Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

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DragonParadox said:
I think the theory should be sound but there are only two ways I can think to so so.
  1. Pull warp-stuff into real space, otherwise known as a warp rift therefore daemons.
  2. Open your Geller Field while in the warp therefore daemons.
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Not necessarily, psykers are fully capable of siphoning from the warp, it's how they can affect things physically in the materium, we would only need to figure out the mechanics behind that to siphon energy from the warp.
If you want further safety, we could try to figure out how a gestalt entity can filter out influences and corruption from the warp.
 
[ ] Plan: We Make Manufactories To Make Manufactories
-[ ] [Free] Poke around some more in the databases, looking for anything in particular.
--[ ] You are morbidly curious about what has happened to the Eldar. By the time humanity had reached beyond Sol the first time, the Eldar Dominion was already the unshakable titan amongst the stars. Had been, according to what they told, for millions of years. And was so still by the time of your accident. What happened to them? Wait, what is this mention about "the Dark Eldar" in your self-censored notes about the sealed Mechanicus files linked to --MAJOR_COGNITOHAZARD_WARP_ENTITY_4--? You had quickly skimmed over the part as not urgently relevant at the time. Sigh. You can already feel your shielding starting to fray a bit again just when thinking about it. Literally. (Learn what you can about the current state of the Eldar, and also sacrifice a (hopefully) small amount of psychic shielding to learn about the Dark Eldar and their link to Slaanesh.)
-[ ] Diplomacy (Admech):
--[ ] Time to construct yet another false report, yay. Thank the stars for your diplomacy and reality-simulation modules. Without those, you would be worried about the report potentially showing inconsistencies. Give just enough to satisfy Thalya, but not to raise her hopes further. Also, continue subverting those interested in your puzzles and lessons, and see if you can maybe widen the net.
-[ ] Construction (1100 BP)
--[ ] Construction slot, 1st
---[ ] 10x Manufactories (100 BP, 50 CP)
---[ ] Shield Repair (50 BP)
---[ ] Trade Goods, Aevon (50 BP) (stored 20 -> 70)
-[ ] Research x2 (400 RP + 10 Anexa RP)
--[ ] Research slot, 1st
---[ ] Blueprint: 100 RP - Medium Void-shield installation (1000 BP, 50 CP)
---[ ] Small-craft Stealth (100 RP)
--[ ] Research slot, 2nd
---[ ] Machine spirit jamming (150 RP)
---[ ] Brain Implants (40 + 10 Anexa RP)
---[ ] Blueprint: 10/15 RP - Anti-personnel Bunker (20 BP, 2 CP)
-[ ] Pay rent (Trade Goods, Aevon 70 -> 55)
-[ ] Anexa active Action: Research (Brain Implants) - assists a research action you take, granting +5xLevel RP to the action. Will level on successful roll, scaled by the importance of the tech.
--[ ] [Free] Write-in: Warn Anexa that you just found that the Mechanicus and the Imperium were right about there being a "corruption" that you both will have to be careful about. Because it is a literal warp-based cognitohazard, particularly dangerous to the AI, but even resistant beings with "souls" like humans and machine spirits can be corrupted. Your shielding took a hit even with all the precautions you set in place, though fortunately it caused only minor fraying and nothing got through, it seems. Tell her that you are hoping to miniaturize your shielding fit for human sizes at some point, thought this is currently far off in the future. Especially important if she is interested in the topic, even in how to combat it. Because you had to seal the information regarding this topic into a memory vault. Just to stop your shield from continuously fraying from stray thoughts regarding it. Meaning that even during this conversation, you don't know more than the surface details for the very rough warning signs. You ask Anexa to promise to tell you if you or your tech starts to act weirdly, because it might save both of you if it comes to it.

