Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

[Aineko]

I edited this in later, but the juicier prize isn't the stations themselves, but the people inside:

Success on humanitarian goals with enough initial investment for our techpriest detachment to do uplift could pay off big. We've given denva a lot of technologies, but cloning wasn't one of them. Thus, workforce will be a bottleneck to their expansion, and we might be able to mitigate that here.

Q&A with neablis for feasibility pending, of course. But that's what discussing options is for, no?

The math on which site snowballs factories better is already clear. This part, not so much.

When I started this back and forth, I was suggesting fully automated factories, after all. Now I've noticed that those are besides the point - well, goes to show how early the thonks are.

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The population here is tiny. There are fewer people in this solar system than in the state of Virginia.

Denva has a thousand times as many people. The population here is barely noteworthy as a resource. Remember my calculation of how affordable it is to simply relocate this many people? If one is inclined to a shut up and multiply kind of ethics, they also are a dubious use of Vita's time compared to pretty much any inhabitable planet...

(Also, we should probably have cloning tech available next time we hit Denva, if it matters.)

 

[AeonIlluminate]

We've given denva a lot of technologies, but cloning wasn't one of them. Thus, workforce will be a bottleneck to their expansion, and we might be able to mitigate that here.

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Per the "Known Civilisations" Informational page, there are "several billion" people on Denva and only "several million" in Vorthryn. Thats not really enough people to fix more than a small workforce bottleneck

 

[KyleDaScourge]

Do you have a plan that actually allows substantive bootstrapping here while Vita is elsewhere? Our tech-priest crew only has 840 CP in total. I don't know how fast they would build without Vita present, but they have a somewhat limiting ceiling on building up even using machine spirit deep space manufactories - and that's if we drop off the lot of them. (Admittedly, 6750 VBP is pretty substantial, if they devoted almost all their CP to MS-DSM.)

(And autonomous manufactories we don't know the stats of but do know we'd need at least one and probably two additional techs to make useful for this.)

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Pretty sure the rest of the OMC techs, at least the ones available now, would make the Cogitare at least comparable to our own ability to run the bootstrapping in this system and it's somewhat slower but also much less difficult to just recruit and train more Cogitare from the population they're saving vs us needing to immediately push as hard as possible down the AI or Warp Communication trees to the point where we could do the same thing from outside of the system or build another Stone Person to do it for us.

 

[meianmaru]

My solution to to relief effort, uplift and alliance with these people (if we go for it) can be summarized pretty easily:

"Get someone else to do it."

Seriously, just give the fledgling Stellar Ascendancy the techs we will be refining for safe(r) warp travel anyway. We already have shaped their culture to mimic our efforts in uplifting them, so they could get the job done if they can just reach this place. No need to put too effort on this again, when we should have someone else perfectly willing to do it for us. Just prop up the place enough so that it doesn't implode while the help is still on the way.

And now that we have personal shields and basic cognition filters and psychic detectors in shielding, exposure to the knowledge about Chaos on this level won't likely be as big of a problem of. At least after we implement tripwires and omnipresent (free) minimum-level psychic shielding. Tripwires might seem reduntant on top of free shielding, but I want them because I'd like that the manufactories shut down if they still get infected by Chaos even. Insted of starting to spew chaos-bots from production lines. Just to make an example.

 

[Prime 2.0]

The population here is tiny. There are fewer people in this solar system than in the state of Virginia.

Denva has a thousand times as many people. The population here is barely noteworthy as a resource. Remember my calculation of how affordable it is to simply relocate this many people. If one is inclined to a shut up and multiply kind of ethics, they also are a dubious use of Vita's time compared to pretty much any inhabitable planet...

(Also, we should probably have cloning tech available next time we hit Denva, if it matters.)

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Hm, point...? I don't know that neablis put a number to it other than "millions", but the difference between <8 million and a couple dozen doesn't matter too much to what you're saying, I figure.

Also, now this:

Per the "Known Civilisations" Informational page, there are "several billion" people on Denva and only "several million" in Vorthryn. Thats not really enough people to fix more than a small workforce bottleneck

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Honestly I'd been pegging denva as like, around 4-6 billion or so. 20th century earth population numbers, basically, since mechanicus kept them to that tech level thereabouts.

Where things are interesting is that the number only tells part of the story - most of those denvans, vaaaaast majority, are growing up on a planet - and they're roughly first world country-esque. You know, capitalism, previously trending towards the inverse pyramid, etc.

Everyone here? They grew up on these mining stations, are intimately familiar with how to navigate them, and know basically nothing else - these places are not just potential factories, to the people living there it's home, the only one they've ever known. Meanwhile, the reason their population numbers are in the 'several millions' range is the resource scarcity, raiding, and general squalor that we'd like to fix - food scarcity and relocation from failing stations might be reasonably attainable between the mass food production research and the ship we just captured.

