I suggest we keep them forever and name them Bingo.
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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
Anybody have any opinions about this thing? It's kind of a complete mystery box. I have no idea how to judge it's value. I do have some questions about it though:
- How common is this stuff? If it's too hard to get our mitts on it, then it's not going to be very useful no matter what it can do. On the other hand, if we can synthesize it without too much effort, then that sounds like a big deal.
- That said, what does it actually do? 'discounts to technologies that involve resonance with the warp' is pretty broad - that's, like, all of our warp tech, our psytech, our psychic shields, our machine spirits, and odd things like auramite over in materials. Even the necrons arguably count, if you're willing to stretch 'resonance with the warp' to 'telling the warp to fuck off and go away'. :/
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Lexicanum reviled this after quick search but I remember that there being some other crystals telepatica valued greatly.
wh40k.lexicanum.com
Edit: Maybe this?
warhammer40k.fandom.com
Organo-Crystal - Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum
Edit: Maybe this?
Lorelei
Lorelei is a type of psychoactive crystal exclusively mined upon the Imperial Industrial World of Kalidar, which is why it is also referred to as "Kalidarian Lorelei" by specialists. As a psychoactive material, refined Lorelei may be used to fabricate tools and weapons that benefit the psykers...
warhammer40k.fandom.com
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I guess part of my issue there is MS Controlled Shields will imply a whole refit of all psychic shields.
That's not a short delay of Demonology; it's a long one.
BTW all: should we start making a list of questions so we can just ping Neablis with all of them at once? Because since attention was called to it I do want to know if an Order using just our current forces plus taste of chaos to reinforce Denva is a valid thing to attempt at all.
This sentence struck me a bit as weird as the use of 'turns' feels a bit 'out of universe' language slipping in the 'in universe' narrative.
It does mention making psy materials, so it's at least useful for learning how to make the stuff. I'd place it below the Necrons in priority, though. Just having these on board is a huge risk if we come anywehere near any necron installations, and those could be anywhere.
So you actually intend to build 400 tanks for (A) police action on Denva and (B) boarding defense?
Those both seem like awful ideas. Tanks are bad boarding weapons, and they're pretty bad policing weapons. That light tanks were useful on clearing the core passages in a gigantic hab station does not mean they're useful to defend the Spark. And politically, I don't think Vita sending tanks to hunt Denva civilians is any kind of good idea. I honestly doubt they want any combat material from us for that - remember Denva has access to more of that than we do. If they want to send in tanks, they can send their own. Bots might be somewhat useful, though. Mostly, our sensor tech + action is the thing.
And yes, we need to repair the shipyard. Which is why I want BP to be spent in that direction instead of on tanks. I'm not expecting to get to actually producing ships. (I also agree with the remark that more caltrops aren't worth the effort.)
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
We don't have to do them all at once. We can refit them over time as it's convenient - our repair bays are super efficient anyway. And using the tech for new stuff is the main thing I want from it, so that parts fine. Besides which, the sooner we get the tech, the sooner we know the shape of that problem, and the sooner we can start chipping away at it.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
A million or more BP for housing and then it'll need to be repaired when it breaks. I still don't think this is nearly as good of an idea as you do.
We do have dark mechanicus forge works nearby, and chaos did just loose a heavy cruiser here. Anything they send to follow that up is going to be capable of killing whatever they suspect killed the Echo. If they send follow-up.
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
I will point out, Necrons are far from unified. These necrons could be from the other side of the galaxy, and belong to a completely different dynasty than the one we're dealing with here.
Edit: Though, they were purchased in Red Harbor, which is mighty suspicious, yeah...
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My impression is they didn't send the Echo, so it'd less be 'follow-up' and more 'where'd those guys go anyway'. They were basically doing some traditional adventuring - strike out to find someplace worth making yourself a petty king. Dunno whether they'd have left a flight plan or not.
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
This is a point, yeah. The Echo was less 'working for them' and more 'fucking off to do their own thing'.
Edit: On that topic, 'two cruisers of about the same weight working together' is a really awkward force for chaos to field. The natural way for that to end is with one of the two fucking off to do their own thing, or stabbing the other in the back, or some other breakdown of relations between the two of them...
