In the ideal circumstance it's not breakable since machine spirits can make them self-healing, even if not this isn't archeo-tech to the Denvans, this is just tech.
Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest
- Thread starter Neablis
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi
In the ideal circumstance it's not breakable since machine spirits can make them self-healing, even if not this isn't archeo-tech to the Denvans, this is just tech.
Every RP your plan spends is towards the singular goal of fighting Chaos, now and in the future, and I'll admit it does a good job at that. I think the immediate utility of SSDIPS is debatable, but long term it probably would totally solve the problem of chaos as laid out in your plan.
I think my plan still makes trying to run or start a chaos cult on Denva more-or-less impossible starting next turn, lets the Denvans themselves extend that status to anywhere else they control going forward, and also gets things done on fronts other than fighting against chaos corruption. I think splitting our focus like that is necessary given all the other enemies that have to be considered. Sticking psychic-shields around every structure on the planet as quickly as possible is arguably a perfect solution, but the perfect is the enemy of the good enough and it falls short on preparing to deal with anyone other than chaos cultists.
- Location
- Norway
Yeah I think my main issue with the runner up plan is that it doesn't spend any BP to get the warp screens up, and I don't know how realistic it is for Denva to build it by themselves. Especially how realistic it is for them to get enough of it this turn to fulfill the boon.
- Location
- Earth
Denva has plenty of ground based production.
No more than just replacing the building(s) due to the integrated designs.
That's what they do.
Once designed, psy shielding is free in terms of BP.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
It's also the equivalent of equipping every apartment in the world with a helipad and helicopter, in the sense that you are putting a million dollar sensor net onto a $100k house.
Speed of rollout, comprehensiveness of coverage in the meantime, and hugely inefficient resource allocation are the problems.
Let me rephrase then: how many BP does it take to rebuild housing for an entire planet? How fast is it going to happen?
The issue isn't just the end state, it's the implementation.
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Well if lack of a helipad could lead to your soul getting eaten by demons from hell something tells me the population of most democratic polities would be profoundly pro-helipad.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I guess it's more of an optimistic focus -
I didn't say so at the time, but if a friendly visitor is fine with their stuff breaking in the next 20-40 years or so, so long as it helps them out now, then it establishes us as ready to offer them as a trade good immediately. All the miscellaneous stuff that Denva is going to have us help design those are things that could work as trade goods.
This may be more relevant than it seems, Because back before we left, we saw a visitor every two turns on Denva. Arguably the reason we didn't see one immediately is because we instead intercepted them at Caldereth: the orks.
So that means we're due for one of those fun™️ 1d6s.
And if it's not somebody friendly. Well.
We do have chaos to 3 out of 5 sides of zantris.
I'm also pretty sure my plan manages to bounce back from a nat 1 anywhere but SSDIPS, but I just ran out of time to go over those one by one.
They were able to lease us 15,000 BP for that one-time boon - all of it ship board manufacturing, their entire planet-side industrial park stayed in their hands last turn.
My answer to the concern about this being a white elephant or perfect being the enemy of the good is the same as it was last time, ultimately.
I asked Neablis what help we could give Denva and he said 10 to 100 RP. Then I asked for clarification on that and he said they would tell us to stop helping at 100. All in thread.
They have the build points to start with emergency shelters and then build out from high density housing in the most populous urban centers and move outwards to higher hanging fruits progressively from there.
There is no good SSDIPS is standing opposed to as the perfect - it provides most of its value up front while in progress, and for anything it hasn't gotten to yet, there are a couple dozen thousand sensor toting swat bots ready to fill the gap.
In the first place, there's a lot of construction that's going to be going on in those areas anyways, because as that canon omake showed, they're in a terrible state, and a lot of the stuff there is going to be condemned, regardless of whether or not we give Denva the ability to rebuild it with added psychic shielding for free. BP cost just isn't the issue here, that's what SSDIPS solves right on the tin.
Circling back to perfect V good over multiple turns, the things I take this turn are things we were going to get anyways before leaving, some of it which blocked stuff that we wanted to have even earlier.That's why I say it doesn't slow us down - it does not sacrifice our long term agenda at all.
Anything that Plan Eye gets, we can still get next turn to use immediately if that is the direction we want to take next turn's plan in.
So it's mostly better to get it next turn, and focus on counter-insurgency this turn.
Birds plural, meet stone singular.
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
And if there was an option that was 98% as good and a billion times cheaper?
I mean you would have to convince them of that far with the words 'damnation and daemon' ringing in their brains. Keep in mind a significant number of them are still traumatized from the Chaos invasion.
- Location
- Norway
I'm not sure if this will count as a small instalation.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It will apply to civilian infrastructure in general.
