Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
...But how many turns before we leave Denva? IMO, we have like 3, maybe only 2.
Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest
- Thread starter Neablis
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi
...But how many turns before we leave Denva? IMO, we have like 3, maybe only 2.
Where was it said that Advanced Materials discounts Intelligence Coding? They don't sound related.
...Because it's a super cool foundational tech that revolutionizes our understanding of the Warp, so it's good to have if you're planning to do warp things like daemonology and warp comms?
Angle
Release Candidate Enby
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs/Comrade
Okay. I think pushing a tech in front because it might discount on a crit is seriously misguided though.
- Location
- Earth
Especially since there are only 230RP left to do on Intelligence Coding.
Advanced Materials cost 250RP.
MrRobot
In doubt there's always the Sun!
You are assuming that soul cancer is just a neurochemical change not a magical disease.
Personality reversion may work on humans that experience passive corruption to avoid memetic brainwashing.
But the shit that actually ping on Vita's psy shield is not that chill.
This tech trail is more likely to eventually lead to the creation of a human soulsone trough.
That may well be, but if we have three then my order makes sense.
And if we don't then it may not even be possible to do warp comms by then—a poor success would doom the venture.
I am pushing it because the necrons are a time bomb and I think we need to be done with them yesterday.
The fact that it discounts AIC is just a minor point for why, among various urgent things, AdMat should precede AIC.
F0lkL0re
Officially not an Inquisitor
- Location
- Shetland
1. the QM has told us that baring really good rolls setting up Denva's R&D is going to be a multiple turn effort and having an R&D sector doesn't require collab instead collab will just make it better, I'm pretty certain that Neablis told us before we first left the system that Denva could only contribute 50RP towards our research but as far as I remember that was before collab was available so that number should now be higher.
2.
👆 pretty much this
3. this more or less loops back into point two combined with I want Bongo dealt with and letting it fester will just make the job harder as time goes on while giving it time come up with ways to screw with us so while I'm not panicked by it nor am I distressed by it's presence I do want to remove it from the board.
Please note anti-Bongo crowd if you keep demanding that we toss it into the sun I'm going to start referring to you lot as the free Bongo crowd because that's what you are asking us to do with that action.
I want to say that we have more then two or three turns before wayfinder kicks in but I have no evidence here so I can't really say anything for sure, but I do think that your being a little overly pessimistic here.
Oh good I've got Large-scale Machine spirits in my plan so I'm working towards coding yay.
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I meant rolling back corruption on AIs. Which don't have souls on which to get cancer. The chaos intervention techs for humans are elsewhere.
MrRobot
In doubt there's always the Sun!
Just because they don't have souls proper this is not stilopping the magic.
Otherwise they wouldn't got corrupted to being with.
You are mistaking the state Vita have for nulls and Necrons that are completely insulated from psychic energy (and the Imperium says they have no soul because of it).
F0lkL0re
Officially not an Inquisitor
- Location
- Shetland
Something I forgot to mention when explaining my plan putting the Necrons in status pods should lower the threat they represent because these are just normal warriors so being suspended in time should put a dampener on their ability to do anything.
Advanced Materials isn't a prereq for necrons 101. Yes, I do see how they're related, but if you want to get Necron Initial Investigations behind us ASAP, the way to do that is to just do it.
And unlike other endless-pushback trajectories, AdMat isn't a 'defend against fallout' research.
The tendency to assume stuff in our tech tree will actually not do what it's supposed to at all seems unproductive. Those tech descriptions aren't written to sucker us.
- Location
- Norway
-[] Abacus Manufacturing (50 RP)
-[] Demonology (100 RP + 25 RP boost)
-[] Large-scale Machine spirits (75 RP)
These are the things I think we should really do this turn, as they sets us up to deal with Bongo and build ships, which lets us use our BP for the next turns. The rest is gravy imo, I presume the next 2 turn we can use to set up warp communications and all the other things we want before we bounce.
