I don't like the way it feels like Characters are treated as far more valuable than characters. To some extent it can't be avoided, but I'd like to try for self consistency.
"Ah." She pauses. "I wanted to apologize again for the damage. If there's a way for me to make it up..."
You cut her off, somewhat sharply. "Absolutely not. You're part of my Crew, Cia. I want you to learn, and grow. And journey with us, across the stars. See amazing things, do great deeds. We're just starting out, and I want you to understand that I would sacrifice a thousand shuttles for any one of you without even thinking about it. Metal's cheap, and so are lives. But you" you stab a finger towards her "aren't. I can't care about everybody. But when I start, I don't stop."
She takes a deep breath, and dabs at her eyes surreptitiously. Her answer is formal. "Thank you, Vita."
As a reminder, after her previous Crew died, she spent thousands of years stranded on a Space Hulk and then in a hole in the ground, even if in slow-mode. So its no wonder that she might get extremely attached to her new Crew while being a bit more distant when it comes to others. Especially when Vita's backstory points out that she did go insane during those long years, only to reach some sort of stability again later on.
All the social activity with her Crew and others and getting to actually travel has probably helped her to heal a lot. But that kind of thing still leaves scars. Also, still an AI even if her thought process is pretty damn human-aligned. So some weirdness can be expected just from that.
I'm a bit annoyed that there is such a vast difference between what people consider the minimum of care and consideration for the navibean, and the way we are about to leave thousands of kids stranded in decaying spacestations to how that the oxygen doesn't fail before we get around to doing something about it. If we ever do something about it.
Addressing the ongoing humanitarian disaster happening here is why my plan features immediate action to prevent the one group constantly going around and killing people from continuing to do that, followed by beginning to ramp up local production to address the technological and infrastructural collapse, and researching the technology necessary to empower agents (Denva & the Cogitare) who will be able to assist us in employing the fruits of that production on a broad scale.
Chipping in on the navigator v. abaci discussion, something to remember is that every ship in a fleet needs a navigator. Right now that's no problem but considering the plan is to return to Denva and build up a fleet that means only the Voice of the Ancients can travel quickly, so either we need to research warp comms to keep in contact with the rest of the fleet traveling behind us, or clone more navigators which will require tech + crewing every ship in the fleet.
Now, neither of these thing are bad to work towards, just saying that it's not as quick or cheap as people are thinking, not including navigator QoL stuff like understanding mutations and navigator genetics.
Chipping in on the navigator v. abaci discussion, something to remember is that every ship in a fleet needs a navigator. Right now that's no problem but considering the plan is to return to Denva and build up a fleet that means only the Voice of the Ancients can travel quickly, so either we need to research warp comms to keep in contact with the rest of the fleet traveling behind us, or clone more navigators which will require tech + crewing every ship in the fleet.
Now, neither of these thing are bad to work towards, just saying that it's not as quick or cheap as people are thinking, not including navigator QoL stuff like understanding mutations and navigator genetics.
I think that probably isn't true for a group of Vita ships traveling together. Not certain if it's been declared though?
(We did get it said that multiple Vita-operated ships can travel together without having to develop special communications tech, but sharing navigation methods is slightly different.)
I like this plan. Depending on what we think of the state of the stations i would like to swap out one of the research actions(probably only partially fill the Cognito Filters) for another diplomacy/subversion action to hack the stations/ships machine spirit to:
1. stop the ship docking to lived in stations therefore prevent the fighting and set us up for taking them over
2. help the Faith is my shield? ressearch by nudging the people in the stations using our (more or less extensive) access. (In space there is no ethics board to stop you)
I would love to do a couple concentrated research turns, tick some low cost research of the lost and do any research which improves efficiency such as ship design, efficient weapons and manufactory increases. And stealth/shield increases with the thought to eventually getting back to Denva and building ourselves a giant and improved ship.
I would love to do a couple concentrated research turns, tick some low cost research of the lost and do any research which improves efficiency such as ship design, efficient weapons and manufactory increases
I'd like to avoid those kinds of research until we get back to Denva. That's the kind of tech that we used a boon to tell them to research, so better to avoid getting something they may have already figured out.
