Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

[Aineko]

Obviously speculating in advance of the chapter, but this:

d6 is on the factions present on the transport. 5. Better than you might expect.

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grabbed my attention.

I can see a few axes that might fall on.

• Organization - maybe the proper shipboard factions actually are allied or unified, and the fighting is only with invaders?
• Alignment - maybe they're relatively comfortable for Vita to interact with, with the Imperium structures that forge zealots having left in the evacuation?
• Technological proficiency - while we know they lack critical technical capacities, but maybe some of them aren't cavemen in space after all? That would greatly increase the possibilities for making them a useful proxy.

 

[redpotato4]

Basically, no matter the particulars of the scale and scope of the stopgap effort, we're leaving techpriests there. How many, and what we'd like them to be doing is up in the air, but I can't imagine a plan where we don't leave any as being feasible.

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I'm fine with leaving tech priests here, but only with the understanding that we're not coming back to this system, only Denva. They can handle helping out this system while we get back to exploring.

 

[Prime 2.0]

Even then, that is not enough of a reason for me for one reason: They know that Vita is an AI.

Because seriously, they would be completely undefended here for many years. And 40k quite many factions that can extract information from unwilling subjects. And methods to find those subjects in the first place. No matter what, I won't accept increasing the risk Vita's secret of being an AI leaking out. Even if its only a small chance. Because we are still nowhere near the point to be able to stand the attention it might bring if leaked.

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Our void manufactories are stealthed, and so are our shuttles, of which we already have several. The only thing that stands out is the imperial ship itself, but there's no reason the techpriests have to stay on that ship if invaders come into the system, and likewise little stopping us from putting down good sensors for them to detect said invaders in time for them to go to ground.


Hell, with remote OMC they might not have to be on the ship themselves, ever. Distribute supplies from a stelathed manufactory in a system full of not stealthy ones, using stealth shuttles, and to dead drops at random points along the ship's existing flight path - practically invisible even if they did it while invaders were in the system, which of course they wouldn't because of the forewarning.

And even if somehow, invaders come in at exactly the wrong time with their sensors pointed in exactly the right place and somehow manage to get a lead going back to the manufactory, the stealth shuttles can be used to go to ground even from the stealth manufactory, complete with decoys because we don't have to build the spares.

Plus whatever our awesome guy victan cooks up. Good fucking luck managing a capture after all of that.

For rather modest prep, the chance of capture isn't just small, it's microscopic, beneath consideration. We may be a few techs off from outright avatar-like teleprescence via robot, but teleprescence via good old fashioned TV screens and encrypted radio we've had since before we took over Denva.

 

[Nightlord256]

My rough expectation is for next turn to be 1 research, 2 construction, 1 exploration - ideally heading back to Denva to start the crash build.

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I'd prefer to spend a few more away from Denva. If we return next turn we will only have been gone 4 1/2 turns, seems like we will get better RoI from the boons we have cooking if we let them bake a bit longer.

There is ~1,000 RP of stuff I'd like to get done before we return:
-Empathy at Range - we didn't have these scanners when we were in Denva system, so I'd like to give it a once over to check for warp stuff
-MS Hallucinations - more RP is always good and will improve our throughput when we start loading up on construction actions
-Cloning + Nav Gestation - It will take 3-4 turns for the navi bean to grow up, doing this in Denva seems like a good idea
-Human Design Interfaces - Not only makes our designs even cheaper, but magic AutoCAD that connects to your brain will be a massive boon for Denva.

 

[Prime 2.0]

I'd prefer to spend a few more away from Denva. If we return next turn we will only have been gone 4 1/2 turns, seems like we will get better RoI from the boons we have cooking if we let them bake a bit longer.

There is ~1,000 RP of stuff I'd like to get done before we return:
-Empathy at Range - we didn't have these scanners when we were in Denva system, so I'd like to give it a once over to check for warp stuff
-MS Hallucinations - more RP is always good and will improve our throughput when we start loading up on construction actions
-Cloning + Nav Gestation - It will take 3-4 turns for the navi bean to grow up, doing this in Denva seems like a good idea
-Human Design Interfaces - Not only makes our designs even cheaper, but magic AutoCAD that connects to your brain will be a massive boon for Denva.

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RoI isn't a concern when we already have enough for two boons on us. One can go towards upgrading to permanent manufacture share - and we wont' slow down their expansion from using it since we'd be building more factories, they may even offer to let us take over more once they know what's what we're doing. The other can go towards restocking our staff. More on top is gravy, could get those iota psykers or something.