Things I want but realize are stretch goals are:
-[] Shards of Humming Gemstone (100 RP) I think it will make for cheaper warp communications
-[] Gameified OMC (75 RP), -[] Streamlined OMC interface (125 RP), -[] Lower OMC Implant Specs (150 RP) and -[] Large-Scale organic-machine Control (75 RP) to make someone able to controll a ship through OMC and launch Battlefleet Gothic Armada Vita edition to get Devna's navy tradition going and get us an Admiral. (Plan "We have Spire at home)
-[] Demonology (100 RP + 25 RP boost)
-[] Large-scale Machine spirits (75 RP)
These are the things I think we should really do this turn, as they sets us up to deal with Bongo and build ships, which lets us use our BP for the next turns. The rest is gravy imo, I presume the next 2 turn we can use to set up warp communications and all the other things we want before we bounce.
Things I want but realize are stretch goals are:
-[] Shards of Humming Gemstone (100 RP) I think it will make for cheaper warp communications
-[] Gameified OMC (75 RP), -[] Streamlined OMC interface (125 RP), -[] Lower OMC Implant Specs (150 RP) and -[] Large-Scale organic-machine Control (75 RP) to make someone able to controll a ship through OMC and launch Battlefleet Gothic Armada Vita edition to get Devna's navy tradition going and get us an Admiral. (Plan "We have Spire at home)
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Having Collab is almost certain to cut that one down by a lot. They're a whole planet; the ability to coordinate more than 50 researchers at a time is very useful.
I wouldn't call it foundational; the foundational tech was the one that unlocked it. That said, it is a pretty cool tech! Just not urgent right now, and we have a tonne of cool stuff to look through.
1. I've never said to toss Bongo in the sun. I've argued vehemently against it. I've been lobbying for us to do demonology for like four turns now, and my proto plan includes it. Don't lump me in with that crowd.
2. I wasn't suggesting don't do demonology. I was suggesting delaying it a single turn for more RP efficiency and a better effect for the Denva action.
3. That said, my personal suggestion is leave Imm. Und. for later and let's do the other stuff. I was trying to accommodate your priorities in offering that idea. I also think dealing with Bongo should be done A.S.A.P. I'm just also trying to be efficient with it.
MrRobot
In doubt there's always the Sun!
The tendency to assume each tech (or rather the tech one want resserch) at any given moment be the silver bullet when things are incremental and with clear in universe defined strong and week points, lends to 90% of this treads text wall wars.
F0lkL0re
Officially not an Inquisitor
- Location
- Shetland
Sorry I don't mean to lump you in with them I just wanted to make my feelings on the matter clear.
I'm not here pushing for this tech. I don't actually care much about Personality-Checking Routines, though I do like AI coding. However, it's quite to the point about what it does, in particular:
Barring catastrophic rolls, that further research will exist and will work. We don't have to have FUD about how you can't do that to Chaos.
Look. The research states that it leads to being able to prevent and roll back personality alterations. I don't think the QM is being deceptive here.
We have no idea whether the Necrons' ability to detect these, wake them, or teleport them away cares at all about stasis pods. We also don't know if our pods can contain them at all.
There's also just the possibility of Necrons detecting them nearby while we move by and that making them interested in us.
It's not a prereq, but someone (I think @meianmaru ?) asked and the QM said having it would boost its output enough to be worth it. If it looks like we won't have time to do Ad. Mat. before leaving, I'll push for raw Necron 101, but for now I want to get best results. Because if this brings Really Good Robotics down a bunch, or the Necron tech unlocks even some basics of their self-repair tech, it will be very worth it.
Also: Ad Mat lets us put the Void Miners to queue up some megastructures and come back when they're done.
No one's saying anything is a silver bullet. Chaos can still mess us up even if Vita personally becomes very hard to corrupt. Not to speak of many other foes. You just said that a particular tree was where the tools to fight against ai corruption lay, and the text of the given information said it lay elsewhere (not to say there's not also tools in the MS tree). That's all.
And it's disingenuous to claim others are claiming other things are silver bullets when you've been saying machine spirit integration is it.
Apology accepted. In the future, try to address groups you're not lumping in together in separate paragraphs.
Okay. That's not what I'd call wanting to get rid of the necrons ASAP, but it makes sense.
We'd probably need tech for the actual megastructure, not just the first step in the path, for whatever megastructure you have in mind, and at their current output it'd probably take more than the length of the quest to date for them to finish anything in that category...
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...I apologize for missing it, but personality backups and rollbacks and corruption detection is all in the same tree, and absolutely do succeed at the role of being an immune system.
It's right there in the mechanics text. Detection of injury, and the means to heal it. All in one tree, without needing any other.
