Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

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Picio said:
There are few worse ideas then getting hit by a nuke.
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The ones you are proposing are.

Because those mean they won't stop at one 1 nuke.
They'll nuke, retrace our steps, then nuke that place as well.

Being found doesn't mean not getting nuked, it means getting nuked extra hard.
Losing our expendable manufacturing facility to a nuke isn't great, but it's far better than losing it and losing the ship.
 
10ebbor10 said:
That's an even worse idea.

Because now they're not dealing with a rogue state facility, but with a rogue member of the Mechanicus, exchanging technology with a nationstate without authorization from the enclaves.
It will just burn both of our secret identities.

(Also, what Mechanicus civil war. We have 0 support amongst the Mechanicus, and 2 enemies. No one will side with us).
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No, this could be made to work actually.

How we got the local government to cooperate in hiding our Enclave / Dig-site? Just standard Mechanicus bribery, definitely not giving them access to the knowledge and technology so that they can replicate them.

In which case, we do not probably immediately lose the base and the industrial capacity to all the Mechanicus Enclaves trying to nuke us. But some of them might try sabotage, or "deniable" missile strikes in the immediate confusion. Or just decide to throw subtlety away, and try to take the "dig-site" from us with force. So yes, I'm going to be advocating stealth/underground defences. Maybe not immediately, but at some point definitely.

Because as long as they believe in the fiction of even a potential STC-fragment, that will tie their hands when it comes to WMDs. So more attention potentially if we are forced to reveal our location, with the possibility of having to defend our base. But less worries about getting nuked back to what we have underground at our ship.

Speaking of which, @Neablis? What would bunker cost us in RP for designing such a thing? How good we can manage with cost-efficiency in mind?
 
@10ebbor10 You really don't want those anti-air defenses set up, do you? Are you certain the Mechanicus will instantly send an attack the second we set up ant-air defenses?
 
That's a terrible way of thinking about things are you kidding, to know how expensive they are, to have the option are both valid uses. That is like the literal definition of the sunk cost fallacy. The only use of them is going to be enough to fully stop an attack from them otherwise they will just attack again harder but also we have there attention. Also they are expensive so instead of wasting time one building them we can make more factories and them build them later when our spy's start warning us about an incoming attack. And get it done faster than if we wasted time on them earlier.
 
dlwj2000 said:
That's a terrible way of thinking about things are you kidding, to know how expensive they are, to have the option are both valid uses. That is like the literal definition of the sunk cost fallacy. The only use of them is going to be enough to fully stop an attack from them otherwise they will just attack again harder but also we have there attention. Also they are expensive so instead of wasting time one building them we can make more factories and them build them later when our spy's start warning us about an incoming attack. And get it done faster than if we wasted time on them earlier.
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Or we could just hide them the same way we do the factories, build an underground version. That way we have a panic button if we are attacked for some other reason without revealing them in normal operations.
 
Should we tell Aevon Counter-Intelligence that the Mechanicus bribed some members of the government and hacked into several systems?
 
Give away the blueprints to W, I'm sure the Aevon's won't mind spending their own money for an effective defense against Mechanicus nukes
 
DragonParadox said:
Or we could just hide them the same way we do the factories, build an underground version. That way we have a panic button if we are attacked for some other reason without revealing them in normal operations.
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They will still know we have them when we use them, weather or not they are hidden. So unless we have enough to completely stop them it will not do much good. We can just industrialize more with the savings.
 
Speedemon22 said:
@10ebbor10 You really don't want those anti-air defenses set up, do you? Are you certain the Mechanicus will instantly send an attack the second we set up ant-air defenses?
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That's not the argument I am making.

The argument I'm making is that either the Mechanicus won't attack us, in which case the defenses aren't needed, or they will, in which cases the defenses make the situation worse.

Without defenses, our factory is just a factory. Lob a missile at it, problem solved. No need to think more.
With them, the Mechanicus will be forced to expend more military assets, which means they'll look at the battle in far more detail, dramatically increasing the chances that we are discovered.

Put simply, there's no situation in which the defenses help (not yet anyway), and plenty of situations in which it harms.

