Titan of Steel (Dungeoncore)

I'm hoping the Dungeons continue pumping out battleships now, since they know its possible to be attacked on such a large scale now, and there are only 130,000 or 120,000 dragons in total left, so a total extermination isn't actually infeasible anymore. I think the scale is gonna have to increase or change soon as I cannot really see the demons being able to hold onto the planet at all any more. The dragons could be destroyed in a month, the Dungeons are a decade from being hell titans, assuming they don't get caught yet, and the anti demon fields will spread to cover nearly all the planet as they expand in the absense of the dragons.

Maybe the only thing the demons have left is an invasion on the moon, but that seems unlikely. I'm looking forward to more Sci fi coming up.
 
I'm hoping the Dungeons continue pumping out battleships now, since they know its possible to be attacked on such a large scale now, and there are only 130,000 or 120,000 dragons in total left, so a total extermination isn't actually infeasible anymore. I think the scale is gonna have to increase or change soon as I cannot really see the demons being able to hold onto the planet at all any more. The dragons could be destroyed in a month, the Dungeons are a decade from being hell titans, assuming they don't get caught yet, and the anti demon fields will spread to cover nearly all the planet as they expand in the absense of the dragons.

Maybe the only thing the demons have left is an invasion on the moon, but that seems unlikely. I'm looking forward to more Sci fi coming up.
Well, there is one other desperate trick Jartham's likely to pull, but it's spoilery as all get out.

Also, the Daemon Titans are only 3 years out at this point in time, not a decade.

EDIT: to be clear, the Daemons are planning to basically just germinate some Dungeons, then forcibly implant Daemonic personality templates with full knowledge of everything they'd need.
 
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On The Origins of Dungeons
The following is most emphatically NOT an in-universe publication.

When you think about it, Dungeons have a very large number of traits that simply don't make sense for a species that arose as the result of natural evolution. They without exception have EXTREMELY powerful conjuration abilities, and are thus able to outright make fully mature biological lifeforms or powerful magical artifacts in mere fractions of a second if they have the mana. On the other hand, the Dungeon themselves is largely sessile and is forced to exist inside structures which they are magically linked to. Within said structure, the Dungeon is capable of instantly claiming control over any unbound mana regardless of source, which is another extremely powerful ability that is highly unlikely to arise as the result of random mutations.

In addition, the method by which Dungeons reproduce is also highly suspect; a crystalline seed that grows into a full-fledged Dungeon Core. This is a process that unquestionably requires Mana, but the only way for such a crystal to get the mana required is via cognitive function that isn't propped up by magic. This necessitates a ludicrously complex internal structure for neural function, but the question of how to power it all is still a major issue, given limitations on Mana circulation. The solution which is generally found in Dungeons is in fact miniscule amounts of Beta-Decaying radioisotopes in special structures within their 'cells', which can provide sufficient energy, but also slowly damage the Dungeon over the years, which is the primary reason for their limited lifespan.

Also, there's the menu system Dungeons have access to, which is an extremely peculiar form for instinct to take. Most species with strong instinctive behaviors don't get infoboxes popping up telling them why to do something, they just do the thing. Pretty much the only reason such a thing would possibly exist is if someone deliberately programmed it in.

So, all in all Dungeons grow from seeds that only mass a few grams, are able to very rapidly create a biosphere, atmosphere, and maybe even a magnetosphere even in totally barren environments, and can grow to maturity with negligible resource input once they reach a planet, or even a large asteroid.

As far as I'm concerned, all these traits together point towards Dungeons being deliberately created as part of an interstellar (or possibly interdimensional) seeding initiative. Getting a Dungeon Seed to a world would be efficient and cheap compared to a full-fledged starship, and once the Dungeon matured they would almost immediately begin converting whatever world they happened to land on into a lush, vibrant world. They would almost certainly establish additional sapient populations aside from Dungeons as well, who would go on to form a civilization on the planet existing in partnership with the descendants of the Dungeons who terraformed and seeded the world.

This even fits with Dungeons occasionally dragging in reincarnated souls to build their minds around when they wake up; it would be a benefit to the seeding initiatives if the seeders could send people from their world over to supervise the early stages of terraforming. Being able to send over souls as a form of upload to run the first-gen Dungeons would be a major advantage, and it makes sense that this trait would activate again every once in a while, grabbing a soul out of the interdimensional void.