If I had to guess, it would also be locked behind basics of psychic computing and maybe Immaterium Understanding.
They absolutely did have a break in history, they lost an enormous amount of institutional knowledge with the pull-out of the imperium and the extinction of the governing house. Even if they hadn't, the imperium of man goes out of its way to make each world dysfunctional without the broader support of the empire, and that extends to governing knowledge.
Heck, the person most well connected to that prior history on the planet, Thayla, who was also a former inquisitorial collaborator, only had a map of the subsector and a few things like where the nearest forge-world and hive world were!
What on earth do you call that if not a break in histories?
All civilizations are made up of adults. That's a completely irrelevant metric for applying the concepts of young, adult, or adult independence to a country.
So by what metric is the Stellar Ascendancy not a child?
...
Before I go further - what you said isn't like, so wrong that it merited all the shit below. I mostly just decided to do it so I'd have an effortpost I could link back to in the future when the "Why Help Denva" bandwagon starts back up again, and it kind of kept growing and growing and growing, and all of it was from recollection anyways, lol.
But still I went through the trouble, so may as well use it.
*ahem*
So by what metric is the Stellar Ascendancy an "adult", meaning being prepared to independently survive and thrive?
- Age?
- They lost most of their history with the pullout of the imperium and the extinction of its original governing dynasty, and have existed for less than half a thousand years, in a galaxy where mature civilizations are ones that have been around for well into the tens of thousands of years since their predecessor's fall.
- For example, the most notable newcomers are the Tau, who started the first sphere of expansion about five thousand years ago. They are notably a faction that is still characterized by naivety, especially towards Chaos and the warp. Post-Imperium Denva as a planet-locked entity is not even a tenth that age, and the Stellar Ascendancy is not even into the triple digits.
- Growth?
- They're confined to one system. In 40k terms, beyond insignificant.
- Their industry just got kicked in the teeth - pound for pound it's better than everyone else's, but the weight class difference is too stark to bridge that gap against the standing forces everyone else has.
- They have no trade partners or allies except us.
- This conversation mostly started because they haven't rebuilt their navy, so that's a bust too.
- Experience? With what?
- Science and Technology?
- First, a disclaimer: The technologies we give them are no more evidence of their maturity there than a child's allowance is evidence of employment. Their R&D sector was torn asunder by the Echo's invasion, and they're now asking us to help them set it up again. The founding of their modern research and design methodologies - not the institutions, those got ass blasted as said - is still in living memory, there is little applicable prior knowledge to draw on, no giants to stand on the shoulders of but Vita's. I will be judging this on what they've demonstrated and done, not by what they have.
- The Stellar Ascendancy's research and development prospects are better than most here, but between being an isolated imperial successor state, the Mechanicus enclaves drop-kicking any attempt at building institutions for R&D they could find until Vita couped them, the war-band drop-kicking those institutions again after we left just as they might have otherwise hit their stride, they're mostly still building from the ground up. We have a boon bounty for helping them do it, even. Denva's experience at R&D is promising, but still in its early stages.
- Archaeology. Look, this is 40k Finding and reverse engineering old human tech, and acquired xeno-tech are core skillsets for any competent state's technology program. Here, Denva has their two centuries+ of living under the yoke of the Mechanicus enclaves and stealing or otherwise exfiltrating secrets from them while denying that they're doing it - and the Cogitare inherited a culture that prizes the ability to find and reproduce Archaeotech, and interally tried to reverse engineer and steal each other's secrets constantly, so the Stellar Ascendancy isn't unfamiliar... But they haven't actually had much opportunity to apply it outside of their bubble. Klyssar's nest was a particular bright spot, having their founding mythos rooted in a sink-or-swim application of this skill to the station they live on, but they've still taken a hell of a beating, and have not had much time or opportunity to let that ethos cook, you know? Denva's experience with exploration is limited, and with reverse engineering, narrow.
- Secrecy. In 40k, tech advantage can be retained for far longer than is realistic, but that presupposes you know how to do it. In that respect Denva could be better, but they also could be worse - they failed to deny all of their orbital manufacturing to the war-band, but while the war-band managed to jury rig the ability to use those captured facilities eventually, and they had developed novel attacks against psy shielding which may indicate some was captured, they noticeably did not have jammers, did not have more bots than could be explained by capture, and were USING that jury-rigged manufacturing to make what mostly appeared to be conventional (for them) designs. All in all, an expensive but valuable lesson for a polity that managed to avoid several worst case scenarios in this field. With the Cogitare being revitalized, the institutional ad-mech knowledge on the subject should become more prominent in their thinking as well. Denva has a ways left to go at preserving technological secrets, but they're making rapid progress.