I'm pretty sure "small installations" is meant to stand in contrast to megastructures, because otherwise it seems to apply to basically all ground installations and units anytime we've asked.
And also personal psy shields and housing, which I asked about and received confirmation for directly.
- Location
- Earth
Houses definitely count. Neablis has said so already.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Some more quotes on top of those already done by others on the topic:
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
And I'll bet you 90% of them would prefer warships and immediate 100% coverage sensor nets that would keep chaos from landing again and identify them once they are here. But that's not a choice they get to make, it's one we are making for them
The plan just has this 'we'll get an entire planet of shielded buildings quickly and for free' assumption that I cannot get past.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, we have our second generation sensor equipment, and we shared it with Denva when we arrived, so I don't think any new chaos visitors are going to manage that. Or that new warp sensors will budge the needle much on non chaos visitors.
I also think it's worth noting that if the war band had stealth insertion capability able to defeat even our old gen sensors that the Echo would not have had such a struggle taking down Aevon.
Also? I am a little nettled that you keep asking me and my plan's supporters what BP is going to be used for this, like we know more than what the QM has told us.
If you feel Neablis's clarifications have been ambiguous on whether or not Denva can implement these designs at a scale that significantly helps the counterinsurgency, perhaps you should be asking them about BP instead. This isn't unreasonable.
But personally, I'm confident that the critical success that Denva rolled for manufacturing growth is up to the task, particularly after neablis appeared to honor it narratively in spite of the invasion by putting so much of it on ships and in aevon.
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Ah, gotcha. I suppose that's for building a psychic experimentation lab with the same amount of shield HP as the old one, and not upgrading it. Fair enough!
I'm trying not to lay down firm numbers in order to avoid them getting quoted back to me in a way I don't mean. However, the point behind the standardized design-integrated chaos shielding (keep in mind it was unlocked by a high roll, I forget if it was a crit or not) was that with some extra optimization & standardization you can figure out how to mass-produce it for specific applications.
In the case of houses, think of that Tyvek wrap that goes in the internal layers of virtually every new house (at least in the US) to prevent water damage. Now you make a new version of it that's more expensive because it's got circuitry for a weak psychic shield printed into it. But because you spent a lot of effort optimizing the printing process and it's being made by DaoT-level manufactories, it's only twice as expensive as the base component, which is only a hundredth the cost of the new construction. Then once the house is finished being built, you hook it into a communications network that runs in parallel to the power grid.
Is it free? No. Will the planet get covered with them in the next five years? Also no. But it will get rolled out in the rebuilding process, and in the long run every new building they build will have it, kind of like how they all come with fire alarms. It'll be part of the building code. That's the kind of innovation that this research means.
This all sounds great, and it is. You're really delving into the Psychic Shielding tree and these are the rewards. But all of that has been at the expense of other things you could have done and didn't - for example nova cannons, or building Denva a more complete fleet that could have warded off the Echo of Apotheosis, or knights that could have been more effective at fighting them off on the ground or whatever.
[x] Plan: G-1st Counter-Insurgency featuring shields for literally everybody
Both votes are tech transferring some very useful tech, but I think the Counter-Insurgency is better, so vote switching time
- Location
- Outside the Box
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- She/Her
The best time to start a long-term solution is... now. And with Denva's ridiculous production capacity, I think it's going to spread around way faster than you'd think.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Median age of US houses is 40 years, higher for apartments. Oldest buildings are disproportionately occupied by the poor.
So a half-century to get to 50% coverage, with that coverage heavily focused on the rich, seems reasonable.
It seems like planting a forest to deal with the problem of being cold and having no firewood. Great long term. But unlikely to benefit anyone alive right now.
So for what it's worth, some quick math based on the housing blueprint we already have (10 BP to house 1,000 people) says that even in the best case where the new psychic shielding leaves the cost unchanged, we're still talking about rebuilding housing for most if not all of Denva's population... That was several billion before the chaos invasion, and given that the nest only suffered 30% casualties while being entirely under the control of cultists for at least a decade, it's probably safe to say the population is still more than one billion.
Building new houses for a billion people at 10 BP / 1,000 is going to cost Denva 10,000,000 BP. If Denva's "ridiculous production capacity" was anything remotely close to something that could cover that in a timely manner, they would have drowned the Echo under an ocean of small-craft and missiles before we got back and wouldn't have needed us to save them.
Building new houses for a billion people at 10 BP / 1,000 is going to cost Denva 10,000,000 BP. If Denva's "ridiculous production capacity" was anything remotely close to something that could cover that in a timely manner, they would have drowned the Echo under an ocean of small-craft and missiles before we got back and wouldn't have needed us to save them.