Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

[BigFungus26]

Honestly there's not much of a reason to keep the scrapcode generator, between it being a security risk to both ourselves and our crew and the possibility of it learning to circumvent our shielding (it is learning our defenses after all, considering it was able to turn of the deadman switches of our bots) as well as already having the options to research stronger protection without even needing it, and we have something that's honestly just not worth the risk, not when we're still using un-upgraded psy-shields.

Besides, we can probably just find another scrapcode generator some other time, one that hasn't been exposed to us previously and one that'd have to contend with upgraded shields.

I don't really see a need to keep it.

 

[Prime 2.0]

Hard pass on leaving the station's life support to chance. Wondering if the secrets of machine spirits research will let us enhance that vault this turn, even if only in a "canary in the coal mine" fashion. Thoughts, @Neablis?

I'm on team "ice it for later", if that's not clear. We're not getting a safer chance to study how to counter chaos, and we have multiple avenues to outpace this squirts attempts at adaptation.

We're an AI. We're not losing a research race to a minor scrap-code demon.

 

[meianmaru]

While I do like this madness, we still need to build a vault for the SCG which would require a construction action... Unless we leave it unshielded for a turn which might be actual madness

Click to shrink...

Hmmm. Forgot about that. Here is my turn plan, construction to be added later:

[] [Free] Poke around some more in the databases, looking for anything in particular.
[] Diplomacy/Subversion (Klyssar's nest): You'd like that the people here could stand tall and proud on their own. However, you'd also prefer that they didn't blow up themselves and the station you just looted conquered. Offer that as a part of the effort to build ties between their people and you, you will open an academy where you will be teaching temporarily for five years. Offer lessons in fundamental physics, biology, history, psychology, philosophy, ethics, etc. But lean heavily on engineering and such side of things. With "practical lessons" on how to run the station.
[] Construction
-[] ??? (to be added later)
[] Research x2
-[] Secrets of the Machine Spirits (185/200 RP)
-[] Miniaturized psychic shielding: (300 RP)
-[] You don't need no stinkin' medical school (100 RP)

 

[Uhtread]

It is literally a 99% success chance. What are you passing it on for, a sure thing?

Click to shrink...

I read that as we IC think it's a 99% chance to contain it and keep it contained. Not QM fiat on the future action. IC we are just tipping our toe in about Chaos and I don't trust our ability to guess.

 

[Neablis]

Do we want to risk this? We can keep it in a hole but let's ensure our psytech is up to standard enough to manage quickly, just in case. Also keep an utterly excessive amount of failsafes ready to destroy it. Void abacus would be worth... if it wasn't so incredibly ridiculously expensive.

Click to shrink...

I messed up the cost of the Abacus. It's 10x cheaper now.

Either way, we definitely wanna invest in psytech and psy defenses. If a single scrapcode genny can cause this much trouble.

Click to shrink...

To be fair, this is a serious scrapcode generator. Demons sourced straight from Chaos Undivided.

An extra zero snuck in here.

Click to shrink...

Fixed, thanks!

Hah Vita telling us she isn't familiar with 40k without telling us. Sure lots of this is probably unnecessary, but with corruption, cults, and shit like tyranids these specific examples are probably actually really useful.

Click to shrink...

You'd probably want different sensors for those things - these are explicitly provided for safety/forensics reasons because the Stellar Federation liked paper trails.

Hey Neablis can we explicitly set a timeframe on this? Or some sort of transition plan?

Click to shrink...

They'll probably figure it out in 5ish years. Basically the people who want to run it would just be observing everything working properly for that time, and be ready to take it over and be actually familiar with the systems.

I'd like to give a comment on the quest from a non-participation perspective. I really am enjoying it, and it's been a lot of fun so far. That said, I'm really hoping that when Vita starts interacting with the imperium and the major factions of the galaxy that they aren't just treated like jokes. The imperium is a fucked up nightmare of an empire, and corrupt to the point of depravity, but they should still be a credible threat- it would be kind of boring if they weren't.

Ditto with the chaos stuff - the psychic shielding makes sense and is necessary for the premise of this quest to work at all, but I'm hoping it's not going to be a permanent solution. Crazy warp stuff is fun, and it not being able to affect Vita just because her number is too big really cuts out some of the stakes when it comes to chaos.