- Are they experienced at Warfare?
- They had some intra-planetary squabbles that were extremely counterproductive to their overall fortunes, and we had to roll a nat 100 to beat it out of them. Then, they overcorrected and stopped making or staging war matériel almost altogether, and nearly got pwn'd by an otherwise easily stoppable corsair raid for it. Then, they didn't correct from the raid enough and took almost 30 years to get more warships, directly leading to their present condition. Denva's wisdom of what wars to prepare for and attempt is at best nascent and untested, if not outright dismissable as poor and self-destructive.
- The dust is still clearing from their first defensive war with an extraterrestrial threat, in which they folded like a lawn chair and barely managed to survive the aftermath through insurgency. Denva's experience in spaceborne defensive warfare is insignificant, and their starting point questionable.
- They have not fought a single naval battle as the aggressor, much less prosecuted an interplanetary war. Denva's experience in spaceborne offensive warfare is non-existent.
- In matters of planetary/ground warfare Denva is better. Not good, but better. It should not escape anyone's notice that Neablis planned to have a commander Crew candidate appear, but that Denva rolled too poorly for one to be available, leaving W as the best candidate even though open warfare isn't her wheelhouse at all. Old PDF gear and manuals fall into the same category as Vita's gifts of technology - they are not things the Stellar Ascendancy made or created by the sweat of their brow, they are not indications of maturity and experience in the field... and imperial PDF doctrine is kind of shit, anyways. Denva's experience in Planetary warfare is serviceable, but considerably underdeveloped.
- These factors collectively dictate that the Stellar Ascendancy really is a baby at warfare, even if not quite helpless. It should go without saying that War Hammer anythingis a bad place to be if you're green at warfare, least of all 40k. By any sane reckoning, that qualifies this civilization as being a child outright, in need of external support to reliably survive.
- But, what if they got that support from someone other than Vita? For that, we must ask...
- Are they experienced at Diplomacy?
- Secondus's Internal politics/diplomacy was a shitshow not too long ago. They've made great strides in theory, unification of the government and all, but is still facing one of its first major tests - the invasion is over, insurgency is likely squashed, but there is more to winning the peace than that. How they handle the Two Denvas divide will be quite telling. W is a real ace on their side here though. Denva's Internal diplomacy is mature for the purpose of an isolated state, but is mostly untested against the unique challenges imposed on it by the wider galaxy.
- Secondus's experience with External diplomacy is promising, but far too narrow to call mature. W knocked it out of the park interfacing with Vita, and pulling the wool over the local Mechanicus's eyes - but we know very little about how or even if they interfaced with Primus, and they have yet to interact with any of 40k's other polities on any terms except losing a war and winning an insurgency against the Echo of Apotheosis's war-band. The fractious nature of the planet's internal politics is a benefit to their experience here - Aevon, Denva (the country), the other nations, the Mechanicus enclaves, the monasteries, diplomacy and cold war with humans from positions of strength and weakness is something they have a wealth of institutional knowledge of... but how transferrable that is to the wider galaxy remains to be seen.
- It's also telling that foreign policy with system visitors had, until we left, been handled exclusively by Vita with no meaningful participation by the Secondus government(s).
- Secondus's demonstrated competence with planetary counter-espionage is superb. W and her Alphabetical Order need no introduction - but for the sake of completeness Aevon intelligence seized on Vita immediately and reframed the meeting and relationship to be on their terms, were overwhelmingly successful at hiding Vita's and Aevon's buildup and uplift from the Mechanicus Enclaves, and it clearly succeeded at its first major test against an extraterrestrial opponent by not just surviving the 11-year occupation but keeping Aevon chaos-free entirely and building some measure of secret assets to assist the relief of the siege, even if it fell short of what they'd have needed to avert their eventual fall on their own. Were it not for the huge, huge asterisk of the scope of this experience being in the management of a single planet and system assets, I'd be able to call their counter-espionage in general mature, but alas, that is the farthest thing from a small distinction.
