One is the Imperium. The Imperium structurally reroutes wealth to cause rather than alleviate suffering for the overwhelming majority of the population.
Another is also the Imperium, which intentionally makes people unable to use wealth, and wealth people can't use. A wrecked Imperial Titan would be arguably more valuable than a habitable planet - but it would probably lower, not raise, the standard of living of an inhabited planet it lay on. (With or without active Imperial government.) It might even cause an ongoing mass death event by poisoning the biosphere or something, that sounds pretty 40k.
A third is still the Imperium, but in a somewhat less condemnatory way. While I criticized interstellar food shipment, trade networks aren't a bad idea, and the Imperium had them. They're gone now, severing producers from consumers and making chunks of capital and natural resources alike far less useful, if not outright useless, to the people who possess them.
Any problem that is caused by ongoing imperial misgovernance is not an easily solveable issue - the utilitarian metric is what
actions can you do to get the best result, or for us, how can we achieve the highest velocity of saving lives saved and alleviating suffering.
It's not enough for suffering and death to be present. It has to be cost effective for us to solve relative to other opportunities to mitigate death and suffering, and as even as our most optimistic plans for ascalon showed, nevermind what actually happened, those are issues that can only be dealt with on a longer term scale because they can fight back, and we can't stay around to create a functioning government without, you know,
staying around.
And then everyone else gets hit by a trolley. We brought techpriests with us, not diplomats or nation builders.
We can lay groundwork in passing, such as in my oft-repeated "diplomacy is not friendship" basing rights fait accompli plan, but for actually executing on the humanitarian concerns, that's going to be up to people we delegate to. And we
can do that delegation, because most of these problems don't need an AI to solve if you're willing to take your time with it, and Denva expanding its territory and influence also expands its power, which expands its ability to do humanitarian aid.
Riches attract and retain people with power and guns. If we are dissatisfied with how they are handling a situation, we will probably have to fight them. They are not low hanging fruit, nor quick to deal with, and we're rapidly exhausting our ability to create detachments to handle situations in our absence just with this one system.
We have to go back to denva for a few turns for humanitarian at a scale worth caring about to be possible. I only disagree with angle on doing it as our very second action after blowing up the stations because this case is acute, we can stabilize it enough for it to wait for relief to arrive.
I agree on the second part of number 2 as it happens, though in general if it's not bolted down the retreating imperials will have tried to take it with them. It's very 40k, but it gets to be because 40k is big, and the subsector isn't. This is a corner case.
Number 3 is... well, kind of what we're witnessing in the system we're
in. This is a mining and industrial hub. But it's the low end, which goes a long way to explaining why it was abandoned as completely as it was.
And ultimately, it's that abandonment that makes it so easy for us to just fix things. There is nobody who can reasonably stop us.
@Prime 2.0 and
@LightLan, what are your thoughts on this:
[]Plan: Fix the stuff and get smahter
-[]Order: Destroy the Chaos Stations
-[]Construction 2x:
--[]Build 5 MS Manufactories (250 BP output) on the ship
--[]100 BP of bots and urgent repairs
--[]leave behind 17 techpriest volunteers to manage the ship and run the repairs (backed by a detachment of ~4,000 bots)
-[]Research
--[] Machine Spirit Hallucinations (300 RP)
Put the breaks on the system's decline so it won't break, removes the obvious chaos, and gets us more RP for more research.
edit: quick post between DnD sessions
We
might be able to shave off a construction action - depends on how much more population the ship can handle right now, and how much extra population we can add for a given breakpoint of repairs, versus rate of necessary population influx. Would let us do 2 MS manufactories + medbay and urgent repairs with slace, or 2 MS manufactories with a third almost complete for the techpriests to finish, and then they make the medbay themselves.
Even if the math comes back to say humanitarian operation can manage it on that budget though, I'd want to check in on whether or not it'd cause discontent with the detachment.
MS Hallucinations is... tempting, but the research text says it's not by a "huge" amount. I'm not sure this is the right time, compared to, say, having void abacus manufacturing ready to go right the fuck now AND being in Denva by the end of the turn to give it to them so relief ships can start being made immediately.
Could probably get it the turn after, though.
Omakes are a chance to influence the world. A good Omake can tilt the worldbuilding in a way that is favorable to Vita. But no mechanical rewards, no.
I want to talk about this later actually, because one of the ways a quest provides content is making specific incentives for specific kinds of work - and with the main update schedule slowing down, that's going to be more important for Vox.
I've mentioned it before, but there's lots of room for people to write their own shenanigans about what happens among the crew - and if it's, say, techpriests debating different well detailed potential designs for a potential research (or a tolkein-esque attempt at making the in-universe document detailing a potential design), you could take 1 or 2 RP off of that tech as a reward if you, the QM, liked it. Anexa's passive in hyperminiature, basically.
And if you didn't like it, then those techpriests were just being ineffectual. Lower c crew does as lower c crew does.
And since it's rando techpriests doing it, you'd be under zero obligation to actually make the final tech work that way. As edison once said - all the failed prototypes mattered, because he had to find all the ways to do it wrong before he found the way to do it right.
That's just one example. But even very, very tiny mechanical bonuses can get excellent creative work flowing for your thread.
