have a bubble of stopped time around us. Not a big one, but one none the less, and I assumed as we moved new air would be Time-stopped while the old air stopped being so, being left behind. But they will need a HUD thing to compensate for the fact that everything is about 4000x Dimmer.
Got another question though, what does Sybille want to do with Mauno? Just kill him? I'm fine with that, but if she has another fate for him in mind it would be good to know.
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Pretty much. He's a completely unrepentant serial mind rapist who'd be able to just brainwash his way out of actual justice, and Sybille's smart enough to know this.
She could have had some planned demise other than just death. As a form of revenge, or payback for what he has done to others or something, if she wanted it.
Alrighty, plan.
[X] Sybille and 4 Joes equipped with time-stops, Mind-Screens, and a Perception Filter are to port into Jungfernheide park south of the air-port, enter Time-Stop, and make their way to Mauno. Upon arrival, Sybille is to execute the target however she deems fit. They are then to take the corpse back to where they ported in, exit Time-Stop, and port out.
-[X] They are to each be equipped with a Laser Pistol, but the Joes versions are to be made so they can only fire stun, just in case something goes wrong and Mauno obtains control of them around their mind-screen.
-[X] If for some reason the time it takes us to finish talking with Sybil, prepare, and deploy takes longer than 30 minutes, contact the Airport and request they delay the flight, claiming that we have reason to believe that a criminal is planning on taking that flight and are investigating.
From port in to port out, even if they take a hour from their perspective, a total of .9 seconds would have passed from everyone elses perspective. Mauno should have pretty much just blinked out of existence to everyone elses perspective, and at most there would be the faint smell of something burning.
Any criticisms?
Edit: It was rather convenient for us that Anne not only got spells along with her power up, but they were programmed into easily understood code segments. This should make giving the stuff to other Joes much easier, and translating magic skill gotten from people into skill we can plug into the Joes easier.
And @I just write You mentioned us getting a Interlude covering what happened the rest of last week, including interrogating our new prisoners (and probably releasing the 3 people who didn't know anything) and talking with the UN.
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@I just write Can you give us the specifics of the spells Anne learned? More specifically 'Thermal Adjustment', 'In-depth analysis', and 'mass adjustment'.
Well, he shouldn't be able to react at all thanks to our Time Stop, from what I understand, right? If by some miracle he manages to, - off the top of my head, perhaps his mind is unbound by mortal constraints and he can piggyback on the minds inside the Time Stop effects?.. Bullshit Savants are bullshit, so it wouldn't exactly surprise me, - we need to have a back-up plan for when he inevitably uses hostages. He should also have mind-controlled guards around (some of them could even be mages?), because that's what guys like him do.
Also, it says in his blurb that he can read the minds of computers (within the 200m range), so I've got to ask if he possibly uses a secondary network linked to cameras.
How I roughly see the defenses he set up locally: there's a crowd of brainwashed minions loitering around, a number of them with combat experience and/or magical abilities, and several layers of detection (mundane eyes, cameras, magic spells) watching anyone who approaches him. If they notice anything out of the ordinary (e.g. someone looking out of place; or mundane eyes don't notice anything, but cameras clearly perceive approaching targets), he tries to evaluate the threat with some active scanning (either by artificially increasing his range somehow, or by relying on his puppets), and decides the appropriate response based on their identity.
In our case, like I've mentioned before, hostages are likely, as it's possible he randomly sets up kill-switches in people wherever he goes.
...I kind of wish we could just have a sniper shoot him, but he's bound to have an abundance of protective spells.
We can slice through a large number of those defenses thanks to the Time Stop. Even if he can think past it when we get in range, using our own minds to speed his up (which means he would have to get through the Mind Screens), but even if he does he, physically, can't do anything, his body still to slow. That leaves him only 4 possible puppets, the Joes, to try to stop Sybille (who's own Savantness protects her from Mauno). Their pistols are limited to stun to account for this, so that when Sybille's Karmic Backlash comes into play the worst that happens is that the Joes get stunned, and if used on others no one is seriously harmed.
Well, what he does physically is the least of our concerns. His greatest danger is what he can do with minions, and those aren't really limited to the attackers, are they? One (or several) of his puppets could be a mage specializing in prediction/sensing danger/detecting anomalies, who's programmed to immediately speed up immensely and do whatever he/she can to disrupt the aggressors. Or just automatically let loose with anti-technology/anti-magic spells if they can't speed up to the necessary extent.
Hmm. Is it possible to create a general anti-(complex-)technology spell? One that would work reliably on our Time Stop even if they don't know its mechanics?
Edit: I doubt he's paranoid to this extent, just throwing out ideas of what could go wrong. Will probably vote tomorrow morning.
Hmm. Is it possible to create a general anti-(complex-)technology spell? One that would work reliably on our Time Stop even if they don't know its mechanics?