- On the whole... there's some bright spots with their experience, but mostly where we personally put in lots of diplomatic effort, or wherever W looms menacingly. Their capabilities are wondrous - but their institutions are still extremely wet behind the ears.
- Science and Technology?
- Results? Lacking any other reason to call someone mature and able to live independently, success needs no justification, after all.
- But we're only having this conversation because people keep being disappointed with their results, so.
Like, I get it. Denva is more technologically advanced than real life earth, more unified than it, more populous than it, but when talking about if a civilization is mature and capable of surviving independently, the real world isn't what we're measuring against.
Chaos, The Imperium, The Orks, The Eldar, The Necrons, and maybe if you squint The Tau are.
By the rubric of what it takes to survive and thrive alongside or against all of them as an independent actor, Denva just isn't there yet, and probably won't be for some time.
That's the bottom line.
I mean, that's fair, but also the "baby/child/independent adult" framing is one I used mostly for rhetorical purposes, because when people asserted Denva not being a baby we need to spoon-feed / being not worth the trouble if they need to be spoon-fed, mostly the arguments I saw and used were...
Well, about their position and growth being reasonable, and future returns being better. Even the QM took that angle, for instance defending their research output by saying the time was spent booting up research institutions in the first place since Vita didn't set that up for them.
The impetus of this and my last post by contrast is to go... so what? So what if they're like a baby, needing to be coddled and spoon-fed? The corrolary is that they're rapidly growing and that their current capabilities will be a shadow of what they become, IF we accept that yes, they need the help and will continue needing help, like a baby.
So that's the framing I used, even though like you, I see them more as a friend I want to do well than something I... I mean, children aren't something you own either, but I get what you mean. I see them as a partner still growing into their own, want them to succeed, and I want to challenge the notion that we don't or shouldn't have to put in work to make it happen.
Because at least in that last respect, the metaphor of a child makes sense to me, even if Vita is not actually their parent - even if some amount of paternalism is inherent in the concept of uplift itself.
I find that horizontal rules do wonders for this. You can just type hr in square brackets and it'll auto expand to hr=3 /hr, as you see in the BBCode if you quote this.
Anyways.... this took forever to write and I took a break in the middle to have dinner, lmao. So now I have to catch up on the thread.
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Partial objection: we're not playing on the galactic stage, we're in a small pond here. Denva isn't up against The Imperium - it's up against abandoned dogmatic survivors here and there plus a cut-off Space Marine successor chapter (or chapter fragment, not sure). We're not up against the 13th Black Crusade, we're up against a Chaos pocket kingdom centered around a single forge world. (And the Daemon world on the other side but I legit have no picture of how that operates as a player in our sector, Chaos daemons don't have their own space navy.) The Aeldari presence is what they will put forth to protect one Maiden World. I dunno what the scale of the local Tyrannids, Necrons, and Orks are best described as, but they're probably proportional to the above.
They're each still much bigger fish than Denva, for sure. But they're nothing like the full immensity of the ancient galactic-scale powers that they're fragments of.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yet.
That's the horrifying kicker that Neablis keeps reminding us about. They're not up against the full immensity of the ancient galactic-scale powers those factions are fragments of yet. That's what takes this from being about Denva's survival in isolation to being about Vita's ability to thrive long term, too. Vita's wayfarer trait means she can't scale on her own - so if her close partners don't, she's, well.
The doom clock is aptly named, to put it lightly.
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What? I don't think that's the kicker at all. The threat isn't that the Indomitus Crusade, an entire Hive Fleet, the 14th Black Crusade, the Nth coming of The Beast, and an entire major Necron dynasty are going to dogpile Sector Thrace.
It's that the sector's existing players, those factions I was describing, will swing into proper expansion mode rather than whatever it is that's kept all this abandoned territory still abandoned for the last couple centuries.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Short term, sure. But am I wrong to assume that, in canon, Gulliman acts to reassert some level of control over Nihilus?
Do none of the greater bulk of the different races act there in force, after the great rift?
I'm not actually a 40k expert, I can't answer that with certainty, but this seems implausible. From page one Neablis said that this quest would scale up and up and up by orders of magnitude. Conflict with the capital b Big players will happen eventually.
The smaller factions splintered off from them, that's just in the short term. The stuff that might happen any turn now. It's not the stuff I thought anyone was talking about when the term "doom clock" came up, even if these are our current number one time pressure.
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