We can also just... not redeem the research boon yet, if that's a problem. The main bit is just "do manufacturing crash build, point shiny new denvan relief fleet that-a-way", and then we can get on with the rest of our business out of system.

Though if you ask me I'd love to use the opportunity to do the Immaterium Investigations tech.

We can, likewise, circle back to denva again later for navibean's childhood. Or just go with the "have a population onboard" plan some have floated.

I'm fine with leaving tech priests here, but only with the understanding that we're not coming back to this system, only Denva. They can handle helping out this system while we get back to exploring.

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I mean, nothing stopping us from spending 2 travel actions instead of 1 so that we can just, stop in the system to pick up our tech priests and go "yep, looks like things are going fine", and leave without doing anything else. We might even be able to do that in one action.

My point to both of you is - not every stop in a system has to be a huge commitment. We can do milk runs if we want.

 

[Angle]

Agreed on this. Because I would like to remind everyone that our grace period is ending. The various players surrounding Denva have already started to become aware of its current state, and thus, about us. As we will soon have blunted the best weapons of Chaos with our psychic shielding to a good degree, we will start needing to develop our more conventional military equipment too.

The quality of weapons and defensive measures, both void and ground warfare, will become important soon. Because besides of an superior industry to even get the raw numbers for us and Denva to matter on a larger scale instead of just being a speed bumb? We will still likely be outnumbered. And this is where force multipliers would become handy, like bots equipped with volkite weaponry as their standard gun, or even limited production runs of newly designed bots with integrated void shields. And the power of weapons and shields become even more important when it comes to ships.

Anyway, time is precious, and we can't waste it here. So I'm going to keep advocating that we do the uplift mission here the most efficient way, that being not doing it ourselves.

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I'm in general agreement here, though I don't really think weapons should our immediate priority - I think that should be warp comms, and after that stealth and sensors, and after that engines and warp navigation. Oh, and machine spirits and manufacturing. I want to be able to work in more than one system at a time, and to start scouting out the area on a broad basis and keeping an eye on things - especially if we can do it without being spotted.

 

[Glau]

What I'd like to get out of denva is 2-3 factory ships so we can cover back here and start a shipyard as we do uplift. Having the capability to build a dozen hulls is going to do more for us than playing research turtle and closing all the gaps in our armor.

 

[KyleDaScourge]

Have we had any indication aside from the term "small-arms" as to what weaponry we may have managed to scavenge off the Dark Eldar?

Because while they do have extremely impressive technology what I recall of their stuff off the top of my head suggests that it tends to fall into one of three buckets...

Pseudo-primitive equivalents to more standard weaponry achieved via employing highly advanced tech towards... oddly prioritized goals. Splinter weaponry is their default small arm and is basically a normal gun that uses gravity-tech rather than gunpowder and crazy poison crystals instead of bullets. The gravity tech could be useful, and I think I recall that it allows both splinter and shuriken weapons to fire with no recoil, which is neat, but the poison is useless. Looking at the rest of their "conventional" weaponry the only real prize that jumps out at me is the Heat Lance, which could give a good boost to both our laser and melta weapons.

Clarketech shit that would potential be extremely useful save that it seems to require extremely exotic materials and is likely to be very research heavy. First example that comes to mind is the dark lance, which fires "dark matter particles" that they claim to source from black holes... somehow.

Insane eldritch shit a lot of which depends on exploiting tormented souls, usually those of craftworlders. Examples include the Crucible of Malediction and Soul Trap.

 

[Aineko]

What I'd like to get out of denva is 2-3 factory ships so we can cover back here and start a shipyard as we do uplift. Having the capability to build a dozen hulls is going to do more for us than playing research turtle and closing all the gaps in our armor.

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Why such a halfhearted measure? 2-3 factory ships isn't very specific, but small ones wouldn't add much and big ones would be expensive enough that it doesn't make sense not to add more than 2-3.

Also, for that job you might prefer cargo bays.

Factory ships don't fundamentally change what we can do, they just change where on the growth curve we start out. Spark is a factory ship.

Have we had any indication aside from the term "small-arms" as to what weaponry we may have managed to scavenge off the Dark Eldar?

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We have:

-[] Dark Eldar Weaponry (150 RP) You have a few examples of Dark Eldar weaponry. Some of it just uses esoteric poisons, but other parts seem based on physical princples you can't identify. That's exciting (Unlocks new weapons based on Dark Eldar small-arms weaponry) Requires Advanced Technological Research Lab.

