Turn 21
-[] An Introduction to Human Genetics (100 RP) Humans are complex creatures, but apparently their manufacturing instructions are just 6 billion bits long, and most of that seems redundant. Interesting. (Unlocks very basic genetic enhancements, as well as a basic understanding of mutations. Unlocks research for more complex genetic engineering, and may lead to research to fix mutations)
You understand basic genetics, enough to tell if humans are modified, and enough to do basic enhancement of embryos for better health, slightly improved intelligence and cosmetic traits.
-[] Efficient Psychic Shielding (100 RP) Your "fractal" method is painfully difficult to manufacture, and is bottlenecking further design. If you spend some more time on it you think you could either improve the manufacturing techniques or figure out a more efficient solution to the same problem (Improves the BP/HP ratio for psychic shields, unlocks cost discounts on other kinds of psychic shielding, may unlock further research towards cheaper or more ubiquitous shielding, including extremely minimal shielding that serves to trip an alarm upon damage). Good Success.
Halves BP cost of psychic shielding across the board.
-[] Industrial Organic-Machine control (150 RP) Controlling a combat bot, tank or aircraft is something a human bran can intuitively understand. Machining to incredibly small precisions not so much. (Allows OMC implants to control industrial capacity. Leads to some further research to allow OMC to control shipyards and larger installations, as well as to improve human capacity for research & development, and potential psytech improvements)
Allows OMC implants to control industrial capacity. Anexa has gained the cybernetics specialty.
-[] Scrapcode-resistant Psychic shielding (100 RP) You understand how scrapcode attacks psychic shielding better, and can tune your shields to be more resistant to attacks from scrapcode (Gives your shields improved defense against scrapcode, may unlock techs for even further improved defenses, or broadened defenses against specific entities) Natural 100.
All of your products are much more resistant to scrapcode-based attacks, which will deal approximately a quarter as much damage as previously.
-[] Further Scrapcode research (100 RP) You have more data on how scrapcode works, but it's only left you with more questions. The power of the generator was steadily rising but it spiked when it attacked - where did that energy come from? Can you get a better hint as to how it works? (Discounts existing scrapcode research, may unlock new research around psytech/psychic shielding. Gives better understanding of Chaos Demons. Half of what is needed to bind the Demon inside the scrapcode generator) Poor success.
Turn 22:
-[] Tiny In-atmosphere void shields (100 RP) Instead of scaling up a void shield, can you scale one down to the size of a person? It won't be as capable of the big ones, but if it's only meant to block small-arms fire it could be quite effective. (Unlocks the ability to build personal void shields, as well as add them to combat bots. May unlock research towards better overall void shielding)
Unlocked new Export Goods blueprint - Personal Void Shields (5 bp/person)
-[] Advanced Neural Implants (150 RP) Well, your current neural implants are good, but what if you further integrated them into the brain, improving throughput and allowing the recipient even further integrate themselves with digital systems (unlocks advanced neural implants, unlocks further technologies related to neural implants, such as basic cognition filters. Basal improvements to Organic-machine control).
Your implants are generally more powerful and humans with your implants will be capable of greater control and interaction. +10 to the capacity of organic-machine control per human, it's now at 20.
Turn 23:
-[] Ok, maybe there's a point to medical school (50 RP) You have a textbook understanding of medicine, but it's not enough for you to speculate and unlock new research, or generalize what you know to other areas. (Unlocks discounts for medical tech, cybernetic augmentations and more. May be a prerequisite to further biomedical research. Also unlocks more research for advanced medical care) Critical success.
You're now capable of administering fairly complicated surgeries and advanced medical care. Your auto-docs and medical facilities are all improved.
-[] Better Sensors (200 RP) Trying to find the Eldar was a frustrating experience, and normal sensors didn't cut it. If you're willing to explore more esoteric branches of physics you think you could do a better job. (Unlocks slightly better basal sensors across the board, as well as equipment to cut through stealth technologies. Unlocks more research for better sensors. May unlock research for sensors that will detect what's going on inside enemy ships, improving combat predictions).
You will now be able to detect stealthed ships at longer ranges. Likely will prevent ships from getting into boarding range without you noticing.