I'd like to avoid those kinds of research until we get back to Denva. That's the kind of tech that we used a boon to tell them to research, so better to avoid getting something they may have already figured out.
Yeah I think we should prioritize warp stuff anyway - it's a more immediate need, IMO. Cia, Bongo, Warp travel, Warp Comms, all things we want tech for ASAP.
Oh, and Chaos - as this system shows us, chaos infestations are probably going to be a very common encounter pretty much anywhere we go, even if it's mostly just cultists with pistols.
Ok so reading trough the actual discussion I dawn on me a impression. One that a lot of relatively loud voices on the tread don't quite know the setting and/or have a misconception of the scale that Vita operates is not quite human, not really her perspective mind you but her timetable and the scale of things like spaceship on the setting.
So I will try to explain some things. On a not-realy-a-rant format.
Ok for starters the basics anyone need to understand about Warhammer 40K it it's motto: "In the grim darkness of the far future there's only war."
Basically 40K is culturally the grandfather of edgelord grimdark stories where the universe turbo-suck. As in if anyone is familiar with worm how the autor wich is a edgelord goes out of his way to retcon ways things could fix the universe? Imagine that but as a company policy. When I said in a early post that chaos is wanked, it's literally that on 40K (and fantasy really) chaos is the evil marry sue faction that do get unfair advantages and part of the reason why people are so paranoid about it.
There's many things on the universe that will take a Loooooooong as time to figure shit out specially how research is very incremental with things here. And Vita waking up with no knowledge about how things are done in this environment do mean there's a lot of institutional knowledge that we need to either steal, scavenge or trade for.
Tldr: Shit is fucked and we need a long series of new tech even being to make a noticeble impact on the suck not suck scale. Now another thing I feel people are doing is that they are treating spaceships wrong.
In this universe Spaceship are not really a spece plane/carrier. They are void faring city states that can house millions of souls on board, even, correctly, assuming that Vita don't need that much crew due her technical expertise we are talking about something that do in fact can house a entire population and culture, and there's many reasons that we would want actually have a on board population pool, and have this nascent society have a culture of their own, a solid belief system even because buy and large we need competent humans that let vita have someone trustworthy to settle and uplift a system without having to go back to denva.
In the end Vita do need to have a pool of "Her people", "Her industrial base", "her military general" liking or not she is the faction's "King" in this scenario.
Now with that said on on a more gamey prospect rushing navigators is a bad idea. They are psykers with extra weird genetics that actively have to look at space hell trough their eyes. Even the Imperium that in their own fucked up way heavily invested on the navigators tech tree and have 10000 years of navigator institutional knowledge still have them dying if they hit a warp storm on warp.
For as lesser range the Abacuses are they are a thing that can be made and repaired, the Imperium don't use them not because they thing navigators are better but because the navigator houses actively suppress anything that could replace them. If given the option the Imperium would make the switch.
Now as for the child, i wouldn't worry about they not joining Vita. Mainly because well in a purely doylist perspective they are a hero unit gained by criting a loot roll.
But on the same doylist perspective says that rushing would have Vita's Son/Daughter dying on her if we roll poorly because perils of the warp is a thing that Cia (a way weaker and safer case) it's also at risk of something similar.
Now here a Loooooong ass list of shit we probably would want to have a reasonable shot in actually raising a baby navigator.
Block one:
Faith is my shield?-and probably the follow up research to make a system that increase one's willpower.
Personality-Checking Routines
Personal-sized Psychic shielding
Machine Spirit Chaos resistance
Machine Spirit-controlled Psychic Shields
Psychic Encryption
Basic Cognition Filter
This is honestly the bare minium we should have for make sure all our crew/citizens are more or less protected against passive chaos corruption, specially the psykers that navigators are.
Block 2:
Complex genetic enhancement
Psyker genetics
Understanding Mutations
Navigator Genetics
Dubious Dark Eldar Dissections -and appropriate follow ups if any.