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So look up what small arms with exotic physical principals they use?

 

[Angle]

@Prime 2.0

Anyway, lets consider the potential of leaving behind an automated manufactory to make more manufactories. What would we need to make that happen? Well, we'd have to start by taking the Basic Automated Manufactories tech, for 175 RP. So, that there is most of an action. But wait! That tech specifically still requires CP, and cannot create installations:



So, we'd need to spend another research action or two, digging into techs that aren't even revealed yet. How much more RP will they cost? We have no idea! This one was 250 RP to start with, and Neablis has said that techs increase in price fairly rapidly as we go up the tech tree, so we can probably expect them to be 300+ each. And we need at least two more of them, to allow creating installations and to remove the CP requirement, which means probably at least another 600 RP right there. that's three more research actions, on top of the one for the first tech - in other words, an entire turn spent just researching stuff, without actually building anything, when again, *we could just be going back to Denva*.

Worse, there's the question of how much the new stations will cost and how productive they'll be. I fully expect they'll take a hit on both counts, which means we'll be spending even more BP to get less back. We could spend even more RP to correct that, but again, opportunity costs. We could be doing other stuff with that time, and the other stuff would just be better.

But okay, lets set all that aside and see about actually building the damn things. Currently, we can build deep space manufactories in this system for 375, or MS versions for 450. At that rate, it would take two actions for us to set up just the first automated manufactory - and if it ends up more expensive, then that's be even worse. Furthermore, there are chaos cultists here, so if we're gonna leave automated tech lying around, it probably needs to be scrapcode proof. That means it most likely needs a machine spirit, and ideally a psychic shield too - together, that probably means another extra build action or two to get the thing rolling.

Ah, but wait! We haven't even considered defending the thing from *physical* threats. If those chaos cultists manage to put together even a simple shuttle and swing by to start wrecking the things, then all our effort would go to waste. If dark eldar come by the system and decide to use our infra as target practice, then it would all go to waste. If Orks swing by to see what they can do with it, it'll probably do worse than go to waste. So that means we'd need to also put together some kind of defensive station - which probably means at least another 1000 BP, if not more.

But okay, once we did all that, what could we expct, soming back in 4-6 turns? Honestly, not that much. The basic DSM, without machine spirits or psy shields or any kind of automation, takes 3 actions to make a copy of itself. We have no idea how many actions it would get per turn, but based on the repair bay with fires once per turn, my guess is 1 to start with, and maybe more with more RP spent on automation techs. So if we left 1 behind, we could come back in 4 turns and have... 2 and 2/3rds of one. If we cam back in 6 turns, we could have, like, 4 and maybe most of a fifth. Really not very exciting. Add to that that all the extra expense and potential loss of BP from making the things automated, and I epxect we'd leave one and come back in six turns, and be lucky if there was so much as a second one waiting for us.

So, all in all, we're looking at at least two turns just to get the ball rolling here, in exchange for eventually coming back, and maybe having a second factory, or mayb having a pile of scrap because someone blew it all up. I'm sorry, but the idea is just bad, and we shouldn't do it.

And if you suggest leaving behind tech priests as well... Well, that has all the same problems, except now we also need to provide them life support, and defenses, and whatever other tools they need to do their job, and also it costs us RP, and maybe it upsets the tech priests who didn't sign up for this, and again there's a good chance they all just get enslaved by dark eldar, or that someone manages to torture out tech secrets out of them... Again, I'm sorry, but this is just a bad idea. We shouldn't do it.

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Oh, @Prime 2.0, did you see my longpost here? I did the math on leaving behind automated factories and/or tech priests, it's really quite bad. Especially when we could get to Denva, build a relief fleet, and return within 3 turns:

We could go to Denva, build a relief fleet, and come back in 3 turns. Like, that's twelve actions - we can be back at Denva in 1. Throw another 1-3 actions on diplomacy, depending on how much we want to prioritize this system versus getting the Stellar Ascendancy set up in general, another 4 or so actions on industrial scaling, (Which would get us a ridiculous amount of extra BP, if we do it on Primus), another 1-2 actions actually building ships (If we'd spend more than this, then we should just use the extra actions building manufactories, we'd get more back that way), a couple actions on research, and then another action to come back... And that might all be able to fit inside 2 turns.