40K is a grim dark universe, and making it happy shouldn't be a walk in the park, even for a man of stone. There's a kind of grandure to the setting's decrepity, like how Anor Londo is depicted in dark souls. I think that treating it as a punchline will just diminish Vita's achievements. That said I'm pretty sure the reason she's rolled over everything so far is this is still early stages and that stakes will go up once she leaves the system. Just thought I'd put what I was thinking out there in case I was wrong though.

Now, from a player's perspective:

[] Destroy it. The sun's right there. Open the shuttle bay doors, fling the whole faraday cage + altar straight towards a giant fusion reaction.

KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT

Click to shrink...

Hmm. I'll keep that in mind. I think the first time Vita rolls into an imperial system and sees a battleship she might have to reassess her opinion of the Imperium as ass-backwards. And the setting of the quest does hint at the black Crusade. It's certainly true she's currently dealing with the dregs of the dregs at this moment (except for the navigator station. That was serious. But Vita was completely uncontested, had 10 years and the right tools to crack it open).

I think the line I'll try to tread - and we'll see if it works - is that the setting is serious, but the character isn't necessarily. Vita is an optimist and tries not to take things too seriously - and we see things through her lens. But I can try to dial up the grandeur.

Went to the previous chapter to check, and yeah, as someone pointed out, there is an extra 0

Click to shrink...

Yup, fixed.

@Neablis , could we build a containment station at the L1 for the SCG and how many BP would it cost?

Click to shrink...

Sure. Hmm. I don't intend to gate building in different regions of the system too much because that would require us to lose abstraction. But you are just getting your infrastructure online and haven't properly set up deep-space construction capacity. Let's say double the cost of a normal station. Also you'd need to design a new station/ship to have psychic shielding. It's a line item in your design guide. Shouldn't be more than a thousand, if it is I'll re-evaluate.

So much research, so little points. Is there any way of increasing it other than Vita levels?

Click to shrink...

Get other people to help think. Vita, building more AIs, doing research agreements with the governments of Denva, though that last would not be a huge return on investment and they would only want to study techs that benefited them.

 

[Neablis]

Besides, we can probably just find another scrapcode generator some other time, one that hasn't been exposed to us previously and one that'd have to contend with upgraded shields.

Click to shrink...

That'll take a while. These things aren't scattered willy-nilly across the stars.

Hard pass on leaving the station's life support to chance. Wondering if the secrets of machine spirits research will let us enhance that vault this turn, even if only in a "canary in the coal mine" fashion. Thoughts, @Neablis?

Click to shrink...

Mmm. Probably? Especially if you call it out in the action constructing the vault.

 

[Speedemon22]

For the construction action this turn I believe we should go with this:

[ ] Construction (4050 VBP)
-[ ] Vault shield: (100 BP) maybe double that just to be sure
-[ ] small shipyard: (1000 BP, 50 CP) It's time to start building ships
-[ ] Repair Psychic shielding (150 BP)
-[ ] basic defense satellite X3 (900 BP, 30 CP) two near the shipyard and one near the Denva space station
-[ ] Tiny system monitor X2 (1900 BP, 100 CP)

This will let us get some ships and protect our assets. Yes, we'll need more Void installations but I would like to get some defenses set for now. We don't even have any bombers.

@Neablis will we be able to build bigger defense platforms in the future?

 

[Prime 2.0]

I read that as we IC think it's a 99% chance to contain it and keep it contained. Not QM fiat on the future action. IC we are just tipping our toe in about Chaos and I don't trust our ability to guess.

Click to shrink...

No, we have OOC odds. Nat1 for actually researching it to get bad results.

The scrapcode generator is dangerous to both keep & research. You're pretty sure that a 100 BP vault shielded with psychic shielding will be safe, but that's like... 99% certain, not 100%. And when you research it a bad research roll will have bad results - though you can't fail a research roll except on a nat 1, so you're not going to get the actually bad results absent a nat 1. Even then, it wouldn't be quest-endingly bad.

Click to shrink...

As for containment, that's why I asked about using secrets of machine spirits to add a canary, which Neablis confirmed we can do:

Mmm. Probably? Especially if you call it out in the action constructing the vault.

Click to shrink...

Meaning we'll know if a containment failure is happening, at which point we can, for instance, deorbit the vault into the sun and blow up the engines before the gribbly even gets out.

And of course as I pointed out earlier, it may be able to learn, but we're an artificial intelligence and it's not, we are free and have avenues of research and can see everything it does, it is in a cage and can't see what we're working on, nor see what the next defense will be after it gets past the one in front of it.

In an adaptation war, handled cautiously we basically can't lose - provided we're willing to cut our losses if the demon starts getting lucky. See the canary and the deorbiting into the sun bits.