Picio said:
And that is exactly why we need defences so they cannot hit us with nukes.
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The "don't hit us with nukes" defenses will require us to spend all actions on building them, for 10 turns straight.
Not viable at the moment, ask again in 5 turns, after we build up our industry.

meianmaru said:
No, this could be made to work actually.

How we got the local government to cooperate in hiding our Enclave / Dig-site? Just standard Mechanicus bribery, definitely not giving them access to the knowledge and technology so that they can replicate them.

In which case, we do not probably immediately lose the base and the industrial capacity to all the Mechanicus Enclaves trying to nuke us. But some of them might try sabotage, or "deniable" missile strikes in the immediate confusion. Or just decide to throw subtlety away, and try to take the "dig-site" from us with force. So yes, I'm going to be advocating stealth/underground defences. Maybe not immediately, but at some point definitely.

Because as long as they believe in the fiction of even a potential STC-fragment, that will tie their hands when it comes to WMDs. So more attention potentially if we are forced to reveal our location, with the possibility of having to defend our base. But less worries about getting nuked back to what we have underground at our ship.

Speaking of which, @Neablis? What would bunker cost us in RP for designing such a thing? How good we can manage with cost-efficiency in mind?
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The spider lady already put a tracker on us. She already doesn't trust us.
The moment she gets an inkling of where our base is, she'll deploy her forces to take it help us secure it.

At which point she'll see the advanced factories, realize that we're lying, and we're screwed.

Them nuking our deniable factory site is an infinitely more preferable outcome to them knowing about it.
 
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Frankly, the way I see it.

"If they shoot first, we're already in a shooting war, and just meekly accepting defeat isn't the way to go"

They've regressed heavily, and have mostly denied any resupply, and weapons they use on a decoy facility is weapons they don't have for the subsequent attack--and if they had the ability to solo the entire planet, they wouldn't be playing fuckfuck games with WMDs the way they are.

I'm not saying "We need to spam enough defense emplacements to stop them firing every nuke on the planet at us suddenly", but we should spend enough that they can't take us down with anything but blowing their whole stockpile, which forks them pretty damn hard.

The Mechanicus are strong, but their influence from what we've seen comes down to "We're willing to shoot first and we have first strike capability", not the sort of mass and advanced armaments they need to win a straight fight, which is why they're doing this WMD chicken thing. "We can't beat you conventionally, so we'll make sure that opposing us breaks you too." and all that. In that sense, the trick is going to be setting the bar that they can't just "Accidentally" fire a cruise missile at us and take out our decoy facility, but need to straight up take the mask off and either bombard us with most of their arsenal--which means they don't have it later, and just blew it on our decoy facility--or launch a ground attack, which plays to our strengths, since we've got more dudes than they do most likely.

And if we lose the aboveground facility? But cost them their first strike ability and capacity to repeat the feat in short order? We just won.

Because if they had the power to take the entire planet on, they'd just be in charge right now.
 
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Alectai said:
I'm not saying "We need to spam enough defense emplacements to stop them firing every nuke on the planet at us suddenly", but we should spend enough that they can't take us down with anything but blowing their whole stockpile, which forks them pretty damn hard.
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"spam enough defense emplacements to stand of their stockpile" is 4000 BP worth.
That's more than it'll cost to build an orbital shipyard and (small) ship.

Even just being able to handle a single strike requires the construction of 10 defense emplacements.

The value of the defenses required to hold the site exceed the value of the site several times over.

Alectai said:
or launch a ground attack, which plays to our strengths, since we've got more dudes than they do most likely.
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Vita is in full control of all her military units, and is a man of Stone, not a Man of Iron. She's not good at war, and our forces are, at the moment, lightly equipped.
Any kind of combat is their advantage, not ours.
 
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10ebbor10 said:
"spam enough defense emplacements to stand of their stockpile" is 4000 BP worth.
That's more than it'll cost to build an orbital shipyard and (small) ship.
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We don't need to completely stop "The entire stockpile" though, we just need to stop a casual, deniable 'Accident'

If they're dumb enough to blow their entire stockpile on this, we just won, because they lost the incentive that was keeping the local governments from throwing them the fuck out, and if you think they won't punish them for this given how much they've been waving their robit card around, you've got another thing coming.
 