Which is to say, there will be a much higher proportion of people comfortable with and interested in space station industry work, and any success stories are going to quickly turn into huge population booms. If you take that 20-30 year uplift estimate as something our techpriests can do on their own, that's a recipe for a much larger industrial workforce in waiting than their current population numbers suggests.


But, y'know. That's just spitballing, mostly. Much work to be done to see what's worthwhile, and "book it to denva" is indeed an option, just one that I figured was straightforward enough that it's already pretty well explored. If you're at least entertaining these ideas rather than dismissing them, I'm happy.

Sleep.

 

[Aineko]

It might be a good stress test for the Ascendancy, if they haven't found a more-stressful test already...

Pretty sure the rest of the OMC techs, at least the ones available now, would make the Cogitare at least comparable to our own ability to run the bootstrapping in this system and it's somewhat slower but also much less difficult to just recruit and train more Cogitare from the population they're saving vs us needing to immediately push as hard as possible down the AI or Warp Communication trees to the point where we could do the same thing from outside of the system or build another Stone Person to do it for us.

Click to shrink...

The Cogitare are not going to be close to Vita's ability. Their independent action economy isn't clear, but I'd expect it to not be 4 build actions per round. Their CP is, and...Vita generates 12,500. They generate 20 per capita, with a population of 42. Even throwing in Improved OMC to double that, they're nearly an order of magnitude behind in capacity.

 

[Aineko]

There's actually a somewhat detailed post on leaving Cogitare behind here, though it's not so much addressing them running factories:

They wouldn't be completely inactive if that's what you mean, but they also wouldn't be as productive as you are. You could set them up with a mission and they could do it even if you weren't around or in contact. You wouldn't even need to spend an action to change their mission. Just get in touch with them.

Just have a reasonable expectation for what they can get done. Keep in mind that each tech-priest has a command limit of 20 CP, and can't split their attention the way Vita can. They can't independently build things (well they can, but slowly), but if you captured the ship, put ten tech-priests on it with a few thousand combat bots they could probably keep it running just to the stations you liked and start uplifting them or something over the course of 50 or so years.

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And the population info is here:

Remember there's like... 8 million people total in the system. It's about 0.1% the population of Denva. Less then 10% of them are obviously chaos-aligned.

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[Pyro Hawk]

Well at least we didn't screw up anything this time though it just had to be the psy shields that rolled poorly didn't it.

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Honestly, it's all too easy to sell that roll as 'psy shields have a minimum threshold where they're worth anything in terms of protection and making personal sized psy shields is on the wrong side of that threshold. Fortunately, you can use very expensive materials and high complexity manufacturing processes to bring them onto the right side of the threshold. Unfortunately, this means they're expensive and still fragile as hell'.

Just like the Machine Spirit Tactics roll is easily sold as 'Vita has barely any good data to use training the Machine Spirits with, and her instincts aren't much better. They function, but if you want better than collect more combat data or spend a lot of effort running exercises and simulations artificially producing said data'.

 

[Aura Dragon]

One thing that the people who want the Cogitare to be left here to help out.... Ummm are you sure that you want to tell the people that we had join up to EXPORE and LEARN from Vita to be left behind for at least a few decades while there peers are getting further ahead? That just seems like it would cause issues this early on. Besides the Cogitare are a small group of individuals not an organization, they really don't have the resources to uplift an entire system even with OMC.

 

[meianmaru]

One thing that the people who want the Cogitare to be left here to help out.... Ummm are you sure that you want to tell the people that we had join up to EXPORE and LEARN from Vita to be left behind for at least a few decades while there peers are getting further ahead? That just seems like it would cause issues this early on. Besides the Cogitare are a small group of individuals not an organization, they really don't have the resources to uplift an entire system even with OMC.

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Agreed. And while on our ship, every single one of them is contributing to our research with extra RP. Just throw this job as a long-term job to the Stellar Ascendancy after stabilizing it a bit first.

 

[Karnax626]

We could always just ask if any of the priest would be interested in staying.
If not we'll just have to accept whatever we leave behind will be more likely to deviate.

Just like the Machine Spirit Tactics roll is easily sold as 'Vita has barely any good data to use training the Machine Spirits with, and her instincts aren't much better. They function, but if you want better than collect more combat data or spend a lot of effort running exercises and simulations artificially producing said data'.

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It was still a normal success, not a poor success. I doubt it'll have made future research any harder.

 

[Aura Dragon]

We could always just ask if any of the priest would be interested in staying.
If not we'll just have to accept whatever we leave behind will be more likely to deviate.

