For very sure, but well towards the back of the research, Abacus Construction. With a definite maybe on Improved Void Abacus.
Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest
- Thread starter Neablis
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
We know there are millions of them, scattered over a whole solar system and mixed in with chaos cultists. There's no way that the bottom tier agriculture tech lets us sort that out with 700 RP, especially when more than half of that is earmarked for a DSM. Which is why we should be aiming to return with the muscle required to actually do something about it.
I am thinking about our options! I'm trying to get us aimed at the ones that are actually good and not bad. It's really that simple.
We have the bottom tier stealth tech. And this would be a system with millions of people in it. And Vita saw that ship in large part because she's a superintelligent AI that never sleeps, and she got lucky. Mere humans are far squishier. Those first three actions could be spent to instead get the relief fleet built that much quicker and get back with it that much sooner, so we could, y'know, actually help people, instead of faffing around with things that take pointless risks to barely do anything.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Millions of them, who already have food. They already have food. They already have food.
We are not providing them all their food, we are supplementing it to reduce famine, and we are not doing "bottom tier food tech", we already have that. What this is for is the first try at doing it at massive scale, such as, you know, for supplementing millions. Please, for the love of god, I have repeatedly begged you, withhold judgement until we have numbers.
Because you have. Not. Proven it. You have not stopped to get the relevant facts. You are arguing over speculation and exaggerations, and you are rushing to argue before stopping to consider any new information so much that suggested I was going to put our staff on the ship while quoting me saying we should have them never step foot on the ship.
Think harder.
We have stealth tech that passed muster in motion while in the same orbit as heavily entrenched mechanicus assets, and would be deploying it to a stationary asset in deep space with an entire system that is filled with thousands of factories to hide in. The stealth factory would be a needle in a haystack, dude.
And that's if anyone even enters the system during those three turns we're gone.
As for detection - remember, we would be arming those tech priests with better sensors than what vita used, sensors that were designed with solving that stealth in mind from the start. They don't need to be as good as Vita to see eldar stealth - and even if they don't, they probably don't get found out anyways.
And then, they are able to keep a constant watch through the magic of... taking shifts. Even the locals could add more eyes with a tiny bit of training.
You are telling me to squirm about a minuscule risk to dozens of people, because you want to dismiss an option that, depending on the numbers, could save dozens to hundreds of thousands because they were there in time. So spare me the shadowjumping and speculation, and please wait for neablis to come back with the numbers.
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Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
We can see what Neablis has to say about it. But it's not just about producing the food - we'd also need to distribute it, between over a hundred stations, many of them filled with hostiles. That's not a small operation, and I'm skeptical we can set it up on the budget we have available. And even if we did, that makes it that much harder to keep up the stealth.
That was a tiny stay behind detachment from the mechanicus, and we supplemented it by hacking their systems, and we got lucky. And our sensors are better, but they'd still be working with far fewer resources otherwise.
As for the risk, it's not just about the tech priests - it's about what they know, and about the actions we'd spend setting them up, and the potential diplomatic fallout if we get them killed on a mission that's wildly different than what they signed up for. Though we should still not be careless with the lives of our crew, either.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Thank you. Part of the work of having good plans ready to go is exploring hypotheticals - and analyzing the parts of the problem you have actionable information on, even if you lack what you need to solve others just yet.
That's why I put so much emphasis on exploring options. I was challenged on safety - and that's why I came up with that stealth/sensor/remote OMC regimen.
Anyways, that's actually the easy part - Humanized OMC Robots, as previously said. The ship already makes contact with the staitons enough for the station and ship-board people to fight and this has passed without comment or interference for centuries.
Somebody looking from space might think something is off if instead people aboard the ship are providing "tribute" instead during these moments of contact, but right there in quotes I give an example of a way to make it look like a plausible development of the existing situation from before we arrived that needs no further investigation. Victan doubtlessly could come up with better, particularly with what we learn from diplomacy with the factions aboard the ship during this turn.
Even if it arouses suspicion though, by the time it does the dead drops will already be suspended - and interlopers will be right back to needing to find a needle in a haystack if they even think to check for a lone, stealthed factory at rest out in a system with thousands of factories they CAN see which could be the source of the food instead.
In the vast majority of cases, it just won't matter - almost anyone trying to stir the pot here will be fairly visible when they do. Imperial vessels, chaos vessels, nids, orks, all of these threats will be very much out there in the open and seen early.