So bit more specific but in general the idea is to understand how on a biological level navigators and psykers work, the dark eldar are there because they are a species of stable and powerful psykers that managed to stave of a Major chaos god claim on their colective souls. For ar evil the Drukari are they are very stable.
Block 3.
The Basics of Psychic Computation
Companion Cogitators
Warp Weather Prediction
Improved Void Abacus
Basic Psychic Amplification Devices
Basic Psychic Suppression Devices- And follow up tech.
Complex Psytech Implants
Adult genetic engineering-and follow up tech.
Basically block 3 is a bit more speculative but it's the "let's make sure Vita's child do not explode and can safely guide the ship trough the warp using SCIENCE. Both tech and genemods."
So yeah For those that looked trough it is long but do makes sense since effectively having a navigator would be the key to bring this quest to the next stage where vita is making moves sector wide.
Yeah I think we should prioritize warp stuff anyway - it's a more immediate need, IMO. Cia, Bongo, Warp travel, Warp Comms, all things we want tech for ASAP.
Theoretically it is possible to follow the navigator ship and keep within visual range but any warpy incidents could cause the ships to get separated & lost without a navigator to guide them, this is not nearly as bad for us I suppose since the ship could at least limp towards the original target using the abacus but it still takes away from the mobility potential.
Plus having spare navigators in the fleet or multiple for ship is always good insurance since well.. things can happen/the Guide can let their apprentices learn & cover for them during less turbulent jumps. Ideally we'd want a small navigator cabal for our Navigator like how Anexa has her techpriest minions, Victan possibly acquiring some diplomatic/spy staff or Cia either getting a squad to lead or a circle of less powerful psykers.
Oh, and Chaos - as this system shows us, chaos infestations are probably going to be a very common encounter pretty much anywhere we go, even if it's mostly just cultists with pistols.
Of course, the main issue with cultists for us is probably always going to be the 'what sorcery have they got'. Barring us somehow getting into a tiff with chaos Titans...
I'm gonna be honest, It think we should get Cognition Filters this turn which woukd help a lot in letting us send in people like Cia to fight Chaos. As for the actual Chaos fighting, we have thousands of powerful robots and these are just a bunch of tribal savages with whatever scrap they could get their hands on for over a century. We really don't need to prep a lot other than the Cognition Filters to deal with any cursed Symbols. Let's just get this shit over and done with already and kill all the Cultists.
If that's your priority, fair enough, but we can do it quicker and easier by just lancing every station with chaos iconography or landing squads of bots with lascutters to break every seal they can find and vent the atmosphere.
Not really - we have lots of sub 150 point researches relating to the warp that don't require it. Psy Shield and Psytech machine spirits, to start with, along with faith studies and the psychic tripwires, for where I want to start. After that, alternative shield meanings, the abacus upgrade, psytech amplifiers and suppressors... Lots of stuff.
Of course, the main issue with cultists for us is probably always going to be the 'what sorcery have they got'. Barring us somehow getting into a tiff with chaos Titans...
In the abstract, the main issue with military action on any of the stations is that though they've technologically regressed, though they are in a death spiral, they very much do have a pile of irreplaceable (to them) resources that they have to slowly cannibalize to use, and some of those resources are certain to be usable as weapons, if they are not actually designed as weapons.
Business as usual when these factions bump into each other is to try and conserve those finite resources as much as they can, relative to what's being fought over. Bodies are cheap, dead people are people you don't have to sustain with your limited resources. Tech is expensive, tech used on fighting could have provided for dozens or hundreds of lives. Any faction that isn't conserving their resources this way would have burned itself out already.
But that all changes the moment Vita attacks someone and presses that attack. Our forces are a credible existential threat, and they will blow everything that can be used as a weapon against us if it means a chance of survival.
Now make no mistake, for (almost) any non-chaos resource that means Vita no-diffs them anyways. But when we're talking about insane improvised weapons made out of part of their station with little regard for if it's livable afterwards - well, it's not impossible Cia gets seriously hurt. The risk is never zero when you're fighting a cornered animal.