-----

Plan finished, with the reasoning to follow. The most major change when compared to Alectai's plan is putting, once again, nearly all of our production towards, you guessed it: more manufactories! I'm doing this because if we want an underground version of the Medium Void-shield, which will cost 3000 BP. Ten more manufactories puts us at 1600 BP for the start of the next turn, enough so that we can finish it in two actions and still have some spare from just that. Which will hopefully go towards more manufactories, so something like this:

Turn 10 rough draft (construction)
1st construction slot (1600 BP)
Underground Medium Void Shield (1200/3000 BP)
4x Manufactory (100 BP)
2nd construction slot (1800 BP)
Underground Medium Void Shield (3000/3000 BP)
(Potential) 3rd construction slot (1800 BP) OR turn 11 start (1800 BP)
???

And I want this before we start even dreaming about launching shuttles into space or using a magnetic launch system, stealth or not. The kill-sats vere a nasty surprise, and we should prepare accordingly. A hidden void shield generator that can pop up from underground when needed (if raising it above-ground is even required for it to function) would go a long way to ensuring the integrity of our manufacturing site. Also, I want it underground because it seems like a big enough structure that we might have to worry it being noticable even while hidden with basic stealth if its on the surface.

On the research side, I'm somewhat counter-intuintively more interested in jamming instead of more advanced hacking. I'm taking this approach because I don't think we want to triggering the AdMech by trying to hack them before we are ready if we roll badly and they come after us. But jamming will be useful immediately if we kick off a war. Also, we can hack them if needed, it just won't be very fast or reliable.

Anyway, there is a reason brute-force methods like jamming are used in wars. Something that is both fast and actually semi-reliable, if not as devastating as hacking if it does succeed? Very useful in crippling both their weapons and troops. Should also compound nicely with our other defenses against the Mechanicus. Jamming their kill-sats, even if only enough to delay their launches so that they won't be synchronized? Now that would increase our survivability considerably. Electronic warfare stealth-satellites that we can flip on to jamming or use to hack things might be a good idea.

I also included a couple of write-ins, and would like to ask @Neablis if they are ok (and if the above-mentioned idea for an EW satellite would work).

First, regarding poking the databases (including the Inquisition's files) on the issue of the Eldar and the Dark Eldar / Slaanesh. The second is warning Anexa about the cognitohazard that is the Chaos without actually (hopefully) exposing her to it. I, for one, don't want to be constantly fixing our psychic shielding due to stray thoughts inside the head of one curious bean.

Just give her a heads up that there are some topics that might not be safe to research at the very least before we come up with some better counter-measures. I feel like we shouldn't leave her completely in the dark, because that doesn't really work out against the Chaos in the long run in most cases with people like Anexa.

Curiosity is something that the Chaos is good at exploiting, after all, and Vita now has the primer outlining their methods. Even if only on a very basic level.

EDIT: doing some typo correction and wording changes to the plan
 
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Soulforce said:
Not necessarily, psykers are fully capable of siphoning from the warp, it's how they can affect things physically in the materium, we would only need to figure out the mechanics behind that to siphon energy from the warp.
If you want further safety, we could try to figure out how a gestalt entity can filter out influences and corruption from the warp.
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Yeah but channeling is a major effort for psykers that risks Perils every single time. Effectively they too are opening a warp rift, just inside their souls and most of the time they can modulate it to desired results.
 
DragonParadox said:
Yeah but channeling is a major effort for psykers that risks Perils every single time. Effectively they too are opening a warp rift, just inside their souls and most of the time they can modulate it to desired results.
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Fair enough, with proper safety research, we could work out how to isolate the effects so that at worst we will just have to shut it down and do periodic maintenance to hinder anything to bad from breaching containment.
So while creating a rift can be dangerous with little to no safeties, proper security taking into account the volatility of the warp would reduce it to the point that even whatever daemon or peril might occur would just be dissassembled.
The best idea is to start small and figure out how to first close a rift forcibly before attempting to open one ourselves.
 
It's good to see that Vita's starting to understand the truth of the situation. She's slowly cutting through her large bias against the Imperium in that she only saw it as a "fascist civilization" and realizing that while very flawed they aren't a comically evil civilization like she originally believed that propagandizes about everything, just one that's trying to survive in a harsh galaxy.
 