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There are ways - if one of the captains has a big authority advantage separate from their ship's power, or they answer to a higher authority who commanded them to work together and wouldn't be amused by infighting messing up their toys. Or, conceivably, a couple Chaos captains who have some kind of personal bond - Chaos is stabby, but it's not everyone always stabbing everyone.
But I do see how they (and the Orks) might find the honestly very useful formation of 'a couple ships together' hard to work into their hierarchy, compared to either a lone ship or a larger squadron.
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
Mmm. I mean, it's not impossible, but it does seem unlikely.
Edit: Huh, question. Can we do anything with the large cogitare presence in Denva, right now? Have them run some of our manufacturing efficiency, say? I would assume they'd have at least a few thousand members, and that could get us a lot of extra manufacturing capacity...
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
If I recall right, the foundation of our ability to study psychic materials stems from the psytech samples we got from chargen - and here is a new psychic material sample.
So, presumably it would discount that further to start.
In terms of tanks - I think it's worth noting cultist cleanup is no longer a military problem so much as an investigative and counter-insurgency one. Any cells we find can already be squashed like a bug by Denva themselves, they just need to find them first.
Tanks... don't seem like they'll be that useful for our own anti-boarding measures? I could be wrong. They definitely won't be useful on Primus, which we can thankfully put off a bit anyways because we know the only full sorcerer died aboard the Echo, and most if not all the apprentices died aboard Klyssar. There's nothing any holdouts on Primus can reasonably do to fuck with the rest of the system at this point, and the natives are already very experienced at avoiding a genocidal occupation force larger than what I think the war-band would have put on Primus.
Meanwhile... I'm just not seeing it on needing more shuttles, actually. They're not effective for boarding enemy ships, only worked on Klyssar because it has no space defenses to stop them, and we don't otherwise have a need for mass transport beyond "Stage troops in shuttles over all the population centers for rapid response".
...
Actually I take it back, we might want to check to see if we have enough shuttles for rapid response to chaos readings, lol.
SDIPS on the other hand... you can't exploit that with our bots without redesigning the bots, per Neablis's earlier statements:
We can figure out what a bot redesign, and the hypothetical "psy shielded housing" or even "psy shielded t-shirt" would cost to design when we get all our questions together for Neablis, but some RP is going to need to be earmarked for it.
I'm going to assume that we'll be using the 20 cogitare-to-halve-design-cost on these, considering.
Yeah. My point is it has most utility after we're done spending all our bp repairing things and have begun making new things—a bit like Ship Design.
Our database dive specifically called out the possibility of them just waking up, iirc, as does the description of the tech. I really want to be done with the murderbots before we leave the system. ASAP, really.
I think the point of the tanks is to be a part of those anti chaos operations, going by what Aineko has said.
I think any consumer-grade or otherwise ubiquitous psy shielding would require Psy Shield Reliability or its follow-up. Otherwise, they're too maintenance-intensive.
Why go by what I said? That is my understanding, but it's not my plan. (And I'm against it, I think tanks have their place but it isn't anyplace we're expecting to go soon.)
Very much agreed with this, but also, my understanding of Psy Shield Reliability is that it improves the detection rate of our tripwires (the name is a bit counterintuitive) which themselves are the simplest, cheapest, and thus weakest possible psy shields intended to be built into all kinds of things and used to detect warp-y shit, which they do by trying to block it and presumably immediately burning out... because of the whole "simplest, cheapest, and thus weakest possible" bit. The research for them was a poor success, so what we got has the added drawback that it just flat doesn't work some percentage of the time.
Adding these to everything under the sun seems like they'd all burn out the first time anyone they were trying to "protect" even thought about chaos, such as while installing them, and then they'd need to be replaced. Adding full-on psy shielding to everything probably sees the shields gradually worn down by 1 HP at a time for super minor cognitohazards that the people they're shielding could shrug off, and needing constant replacement.