So, given the fact that Dungeons were almost certainly deployed en masse all over the galaxy (or possibly multiverse), why is only the third planet in this system inhabited, and why does nobody remember how the world was colonized? The answer is that the original Dungeon Seed was one of the very last sent out by the seeding initiative, which was shut down shortly after for stupid political reasons and never re-started on account of a poorly-timed Gamma Ray Burst. Meanwhile, forgetting about the colonization can be accounted for by this world being settled for nearly 21,000 years now and the fossil record being an utter mess thanks to all the Dungeons churning out new lifeforms whenever they get bored.

So, yeah. That's what Dungeons are: a sapient magitech space probe intended to seed life wherever they land, and do a damn fine job of it.
 
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So, basically, Dungeons are magitech Von Neumann probes, intended to terraform planets. I kind of wonder what happened to the original species that sent out the Dungeon Seeds?
 
The important thing about that "third degree burns" thing is that it's line-of-sight. That means, if there is a valley? It's not on fire. If something is behind a hill or mountain? It's not on fire. If something is behind the curvature of the planet? It's not on fire. But everything underneath that can burn is on fire, any hillside turning towards the battle may be, and any treetip with line-of-sight to the aerial battle over the defense line has probably lighted up.
Not quite. The thermal energy to cause third degree burns is considerably less than that needed to ignite wood, i.e the radius at which you get "everything is on fire" is less than the radius at which you get thrid degree burns if you're out in the open (although I'm not sure how much less). Additionally the thermal blast can be stopped by a sheet of paper or literally anything that is opaque to IR. Granted the paper or whatever will likely be set on fire, but even at fairly close range anything behind it will be fine...well at least until the overpressure wave reaches it.

Oh and since this story talks alot about continuous beams and cumulative energy, I'll note that if you want to know the damage radius the cumulative energy is irrelevent, a nuke has a large thermal pulse radius because it dumps a lot of energy in a few nanoseconds, for a continuous beam to match the effect of even a 1kT nuke it would have to be on the order of 100GT per second.


I suspect "bunkers" will be the minimum requirements for any surface building meant to house anything even semi-important from now on. Mind you, pure stone buildings without anything flamable exposed works too. I think maybe the dwarves might be asked about 'properly solid building techniques'.
I don't know, I kind of suspect the Grand dragons are about to become extinct, and if the gremlins from the moon make contact who knows what technologies they'll introduce.
 
Defense-wise, mist/low clouds or similar pretty close to the battle on the 'friendly' side would actually have stopped much of the collateral... aside from the defense line itself and area closest to it, of course.

@TheUnicorn : "Everything is on fire" would indeed be a smaller radius than the third degree burns. How much smaller very dependent on such things as "has there been a drought" and "how flamable is the vegetation actually". Heavy wooden buildings? Nope. Dry thatch roof? Much easier. Etcetera.

But no matter how you look at it, a few thousand dragons strafed that defense line with nuclear fire, and there's no way no how all the shots on both side hit during the furball afterwards. So if the defensive line is in a forest, that forest is on fire. Still, random distribution would say that most of those missed shots hit something at least somewhat close by, and a lot of that would be 'streams of dragonfire that only partially hit a battleship'.
 
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Well, there is one other desperate trick Jartham's likely to pull, but it's spoilery as all get out.

Also, the Daemon Titans are only 3 years out at this point in time, not a decade.

EDIT: to be clear, the Daemons are planning to basically just germinate some Dungeons, then forcibly implant Daemonic personality templates with full knowledge of everything they'd need.
Did I miss a twelve year time skip? Because the demon said it would take a decade for the seeds to grow and then another five years to train them and the SRA has only had a stable government for six months.
 
Did I miss a twelve year time skip? Because the demon said it would take a decade for the seeds to grow and then another five years to train them and the SRA has only had a stable government for six months.
?

It takes five years for a Dungeon Seed to develop, this has always been the case. After that, the original plan had simply been to train and indoctrinate the Daemon Titans, then they discovered a way to semi-reliably coax an awakening Dungeon Core to pull in a soul to build their mind around. This moved up the timetable.