-[] Empathy as Sensors (100 RP) The warp is a place of emotion, and sensing emotions is hard. Still, when emotion determines what is true you think you can work it out. You can probably also make them work in physical reality as well, at least to an extent. (Unlocks better sensors for warp shenanigans. Likely to give you some warning of warp shenanigans. Will likely have synergy with psytech, further warp research, and unlock research towards warp-based FTL communication)
Your psychic shielding is universally sensitive to psychic disturbances beyond just attacks. This includes sensing active psytech, passive psykers, manifested demons and even eyes on you from across the veil.
-[] Basic power armor (100 RP) Putting heavy armor on a person doesn't work well because... well. It's heavy. If you can give it some robotic actuation then they don't need to carry all of it. (Unlocks humanoid heavy armor, as well as being a prereq for superheavy-humanoid armor, i.e. for space marine-quality, once you research superheavy armor.) Poor Success.
You have built basic power armor, and have a suit for Cia. It's good, but it's way more expensive than it needs to be.
-[] Improved combat Machine spirits (100 RP) Right now the machine spirits can match the performance of bots you directly control. However, with some tweaking of their networks, structure and code you think you can make an across-the-board improvement in aim, tactics and decision-making of the machine spirits in combat. (Improved combat performance of machine-spirit imbued infantry & vehicle forces. May unlock technology for improved tactical coordination, as well as improved combat performance of machine-spirit equipped ships/larger installations) Good success.
Your combat bots are more proficient and better at combat across the board. They're still vulnerable to close-in fighting though.
-[] Human Simulation Implants (150 RP) You can simulate reality quite accurately. Adapting these neural implants to do that might yield some impressive benefits. (Improves human capacity for research & development. Tech-priest crew will contribute RP, may unlock further tech for improved help with research & design). Good Success.
Each tech-priest contributes 1 RP/turn. Will have diminishing returns beyond 50 people.
Turn 24:
-[] Improved Gellar Fields (100 RP) Your gellar field technology is fine... but outdated. You think you can figure out how to improve it. (Improves your gellar field technology, reducing the risk for warp travel, specifically the amount of damage you take to your psychic shield.) Success.
You take dramatically reduced damage on warp travel.
-[] Scrapcode Immunity (100 RP) You thought your new algorithms would make you immune to scrapcode, but it's a squirely opponent. But with some more thought you think you can still reach that bar. (Makes your shielding Extraordinarily resistant to potentially completely immune to scrapcode-based attacks. Does not apply to machine spirits. Likely synergistic with generating your own scrapcode) Failed, natural 1. Tech lost.
You've reverted your shield back to the scrapcode resistance versions that take 1/4 damage.
- [] Basic Psychic weapons (150 RP) The most basic application of psychic energy to materials is to make more powerful weapons. Let's try to figure out how to build those, and think about how to expand out to other devices. (Allows you to build basic force weapons, unlocks more technology for advanced force weapons, as well as psychically attuned armor or larger material effects). Success.
You can now manufacture force weapons. Ideally they're manufactured for individuals, but you can also make "general purpose" ones that work but aren't as good.
-[] Basic Spaceship Stealth (50 RP) Spaceships are big, and emit a lot of energy. It's hard to hide them. Nonetheless, by making them show up worse on active sensors you could make an inactive spaceship much harder to spot. (Unlocks new non-combat equipment to improve ship stealth. Unlocks further research towards better spaceship stealth. Will be able to take advantage of some other stealth technologies.) Good Success.
You can now build void ships with passive stealth systems.
- [] Basic Pyromantic understanding (100 RP) Cia's naturally inclined towards energy manipulation with her power. You could try and figure out more details about how that works, though it'll rely on her to generate somewhat larger-scale effects. (Allows you to build pyromancy focused psytech, and potentially unlock new kinds of actions or narrative options for Cia) Barely a success.
You understand pyromancy a bit better now, and can more actively help Cia level-up.
