Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

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Sigil said:
It is rather concerning that we have Bongo aboard and no internal corruption meter yet. True, it is very expensive, but probably worth taking anyway.
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It's soooo expensive. We have Large Scale Machine Spirits, which could give us a discount to it on crit, though, and it's much cheaper. Worth some RP, maybe?

SightUnseen said:
Time to do the checksum/backup research.
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And I still think we should just go for MS Chaos Resist and MS CPS for now.
 
My personal list of anti-chaos techs I think we should pick up ASAP:

Neablis said:
-[] Psychic tripwires (25 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).
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Neablis said:
-[] Faith is my shield? (75 RP) Clearly the Imperium believes that faith can protect you from warp gribblies. It even seems like it might be true. How? Is there a way you can harness the effect without having to dedicate yourself to the Imperial creed. (Understanding the benefits of Faith. May unlock further research to allow Vita to design a less objectionable faith optimized for warp protection, and help develop better psyker training programs.)
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Neablis said:
-[] 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.)
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Neablis said:
-[] Machine Spirit Chaos resistance (100 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.)

-[] Psytech Machine spirits (100 RP) You don't think that machine spirits can be psychically active. However, from what you understand of psytech it's a temperamental and difficult discipline, and you think that integrating machine spirits into the construction of psytech might improve its reliability and performance. (Improves psytech, at the cost of making it somewhat more expensive. May lead to more advanced versions for more advanced psytech, and may contribute to better psychic shields)
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Neablis said:
-[] 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) Requires Machine Spirit Chaos resistance.
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Total is currently 450, which is a decent chunk, but there's a good chance of discounts while we research it, and it would get us a *lot* of stuff - 6 techs in total.
 
It's worth noting that this is not one of the researches that involves poking bongo. Even if the "nat 1 on scrapcode research = Bad consequences" warning from when we first got him happens to still apply just as strongly now as it did back then despite our advances, this isn't that.

Bongo's containment is safest when at rest, and it remains at rest this turn.
 
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Prime 2.0 said:
It's worth noting that this is not one of the researches that involves poking bongo. Even if the "nat 1 on scrapcode research = Bad consequences" warning from when we first got him happens to still apply just as strongly now as it did back then despite our advances, this isn't that.

Bongo's containment is safest when at rest, and it remains at rest this turn.
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Oh I know. But we are eventually going to want to do demonology, and I think we should get a bunch of defensive psytech research done before we do. And it has lots of side benefits, too, such as making levelling safer for Cia, improving our psytech, improving our shields more generally, and furthering our knowledge of the warp.
 
I will say, this is extremely frustrating to me, that a nat 100 tech has the bonus tech roll a nat 1, when that bonus tech could have let us not have to worry as much.

I do trust Neablis to make this work, he's been pretty consistent with that so far, but it is massively irritating that it happened at all, like Charlie Brown getting the football yanked away right as he's about to kick it.
 
Alectai said:
I will say, this is extremely frustrating to me, that a nat 100 tech has the bonus tech roll a nat 1, when that bonus tech could have let us not have to worry as much.

I do trust Neablis to make this work, he's been pretty consistent with that so far, but it is massively irritating that it happened at all, like Charlie Brown getting the football yanked away right as he's about to kick it.
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This is the second time lol, we had the same thing happen with MS Emotional Hacking. XD
 
Eh, dice gives, dice takes.
Overall we've been hella lucky this quest overall, and compared to the rest of the setting we're living a positively charmed life. Losing out on a potential research option really isn't the worst thing in the world.
 
armentho said:
Nope
We need warp protection and get it from poking bongo

Obscurity isnt a defense in 40k where the wrong thought begins to cause your whispers while you sleep
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Not only that, Psy Shield research also feeds into warp research more generally - including warp comms, which would be huge for us. And Bongo also gives us Psytech research, and research to help make things safer for Cia... There's a lot of value to be had.
 
For reference, this is the tech roll that unlocked Scrapcode Immunity.

Neablis said:
Scrapcode-resistant Psychic shielding researched - rolled 100+20=120 Very Critical Success!
All of your products are much more resistant to scrapcode-based attacks, which will deal approximately a quarter as much damage as previously.
New technology unlocked - Scrapcode Immunity (150 RP)
New technology unlocked - Psychic Shield Tuning (200 RP)
Bonus Technology unlocked - Psychic Encryption (150 RP)
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75% resistance still seems impressive, even if complete immunity turns out to be unattainable under Vita's current paradigm. And already people here are speculating on ways to stack the deck in other ways, which is good and prudent.

Alectai said:
I will say, this is extremely frustrating to me, that a nat 100 tech has the bonus tech roll a nat 1, when that bonus tech could have let us not have to worry as much.

I do trust Neablis to make this work, he's been pretty consistent with that so far, but it is massively irritating that it happened at all, like Charlie Brown getting the football yanked away right as he's about to kick it.
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Not quite (see quote above); Scrapcode Immunity was one of the basic followup techs to Scrapcode-resistant shielding. Psychic Encryption is the bonus tech from that 100 roll.
 
My main thing with a research Nat 1 is that it doesn't devalue earlier completed projects im fine with a failure that we're gonna have to take time to repair and spend more RP on.
 
michaell8000 said:
My main thing with a research Nat 1 is that it doesn't devalue earlier completed projects im fine with a failure that we're gonna have to take time to repair and spend more RP on.
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We might not be able to repair that. The last time, the thing we dug into became welp, that's impossible oh well. Now, maybe we can circumvent it but that might be long-game stuff.