Edit: No, seriously, 4 actions scaling at a 1.75 factor means that we could increase our industrial base by like, 15 times. If we start out with just our ship, that means we get up to 5250 BP. If we get an extra 1000 BP from Denva for the first action, that means we could reasonably expect to get up past 10,000 BP. And if we throw another 4 actions scaling at that, up past 150,000 BP.

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And this is mostly ignoring all the boons we get from Denva, or lowballing what we'll get from them. It could be way better than this.

 

[KyleDaScourge]

So no, just the term small-arms then. I didn't think so, but figured I'd ask in case I'd missed something.

Probably still worth doing for the potential of the gravity tech in splinter weapons and hoping we scavenged a heat lance but the lab requirement means we're unlikely to get to it for a while in any case.

 

[Angle]

And I really don't think we need more firepower right now, we mainly need communication, sensors, and stealth. We haven't once had 'You can shoot them but you can't hurt them', it's always been some variation on 'You can't shoot them', either because they were too fast or too stealthy. And we need better communication to work in more than one system at a time.

 

[Aineko]

Oh, @Prime 2.0, did you see my longpost here? I did the math on leaving behind automated factories and/or tech priests, it's really quite bad. Especially when we could get to Denva, build a relief fleet, and return within 3 turns:



And this is mostly ignoring all the boons we get from Denva, or lowballing what we'll get from them. It could be way better than this.

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You'd slam right into the CP window before reaching the endpoints you mention, but maybe not before reaching the endpoints you actually need.

Still don't think your blithe use of Denva Primus as an industrial site is cool though.

 

[KyleDaScourge]

Also, checking just now I could have sworn splinter guns used the same recoilless gravity mechanism that shuriken weapons do, but it looks like they actually use a "magno-electric impulse" and do have recoil. So I'd pretty much just be hoping for the heat lance, although admittedly that may just make it worth it all by itself. Something with the combined advantages of lasers and meltas is potentially extremely powerful.

 

[Angle]

You'd slam right into the CP window before reaching the endpoints you mention, but maybe not before reaching the endpoints you actually need.

Still don't think your blithe use of Denva Primus as an industrial site is cool though.

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We can refit for machine spirits if we need to - it costs 20 BP per manufactory, that's hardly anything. If the Denvan's have MS Productio Improvements sorted, we might want to just build them as the MS versions to start with. As for using Denva Primus, again, the Vellkar like to trade. We can almost certainly make a deal with them - we want to get them uplifted to be part of the Stellar Ascendancy anyway.

 

[Aineko]

And I really don't think we need more firepower right now, we mainly need communication, sensors, and stealth. We haven't once had 'You can shoot them but you can't hurt them', it's always been some variation on 'You can't shoot them', either because they were too fast or too stealthy. And we need better communication to work in more than one system at a time.

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We definitely should not use set that as our cue for scaling, because if we do we're courting death.

Spark is not a ship that can run from what it can't fight. A small cruiser group could handily both catch and destroy us. We really want to have a fleet before we encounter a fleet and have to deal from a position of weakness and without even any assets we can sacrifice to cover our withdrawal.

I don't know if we need better guns, though. We already have better guns than most of the people we'd be shooting at, and we can have quite a lot of tonnage when we decide we want to. That said, going around with something like 20 nova cannon frigates would be hilarious.

Also, checking just now I could have sworn splinter guns used the same recoilless gravity mechanism that shuriken weapons do, but it looks like they actually use a "magno-electric impulse" and do have recoil. So I'd pretty much just be hoping for the heat lance, although admittedly that may just make it worth it all by itself. Something with the combined advantages of lasers and meltas is potentially extremely powerful.

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Why not hope for blasters? Which are "dark matter" weapons.

We can refit for machine spirits if we need to - it costs 20 BP per manufactory, that's hardly anything. If the Denvan's have MS Productio Improvements sorted, we might want to just build them as the MS versions to start with. As for using Denva Primus, again, the Vellkar like to trade. We can almost certainly make a deal with them - we want to get them uplifted to be part of the Stellar Ascendancy anyway.

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Three thousand machine spirit manufactories for 150,000 BP is still sixty thousand CP out of our 13k-ish.

EDIT: As for trade, just because they like trade doesn't mean they like selling vast tracts of land.

 

[KyleDaScourge]

Why not hope for blasters? Which are "dark matter" weapons.

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As I said in my first post on the topic, dark matter weapons, at least per the codexes and such, require doing something to a black hole to get the "dark matter" (which sounds a lot like just antimatter, although why they'd need a black hole to get it escapes me) in question.