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We don't have to do much, just stabilize the situation by shooting and burning the Chaos corrupted stations, give every station what they need to survive and then give them the information on how to learn how to keep it running and repair that stuff when it breaks. That's it. We just need to keep them surviving until Denva expands to absorb them - they are literally 2 jumps away.

 

[Dmol8]

Move the mutually hostile inhabitants in together? Enable the cavemen trapped in spaceships to build up their society despite having zero understanding of its material foundations?

I don't see how this is supposed to work.

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By seeing if there are any tech-priests that want to stick around in this system to help build it up. The Tech-Priests are evolving:

And it is a new normal. There's a rapid period where many of the tech-priests begin to rapidly augment themselves, their new capabilities improving the quality of the augmentics they can build. Several of them have clearly taken the deaths of their fellows to heart and graft advanced armor onto themselves, as well as various kinds of weaponry and combat capabilities. Others seek to emulate Anexa's aesthetic, becoming increasingly ascetic as they return to something closer to the human form, often decorated with golden lines and geometric shapes. Then a third group - primarily represented by those elder tech-priests who wished to join you - seek to proceed down the normal path of mechanics self-modification.

You're worried that they're going to split completely into different cliques, but they don't seem to hold any ill-will towards each other for their choices, and you start to get accustomed to seeing an eight-limbed monstrosity of clanking metal chatting amiably with a short bald-haired man whose lips, nose and ears have been replaced with golden triangles.

Your tech-priests are developing a somewhat weird subculture of self-modification that holds discovery and the acquisition of knowledge above all. There are still some who can pass for members of the mechanicus, and an overlapping group whom are quite capable of of combat. But they're not in stasis.

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and if we plop down at least our Warp Lab here for them to study:

Warp Research Lab (500 BP or 500 VBP, 100 CP) Anexa's brainchild. Half mad science lair, half sensible warp research setup. Will allow you to conduct research on the warp, miniature portal generator and all. Will likely help contain poor results, though maybe give it some psychic shielding. (Rolling a 1 while researching something here might turn out badly, but at least you'll have containment measures in place in addition to any psychic shielding you add.)

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with good psychic shielding while we work on stabilizing this system they will even have things to research while they also uplift the stations.

An already Warp infested system is a good place for a Warp Lab and leaving some of our Tech Priests interested in studying the Warp here with the right tech to do so would yield dividends down the line.

It's still like 250 BP per station. Even if we only need 10 or 20, that's still several turns all on it's own. Add to that the challenge of sorting cultists from non cultists, preventing them from killing each other when we put them in one station, and the education required to keep things running smoothly even just for 20 years or so... I don't know, I don't think it's a good idea. Again, see:

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We don't need to build up every station into a Deep Space Manufactory. Just build them up enough that they'll last until Denva gets to them in like a century at the latest.

 

[Karnax626]

An already Warp infested system is a good place for a Warp Lab and leaving some of our Tech Priests interested in studying the Warp here with the right tech to do so would yield dividends down the line.

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I don't think we want to split their focus, anyone who stays here will have their hands full just fixing things and teaching the systems inhabitants.

 

[Nightlord256]

We're here now, so it stands to reason we should do something to get the ball rolling. Non-rhetorical question: What do y'all think that something be?

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Ideally we remove the chaos presence from the system, or at least the major centers of it, and set the ship up as an aid station to support the stations until Denva returns.

I'm hoping that the ship already has the means to grow food/support the population and it just needs to be fixed. Which would make some sense, these stations needed to get food/supplies from somewhere.

I'm mixed on leaving tech priests behind, perhaps exactly 7 to make our RP output sane. To properly support them would likely require a factory for bots so they have protection. I see this pushing our stay here to 2 more turns.

Depending on the results of the ship take over it might be worth spending another action just studying the ship. A fully automated mining industry ship could have a lot of research discount potential. Depending on how it's automated it might even discount our AI research.

 

[armentho]

YES COGNITO HAZARD BLOCKERS

now machine spirit on shielding and chaos resistent MS and we can give denva means to study the warp safe-ish

 

[Pyro Hawk]

It was still a normal success, not a poor success. I doubt it'll have made future research any harder.

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I didn't say it would make future research harder. I just said that we achieved 'the Machine Spirit Combat Bots are functional at tactics'. They certainly aren't good but they also aren't incompetent or even suffering from restrictions. But considering it barely scraped over the line to Success from Poor Success? We shouldn't expect better than 'just passed Infantry or Officer School' in terms of competence.

Solidly decent, but if you want to avoid mistakes or do well, they'll need a lot more work. Or in other terms, we got exactly what we wanted but we barely achieved that. So we likely unlocked a Project to get them as good as we'd hoped they would be along with all the follow on projects we expected. That follow on project is likely more or less 'generate or acquire a whole bunch of combat experience to learn what actually works or doesn't work in practical terms despite all the theory'.