-[] Machine Spirit Design (200 RP) The potential of industrial machine spirits to improve the design process could be incredible. It might get to a point where you can simply input a design parameter and they could spit out a new design. And you could theoretically use them to generate new research ideas too... (Discounts all designs, from ships to installations to units. Unlocks technology to further optimize ship cramming, as well as potential technology to incorporate machine spirits into your research process, improving the number of RP you get per action). Barely a good success
Cost of all design actions is halved.
Turn 25:
-[] Machine Spirit Ground Tactics (150 RP) Your bots can fight, but they aren't great at coordination. If you figure out how to network them together, you can help fix that. (Improved combat performance of machine-spirit imbued infantry & vehicle forces. May unlock technology for improved strategic coordination. If you want to point your army at a planet and say "Conquer it, spare the civilians" this is a good tech to have.) Success.
Your machine spirit combat bots are more effective at coordination at the squad and company level (200 bots).
-[] Personal-sized Psychic shielding (100 RP) You were able to break your psychic shielding down into components to rescale it, but that gets you down to a size measured in tens of meters. If you want to make another one that's even smaller, then you're going to have to break it down into even smaller pieces and build something back up again. But doing that would let you start weaving the shielding into armor or individual bots. (Allows you to outfit individuals with psychic shielding, though it may be less powerful than what you can build into larger structures. Unlocks additional technology for further miniaturization to put it into totems or implants.) Poor success
You can make personal psychic shields as an inner layer to armor, though it's vulnerable to damage and restricts flexibility.
-[] Basic Cognition Filter: (250 RP) Antimemetic threats are such a hassle. Even the programs you've written to partion your own knowledge are an ad-hoc solution. And aside from having an innate resistance above the zero-tolerance you likely have, humans have a really hard time not thinking about something. Fix it. Work out a method for existing brain-augments to isolate knowledge on cognitohazards to the augment's machine spirit in inert memory vaults. The user will have to instead consciously override the locks on the chosen memories to access them temporarily. That way, stray thoughts about the isolated memories cannot happen, and long-term memories in the brain when the memory vaults are unlocked get instead rerouted to the machine spirit of the brain implant. Will have a harder time isolating knowledge from existing long-term memories formed when not actively using the cognition filter. (Unlocks cognition filter modification to brain implants, unlocks further technologies related to cognition filter and methods for mitigating cognitohazards, basilisk hacks, etc. perceived in real-time.) Critical Success
Anybody equipped with one of your implants will be much less vulnerable to warp-based cognitohazards. Dramatically more effective when paired with psychic shielding.
Turn 26:
-[] Psychic tripwires (50 RP) Standardizing the shielding has given you another idea - you could try to install a very basic version of it into all of your technology, just about the simplest thing that would still generate the desired effect. It wouldn't do much to hinder any warp-corruption of other psyker powers, but it could serve as an alarm or deadman switch setup. (Anything smaller than a ship has psychic tripwires that will alert when warp-based shenanigans happen to them. Will unlock research to use this on ships, and to make civilian-grade versions that could be put into literally everything). Poor Success
Anything smaller than a ship will automatically get psychic tripwires that will detect when the device gets influenced by chaos. Will not always trigger, and it may be possible for slow and careful corruption to proceed without triggering the alarm.
-[] Machine Sprit Production Improvements (75 RP) Your machine spirits seem to be able to suggest more optimal choices than the default under some situations, but you're not confident enough to standardize it. Investigate that, and figure out how to encourage that behavior. (Improves productivity of machine-spirit manufacturing systems, may unlock further boosts to manufactory production or CP discounts). Success
Your Machine Spirit Manufactories produce 20% more BP.
-[] Mechanized agriculture (150 RP) You can synthesize small amounts of food with the modules attached to your crew quarters, but that doesn't scale to larger populations. You don't have the understanding to automatically grow and harvest food, but surely you can figure it out? (Unlocks blueprints for orbital & ground-based food production. Unlocks more technology for improving yield, optimizing for small-scale cultivation in zero-gravity, and generally making human populations self-sufficient in low-resource environments). Poor Success
You can now grow large amounts of food in an industrailized setting effectively. But it's very spicy. Like Thai-grandma spicy. And also colored like flame, because a DaoT biohacker thought it was fun and you didn't read the readme.
