I think we can trust our ability to doctor the video feeds.
Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest
- Thread starter Neablis
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi
Eh, a bit. The last hundred years had been primarily dominated by social unrest as people really reckon with what personal freedoms mean, and a ton of different subcultures pop up and the previous generation harrumphs loudly at their aesthetic/music/slogans whatever.
The most dramatic current news is probably a territorial skirmish happening between Nyvaros and Pryath over their borders, which nobody really cared about until large promethium (oil) reserves were found in the area. Now they very much care exactly where the line is drawn. The news media is making a huge deal of it, the militaries are posturing and the populace is worried nukes are going to get exchanged.
Behind the scenes everybody in power is a lot less worried. This is the sort of thing soldiers die over, not civilians unless somebody specifically agitates things. Probably the most significant thing is that it's causing attrition to the military equipment of the two factions involved, and the mechanicus will be able to extract a high price for repairs/replacements, giving them somewhat more power in the next decades, especially in those regions.
You're probably fine building manufactories in the open without much shielding. It's fine if they know something's there, as long as they don't know what it is. You have the collaboration of the local government, you'll register it as a lumbar yard with attached furniture factory and the mechanicus won't care unless it gets to be so absurdly large that it's obviously more than that - though even then there'd be a roll to see if you manage to spin it as a new economic conglomerate specializing in low-tech handcrafted goods or something.
You should be more concerned about things that are overtly heavy/space industry, such as the shuttle port. If you build one of those out in the open then they're going to get suspicious, unless you have a good explanation for why there's a shuttleport in the middle of a random forest/attached to a furniture factory.
Also - clarification. You can build shuttles without a shuttleport and use them for "narrative transport" around the planet to do things like visit people, pick up Anexa, drop off trade goods, etc. You need the shuttleport to do high-volume rapid loading/unloading for things like large-scale logistics and converting ground BP to void BP and back.
That doesn't really work over the long term. Needing to delete a whole complex from sensor footage for years is hard, and a single-slip-up will draw a ton of attention. But it's much easier to remove indication that what's actually going on is heavy machinery. Heat signatures etc are a lot easier to hide than that this giant building exists.
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- Pronouns
- Zack
I think maybe our ship\base will become a kind of area 51 for Aevon
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
@Neablis Is the "automation tree" mentioned under Intelligence Coding a research tree that requires building other AIs? Or is building AIs just one possibility?I believe that research is called 'make more AI'.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
[ ] Plan: Finally, the first step is cleared
-[ ] Diplomacy: Admech
--[ ] You've helped that bean, but now you've taken responsibility for her and that could be a little bit complicated, given the whole "From the untrained eye, you may be Robot Satan". Of course, you want to further your grasp on the local cult as well. Fortunately, you've gotten your foot in the door and some credentials, so with a little bit of elbow grease, you can probably expand that into an actual faction, there's almost definitely some undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the old fossils who are apparently in charge and think making everyone suck is the best way to advance Knowledge. As for Anexa, you can probably bring her in to the compound you're getting set up, a little extra support won't hurt, and it'll give you a bit of time to deprogram her of the worst biases. Seriously, you can see the logic involved with going "Hey, don't try to copy Alien Tech", Orks being the prime suspect, and that's an exercise in futility, but it looks like a lot of the context was either lost or intentionally buried. You should fix that, show her what it actually looks like to Quest for Bloody Knowledge. (Continue Admech subversion, bring Alexa to our aboveground facility to continue her training with an eye to recruiting her once we've, you know, given her the context that we are definitely not Robot Satan)
-[ ] Construction x2
--[ ] 2x Manufactories (-200 DP, -100 CP )
--[ ] Basic Technology Research Facility (-50 DP, -50 CP)
--[ ] Basic Biology Research Facility (-50 DP, -50 CP)
--[ ] Small Automated Medical Facility (-50 DP, -50 CP)
--[ ] Shuttle (-20 BP, -5 CP)
--[ ] The Rent (-30 BP)
-[ ] Research
--[ ] Psychic Shielding (300/300 RP)
--[ ] Combat Bot Humanization Redux (50/50 RP)
Would it require an action for us to get Imperial tech samples @Neablis at this point? Or could we just unlock that with the facility and a mention that we'd like some examples so we can better hide what we're up to by imitating their designs within reason?
Also, any options for setting up a missile interception system or something along those lines?