...But yeah, it's the chaos bullshit that remains the most credible threat here. I just point out that that's not the only source of risk. Melee bots or bot tactics is probably the best way to hedge against non-warpy technicals/traps if Cia goes in.
I'm gonna be honest, It think we should get Cognition Filters this turn which woukd help a lot in letting us send in people like Cia to fight Chaos. As for the actual Chaos fighting, we have thousands of powerful robots and these are just a bunch of tribal savages with whatever scrap they could get their hands on for over a century. We really don't need to prep a lot other than the Cognition Filters to deal with any cursed Symbols. Let's just get this shit over and done with already and kill all the Cultists.
The alternative of course is to not send Cia in yet at all. Our bots can win pretty much any fight on the inside if they've got chaos resistant machine spirits, and I highly doubt we're going to hit all the stations in one action even if we make the attempt - and some plans just go for more limited objectives like recon or taking the patrolling ship.
We can always get cog filters next turn if we're not deploying her right away, after all.
I'm against any plan that has us attacking this turn because that's just begging for a crit fail to screw us over through reasearch we get the tech to deal with chaos this turn and make sure it's ready to go before planning attacks.
If that's your priority, fair enough, but we can do it quicker and easier by just lancing every station with chaos iconography or landing squads of bots with lascutters to break every seal they can find and vent the atmosphere.
The thing is, I want Cia to actually do something. We've already seen that she's getting more and more frustrated with feeling useless and spending decades just constantly training. The more we try to coddle her the more likely she's going to do something rash. Best we just nip this in the bud and let her get some live combat experience against a bunch of Cultustd who can barely scrape together lasguns to make her feel like she's helping. And who knows? She might even level up.
In the abstract, the main issue with military action on any of the stations is that though they've technologically regressed, though they are in a death spiral, they very much do have a pile of irreplaceable (to them) resources that they have to slowly cannibalize to use, and some of those resources are certain to be usable as weapons, if they are not actually designed as weapons.
Uggggh, I'm getting sick and tired of your paranoid bullshit.
To Reiterate, these are all a bunch of backwards savages that have VERY little to no understanding how any of their tech works and I'd be surprised if they can scrape together more powerful than a lasgun. If anything, I'd wager that the Chaos stations have the least effective reserves since they tend to be insane maniacs that usually infight a lot and tend to be bad at actually preserving stuff. Plus, any powerful weapons they did have would have likely already been used against the Loyalist ship to try and capture it instead of trying to preserve it for some fucking reason b/c apparently to you every Chaos worshipper is always working to be prepared for us in particular.
And let me make something clear, Chaos is VERY dangerous and not to be taken lightly. But if they were such the memetic hazard that most people are thinking of them being this whole system would have been corrupted by them by now. There are billions of people that went up against worse than what these tribals could throw at us and came out uncorrupted without any of the anti-Chaos tech we have, and Cia is a hero unit, she is not going to get screwed over so easily by some guys who have sticks and stones and the occasional gun.
I'm just frustrated with so many quests being driven by questers who have the courage of yellow-bellied Grots spending an excessive amount of time turtling up and shying away from the slightest amount of risk.
I'm against any plan that has us attacking this turn because that's just begging for a crit fail to screw us over through reasearch we get the tech to deal with chaos this turn and make sure it's ready to go before planning attacks.
My dude, that's only a 1/100 chance and we got one last turn. While I am loathe to draw the Wrath of Murphy, we can't act like every roll we make will be a crit fail.
I'm just frustrated with so many quests being driven by questers who have the courage of yellow-bellied Grots spending an excessive amount of time turtling up and shying away from the slightest amount of risk.
My man, I am describing a threat vector so people don't dismiss the danger entirely like you're arguing for, not suggesting "don't put Cia in danger because of this".
You can downplay them all you like, but mind the lower bound:
Each station could probably be stabilized with about 250 BP of trade goods, less if you could get direct access to repair their existing systems. Negotiating that might be... hard.