Turn 27:
-[] Basic Active Stealth (75 RP) Just deflecting away and hiding your signature only helps so much. Then next step is to overlay a hologram over your small craft to make them effectively invisible, and even counter passive sensors. It'll still be a hazy outline, but this is the path towards being able to close to actual combat ranges unobserved (Unlocks improved stealth designs for actively hiding signatures, though they will be expensive. Unlocks further research for improved active stealth, and will synergize with other stealth research. Critical Success
The Basic Stealth blueprint modification now includes active stealth.
-[] Basic Ground force stealth (50 RP) Tanks show up pretty well on scanners, and it would be nice to change that. You might also be able to make your bots hide better. (Unlocks new design options for tanks and ground forces that are less obvious. Unlocks further research towards better ground force stealth. Will be able to take advantage of some other stealth technologies.) Good success.
The Basic Stealth blueprint modification now can be applied to combat bots & vehicles. The cost is 0.5x base BP cost for bots, 0.25x base BP for vehicles.
-[] How to Build a Biosphere (100 RP) Back when you were made terraforming was incredibly common, and one of your more common trade goods was terraforming technology. But you're not sure how you would do it - but it wouldn't be that hard to catch up on the literature. (Unlocks blueprints for slow/expensive terraforming, as well as the terraforming tree, which will include research to make terraforming cheaper, faster and applicable to a broader set of planets).
You'll have some idea of how to improve the livability of various worlds you run across with basic methods. Nothing radical yet, but any planet you run into you can do a project to tune temperature and basic chemistry.
-[] Combat Neural Implants (50 RP) Allows you to install neural implants to calculate trajectories, assist with aiming, further improve reaction time and generally improve human capabilities in combat. (Unlocks combat-focused neural implants. Will synergize with other cybernetics and neural implant technologies) Failed.
You do not get combat neural implants. The tech remains on the tree, and now costs +25 RP.
Turn 28:
-[] Remote Organic-Machine control (50 RP) One of the current limitations of the OMC technology is that it requires the controller to be on-site. But if that wasn't true, then you could imagine truly bloodless wars, or operators living in comfortable cities while they controlled factories in orbit. Something to look into. (Allows OMC implants to control installations or units within the same system. Leads to further research for interoperable units, as well as making it possible for human staff to directly contribute to Vita's CP cap.) Critical Success.
People can control CP-requiring technology like manufactories, combat units & more while within the same planetary system. They are fully functional during this process, able to take care of themselves & even do simple tasks.
-[] Human Virtual OMC simulations (150 RP) Simulation of the organic-machine control interfaces is tricky, but it has some pretty significant benefits. Not only will it make it far easier to train people on how to use the OMC technology, it'll let people virtually fight each other to discover new strategies. Besides, that might be fun. (Dramatically improved OMC competence. This may result in an increase in manufacturing efficiency for OMC-controlled manufactories, and will result in increased effectiveness of OMC-controlled military units.). Critical Success.
All Organic-machine control happens at a higher level of competency, increasing the productivity of manufactories entirely controlled by OMC-equipped personnel, and increasing the combat capabilities of OMC-controlled combat units.
-[] Human Design Interfaces (200 RP) You've adapted your simulation software to work with advanced neural implants, but what about your design software? If humans could play with your auto-cad as well as you can then that would help you design or even entirely farm out the design of things. (Discounts design options, may unlock technology to improve the RP generated from humans with simulation implants, either per-person or simply raising the cap.) Good success.
Humans equipped with your implants, especially the OMC variety, can make their own designs. If you assign 20 people under your command with such implants to a design task it halves the cost of that design task.
-[] Void Organic-Machine control (75 RP) A voidship can be thought of as a living creature, with veins of coolant, a reactor heart and an undying thirst for fuel. How can a single human understand it, much less understand it? (Allows OMC implants to control voidships. Leads to further research to boost CP capacity of OMC specifically for controlling voidships, as well as improvements to allow improved piloting) Researched by Denva.
Allows OMC implants to control voidships.