Corsairs and dark eldar have had centuries to take what they want with no meaningful resistance and probably won't show, but if they do they'll probably go for the ship first, and with no techpriests aboard that means they'll have time to go to ground if there's fear of the factory being discovered.
And, well, if they're corsairs, there's the additional defense of the techpriests' association with Vita, who they want to trade with. So that just leaves dark eldar as a threat.
And when it's dark eldar, "what the techpriests know" stops mattering because they know damn well that killing themselves is preferable to being captured by dark eldar. Gruesome, but we're already talking about a wildly implausible worst case scenario here.
And, ultimately, that's what any scenario where techpriests are at serious risk is. The techpriest detarchment is overwhelmingly likely to have advance notice before anyone is tailing for the hidden operation, and if they aren't doing the operation will be extremely hard to find.
(As for it being an international incident, I don't think it would be anything of the sort. These are volunteers we're talking about, who chose to leave Denva and join Vita among the stars. Denva would have written off the engineers at the refinery if the corsairs had gotten them, and those were still citizens!)
That said? If you're really still concerned about the risk, note the cost of improved passive stealth:
-[] Improved Passive Stealth (50 RP)
Now, let's tally that up with the other stuff we'd research for setting up stopgap aid.
50 RP - Improved Passive Stealth
150 RP - Mechanized Agriculture
50 RP - Remote Organic-Machine control
25 RP - Basic Stealth Shuttles (blueprint) (Probably same cost for designing improved version instead?)
25 RP - Speculative cost of mass food production building (blueprint)
=
300 RP
A newly level 15 Anexa provides 75 + 42 (staff) = 117 RP, giving us a total of 317 for the turn. So, we can afford the research plan above.
And, yeah, I forgot we hadn't actually designed stealth shuttles yet, but easy fix, especially since repair bay applies to replacing the spark's shuttles so we can reasonably expect it to refit them for stealth; and even if they can't, the shuttles are cheap and starting the dead drop operation would only need one.
What I'm getting at here is that we can take the already favorable conditions for doing this work on the down low and improve our stealth even more and still stay in budget to be back at Denva by the end of next turn.
I don't want to be callous about our staff either. But as Neablis put it at the start of the quest, if we don't take even small risks, all we will be is a sad turtle in a hostile universe. Remember who I am: I'm the guy who both led the argument to keep bongo, the argument to study him safely and whose methods tanked a nat1, all while turning a massive RP profit and not slowing down our denvan departure timeline at all.
I'm not disregarding the risks. I'm acknowledging them, and hedging against them to get stuff done, just as I've always done. And my track record shows I'm damn good at it - so, while it was rough getting here, thanks for agreeing to wait for the numbers we need to see if this dead drops plan is worth doing.
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... That post specifically calls out that leaving them in this system wouldn't help much.
I think that would change if we grab the rest of the OMC techs, give them a barebones setup of habitat, industry, bots, and transport, and encourage them to recruit as liberally as possible to expand their numbers as they go.
Even if they haven't radically changed the system, we could trade a fairly trivial initial investment for coming back to find hundreds of Cogitare, if not thousands, making excellent progress and providing us an excellent smokescreen for a claim on the system in the name of a cut-off branch of the mechanicus.
Even if they haven't radically changed the system, we could trade a fairly trivial initial investment for coming back to find hundreds of Cogitare, if not thousands, making excellent progress and providing us an excellent smokescreen for a claim on the system in the name of a cut-off branch of the mechanicus.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And? The task Neablis is describing is uplift. I'm not proposing uplift, I'm proposing food aid and the occasional evacuation to more stable stations.
It's orders of magnitude smaller in scope - and one order of magnitude smaller than "50 years" is 5 years, a single turn.
We're giving them 3 turns before the cavalry arrives, going by Angle's pitch. They don't have to solve this system's problems, just stem the bleeding. We'll see if the food aid part is feasible when Neablis gets back with info about the mechanized agriculture tech - but when every station failure, and we've seen many that already have before we got here, is tens of thousands dead, just having the ability to do evac at all 3 turns early could beat opportunity cost for lives saved.
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Why are you making this balloon in scope, we don't need to do that - we specifically are a small group exploring stuff. We can't get bogged down in every single system that has a population in need - to do that we need to build up Denva. Remember that every other enemy faction is making moves as well - we need to give them the minimum to help the survive until Denva can begin to expand, they are literally 2 jumps away. If we keep trying to help each tragedy one at a time then we will get outpaced by our enemies.