Soulforce said:
Fair enough, with proper safety research, we could work out how to isolate the effects so that at worst we will just have to shut it down and do periodic maintenance to hinder anything to bad from breaching containment.
So while creating a rift can be dangerous with little to no safeties, proper security taking into account the volatility of the warp would reduce it to the point that even whatever daemon or peril might occur would just be dissassembled.
The best idea is to start small and figure out how to first close a rift forcibly before attempting to open one ourselves.
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I think this can be done, in fact I think it has been done with the psy-tech of the old Eldar Empire, to an almost unimaginable level of sophistication. They had what were basically wish machines, reality engines, but the Eldar stopped using it after the fall. Why they did so may indicate how possible it is in present circumstances.
  1. If the craftworlers stopped using that tech for cultural reasons, since it encourages seeking sensation and therefore Slaanesh than we are fine, we are not trying to make super-hedonism happen, just exotic matter
  2. If they stopped because the conditions of the warp no longer permited such synthetic psytech we might be out of luck
 
Negentropy said:
@Neablis, could we increase success chances of developing a following within the Mechanicus through diplomatic action by "reserving" BP or RP for doing tasks/building things to win them over, or is such things more something we need to find out this turn through diplomatic contact, which we could choose to do in the next (or following) turn(s)?
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Generally no, any small amount of BP or RP that's needed for the diplomatic action should get produced as part of the diplomatic action, just to keep things simpler. The exception is when you roll badly and it makes sense, I might dock you trade goods to represent you providing materials to the mechanicus.

Edit: One way to do better would be to spend two diplomatic actions on something. That would be more complicated than just giving you a reroll, but with the increased amount of attention you'd be less likely to make mistakes and more able to fix any issues.

More broadly, how well a diplomatic action goes is determined by two things. First is the roll, which determines where in the probability distribution you land. Modifiers help with that, but pretty much the only way to get more is to recruit a new crewmember who's better at diplomacy. You have a +10, Anexa has a +5 and she's probably not getting much better.

The second part is basically how well it should go, essentially where the probability distribution lies. This is determined by what you're trying to do, how clever you are about it (basically "how good is your write-in"), as well as your capabilities. You have new options now that you have basic hacking. Will that show up as a modifier to the roll? No. But it will mean the same roll will give you better results now than it would have before because you have more capabilities.

Soulforce said:
So, just a thought, but with some better grounding in physics and some research into the warp and psytech, wouldn't it be possible to use a mix of quantum mechanics and Einsteins mass-energy equivalence equation allow us to make matter from energy siphoned off from the warp?
I could see us eventually making exotic matter that doesn't manifest naturaly that way.
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This is super-theoretical. I'm not even going to say no - but I'll say that anything like this is at the very far end of the tech tree. Most of your research so far has been adapting principles you know or understanding new principles you have literature on. Really Good Robotics is the one case where you are trying to invent something totally new, and there's a reason it's your most expensive tech by a long shot. Expect to have to go through like a dozen expensive techs to get to the place you're suggesting.

meianmaru said:
I also included a couple of write-ins, and would like to ask @Neablis if they are ok (and if the above-mentioned idea for an EW satellite would work).
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Write-ins are fine. It's good to mention it to Anexa so she doesn't feel betrayed later, though she's going to be insatiably curious about the whole thing.

The EW satellite is more down the "jamming" route. If you do the jamming tech you'll unlock a module that basically DDOS's machine spirits, and you'll be able to make it into an installation and a ship component to essentially do what you're suggesting.

Toboe said:
Would augments with machine-spirits we crafted be enough of a backdoor, or would we need to create a super-special-hacking-device?
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It depends on exactly what your goal is. If your goal is to essentially servitorize Thalya, then you'd need super-special-hacking device that would probably require the next level of hacking tech & need to be custom-designed on top of that. If you wanted something that could spy on her, or an augment you could shut off at will, or use as a backdoor to disable her for a minute, then you could probably build something now, though the more specialized it is the more likely you'd succeed. She's not going to install something without careful investigation, and there'd be a roll to see if she noticed your backdoor.
 