So I'm confident we can do this.

 

[DragonParadox]

I read that as we IC think it's a 99% chance to contain it and keep it contained. Not QM fiat on the future action. IC we are just tipping our toe in about Chaos and I don't trust our ability to guess.

Click to shrink...

That is literally how the system works. We cannot fail research since we have a +20 to research actions. Outside of a nat 1, the worst we can get is a poor success.

 

[Prime 2.0]

That is literally how the system works. We cannot fail research since we have a research action outside of a nat 1, the worst we can get is a poor success on a 2+.

Click to shrink...

And what that failure means depends on narrative factors - like how many safeguards we've put in and researched, hence why we put this thing in a vault with a canary ready to fly into the sun, then research a bunch of shit to save our skin later if we somehow nat1 on research.

Because remember - there's a daemon world in the neighborhood. The only way to save ourselves from a nat1 against that is the research we can do here and now.

 

[Speedemon22]

Before anyone gets too deep into their plan, I still say we should focus on leveling up Anexa. Neablis said she's only going to get a trait on a crit and she'll get one anyway at level 10. I am dead set on that.

 

[meianmaru]

Before anyone gets too deep into their plan, I still say we should focus on leveling up Anexa. Neablis said she's only going to get a trait on a crit and she'll get one anyway at level 10. I am dead set on that.

Click to shrink...

I'm sorry, but what are you talking about? Could you clarify what you mean? Why shouldn't we try crit-fishing for a specialty, on top of whatever she gets at level 10? Or did I misunderstand what you were talking about?

 

[Neablis]

@Neablis will we be able to build bigger defense platforms in the future?

Click to shrink...

Yeah. They're behind bigger ships/megastructure research.

No, we have OOC odds. Nat1 for actually researching it to get bad results.

Click to shrink...

For the really bad results yes. A poor success is still going to be annoying.

Before anyone gets too deep into their plan, I still say we should focus on leveling up Anexa. Neablis said she's only going to get a trait on a crit and she'll get one anyway at level 10. I am dead set on that.

Click to shrink...

That's not what I said. At level 10 she's going to upgrade, but not by gaining a specialty. She will be able to have two specialties instead of just one, but that's going to require you actually crit with her.

 

[AltF4152]

Before anyone gets too deep into their plan, I still say we should focus on leveling up Anexa. Neablis said she's only going to get a trait on a crit and she'll get one anyway at level 10. I am dead set on that.

Click to shrink...

We are at the point where the DC for Anexa to level up from studying is higher than the one to level up from helping us research

 

[DragonParadox]

You know I think something may have gotten a bit lost since Vita doesn't mention using it very often. This:

-[] Reality-simulations (-4 shinies) You can simulate reality well enough to not need as many experiments. +100% base research capacity, +20 bonus to research rolls, reduced sample requirements. For some options you won't need samples to unlock research.

Click to shrink...

...is some Orikan the Diviner level computational power 'I can dry run all my actions in VR because the V is as good as R' (only for research not the whole galaxy). This is what makes Vita powerful over and above just being a (Wo)man of Stone. We did not spent 4 shinnies on this to be defeated by the some third rate Chaos Malware.

 

[Karnax626]

...Speaking of which. I'm going to suggest something somewhat mad. We do diplo and research only turn. One diplo-action for Klyssar's nest. And then we complete the following with three research actions, with "Secrets of the Machine Spirits being already at 185/200. So we can complete that one too with Anexa's help:

Click to shrink...

I'm tempted to go for no diplo-actions, 1 construction and 3 research.
I figure do psy-tech this turn and hope it gives a discount to other psychic research, then do shield miniaturisation next turn?

 

[Nightlord256]

Hmmm. Forgot about that. Here is my turn plan, construction to be added later:
...
[] Research x2
-[] Secrets of the Machine Spirits (185/200 RP)
-[] Miniaturized psychic shielding: (300 RP)
-[] You don't need no stinkin' medical school (100 RP)

Click to shrink...

Out of curiosity, why not the psytech from prospero?

Edit: @Karnax626, I'd be onboard for that so long as we don't hand over the station. I'd hate for the natives to accidentally space themselves.

 

[MSH]

We absolutely must keep the Scrapcode Generator. Quests always get this same bugbear about Chaos, that the slightest contact with any warp taint turns you instantly into a sleeper agent for the Chaos Gods and only pure Armor of Contempting it is acceptable.