To make psy shields a viable export or viable for widespread deployment beyond specialist military and/or paramilitary use, we need chaos-resistant machine spirits, machine spirit controlled psy shields, and then whatever tech for self-repairing psy-shields that unlocks.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My point is that I think they're mostly unnecessary for the counter-insurgency campaign. Yeah, you'll have the occasional roided out cultist, but heavy bots can deal with them just fine - their ritual trump card aside, we mostly only needed tanks because we needed to thunder run the station to prevent them from doing a spite move that took out the hostage population.
It's not like our troops have to deal with IEDs, their ride in can fly. Speed of response rather than strength of response is our limiting military factor here imo, which is why staging shuttles above population centers caught my interest.
...and while there will probably be an exception or two where they've got a dug in james bond-esque secret lair, we aren't out of tanks by any means, and Cia is right there. It'll be fine, I think.
Yeah, that's reasonable. Mind, it seems like the same design that lets you print out shielded housing would also let you print out shielded housing... replacement parts? Walls? Failing all else you can just demolish the house and plop a new one down if partial psy shield replacement doesn't go down in price, probably gonna be a fair amount of raze and pave like that anyways if a ritual that could bust house shields is used in a terror attack.
The vast majority isn't going to be put under any kind of stress, so it'll last until we get that reliability improvement if we can't get it immediately. They take damage when they block something rather than continuously, and while they offer tremendous value to healing the Two Denvas rift and may save a bunch of lives in a terrorist attack, the bulk of their immediate value will come from warp sensor ubiquity unless another chaos war-band suddenly invades and takes a swing at Secondus before we slap their shit.
Point being, maintaining acceptable shielding will be orders of magnitude lower cost than establishing it would be without SSDIPS. If we get lucky, places that are shielded up like that won't even be targeted at all - these cultists have had 15 years to get used to the idea that these things are genuinely effective, so they may just try to regroup and go after a softer target... and in the process, suffer a greater risk of their cell being detected conventionally during the transition.
We're not at the point of this being an export good yet, regardless - self-healing shields is something that is unlocked for research after MS controlled shields. This is a setup that works for Denva and Denva alone because they have shitloads of manufacturing even in their reduced state.
But, that does work for our purposes.
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I didn't mean it was your plan; I meant I believed I had seen a post by you earlier indicating we'd need to increase our forces to do anti-chaos work.
It's not a matter of self-healing—it's a matter of all of our psychic shields degrading appreciably over time. With Vita controlling (an maybe with an OMC operator), this can be noticed and failed panels replaced (a level of expense that is below the abstraction level). For a civilian good, that is unacceptable.
Agreed on unnecessary—you may note my plan has no bots being built. I was just trying to provide someone else's reasoning.
The Reliability research explicitly calls out that our current shields degrade even under no strain. That is unacceptable for wide adoption—civilians have no way to monitor their shields for failure, and replacement is very, very expensive; consider how many BP go into outfitting a house, then imagine a section of the wall fritzes out and the whole wall needs to be replaced.
If a panel fritzes out then that panel is replaced, not the whole wall?!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hmmm... actually, I think they do have a way of monitoring it? Like, much of the point of the mass distribution is that the shields are being monitored, because they're also sensors that can see chaos.
As for regular shields...
It's not actually clear what it means by "last without maintenance". It doesn't actually say it takes damage passively, so I'm not sure what we'd compare it to.
Well, I suppose it's a good pick regardless.
fallen space marine as leader of a warband, which just so happens to have two cruisers now.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Eh, I don't think they're large yet - we just started the recruitment campaign for them. Cogitare have never boosted our manufacturing anyways, though we could stick the ones we already have in scouting ships whether or not we have warp comms, I suppose?
We're not quite ready to make ships yet though, afaik, still building back the factories and shipyards.
As of the last firm update I recall on the matter, we're at the point with OMC tech that an operator dedicating themselves to running a factory for a turn can get approximately as much production out of it as Vita could with 1.3 Construction Actions. So theoretically, if we've got enough Cogitare to run things and can't afford more than one production action in a given turn, it makes sense to have them do it for us.
The only question is whether that would actually be legal by the mechanics and rules of the quest.
The only question is whether that would actually be legal by the mechanics and rules of the quest.