Edit: I doubt he's paranoid to this extent, just throwing out ideas of what could go wrong. Will probably vote tomorrow morning.
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Not exactly, but EMP spells are a thing. Remember what that Technomancer did to Anne?
But his minions are also stuck in the time-stop, that's the entire point. And even if they have commands to do something at a specific trigger, they need time to do those things. Again, to a Time Stopped individual, .9 seconds is a hour. The fastest acting minion with a reaction time of .15 seconds would still take 10 minutes to do anything from the Time Stopped individual's perspective. And supposing the attacker COULD respond in time, they are working with limited power to do anything with. Supposing they are being fed by Mauno himself, they have about 50 gigawatts (I'm guessing, mid-range of savants) of power to work with, assuming 100% efficency. If they used ALL of it to accelerate one 50 kg dude, he'd reach about 10 m/s from the perspective of the Joes in a second, which while fast, isn't very fast, and be plenty of time for one of them to crack off a disabling shot.
While they might be able to do something with a EMP spell, Mauno wouldn't have MUCH reason to do something like that, considering he fears Sybille, not us, and that wouldn't stop Sybille.
And we can be fairly confident that he doesn't got any teleportation spells or the like, considering he's even bothering with taking a plane, so we don't have to worry about him splitting on us the moment he finds out we are there.
@I just write You mentioned us getting a Interlude covering what happened the rest of last week, including interrogating our new prisoners (and probably releasing the 3 people who didn't know anything) and talking with the UN.
And can you give us the specifics of the spells Anne learned? More specifically 'Thermal Adjustment', 'In-depth analysis', and 'mass adjustment'.
[X] Trondason
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Hello, I seem to be over the latest burst of writer's block, so I'm locking the vote as Trondason's plan.
@I just write
You mentioned us getting a Interlude covering what happened the rest of last week, including interrogating our new prisoners (and probably releasing the 3 people who didn't know anything) and talking with the UN. You working on that concurrently with current events, or is that just not happening?
Can you give us the specifics of the spells Anne learned? More specifically 'Thermal Adjustment', 'In-depth analysis', and 'mass adjustment'.
How powerful of a computer would you say the computer that Technomancer was using was? Was it up there, as super computers go, or was it about average for a corporate mainframe?
You mentioned us getting a Interlude covering what happened the rest of last week, including interrogating our new prisoners (and probably releasing the 3 people who didn't know anything) and talking with the UN. You working on that concurrently with current events, or is that just not happening?
Can you give us the specifics of the spells Anne learned? More specifically 'Thermal Adjustment', 'In-depth analysis', and 'mass adjustment'.
How powerful of a computer would you say the computer that Technomancer was using was? Was it up there, as super computers go, or was it about average for a corporate mainframe?
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Spells
-Thermal Adjustment: Adjust temperature of target in line of sight, may go either up or down, total change in thermal energy may not exceed Madness expended.
-In-depth analysis: Mentally disassemble target magical effect or device. Can duplicate effect afterwards. Requires 15 kilojoules madness after inefficiency (roughly translates to a bit of minor irrationality or a proclivity to not consider consequences beyond the most basic level, please be aware that Anne's efficiency is only 20%).
-Mass Adjustment: Temporarily shift the decimal point on the target's (may be self, a part of self, or something in line of sight) mass, each place you move it costs 25*2x watts to maintain. Adjusted mass doesn't alter temperature, heat transfer, the speed of light, chemical reactions, or anything else of that sort.
EDIT: That Technomancer had a few server racks of mid-grade hardware from late 2014. He had been planning on an upgrade, but servers are expensive.
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... That is amazingly useful. Is that a unique spell to Joes, or is this a fairly standard spell for mages? Cause if it's standard, we are going to have to safe-guard our tech a lot better.
That is also rather darn handy, especially considering it's very lower power cost. What low power-cost it has can be further decreased by strategic casting, only doing it when it absolutely needs to be done, like at moment of impact, so that you are only powering it for maybe 1/10th of a second.
So maybe about equal to Watson?
Supposing madness production scales linearly with processing power, that means we can make something 460 times (estimated computing power of the human brain in relation to Watson's computing power) more powerful using just 79.94 cubic inches of space (cube 4.3 inches long on each side).
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In-depth analysis is a consequence of the Joes' natures as being derived from mega man tech. More specifically, the variable weapon system.
Also, this techy's rig couldn't hope to hold a match to Watson in terms of processing power, let alone a candle. It's still a pretty good setup though, for someone who's not backed by any sort of major corporation. Also, Watson and a Madness reactor have completely opposing design priorities. Watson would be hard-pressed to make 30 kilowatts of madness, this guy's setup produced 30 MEGAwatts and could automatically handle the maintenance of those projections at up to 200 km away without any active casting from the guy whatsoever.