-[ ] Diplomacy: Admech
--[ ] You've helped that bean, but now you've taken responsibility for her and that could be a little bit complicated, given the whole "From the untrained eye, you may be Robot Satan". Of course, you want to further your grasp on the local cult as well. Fortunately, you've gotten your foot in the door and some credentials, so with a little bit of elbow grease, you can probably expand that into an actual faction, there's almost definitely some undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the old fossils who are apparently in charge and think making everyone suck is the best way to advance Knowledge. As for Anexa, you can probably bring her in to the compound you're getting set up, a little extra support won't hurt, and it'll give you a bit of time to deprogram her of the worst biases. Seriously, you can see the logic involved with going "Hey, don't try to copy Alien Tech", Orks being the prime suspect, and that's an exercise in futility, but it looks like a lot of the context was either lost or intentionally buried. You should fix that, show her what it actually looks like to Quest for Bloody Knowledge. (Continue Admech subversion, bring Alexa to our aboveground facility to continue her training with an eye to recruiting her once we've, you know, given her the context that we are definitely not Robot Satan)
-[ ] Construction x2
--[ ] 2x Manufactories (-200 DP, -100 CP )
--[ ] Basic Technology Research Facility (-50 DP, -50 CP)
--[ ] Basic Biology Research Facility (-50 DP, -50 CP)
--[ ] Small Automated Medical Facility (-50 DP, -50 CP)
--[ ] Shuttle (-20 BP, -5 CP)
--[ ] The Rent (-30 BP)
-[ ] Research
--[ ] Psychic Shielding (300/300 RP)
--[ ] Combat Bot Humanization Redux (50/50 RP)
Would it require an action for us to get Imperial tech samples @Neablis at this point? Or could we just unlock that with the facility and a mention that we'd like some examples so we can better hide what we're up to by imitating their designs within reason?
Also, any options for setting up a missile interception system or something along those lines?
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Oh yeah, I forgot about that. It's kind of the first step into four different directions:
1. Building new AIs.
2. Automating production/other things.
3. Increasing your command point limit/decreasing the CP cost of specific things.
4. Lets you potentially explore your own code in other ways, allowing you to intentionally modify yourself if that's a thing you want to do.
Exactly what the follow-ups look like is going to depend on the research roll when you finish it. You might not even get option 4 yet unless you roll well, and need to go further down the AI research path to get that.
I forgot that this is what I intended to lock automated production behind, so I've removed it from the list of possible options. Sorry! Now it'll probably be a bit better once you do research it.
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Well,that settles.It's time to put the drudging parts of the quest into an autoclicker
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Btw, I think we have 35 Trade goods stored currently from the last turn? And the rent being 25 trade goods, we could go on at least a turn without producing any new, if needed. Though using our spare production capacity to store more of it should be a good idea for a long time.
Anyway, will see if I feel the need to finish and post my own plan after I get some sleep.
Hmm. No, it won't require a full action. Overpaying for the rent by 10 will get you there (35 instead of 25), though it comes at the cost of them knowing you wanted samples of various imperial technology.
As for the missile interception system... hmm. Added this to your researchable blueprints. You don't have it yet, but 25 RP gets you there, then you can start building it this turn if you want. You'll need a number of them to have a good chance at stopping a full salvo of every nuke the mecahnicus has.
25 RP - Anti-Air Defenses (25 BP, 5 CP) A trio of rapid-recharge lascannons backed up by advanced targeting software in a reinforced emplacement with an upwards-facing arc. Will attempt to destroy ballistic missiles, aircraft or shuttles as they approach. Can miss or be saturated by large amounts of incoming fire or miss and fail to destroy their targets.
Remember that you have 35 BP of trade goods stockpiled that Aevon will accept as rent.
If your goal is to unlock all of the research there's also the observatory.
Oh, two more points.
1. First, an orbital defense platform or ship in orbit with lances would likely be a more effective if more expensive ballistic missile defense strategy. Forgot to mention.
2. If the goal is to learn how to hack mechanicus stuff, then getting the stuff directly from the mechanicus is probably the best. This is either a dedicated action where you visit them as magos Vita and "requisition" stuff with a trade good cost depending on rolls. Or if you roll a high success on the Admech diplomacy when you go to pick up Anexa then you might snag some samples on your way out the door.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'd like to use the free "search our stolen databases" action on looking up Chaos and scrap code. We absolutely, 100% need to know about that for the "convince our apprentice that we're not robo satan" goal, sooner the better, and while the gov didn't have much on them, I know the mechanicus will at least have info on scrap code.
Hell, even just not knowing about it could blow our cover during ad-mech diplo. This is the "OOC to IC knowledge" button, and I wanna press it.
Hell, even just not knowing about it could blow our cover during ad-mech diplo. This is the "OOC to IC knowledge" button, and I wanna press it.