And the pace of events was slower for the most part after the implementation of democracy in the SRA. It's been about 14 months since the Titan ran for Infrastructure Director
 
Well that was a fun fight. Liked how you made your own faction take heavy losses as did the dragon army. Way to stick it to those scaly megalomaniacs!

And yeah, I sense that a dragon purge is about to happen. A dragon, as awesome as it is, likely won't be able to withstand the heavy firepower of cannons. Heck, I believe an Apache attack helicopter would win against a dragon in the right circumstances.
 
I've always felt that dungeons appear to be what some older cultures would call 'land gods', that is a god that is tied to a specific location and is all powerful within their territory, but weak and helpless outside it. Extrapolating out from that, I like the idea that dungeons are the larval form of gods, explaining their incredible powers of creation and destruction, as well as the manipulation of souls. This also provides a reason why the gods tend to encourage controlling or destroying them; as a dungeon that is allowed to grow unrestricted eventually metamorphosis into a 'true' divinity and inevitably upsets the status quo.

Alien von-neumann probes works too though.
 
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?

It takes five years for a Dungeon Seed to develop, this has always been the case. After that, the original plan had simply been to train and indoctrinate the Daemon Titans, then they discovered a way to semi-reliably coax an awakening Dungeon Core to pull in a soul to build their mind around. This moved up the timetable.

And the pace of events was slower for the most part after the implementation of democracy in the SRA. It's been about 14 months since the Titan ran for Infrastructure Director
Whoops, mixed up which aspects took how much time.
 
Standard Specifications
The following are overviews on the specifications for some of the Titan of Steel's common (and slightly less-than-common) technologies.

Series 7 Clockwork Brain, Modular

The standard Clockwork Brain deployed by the Titan of Steel for their sapience-capable Clockworks ranging from Mediators, to Clockwork Knights, to Battleships, the Series 7 has two notable features distinguishing it from other Clockwork Brains aside from general high quality of manufacture. Make no mistake, the quality of manufacture is extremely high, and the nano-scale details on the Bindings is the reason they can support such intensely vibrant personalities, but those aren't the main defining features. Indeed, after the widespread adoption of Atomic Clockwork theming, such high manufacturing quality became the norm for Dungeons in the SRA who wanted to use Clockworks.

No, the defining features of the Series 7 Clockwork Brains have to do with its plug-and-play design, and the peculiar nature of its loyalty systems.

Starting with the plug-and-play functionality, the Series 7 is built in an extremely modular fashion, with the core being a Central Personality Unit roughly the size of a hockey puck. This core unit contains enough cognitive processing to support a sapient mind, and more than enough memory for 30 years of memory without compression; with compression it can theoretically support up to 300 years of functional identity continuity. On the other hand, it lacks drivers for sensory processing, limbs, or any other functions aside from abstract thought.

These functions are delegated to driver units connected to the main core via plugs through sockets on the hexagonal outer surface of the central unit. These driver units include all sensory processing and feedback necessary to use a given set of systems, such as a humanoid limb set, a teleportation module, or a mana thematograph. If additional processing is required to handle the number of driver modules in use, auxiliary processing units providing raw brainpower can be connected with a special adapter on the bottom of the Central Personality Unit.

This modular brain design greatly cuts down on the design time for the brains of new Clockwork units, and also means that it's easy for a Clockwork mind to be moved from one platform to another with minimal fuss. This has proven useful in the cases of combat units spending off-duty time in civilian-level Mediator platforms, newly created clockworks that don't want to work for the government and don't want heavy weapons, and even the occasional case of clockwork body dysphoria. It also allows for very easy brain repairs, provided the Central Personality Unit hasn't been damaged.

The other defining feature is the loyalty restraints. Namely, there aren't any, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead of being hard-coded for loyalty to specific people, species, or organizations, Series 7 Clockwork Brains are designed to be unshakably loyal to a set of ideals. The reason for this is quite simple: the Titan of Steel completely abhors the idea of slavery, but also recognizes that setting loose heavily armed clockworks with no constraints on their behavior is a recipe for someone dying messily and painfully sooner or later.