Turn 29:
-[] Drugs? Drugs. (75 RP) Human biochemistry is... weird. You've got a standard list of recipies for basic drugs, but if you wanted to get further into it you could start pulling out some stranger and more illicit ones from your research databanks. (Unlocks a wide variety of drugs for things like interrogation, combat, sedation, etc. May lead to research for things like perfect knockout gas, super-adrenaline, psytech drugs, etc.) Critical success!
You can custom-design drugs for various applications. Bonus to medical care, interrogation, taking prisoners, etc.
-[] Psychic Encryption (150 RP) Warp-based shenanigans can clearly steal information they shouldn't be able to get. You think you have the solution to prevent that, and it's encryption. Modulate your psychic shielding so anything coming through it is so garbled and compressed that it can't be understood even to the most sensitive psychic. (Blocks scrying of information protected by your shielding. Likely unlocks better versions that will defeat more powerful seers, and may unlock specialized research to build installations that will deny scrying and foresight over a larger area - like a system) Poor success.
Your psychic shields are better at blocking scrying and warp communication, but you're not sure by how much.
-[] A Curio Cabinet of Cultists (100 RP) You have a haul of items and bodies from the Chaos cult aboard the Auric Burden . Investigate them, and see what you can learn. (Improved knowledge about Chaos Cults. May lead to enhanced detection of Chaos cults & cultists. May lead to some understanding of how to use warp rituals to enhance items. May unlock further research once you have more samples.) Critical success.
You understand Chaotic items and rituals better, and will be better at detecting them.
Turn 30:
-[] Hardware Psychic Encryption (50 RP) To properly block scrying, you need to design new psychic shielding. You don't think it'll be more expensive, but you could be wrong. (New versions of psychic shielding that block scrying with much greater effectiveness. Likely unlocks better versions that will defeat the most powerful seers, and may unlock specialized research to build installations that will deny scrying and foresight over a larger area - like a system) Barely a good success.
All of the psychic shields you build from here on out will block normal scrying and warp communication.
-[] Small-scale design-integrated psychic shielding (150 RP) You could take this approach a step further, and integrate the psychic shielding into the designs of bots, vehicles and small installations from the start. (Makes the cheapest version of psychic shielding free & automatic to build into bots, vehicles and small installations. Will likely improve the quality of shielding available and unlock research for further shielding improvements) Good Success
You can design psychic shielding on bots & other small objects that will not increase manufacturing costs. Can't break the rules for multiple layers of shielding.
-[] The Taste of Chaos (100 RP) When investigating the stations in Vorthryn, and again when investigating the artifacts you found a flavor to the warp signatures hanging around the chaos-corrupted stations. If you do more analysis on it, you should be able to set up some filters that can tell you when a signature is chaos-associated or identify active Chaos-cults, chaotic blessings or chaoticlly-enhanced items through sensors alone (Makes your warp sensors very sensitive to Chaos-associated markers. More useful in detecting cults than individuals, though will be able to detect chaos blessings. Like to unlock further research to screen for ever-smaller amounts of chaotic influence). Good (almost critical) success.
Your warp-sensors are sensitive to chaos signatures, including chaos blessings & inactive artifacts at close range, and active chaos rituals at long range. You will have some idea of what the blessing/ritual is when you detect it, and who its dedicated to.
-[] Machine Spirit Chaos resistance (75 RP) You think the reason that the machine spirits resist chaos is because they understand their purpose to some extent, and the entire neural network needs to be corrupted to corrupt that purpose, which is harder. There's also emotional simulation that's going on in there. (Improves the basal resistance of machine spirits to chaos corruption. May unlock further technology down this chain, as well as half of the requirements to integrate machine spirits with psychic shielding.) Critical success.
Your machine spirits are much harder for Chaotic and other kinds of warp-based attacks to corrupt.
-[] Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields (50 RP) You think it's possible to integrate machine spirits into your chaos shielding, which would probably make it more effective in almost every way except cost. (Unlocks new kinds of psychic shielding that are more resistant to damage, potentially self-repairing and more)
The psychic shielding & machine-spirit blueprint modifications are now synergistic. Anything you spend BP on for psychic shielding HP, you can now spend twice as much (includes shipboard equipment & installations).