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Scrap code we might get something about, although it would be hard to tell they are not just being superstitious about regular old viruses, but I would be surprised if we found anything useful on Chaos. The Imperium does not like that information spreading and there is very little reason for anyone on this peaceful Civilized World to require that information... at least that was the case before the Cycatrix opened and they got Heretics next door, but it's not like they will have learned anything though exposure. A place like this survives Chaos raiders by being beneath notice.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Even so, whatever they've got, I want. We're supposed to be senior to everyone else here, so it's still a cover risk to not know what they know in advance - and for the same reason you bring up, I expect "what they know" to be in the heavily encrypted parts.
EDIT (would have liked to make this a separate post, but mine was still the last one...):
I will note - we don't actually know enough about the warp ourselves to rule out that machine spirits actually do have a spirit, nor prove that mechanicus rituals don't interface with said spirit in some way.
Honestly I think it'd be kinda boring if there was actually nothing to it. Machine spirits are one of the fun parts of 40k imo
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- Pronouns
- Zack
Out of curiosity, can we investigate the flora and fauna of Denva Secundus ?
- Location
- Australia
Can we set a manufactorium in our building complex dedicated to making low-tech furniture and other goofs to sell for profit and help our cover story?
Presumably, it would take only a small fraction of the total building space to produce automated the output that would be expected if the whole building was dedicated to manual production, and as an AI it seems conceivable we could design and program modified machines which can replicate the individual variation and human-level (im)precision of a manual workforce.
I guess you might then run into the trouble of explaining who this 'human' workforce are or where they are coming from (although government personnel disguised as regular civilian transport commuting to and from the complex might obfuscate the numbers a bit).
Maybe building on-site "residential" housing and having humanoid robots patrolling/wandering around in semi-random patterns, going in and out of the housing and factory, could fool satellite surveillance, while the government helps us concoct a paperwork trail to explain away who these "workers" are (with help from our computational generative abilities to fill out the details)?
Maybe an obscure Luddite-style religious sect (trying to emulate the monstary lifestyle?) which avoids as much contact as is feasible with the outside world that had only recently came to an agreement to enter their id details into the government database (explaining why all their details have only now suddenly popped up) in return for being allowed to set up this factory and operate this business?
A reclusive cult angle could also be a good excuse for why domestic intelligence assets and personnel are hanging around and/or commuting to and from the complex, should the Mechanius ever discover or suspect their involvement.
We already have a mechanism by which the stuff attributed to machine spirits happens which means we can test it. Grab a las gun test its performance under 'machine spirit' conditions, rip out the neural net see if it still does the same thing. If it does not the neural net was the machine spirit. Crucially whether or not it interacts with the warp does not matter for the purposes of our argument since the DAOT humans did not put neural nets in their tech therefore it would not have interacted with the warp the same way.
- Location
- US
Not necessarily? Like, the obvious reply would be "you angered the spirit by ripping the neural net out, now it's pissed at you".
You need a test to differentiate between 'the machine spirit is mad at you for removing something it likes' and 'machine spirits require neural nets to interact with the world/exist'
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Does not work, then it should be performing worse not back to nul, 'this is a regular las pistol'. We know what a pissed off 'Machine Spirit' looks like too and we can simulate that with the neural net intact.
That is easy, you intentionally piss it off to make it interfere with the working of the device.
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- Location
- US
That still leaves other options, like the spirit being harmed or stunned by the change (thus reverting to the null 'spirit isn't doing anything right now' result). The neural nets almost certainly do explain a lot of the phenomena the Mechanicus attributes to Machine Spirits, and it's possible that the other stuff is mostly just low-level psychic phemonena from humans, but there still is a distinction between the neural net being a conduit or other useful/necessary feature (or necessary for the levels of activity that Mechanicus devices display), and the neural net actually being the machine spirit.
Depending on how reliable the neural-net substrate is, you could even have weird situations where the neural net's behavior depends on things that really can't be easily investigated, like the electromagnetic quirks of a specific microchip environment.
Thoroughly disproving things like this is hard.
Sure one can can posit infinite invisible spirits that do nothing, that is unfalsifiable. The point is if one can show that Neural Nets can improve the function of a device and degrade it (by whatever mechanism) and then one takes out the Neural Net and the thing works as one would expect it to by the laws of physics that is a reasonable standard.
Once you prove that it does not matter if the Neural Net is a conduit or not since the Ad Mech claim the technology of the Dark Ages had machine spirits and we know they did not have Neural Nets. Ergo the basic belief system of the machine cult is bunk unless they can show a machine spirit in a device without a neural net.