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Neablis said:
It depends on exactly what your goal is. If your goal is to essentially servitorize Thalya, then you'd need super-special-hacking device that would probably require the next level of hacking tech & need to be custom-designed on top of that. If you wanted something that could spy on her, or an augment you could shut off at will, or use as a backdoor to disable her for a minute, then you could probably build something now, though the more specialized it is the more likely you'd succeed. She's not going to install something without careful investigation, and there'd be a roll to see if she noticed your backdoor.
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Oooh, nice.
Spy, dis-able aug/hack for temp are available.
So we could in theory start spreading Spy augments and hope to get some hot gossip on the space station mechanicus.

Can the aug-machine-spirits also be used to subvert other machine spirits in their vicinity? (For example if the acolyte tasked with maintenance has one of our augs)
 
We could try to talk our way onto a space station. Claim we have found a nav box that hints part of the disintegrating ship we are tracking landed elsewhere in the system.
 
Neablis said:
Write-ins are fine. It's good to mention it to Anexa so she doesn't feel betrayed later, though she's going to be insatiably curious about the whole thing.
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Yes, that was basically the idea. "This shit is dangerous to even think about. I'm going to tell you the specifics later on, so please don't try to look into it until I've managed to cook up some better counter-measures. And here, also some very rough, very sanitized warning signs about potential changes in behaviour and such that can tell you it might be happening."
 
10ebbor10 said:
Hmm. Can the orbital launching coilgimun shoot down weapon sats.
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You want
Anti-Orbital Defenses (100 BP, 5 CP) A single large lance dug into a reinforced bunker. Will prevent hostile forces from claiming the orbits uncontested, but can be neutralized by orbital bombardment or ground invasion.

Which you've already got designed. They'd get into a duel with the satellites and probably win if you had good shields.

Toboe said:
Can the aug-machine-spirits also be used to subvert other machine spirits in their vicinity? (For example if the acolyte tasked with maintenance has one of our augs)
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Ehhh if you designed them that way, maybe? Especially if the acolytes in question knew that's what they were doing and were trying to make it happen?

Toboe said:
Might be able to shoot rockets into orbit which later collectively activate and go hit weapon-sats.
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Launching rockets is rarely a stealthy activity.
 
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Personally, I think I like the idea of going for a schism in the mechanicus. We'd need to invest a large number of diplo actions, but I think it's doable. Beyond that, I think that our previous subversion action has probably not lost it's effects. It's been 20 years, yes? But most of those interested solved 3-4 puzzles in the time we were monitoring, but we installed 120, if memory serves. Plus, there are always new recruits who will see them and not know how old they are. If we're lucky, maybe those hunting down the puzzles have formed a small community, like people solving ARGs in real life do. Of course, how much effect our previous action still has will probably depend on how good our next roll is.

As for the space station, I have seen people theorizing that they may be explorators, but I think it's more likely they are the ones overseeing the weapons satellites. That being said, chances are the only way to find out is with a diplomacy action. As for how, I'd probably advice a sort of wait-and-see approach. All we know about them so far is that they were wiped from the database.we should observe them and see what kind of communications, if any, they send. If they have regular correspondence with the mechanicus, we can surmise they are on a sanctioned mission, and get into contact that way. If there are very few communications, then maybe they are explorators. If there are none, then talking to them in any kind of non-suspicious way might be impossible, and we may need to rely solely on spying on them.
 
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Neablis said:
You want
Anti-Orbital Defenses (100 BP, 5 CP) A single large lance dug into a reinforced bunker. Will prevent hostile forces from claiming the orbits uncontested, but can be neutralized by orbital bombardment or ground invasion.

Which you've already built. They'd get into a duel with the satellites and probably win if you had good shields.
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I thought we only had built anti-air emplacements? We have anti-orbitals designed, but I don't remember or (*checks*) see any mention about lance-installations being built.
 
zack omega24 said:
Wouldn't it be safer if we built a Miniaturized Psychic Shielding for Anexa before giving her that information?
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Was it safer for the Emperor to not tell about about the Chaos to his Primarchs, before he managed to properly counter the Chaos? Especially with someone as naturally curious as Anexa?