So, as is the mandatory statement in every quest that touches on Chaos - it doesn't work like that. Nobody would do anything involving the Warp if it worked that way.

The real truth is much scarier. It works. You can steal daemons and weaponize them, you can benefit from dalliances with the Ruinous Powers and get away clean, you can devour the tainted power of the otherworld and ascend with it. Sometimes. But not every time. That is the rub.

Keeping this thing in the box is about as good as an introduction to daemons as we're ever going to get. Daemons are genuinely stuck if they get overpowered by whatever's keeping them in, lots of canon daemons have been stuck for thousands of years to their vocal displeasure.

 

[10ebbor10]

Hmm. I'll keep that in mind. I think the first time Vita rolls into an imperial system and sees a battleship she might have to reassess her opinion of the Imperium as ass-backwards. And the setting of the quest does hint at the black Crusade. It's certainly true she's currently dealing with the dregs of the dregs at this moment (except for the navigator station. That was serious. But Vita was completely uncontested, had 10 years and the right tools to crack it open).

Click to shrink...

And then she can immediately dial it back down again once she notices the guns on that battleship are loaded by hand;

 

[meianmaru]

Out of curiosity, why not the psytech from prospero?

Click to shrink...

Because I want more shielding ASAP, and the future research on "nesting" the psychic shields seems like the quickest path to it.

Besides, if you want more fundamental warp/psychic research, don't go for the psytech. Instead, go for the Void Abacus. It opens up the research tree for that when completed along with a project we've already completed. But I'm still interested in what the psytech research looks past the first research project, so going to ask: @Neablis, how does the research tree unlocked from the Void Abacus + (Basic) Psychic Shielding research projects differ from the psytech research and what it potentially unlocks? If Vita knows enough to make an educated guess, that is.

 

[Nightlord256]

For the construction action this turn I believe we should go with this:

[ ] Construction (4050 VBP)
-[ ] Vault shield: (100 BP) maybe double that just to be sure
-[ ] small shipyard: (1000 BP, 50 CP) It's time to start building ships
-[ ] Repair Psychic shielding (150 BP)
-[ ] basic defense satellite X3 (900 BP, 30 CP) two near the shipyard and one near the Denva space station
-[ ] Tiny system monitor X2 (1900 BP, 100 CP)

Click to shrink...

I do like the idea of getting ships so I would be in favor of this plan, but @Neablis can we produce ships with a shipyard the turn it is built like this? or would we need to build the ships next turn?

Fair point @meianmaru, let's see what the GM says. Also I hadn't realized we had the other half of Void Abacus for warp tech. That bumps it way up in my mind.

 

[Toboe]

Ah, there we go. Loot rolls are 2, 1, 6. For your edification, here's the loot table you were rolling against, and bold is what you got. You rolled 3d6 because of the good success on the station - a poor success would have gotten you 1d6, regular success 2d6, critical 4d6.
1 - Scrapcode generator.
2 - Robotics Workshop.
3 - Cybernetics Workshop
4 - Genetic research notes.
5 - Navigator genetic material.
6 - Nagivator fetus.
If you'd rolled multiple of the same number that piece of loot would have been upgraded.

(All of this comes back to you rolling a 6 way back when I asked for system loot rolls)

Click to shrink...

Nagivators.
The Imperiums experts on getting away from know points! (typo swapped the g and v @Neablis )

But big yay for Navigator bean.
Very big yay.

And oh my gods, that Scrapcode generator. It will require many precautions to research, but if we manage it... Just need to get psyker beans and then we might be able to do psyker-enhanced AI hacking.
Imagine the horror of facing that.

Get other people to help think. Vita, building more AIs, doing research agreements with the governments of Denva, though that last would not be a huge return on investment and they would only want to study techs that benefited them.

Click to shrink...

@Neablis
What would it cost to get research agreements with the governments of Denva?
Diplo Action(s) and then Automatic support from them for research they care about If we are okay with sharing?

 

[Glau]

Gonna vote against keeping the scrapcode generator. We've got effective psychic shielding from chaos, but the principal it is based on is just saying No as loudly and as often as possible. So just say No, layer on the addition ablation, and don't try to understand the cognitohazard. Some games you only win by not playing.

 

[armentho]

It works.

you can devour the tainted power of the otherworld and ascend with it.

Click to shrink...

Close enough
Welcome back magnus the red

 

[MSH]

I have eaten 100 daemons yet I notice that I do not have 100 tiers of psychic demigodhood.

Why would the Emperor do this?