Alectai said:
We don't need to completely stop "The entire stockpile" though, we just need to stop a casual, deniable 'Accident'

If they're dumb enough to blow their entire stockpile on this, we just won, because they lost the incentive that was keeping the local governments from throwing them the fuck out, and if you think they won't punish them for this given how much they've been waving their robit card around, you've got another thing coming.
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And even that is far more budget than we have, or have invested in the site.

I am not opposed to building defenses, ever.

But right now, the defenses being proposed are too weak to stop that "accident" and just big enough to screw us over.
 
DragonParadox said:
if we used them that means someone tried to nuke us. At that point we would have to answer with nukes to every enclave that has WMDs,
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Not really?

The far more likely scenario is that they launched a conventional missile strike to damage what they think was a too advanced factory.
The anti-air defense is what'll escalate the scenario up the threat ladder, and result in the nuke/invasion or other consequence.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Not really?

The far more likely scenario is that they launched a conventional missile strike.
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If they launch a conventional missile strike we can just not fire. I want nuke insurance from those hidden batteries. Once we have that and enough nukes for a Second Strike capacity we have insulated ourselves from an Ad mech caused bad end. Winning a nuclear exchange is not ideal it is far better than losing one.
 
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DragonParadox said:
If they launch a conventional missile strike we can just not fire. I want nuke insurance from those hidden batteries. Once we have that and enough nukes for a Second Strike capacity we have insulated ourselves from an Ad mech cased bad end. Winning a nuclear exchange is not ideal it is far better than losing one.
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What's the point, then?

Our facilities are not armored at all. If we refuse to fire because the missile is conventional (something that, from the outside, you can't really tell), we still loose our entire factory.
 
10ebbor10 said:
What's the point, then?

Our facilities are not armored. If we refuse to fire because the missile is conventional (something that, from the outside, you can't really tell), we still loose our entire factory.
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The point is to have the capacity to answer if we see a bunker buster nuke coming, the kind that would destroy the ship and Vita herself. Also yes we can tell, we have sufficiently advanced tech.
 
Also, keep in mind, if they drop bunker busters, they still need to target where we are, we built a tunnel, it's several miles out from our spot.

They're not omnipotent and will just target a spot four miles out with bunker busters that just so happens to be our actual base, come on.
 
10ebbor10 said:
What's the point, then?

Our facilities are not armored at all. If we refuse to fire because the missile is conventional (something that, from the outside, you can't really tell), we still loose our entire factory.
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I would like to remind you that our QM has said IC through highly-competent Vita the following (underlined):
Neablis said:
For air defense you take the same idea and scale it down. The most important thing is the tracking, since things like ballistic missiles or aircraft are small and fast targets. You end up with a tri-barreled set of rapid-recharge lascanons coupled to an advanced targeting computer. You would need at least ten of them and some early warning to be confident in handling a set of nukes, and you'd probably need 50 to be able to stand off the entire mechanicus arsenal, but even a few will provide a nice safety net, though if you want them to be at all concealed you'll need to dig them into camouflage or underground, which will both hide them and make them more resilient to damage.
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The fact that "even a few" giving some protection in a scenario that Vita can imagine happening tells us it would not be for nothing. Simple as that. Considerably more would be better, but if we avoid the "Oh no its an AI. Fire everything at the Abominable Intelligence!" -reaction? Even those limited number of AA installations might save us decades worth of effort for a relatively low cost.

Or, you know. The life of our new apprentice if she happens to be at the base if Mechanicus decided to bomb it. Because they have a lot more in their arsenal than nukes, while being also petty as fuck. Airstrike or something similar might have considerably less warning time than the ICBM -equivalent of w40k, because they might be launched from somewhere much closer.

And those were just a couple of scenarios I managed to cook up in a short amount of time. I know that putting nearly everything into manufacturing for exponential growth would be nice to get that 99.999% guaranteed safety-net online ASAP. But while very efficient and fast if we pull it off, I fear that there is a very real chance it wouldn't be that clean and simple.
 
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