And while I would love to go all in with anti-Chaos-countermeasures immediately, we unfortunately have the more immediate problem of AdMech taking our very limited attention away from it. So I'm hoping that not going into details, her being a human with a soul, and also spending basically all her time inside the ship's shielding will be enough.
 
ArticulateJargon said:
Personally, I think I like the idea of going for a schism in the mechanicus. We'd need to invest a large number of diplo actions, but I think it's doable. Beyond that, I think that our previous subversion action has probably not lost it's effects. It's been 20 years, yes? But most of those interested solved 3-4 puzzles in the time we were monitoring, but we installed 120, if memory serves. Plus, there are always new recruits who will see them and not know how old they are. If we're lucky, maybe those hunting down the puzzles have formed a small community, like people solving ARGs in real life do. Of course, how much effect our previous action still has will probably depend on how good our next roll is.

As for the space station, I have seen people theorizing that they may be explorators, but I think it's more likely they are the ones overseeing the weapons satellites. That being said, chances are the only way to find out is with a diplomacy action. As for how, I'd probably advice a sort of wait-and-see approach. All we know about them so far is that they were wiped from the database.we should observe them and see what kind of communications, if any, they send. If they have regular correspondence with the mechanicus, we can surmise they are on a sanctioned mission, and get into contact that way. If there are very few communications, then maybe they are explorators. If there are none, then talking to them in any kind of non-suspicious way might be impossible, and we may need to rely solely on spying on them.
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I don't think the space station oversees the weapon sats. It's just too far away. A week's commute for maintenance.


Neablis said:
Which you've already got designed. They'd get into a duel with the satellites and probably win if you had good shields
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How big is our river?

Can we, for example, design a sub and attack the sats from the ocean?
 
"Faster hacking" is only as risky as we let it be - QM will say what we roll for and how to use it safely, and much of the risk of current methods is because of how slow it is. Meanwhile, based on earlier answers, jamming is not going to scale enough on its own, so we're back to building up towards foiling their WMDs. Including building up electronic warfare platforms to deploy said jamming, which is itself something that raises the risk of being noticed.

Basically, fast hacking early is strongly desireable because it dovetails with mechanicus subversion overall and lets us disarm the threat bit by bit over time, same as we're working towards with anti-air and anti-orbital defenses. But physical buildup will always be easier to discover and attribute to something we want to protect than digital.

Hacking in general is one of the lowest profile acts of subversion we can do, given how thoroughly we mask our trail and how we can red herring anything that does notice into blaming it on a rival enclave rather than the more outlandish explanations of the "backwards" natives or a mythical enemy (AI) doing it.

We were damn good at covering our tracks before we knew what machine spirits even were. We've only gotten better at it.

Go Time will be won by many approaches working in tandem - including electronic war platforms using jamming, I'm not saying we should never do that. Rather, Im arguing that we should not, and arguably cannot discard an appriach as powerful and stealthy as hacking to subvert their systems ahead of time.

That said, I very much want to do the "secrets of machine spirits" research to firm up our knowledge and make that hacking even better.
DragonParadox said:
The only thing that might change those odds is AI, but
A) They would not take AI because of left over imperial prejudices
B) Our shielding isn't good enough to stand up to the attention of Chaos which they would get if they start expanding with that
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These are easily - albiet not quickly - solveable problems. Who do you trust more, the creed of the Imperials you actively want to avoid, or the AI that saved you from the mechanics killsats?

We spent the shinies to get an easy to ally with civilization. Not leaning in to that is a mistake - civs that are palateable and can defend themselves will basically only exist when we help make them.
 
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Neablis said:
Launching rockets is rarely a stealthy activity.
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The Idea was to have smaller rockets that are thrown into orbit with
Neablis said:
Magnetic Catapult launch system (1000 BP, 50 CP) Allows you to convert up to 500 ground build capacity to void build capacity with no loss. Stealthier than you'd think.
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Which then act as inert space debris until we think we have enough rockets and then they all activate and try to blow in the kill sats.

I.e. until we pull the trigger they do not act as rockets.
 