They can fix the stations on their own if given the parts. Vita wouldn't even know which ones they need! These are not the Cavemen in Spaaaaaace you are describing. If they're familiar enough with the station systems to pop them open and replace what's broken, then they're familiar enough with them to make them explode. The bar for being dangerous when you care about nothing else is really not that high.
I laid out my prereqs already. Personal shields and cog filters, and a scouting force ahead of Cia. That's plenty for chaos threats AND one-off desperation traps/technicals of a non-warp nature.
I'm just frustrated with so many quests being driven by questers who have the courage of yellow-bellied Grots spending an excessive amount of time turtling up and shying away from the slightest amount of risk.
There's nothing for it. Even when questers are told to pick between risks they just invent reasons for one to be the clearly lesser risk and insist on that.
I for my part have shifted to just leaving this system. It'll be useful to us on the order of hundreds of thousands of BP per turn, but that won't be feasible without more industrial tech. And nobody is willing to research any of that tech because "Denva is supposed to do it", even though their scientific capacity is basically nothing.
We finish the triangle and go back to Denva, maybe by then we can begin making a plan for effective exploitation of this system.
To be honest I'd be fine with sending Cia against one or more of the Chaos stations as-is this turn. I consider the risk fairly minimal, if she can't stand up to feral cultists with no subtlety whatsoever in open combat when supported by an army of our bots providing fairly absurdly overwhelming fire support and an ablative shield of heavily armored bodies on top of her own power armor then all of her training thus far has been far less effective than I'd have thought.
It's just that "personal combat against the already totally isolated and dying feral cultists" is by far the least effective way we have to handle them and also the ship that is actively going around indiscriminately killing the non-corrupted people of the system in raids is a higher priority.
Also, she just gave us a lecture a significant part of which included how serious a threat corruption was. She shouldn't be able to take issue with us choosing to avoid the possibility altogether this time by just annihilating these cultists from well beyond their ability to hope to effect us.
Oh, a thought! We should do the teleportation research before we examine the webway gate, so we can make better sense of it. That still leaves us several turns to get around to it, of course, but something to keep in mind all the same.
People keep mentioning the ship as if it's a singular force, but the ship is a box with a bunch of disparate neobarbs rattling around in it. Note that the ship is described as a battleground. from this description, I'm not sure if the ship is raiding the populated station or the other way around. Or both at once, for that matter.
"Nowhere is this more obvious than the huge non-warp-capable transport ship that makes a circuit of the belt every ten years or so. It sends out automated shuttles to the smaller mining stations and docks with the larger ones. It's clearly intended to pick up and transport ore and smelted metal, though I'm not sure if it drops off the ore somewhere or if trade ships would directly dock with it for transshipping to take the metal out-system.
"But whatever its original purpose, now it's a battleground. Every time it docks with an inhabited station there's a fierce battle between whoever's on the station and the multiple different factions on the ship. From the brief recordings I was able to get most of the combat is with crude melee weapons, with the occasional weapon from imperial times.
"Then, whenever it docks with an uninhabited station the ship factions do their best to strip everything they can, often holding the breath in nonfunctional void suits." You shake your head, disbelieving of that fact.
It's true that there's some indication the ship factions are generally non-chaotic (Vita didn't see Chaos symbols or defacement of the Imperial symbols), they're definitively not unified either.
People keep mentioning the ship as if it's a singular force, but the ship is a box with a bunch of disparate neobarbs rattling around in it. Note that the ship is described as a battleground. from this description, I'm not sure if the ship is raiding the populated station or the other way around. Or both at once, for that matter.
When I say the ship I mean the physical ship itself, not any of the factions on it. I want to take control of it's course, preferably by hacking it, to stop it's inhabitants from continuing to get into bloody fights with everyone they encounter by diverting it away from inhabited stations.
I have no interest in attempting diplomacy without at least one more dedicated action spent investigating to get the lay of the land, but it's not like the inhabitants have any control over it, so establishing our own doesn't necessarily require any interaction with them.