Edit: If you want to go out and help people then you should push for research that ramps up our ability to project force and access multiple systems with fleets (Warp Comms and Denva crewed ships).
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
I am, quite literally, advocating for "giving them the minimum to survive until denva can get there". That's what "stopgap" means.
Food and Evac from stations about to fail is the minimum. I have repeatedly stated that I intend to head back to denva on the very next vote we have - they are 2 jumps away, as you say, we would arrive same turn.
I'm not getting back into why I think it's pragmatic to care here. It's 15 minutes to midnight and I already explained why I think that earlier in the discussion - I can be convinced about how to approach triage, but if 3 actions is too much helping for your taste, then we're not going to agree on much.
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.... The next stop is not Denva, its Caldereth. We went: Denva -> Ascalon -> Vorthryn (Current Location). The goal of this expedition was to complete the loop to survey this section of the Sub Sector.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Doesn't matter. The goal of the expedition was to find out what was in this direction from Denva, because it was the only exit out of the subsector we had no intel on - we know about necrons to the northwest, we know about the space marines to the northeast, and we know about chaos to the southeast, but we knew nothing about dangers to the southwest.
The circuit was just a means to an end.
Anyways, we accomplished the circuit's goal last turn when we traded with the Eldar - the maps, the DEldar stronghold, the warning about other chaotic forces and orks, all of that - that's what we were actually after, why we went here first.
Now our next goal is about how to quickly build up against those threats. And it's quickly turning out to be the case that the best way to do that is first to stop back at Denva, help their industrial output, and point them here to gain their first bits of strategic depth and more opportunities for rapid industrial and naval expansion.
Because as you said:
This applies to aimless travel too. We are behind schedule, this circuit was originally planned to take 4 turns total. There's no reason to treat Caldereth as special - we've accomplished our first road trip's goal, it's time to head back and prepare for the coming storm.
So how does that tie back into my plans for Vorthryn? Because expanding and building out into new systems will always come with humanitarian crisises of some sort, be they tyrannical oppression of imperial holdouts or the horrible squalor of feral colonies or good 'ol war. Part of Denva's buildout will necessarily include dealing with those, each and every time.
We made it a tenant of their social other to "be for others what we were for you". Even if Vita disregards the suffering here for expediency, Denva won't. But thankfully, relieving the humanitarian crisis shares most steps with "build the fuck out of that industry" which is a prerequisite to "build all the guns so the bad guys can't get you". We smooth the way by putting a stopgap here and book it back to denva, and we hit both birds with one stone.
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- Location
- Sydney,Australia
The main reason we did this small loop was to test how well we our ship can handle exploration while still in range of denva so we have an emergency fallback location we could run to in one action and to be completely honest I'm not impressed so far the spark isn't able to do the job properly it's partly due to space issues but more to the point we're reacting instead of planning ahead.
I'd argue the whole point of building a good ship for exploration (which I think the Spark is) is that it's hard to plan ahead for the unknown.
That said, we do have the ability to rapidly complete a few technologies and build a notably better ship. Since it's already been established that we've managed to learn a lot just by contacting people who have been around this side of the sector and having them tell us about it, I wouldn't mind heading back to Denva to do that. Although I'd like to setup a seed colony of Cogitare here first, and probably go ahead and destroy the obvious Chaos stations.
We'll see what we learn in the update.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
I think you are really underestimating the Drukhari here. Their technology, their skill and just the sheer petty spitefullness of their sadism. These are people who, sometimes very literally, have practiced exploiting vulnerable targets to bring it to a level of a literal art-form. Though even then, if we were a complete unknown to the Drukhari at this point, I might have been able to trust the protection that obscurity would bring. Unfortunately, we don't have that anymore, and in fact defied the local Drukhari raiders and their leader by not allowing anything to be stolen from our ship.
And if we leave tech-priest here to try to uplift this place, I don't trust that the Drukhari won't put things together if they decide to raid this place for slaves as a vulnerable target. It is basically a next door war-jump to where we had the "pleasure" of running into the Bleeding Web, so it wouldn't be that hard to realize. And just because it hasn't been raided yet (which we don't actually know about), doesn't mean it won't be in the future. And if they notice that the place is in the progress of being uplifted, it might draw their attention before they otherwise would've targeted this place.