LightLan said:
welp, time to get rid of the daemon.
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Nah. The psychic shields we have seem to be well overbuilt. Seem, yes, and we definitely want to look into corruption-measurement measures, checksum records, backup protections, RAID-redundancy and the like - and absolutely daemonology. Just because we yeet Bongo into a sun does not mean Bongo will be done with us, and I would rather properly banish the little shit than risk him warp-stalking us after we let him out of the cage.

Edit: Opinions are personal, I'm not trying to convince you to vote otherwise - just musing here.

Edit2: Maybe worth noting that if we take an action to banish it is likely to be more rewarding than a free yeet what with the action-investment mechanism - also I just think an AntiDaemonic borderline-Malleus AI is neat. Of course, if things go super badly I'm happy to see how the Abominable Intelligence arc continues. Maybe we take the Soul Forge?
 
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SightUnseen said:
We might not be able to repair that. The last time, the thing we dug into became welp, that's impossible oh well. Now, maybe we can circumvent it but that might be long-game stuff.
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OK so replying to arguments like these with context:

Neablis said:
Machine spirit jamming research completed - rolled 77+20 = 97. Critical success!
Small flat combat advantage for general units against Imperium & Mechanicus forces. Not a dice bonus, just gives your units a new weapon.
Unlocked new blueprint for design - Machine-spirit Jammer (25 RP)
Unlocked new ship combat equipment - Light/Medium/Heavy Machine Spirit Jammers
Unlocked new special research - Machine Spirit Emotional Hacking (150 RP)
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A Critical Success on Machine Spirit Jamming got us the Machine Spirit Emotional Hacking as a bonus Research to a research action that was otherwise about developing Blueprints Research and not new tech. We then had a Critical Failure on Machine Spirit Emotional Hacking:

Neablis said:
Researched Machine Spirit Emotional Hacking - rolled 1, critical autofail.
A critical failure means that the emotional manipulation to enhance hacking is impossible, it turns out.
Additionally, Anexa doesn't level at all this turn.

Unlocked new research option - Improved Machine-spirit Jamming (400 RP)
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we fell forward and unlocked Improved Machine-spirit Jamming as a tech Research.

So in this case of a Critical Failure on a folow up tech to a Critical Success:

Neablis said:
Scrapcode-resistant Psychic shielding researched - rolled 100+20=120 Very Critical Success!
All of your products are much more resistant to scrapcode-based attacks, which will deal approximately a quarter as much damage as previously.
New technology unlocked - Scrapcode Immunity (150 RP)
New technology unlocked - Psychic Shield Tuning (200 RP)
Bonus Technology unlocked - Psychic Encryption (150 RP)
Existing technology discounted - Machine Spirit Chaos resistance cost reduced by 100 RP.
Existing technology discounted - Alternative Shielding Meanings reduced by 50 RP.
Existing technology discounted - Multi-meaning shields cost reduced by 100 RP.
Existing technology discounted - Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields cost reduced by 50 RP.
Existing technology discounted - Psychic tripwires cost reduced by 50 RP.
Existing technology discounted - Machine Spirit Chaos resistance cost reduced by 100 RP.
Existing technology discounted - The Basics of Psychic Computation cost reduced by 50 RP.
Existing technology discounted - Empathy as Sensors cost reduced by 50 RP.
Existing technology discounted - Scrapcode Generation cost reduced by 50 RP.
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it was Scrapcode Immunity that suffered Critical Failure. Alright the most likely outcome is that we get Improved Scrapcode-resistant Psychic shielding to Research instead of it with a high RP cost. Or we get to do small steps again like with Biology is Wet. We fall forward again. The bonus Tech is Psychic Encryption so it is what we can lose on a critical failure. Immunity will have to wait for us to figure out more general Warp resistance/immunity first.
 
MrRobot said:
Remember this is usually the representation of RNJesus for a reason.
it know no chill or mercy
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Looks fake, there's a 20 instead of a 1 on his face.
Derpmind said:
Bongo is leaking again! Do no, I repeat, do not sacrifice anything to the friendly scrapcode generator!
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Eh, the vault can take it.
Angle said:
Ooof. Well, we can pick up MS Chaos Resist and MS CPS to hopefully fill in for Scrapcode Immunity? Not quite as good, but it should still give us a leg up.
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I think Psychic Encryption would be the best fill-in. But I do think we should pick those two up, as well.
sum ergo cogito said:
Hmm if scrapcode immunity is actually impossible, maybe some kind of like, counter-scrapcode? Maybe after makeing artificial deamons? Kind of immune system code?
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We can use the encryption tech to prevent Bongo from reading our countermeasures. Would also be very useful for warp comms and for Prime's psyshield opsec concerns.
Angle said:
It's soooo expensive. We have Large Scale Machine Spirits, which could give us a discount to it on crit, though, and it's much cheaper. Worth some RP, maybe?

And I still think we should just go for MS Chaos Resist and MS CPS for now.
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I'm hoping one of these systems will give us Advanced Materials samples, too. Or, at worst, that we can negotiate some ore with the nice people at Denva Primus.
Angle said:
My personal list of anti-chaos techs I think we should pick up ASAP:

Total is currently 450, which is a decent chunk, but there's a good chance of discounts while we research it, and it would get us a *lot* of stuff - 6 techs in total.
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I think Personal Shields is less important than the encryption right now.
LightLan said:
welp, time to get rid of the daemon.
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Yeah! Let's bind it now! While our luck is good :D
 
Angle said:
Total is currently 450, which is a decent chunk, but there's a good chance of discounts while we research it, and it would get us a *lot* of stuff - 6 techs in total.
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The personal-sized psychic shields have only limited use until we also research Triple Nested Psychic shielding.
We can only have one shield inside another one, not two until we do that.
And we already have that Ship->daemon, ship->Crew quarters, ship->ai core, ship->psy lab.
 
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