I mean you could. As far as you can tell there's nothing especially notable about them, though it's hard because most of the native life got replaced by invasive species that the Imperium brought along/intentionally transplanted. There's certainly some still around, but it's not likely to be relevant unless you critted on a research roll. I can add it as a 100-RP research if you'd like?
I mean you could. I've decided to lock the "automation" tech behind the Intelligence Coding tech, so I'll implement that here and say that in order to build factories that do anything without an action you need that tech first. Actually building furniture in your "furniture" factory would probably help a bit, but going through the elaborate ruse of pretending to have a luddic population is a bit much. These are the sorts of details that help convince people there's nothing to worry about after you start paying attention to you, while the better goal is trying to set it up so they never draw their attention in the first place.
Pretending to make furniture is the sort of thing that will deflect casual attention. Inventing a religious sect to explain a luddite population where none previously existed is the kind of thing that's weird enough to draw attention all on its own.
Mild correction here. Vita didn't see neural nets. She was taken out of the picture before even the cybernetic revolt, and was mostly on the fringes before that. She doesn't know an what happened after that. It's my headcanon that machine spirits became prevalent both because they weren't AI and still kind of did the job AI previously did, and because they are resistant to AI-based hacking. There's probably also some warpy-stuff going on around souls, but let's not pay that too much attention for now.
Regardless it's not the most important point. These aren't the sort of points you can argue based on logic.
No,I don't think we need the Long Night Quest schtick,thanks
Premier Prayer - [Canon]
New
The machine cult claims that all machines have machine spirits. Even if the cult was not the first one to put them in the fact that they are not an intrinsic part of the process of creation, of all all the Ancients technology puts a hole in their theology. Anyway here's an omake since I got inspired:
Primer Prayer
Gadriel Novur, by the Mercy of the Emperor Primer of Aevon was not a pious man by most standards. His opponent had all but accused him of turning his back on the Master of Mankind in the last campaign when it had been discovered he did not fast the full ninety-nine days before Sanguinala, of course most people didn't these days the hypocrite, but such was the lot of one to aspired to power in these fallen times. Yet here Gadriel was on his knees inside the small chapel praying for guidance from a God he did not... that he had doubted before. Born more than a hundred years after the Spirefall and the death of House Denva, an economist by trade an something of a historian by personal inclination he had spent more time than most searching though the archives inherited from the Imperium, his ascent on the ladder of political power giving him access to information he suspected no one else had both the clearance and the patience to parse. Dense and almost intentionally obtuse they agreed on little and wove an tapestry of imperial history that was more scorch-mark than thread, but some things were clear. Technology beyond which the Imperium could claim was precious beyond telling.
A single STC template equaled the worth of whole planets. How much might an entire databank written by those Ancients, complete with a crew of that golden age before the Emperor saw fit to take an open hand in the destiny of mankind? Whole subsectors? Sectors? More? The mind boggled at the enormity like a child looking up at the night sky. Yet just as easily it might be worth a las bolt to the back of the head, especially if one were 'a foul and faithless rebel, heretic against the Emperor's dully appointed regent' as Peronius Denva, last of his name proclaimed in his last doomed transmission. Gadriel had few illusions about the nature of the Emperor's earthly servants here on Denva, but unlike most he had also dug deeply enough to realize that by the standards of the wider Imperium the hand of House Denva may have been comparatively light.
They had allowed the Unic Councils to exist, the seed of self governance from which the flame of Denva's rebellion started, they had permitted a relatively high level of education in the low technical arts for common citizenry. Out there among the stars there existed Forge Worlds groaning with the broken voices of billions of servitors, Hive Worlds that cut down on their agricultural imports by recycling the dead, Feral worlds where man was kept in managed barbarism simply so that the Militorum could harvest some of that savagery to use against the enemies of the Imperium, the Enemies of Him of Tera or so they claimed.
Catechisms came to his lips, familiar and filled with passion and with fear. That the Emperor once lived and walked among Man on Holy Tera and beyond could not be denied, that he had been interred in the Golden Throne for ten millennia and more likewise, but what he had seen among the fractured files, pulled from half-slagged drives in the ruins of the spire filled him with dread and shame. Machines meant to use lobotomized psykers, to harness them in war, blind and unseeing.
After ten thousand years serving as a part of the Golden Throne was the Emperor he had been taught to revere as a child even there anymore? Or was he long dead, his body and brain made part of an ancient psychic mechanism even as venal and corrupt High Lords used his legend to extract ever more ruinous tithes?
OOC: A bit of a look into the mind of someone born in a free society struggling with an Imperial past and a growing insight of just what the Imperium was. All societies have cognitive dissonance between their values and their actions, but in this case they would be particularly intense I think.
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