Prime 2.0 said:
"Faster hacking" is only as risky as we let it be - QM will say what we roll for and how to use it safely, and much of the risk of current methods is because of how slow it is. Meanwhile, based on earlier answers, jamming is not going to scale enough on its own, so we're back to building up towards foiling their WMDs. Including building up electronic warfare platforms to deploy said jamming, which is itself something that raises the risk of being noticed.

Basically, fast hacking early is strongly desireable because it dovetails with mechanicus subversion overall and lets us disarm the threat bit by bit over time, same as we're working towards with anti-air and anti-orbital defenses. But physical buildup will always be easier to discover and attribute to something we want to protect than digital.

Hacking in general is one of the lowest profile acts of subversion we can do, given how thoroughly we mask our trail and how we can red herring anything that does notice into blaming it on a rival enclave rather than the more outlandish explanations of the "backwards" natives or a mythical enemy (AI) doing it.

We were damn good at covering our tracks before we knew what machine spirits even were. We've only gotten better at it.

Go Time will be won by many approaches working in tandem - including electronic war platforms using jamming, I'm not saying we should never do that. Rather, Im arguing that we should not, and arguably cannot discard an appriach as powerful and stealthy as hacking to subvert their systems ahead of time.

That said, I very much want to do the "secrets of machine spirits" research to firm up our knowledge and make that hacking even better.
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My idea is to first build up our ability jam everything. And its not really noticable, if we build the installation(s) underground, like I'm also planning for the Medium Void-shield installation. Jamming-satellites and all the other more noticable stuff would come later. What I want basically is the earliest possible chance to complete our defense-onion with the third outermost layer.

Something where the nukes from both the kill-sat and the enclaves would first have to manage to hit our manufacturing centre through jamming fast enough in a synchronized strike before the AA swats everything out of the sky and in great enough numbers to overwhelm the void-shield. Or try to go through the ground-defenses (which I'm also planning to build up) with their forces, with a long jog to the base as the AA should prevent them just dropping their forces on it.

EDIT: Oh, and maybe three or more anti-orbital lance-installations to thin out the kill-sats before all of them manage to drop their payloads. As well as there for any other nasty surprises in the space.

So jamming is there to give our AA the time to swat as many nukes out of the sky as feasible while the void shield takes care those that get through. And jamming also making approaching the base on foot a living hell for the heavily augmented and mechanized forces of AdMech. Throw in some bunkers, light and medium tanks plus some artillery? They are not getting through easily with their relatively small elite forces.
 
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meianmaru said:
I thought we only had built anti-air emplacements? We have anti-orbitals designed, but I don't remember or (*checks*) see any mention about lance-installations being built.
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Typo - yeah, you have it designed but not produced.

zack omega24 said:
Wouldn't it be safer if we built a Miniaturized Psychic Shielding for Anexa before giving her that information?
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Yes, certainly. To some extent merely being inside your old ship is a decent safety net, since your psychic shielding covers anything inside it.

10ebbor10 said:
How big is our river?

Can we, for example, design a sub and attack the sats from the ocean?
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Not big enough for a serious sub. You could build a little cargo sub that could stealthily deliver your avatar, some bots and some cargo to the city downriver, but nothing that mounted orbit-capable weaponry.

Toboe said:
The Idea was to have smaller rockets that are thrown into orbit with

Which then act as inert space debris until we think we have enough rockets and then they all activate and try to blow in the kill sats.

I.e. until we pull the trigger they do not act as rockets.
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Yeah, that might work. Almost easier to just build fighters - but this would be pretty versatile as well. You'd probably need small-craft stealth and then to build stealthier missiles, but them not needing to get to orbit would make them relatively cheap.

As a side note for all of the chatter going around, remember that perfect is the enemy of good. If you take a hundred years to build up the absolutely perfect counter to all of the mechanicus stuff then you'll be all set to stomp them only for a tyranid or space marine or necron or chaos fleet to jump in and wreck all of your preparations.

You don't have infinite time to spend mucking around on this planet. Don't take a hundred years as word of god either - that's a random estimate. But you aren't playing in an empty sandbox, and the longer you wait the bigger and badder things will be when you finally get out into the broader sector.
 
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