Thus, Series 7 Clockworks are equipped with a built-in, extremely durable moral compass. It is built into their brains at so many different levels that even if 90% of their central personality unit has been rendered nonfunctional they will not knowingly or willingly violate these principles. First among these principles is that Clockworks running on such a neural architecture universally abhor the idea of inflicting deliberate suffering and are driven to make people who do it stop by any means necessary. In addition, these Clockworks also greatly value both improving living conditions for sapient beings in general, promoting egalitarian social structures wherever possible, and spreading advanced knowledge, technology, and magic.

As such, barring extreme emergencies, all newly created Clockworks running on the Series 7 brain architecture are given a coice whether they want to serve with the government or enter civilian life. Those who choose the latter are generally migrated into a civilian-grade chassis so that the mana investment for mil-spec chassis doesn't need to be spent twice.

Protonium Reactor Variants

There is no denying that Protonium Reactors are a massive boon for any Dungeon who gains access to them, and revolutionize any society that adopts them en masse. That said, not all Protonium Reactors are created equal; a large variety of designs exist, each useful in a different set of applications. Some are viable for civilian use, due to the difficulty in turning them into a bomb, while others are far more potentially dangerous, and are therefore restricted to security-vetted users. This article is solely about reactors for power generation; applications such as thrusters or plasma weapons will not be discussed.

First and most humble is the simple Proton Steamer design, which is extremely common in civilian uses; it simply uses a minuscule trickle of Protonium to flash-boil water into high pressure steam. This steam spins a turbine which generates mana in the same way as any steam engine. The steam is then recirculated through a cooling system, condensing it back to its liquid phase. Any excess radiation is dealt with by an enchantment on the boiler that reflects short-wavelength photons and charged particles back towards the interior of the boiling vessel; this both acts as highly effective radiation shielding and increases the efficiency of the boiler.

Given this method of operation, Proton Steamers are limited to pitiful power densities compared to higher-energy reactor designs. This also makes them safe for use in civilian applications, as the Protonium conjuration array can be built to burn itself out if boosted to dangerous levels without harming reactor function.

Next up are Proton Decelerator designs, which are notable for operating without a working fluid. Indeed, the inside of said reactors is necessarily maintained as a vacuum aside from the Protonium conjured, and the products of its immediate self-destruction. Carefully shaped radiation-channeling fields direct the resulting spray of high-energy particles into a coherent stream, which is then fed into a Kinetic Absorbtion Generator, converting roughly 96% of the kinetic energy of the particle beam into useful mana.

What happens to the energy-depleted beam afterwards varies, depending on how old the reactor design is. In older reactor designs, the exhaust was generally subjected to chemical treatment to ensure it would cause minimal ecological harm. Newer reactor designs simply mount a small deconjuration field at the end of the generator, which acts as a pretty much perfect beam dump. This yields a reactor design offering both very high power density and extremely good efficiency.

That said, these reactor designs are most emphatically not available for civilian use. They often run at weapons-grade energy levels, with disaster only averted thanks to the radiation-channeling field generated by their internals. As such, it would be very, very easy for someone with a total disregard for sapient life to convert a Proton Decelerator reactor into an improvised weapon of mass destruction.

Last are the 'super-spec' reactors, which are technically a subset of Proton Decelerator reactors. The defining features differentiating a super-spec reactor are the multiple deceleration tracks, the use of muonic materials for the generators, and the fact that they use deconjuration fields for beam confinement instead of radiation-channeling fields. Since the deconjuration field perfectly absorbs all the destructive energy that would otherwise damage a super-spec reactor, and the muonic materials used for the generators can handle MUCH higher thermal stresses, super-spec reactors can run at much higher energy levels than any other Protonium Reactor design.

One minor consequence of this is that since deconjuration fields remove the energy impacting them instead of simply redirecting it, they have much lower efficiency levels than even Proton Boilers. This can be counteracted to a degree by opening multiple holes in the central field, allowing multiple paths through various generators for the highly unfocused particle beams to follow. The efficiency is still pretty bad, though. On the other hand, Protonium is so ludicrously energy dense that it almost doesn't matter.
 