So no. I don't think there is anything implausible here about this place becoming a target for the Drukhari. And if it does, the Drukhari are experts at capturing targets alive. I can't trust the level of technology when it comes to stealth and telepresence we can reach in short-term to protect them against a threat like that.
Because while the tech-priests might be able to kill themselves before they are captured, they might also be caught unaware. Maybe they might also, you know, hesitate killing themselves because of the vain hope of getting through this alive and uncaptured. Maybe just for a moment, but could end up being all that the Drukhari need. Regardless, the risk is too big for me to condone, when I can see a bad roll plausibly leading to this kind of scenario.
And that is just one faction, though the most plausible one in my mind for those that might discover our secret.
However. Why don't we just make this much safer way, and just pick and train some locals to become the equivalent of tech-priest initiates? Without telling them the truth about Vita? Give them a crash course in maintaining and fixing the local technology, uplift primers for further reading, some augmentations to those wiling so that they can better absorb information and be able to better to defend themselves, and the technology to start expanding both their numbers and repairs they do. Doesn't require leaving behind our tech-priest crew and still gets the job done.
What are you planning to build for them with a sensor package??
What bleeding, though? There's no rapid collapse in progress. They'll still be here in 3 turns if we do nothing, as a population.
I rather thought exploring some stars was the point. We've done very little of that, and have very little need to stop.
Making a 'seed colony' or leaving some of the Cogitare here means that we lock in coming back here when we could be exploring the other nearby systems. Going from where we are its 2 Actions to go to Denva, X Actions that we spend turtling up at Denva, then 2 Actions to get back to Vorthryn to pick them up. On top of that having them stay here locks in our next 'major task' so to speak as 'uplifting this system'. That's something that we really should be leaving to Denva as they expand.
From where we are it's one action to go to Denva. We can currently travel 3 systems per action, and can easily increase that somewhat by improving our navigation hardware.
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
20 to 30 years was the timeline we had for that. Even if we halve that, thats still about as long as it would take us to build a relief fleet and come back.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
For training tech-priest -equivalents? Did we get a confirmation from Neablis? Also, even if we don't train them to that level, just some tech-knowledge to get them started and uplift primers might help them to slowly get there and expand. Oh, and weaponry and armor to defend themselves.
- Location
- Sydney,Australia
There is a blueprint for an uplift campus 25RP that still works even if vita isn't controling it.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
You mean this, that Neablis made in reponse to your idea?
Hmmm. I have to say, that "variable number BP" sounds pretty good for our current situation. If we could make a very small campus for 100 BP and spend 250 BP on other material aid to get them going...
EDIT: Or wait, is the Uplift Campus separate from the "variable BP" uplift stuff, now that I'm looking at it more closely?
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Sounds like something that would be fought over by a not very established polity.
- Location
- Sydney,Australia
The idea I had was to distribute the research we had overtime rather than in a single burst sure Denva is a civilized but means they're using tech that we'd be able to use today with a demonstration rather than imperial level or worse Federation sure Denva managed to incorporate the data dump we inflicted on them but that couldve gone way worse whereas an uplift campus does the same thing over time and without us needing to dedicate actions to it and manageing fallout
We're talking a bunch of near feral humans of course they'll fight over it. I'm losing more and more enthusiasm about actually talking to these people and wondering if we just tell Denva to nab them and put them through uplift the hard way and separate them out into family groups and that's that it's not like these people will bring any net positive without decades of investment.
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
- Location
- Belgrade,Serbia
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Saving one action from 4 is a 25% discount, saving one action from 12 is a 8.34% discount. Neither of those are small discounts.
I'm sorry what?So far the only factions that have contacted us are the roaming ones that have it in their interest to scout this Sector at least in part regularly. We haven't even seen the scouts for the more organized bad factions yet and yet people are panicking about a Drukhari world destroyer.
First off Drukhari don't do world destruction, not in the same way as other factions. Instead they sometimes steal worlds close enough to a Webway for their own gains.
Denva doesn't have a Webway Gate so they are fine on that front even if a sufficiently large Drukhari raid could fuck them over. Vorthryn where we are right now on the other hand is just plain boring and out of the way of regular transportation. It's only use to the Imperium was as a mining system and most of the other factions have bigger targets to attack.
Like yes be afraid that there are so many assholes out there to get you, but don't descend into outright paranoia because even and especially when they are out to get you it is still paranoia and as such self-defeating.