Good to upgrade to once we've got all the prerequisites in terms of research and industry sorted out, but a heat lance could well be just a straight upgrade to both our laser/lance and melta weaponry with no strange industrial prerequisites.

 

[Angle]

We definitely should not use set that as our cue for scaling, because if we do we're courting death.

Spark is not a ship that can run from what it can't fight. A small cruiser group could handily both catch and destroy us. We really want to have a fleet before we encounter a fleet and have to deal from a position of weakness and without even any assets we can sacrifice to cover our withdrawal.

I don't know if we need better guns, though. We already have better guns than most of the people we'd be shooting at, and we can have quite a lot of tonnage when we decide we want to. That said, going around with something like 20 nova cannon frigates would be hilarious.

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I'm talking about research there, not ships. Though I do want to focus mainly on building scouts and sensor ships, but that's a separate argument, and we can have it after we have the shipyard up.

Three thousand machine spirit manufactories for 150,000 BP is still sixty thousand CP out of our 13k-ish.

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And? Once we have them up, we can turn around and use them to build orbital or deep space manufactories, or manufacturing ships to replace them, if we want to. 150,000 BP covers a lot of DSMs in an action or two. We can trade the old manufactories off to the Vellkar when we're done with them. Or make that part of our initial agreement to start with.

 

[Aineko]

And? Once we have them up, we can turn around and use them to build orbital or deep space manufactories, or manufacturing ships to replace them, if we want to. 150,000 BP covers a lot of DSMs in an action or two. We can trade the old manufactories off to the Vellkar when we're done with them. Or make that part of our initial agreement to start with.

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...We can't have them up. Because they take nearly five times our total CP. That's the thing I pointed out. They'd still take way more than our CP limit as deep space manufactories.

Also, how are you planning to have the technologically primitive non-humans operate our manufactories now?

 

[redpotato4]

Still don't think your blithe use of Denva Primus as an industrial site is cool though.

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The vellkar live underground. It would be like if aliens came to us and wanted to make a deal involving setting up factories deep underground, where we don't live.

We'd be harvesting resources from their planet however, so a proper equivalent exchange of goods, tech, alliance, etc would be needed. And it would also depend on how interactions between Secundus and them have gone. But their culture specifically values trade, so I wouldn't worry too much about them not knowing a good deal.

 

[KyleDaScourge]

I think ideally we'd negotiate to form some kind of federation with the unified government of Denva and Vita as an entity as the founding members, then try to entice the Vellkar to join up. The Cogitare can either be an NGO within the federation, their own member state, or maybe just a foreign ally depending on whether it seems potential advantageous to pretend they're still AdMech for the Imperium.

 

[Angle]

...We can't have them up. Because they take nearly five times our total CP. That's the thing I pointed out. They'd still take way more than our CP limit as deep space manufactories.

Also, how are you planning to have the technologically primitive non-humans operate our manufactories now?

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Oh, right, well we don't need that much BP anyway. We can refit manufactories to use machine spirits as we need to, and can pick up GMEI and MS Production improvements to make things easier - assuming the Denvan's don't just give them to us for free when we show up, we have a boon to that end after all.

I think ideally we'd negotiate to form some kind of federation with the unified government of Denva and Vita as an entity as the founding members, then try to entice the Vellkar to join up. The Cogitare can either be an NGO within the federation, their own member state, or maybe just a foreign ally depending on whether it seems potential advantageous to pretend they're still AdMech for the Imperium.

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This too! Though I think the Cogitare as an NGO makes the most sense.

 

[KyleDaScourge]

The technologically primitive humans don't have to stay that way either. This system is potentially amazingly fertile ground for rapidly expanding the Cogitare.

 

[Angle]

The technologically primitive humans don't have to stay that way either. This system is potentially amazingly fertile ground for rapidly expanding the Cogitare.

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Ehh, not really? It has a 0.33 growth factor for industry (compared to the 0.5 we could get on Denva Secundus, or the 0.75 we could get on Denva Primus), and a bunch of slowly dying cavemen stuck on stations, many of whom are chaos cultists. I'm sorry, but it's really not great.

Oh, and it's exposed to druhkari attentions, too, just to make things more annoying.

 

[KyleDaScourge]

Oh, and it's exposed to druhkari attentions, too, just to make things more annoying.

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Did I miss something about the dark eldar being around? I would have expected literally everyone here to have been shipped off into the webway if they were, they're hilariously vulnerable and it's not like their numbers are going anywhere but down so they can't be waiting on the number of victims to increase or replenish between raids or anything.