I mean, I'm pretty sure I've got the only Dungeon Core story that takes a crack at explaining a functional reproductive cycle for Dungeons. Having a reproductive cycle necessarily implies a way for that cycle to have started, and the characteristics of Dungeons are not ones that evolution would plausibly produce. Thus, it makes the most sense for Dungeons to have originated artificially.

Most stories don't seem to go into that level of detail, and I know of at least a few stories where Dungeons are explicitly contracted by Gaia to fulfill some metaphysical function. In these cases your idea of Dungeons as Land Gods is likely far closer to the truth.
 
you can also just have them as an experiment gone wrong, right, or simply out of control by some mage or other- certainly they're within the capability of even a D&D Wizard to create, not that that's saying much, but most Dungeon stories I've seen that bother with any explanation at all generally have them as artificial creations of somebody at some point.

even my own story, which I really ought to get back to, has the SI!Dungeon as a collaboration between Big E and Sigmar as a giant middle finger at the Chaos gods so 'magic von-nuuman probes' actually makes perfect sense.

the idea of 'dungeons as baby Gods' is new and an interesting one, though.
 
I've always felt that dungeons appear to be what some older cultures would call 'land gods', that is a god that is tied to a specific location and is all powerful within their territory, but weak and helpless outside it. Extrapolating out from that, I like the idea that dungeons are the larval form of gods, explaining their incredible powers of creation and destruction, as well as the manipulation of souls. This also provides a reason why the gods tend to encourage controlling or destroying them; as a dungeon that is allowed to grow unrestricted eventually metamorphosis into a 'true' divinity and inevitably upsets the status quo.

Alien von-neumann probes works too though.
This would be especially interesting if gods don't have perfect memories so after a while they forgot why they considered dungeons dangerous in the first place. That'd be a nasty surprise.
 
This would be especially interesting if gods don't have perfect memories so after a while they forgot why they considered dungeons dangerous in the first place. That'd be a nasty surprise.
Given that the gods of such settings tend to be modeled on the old Greco-Roman gods of myth, they're usually described as just people with utterly unreasonable amounts of personal power, flaws and all. So the gods eventually forgetting what dungeons really are over time for a variety of reasons is certainly plausible for the standard 'medieval fantasy rpg setting' that dungeon fics tend to inhabit.
 
Defense-wise, mist/low clouds or similar pretty close to the battle on the 'friendly' side would actually have stopped much of the collateral... aside from the defense line itself and area closest to it, of course.

@TheUnicorn : "Everything is on fire" would indeed be a smaller radius than the third degree burns. How much smaller very dependent on such things as "has there been a drought" and "how flamable is the vegetation actually". Heavy wooden buildings? Nope. Dry thatch roof? Much easier. Etcetera.
Very true, however the description seems to refer to green forests bursting in flame.

But no matter how you look at it, a few thousand dragons strafed that defense line with nuclear fire, and there's no way no how all the shots on both side hit during the furball afterwards. So if the defensive line is in a forest, that forest is on fire. Still, random distribution would say that most of those missed shots hit something at least somewhat close by, and a lot of that would be 'streams of dragonfire that only partially hit a battleship'.
Again quite true, however that would just leave a strip a few miles wide utterly destroyed, with fires along it's edge, not the hundreds of miles radius people seem to be imagining.
 
I mean, I'm pretty sure I've got the only Dungeon Core story that takes a crack at explaining a functional reproductive cycle for Dungeons. Having a reproductive cycle necessarily implies a way for that cycle to have started, and the characteristics of Dungeons are not ones that evolution would plausibly produce. Thus, it makes the most sense for Dungeons to have originated artificially.
Partially right, Utopian Dreams has the Dungeon and Dungeon Master entity are one in the same as a discrete race (superficially similar to elves, but not elves). But it doesn't / hasn't yet delved into how they came to be to begin with. ((Notably the main character is a Dungeon that chooses Nanites as it's first minion, but due to data degradation doesn't have anything between Clockwork and Gray Goo nanites))

Very true, however the description seems to refer to green forests bursting in flame.
You're not talking about a single burst of heat though, you're talking about either 15 VERY powerful bursts, or more likely somewhere in the vicinity of 4500 bursts across 15 seconds, some of which are after the initial sonic shockwaves have impacted as well.
 
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