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Ah, good. Though I'm rather sure we didn't install the Variable Weapon System, but whatever.
Though, while we are on the topic, I want to make sure you know that we aren't selling the Time Dialation tech, we are keeping that to ourselves, and the stuff that is off base is closely monitored.
But are the differences design hard-ware, or software based? Because if it's soft-ware, then the comparison holds up just fine, the difference is how they are using the processing power, not what could be done with it.
As for how good his set up is compared to big names, I sorta expected money to not be a BIG problem, considering they got magic and can very easily steal shit.
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It's mostly software differences. As an interesting side-note, this guy was actually using evolutionary algorithms to optimize his madness output using some very simple A.I.s and then just running a crapton of the best version all at once.
How would you compare his set up to Watson, processing power wise? Cause really, you can get Watson levels of processing power out of 17 Radeon HD 5970s, each costing about 800 bucks.
Edit: Ran some numbers, and if we ran his stuff soft-ware on our hardware, we could produce 10.5 Terawatts of Madness per cubic meter. Far better than any other generator design we got.
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Oh. I overestimated. umm.... I'll get back to you on that.
Honestly, I don't think I'll be able to actually write the interlude. I'll still list off what you learned.
-This guy thought you'd made some sort of ultimate technomancy breakthrough to power all your crazy stuff and wanted to get his hands on your stuff so he could see how you did it.
-He's needed a team of operatives that wouldn't be at risk of getting killed and would be perfectly loyal for a while, thus he rigged up his little server farm in the basement to have that projection capability linked to his tabletop gaming equipment as the high-level control mechanism.
-When GMing he was actually in a sort of trance-like state so as to accurately convey information on what was going on (limited to what the characters knew) without arousing suspicion
-The gaming groups he GM'd for were completely oblivious to the fact that it was anything other than a bunch of awesome dungeon crawls/jobs, and he never gave them any reason to suspect otherwise.
-He had two gaming groups, a D&D group, and a Shadowrun group. Normally he'd have sent the Shadowrun group for something like this, but he was impatient.
-A few of the previous jobs he sent his friends on, mainly busting a few Torturers in the area, a lot of the time they were just gaming without the system being active.
-When not being used for anything else, his mainframe was actually dumping the vast majority of its output into counteracting the memory veil, which pissed off most of the Torturers in the area given that a REALLY good Torturer can only get double digit kilowatts when averaged. Still, the adage about attacking a Tinker in their lab just applies to an even greater degree for Technomancers, which is why he's still around.
-No, it never occurred to him to just try asking.
This is where I have been getting my info.
He could have just asked. We would probably have hired him. But he went and blew it. Might still hire him, but on probation and high scrutiny.
Why couldn't he have ran it himself? One projection, but much stronger, and actually aware of the real goal?
That at least speaks good for him. While he was rather idiotic in this instance, he's generally a good guy.
And what about the UN? The "inconsistent " reputation really isn't deserved, as we have gone over, and odds are someone would talk with us about it and we would have explained our reasoning. We need military might if we want negotiations to be a option, as we said.
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Hmmm. If we made a supercomputer optimized for madness production and mass production, how many would it take to overwhelm the veil on magic?
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Let's see, 280,000 magic users world wide, of which 4% are Torturers, and half of them actually contribute. On average a Torturer has an output of roughly 35 kilowatts. This totals to 196 megawatts of torture-power total. Add 146 gigawatts for the captured Savants in Transylvania and Beijing, and to start bringing the veil down you need 146,196 megawatts. This is exacerbated by the fact that the veil is a very old spell that has had stupidly huge amounts of madness poured into it over the centuries, meaning it could theoretically keep going for 9 years on stored power alone with its 800 kilowatt power draw. It takes more power to cover up big incidents though.
As a side note, here's some other magical demographics
Torturers: 4%
Technomancers: 25% (Of these, 60% are 'script kiddies')
Therapists: 10%
Nutcases: 30%
Victims: 31%
Savants: 0.001%
There's actually a few grey area Torturers who make a living off of activating people as Mages.
Historically (before Technomancy was a thing), the demographics looked more like this.
Torturers: 26%
Therapists: 15%
Nutcases: 51%
Victims: 8%
Savants: 0.001%
So, why the change? Well, the creation of Technomancy is responsible for most of it. A proper Technomancy rig offers far more power than you're likely to ever get by becoming a Torturer, Therapist or Nutcase, attracting a large number of new Mages who would have otherwise taken up one of the other disciplines. There were fewer Victims back then because they tended to get grabbed by various factions to use as quick magic batteries, possibly getting trained as a Mage after, possibly not. Savants have stayed pretty constant in terms of demographics, but more humans means more Mages, which means more Savants.
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