there is however many of her she wants, but just cloning yourself can't make you a good substitute for the innovative power of a mature space age civilization composed of trillions of sophs
20:05
her tinker power, right now at least, is based around already-existing technology and designs. While she's not stupid, she probably isn't going to be able to invent mature ontotech by herself, so she's limited to whatever the Empire had at the time
20:06
(which is substantially more mature ontotech, to be sure, since they managed to get between universes at all. But if it was good enough that they could just universe skip as easily as a trip down to the chemist and solve the problem, they would've just done that in all likelyhood.)
the Transcend rather likes to be lazy efficient, so their intervention is less "maximum possible" as it is "minimum necessary"
20:10
but there's no telling what the actual maximum is
20:11
traveling between universes would be, as a upper bound, substantially more difficult than interstellar travel i expect
20:12
because otherwise the problem would get solved more quickly by virtue of adventurers seeing a problem and proceeding to adventure. While the Transcend might prefer efficiency, that doesn't mean plenty of other sophs wouldn't show up to help if it was as easy as traveling to the outer systems(edited)
there's already a comprehensive archive on site, and given current demonstrated capabilities (taking a few dozen kilos out of the universe, modifying them and adding a few more kilos, and then putting them back), they couldn't sent through all that much more than what could be produced on-site
20:17
a ship would be a few orders of magnitude of a step up, as far as mass goes.
20:18
well, i suppose that assumes mass is the limiting factor
20:19
maybe if there are some very tricky ontotech doohickeys that are very hard to manufacture, it'd be worthwhile to send thme
20:19
but other than that, i'd think the best thing to do would be to drop in a prepared team in the form of a box of metaphorical hard drives of mindstates
teleportation would be a good choice so long as there's a form of teleportation that fits
20:36
on earth, teleportation that needs infrastructure at both ends is still usable as 'free' teleportation in some cases, because the shard can be at both ends
20:36
but Simurgh would have to use teleportation that doesn't need a receiver of any sort
but that's the Shard's shtick. They're all off in different dimensions sitting on empty alternate earths, reaching through dimensions to anchor themselves to people's brains and do power-y stuff. A bunch of powers works directly off of bringing stuff from other dimensions or otherwise moving matter between them; IIRC that's how a lot of matter 'creation' actually works.
that or any other sort of tinkertech weapon, probably
20:44
though, now that i think about it, that might be difficult for the Simurgh to achieve
20:45
She'd have to break String Theory out and control her into making the weapon; IIRC Simurgh, despite being strong and powerful, doesn't have any sort of 'administrator access' that would let her just co-op String Theory's shard
i dunno, could Simurgh actually stop the equivalent of a Imperial AKV with a nanotech payload? Those things are rather more sprightly than a chemical rocket
20:49
she sort of just... throws stuff, right? Throws it, or grabs it if she's in telekinetic range
20:49
or uses tinker tech if she has it available.
20:50
but that relies a lot on her foresight, and WoG is that doesn't work so well with the whole free-will thing unless there's a shard behind it oppressing it, so between that and being military hardware specifically designed for dodging while trying to reach a target...
20:51
(granted, they aren't designed to work in a atmosphere or function as a launch vehicle)
in the end battle, Scion, who's basically a group of shards, ends up dying to a energy weapon (i think it was from String Theory?) which directly hit his real body. From other entities, which we can guess are on the large side as far as shards go because they have multiple strong powers, a shard is basically big-room-sized and isn't especially durable(edited)
21:18
notably, Eden dies after she's stabbed by a knife, albeit with Contessa's power to guide it.
21:22
whole entities, on the other hand, are very large by virtue of being composed of a damned lot of shards. Literally "planet dwarfing"
21:26
though it's not set in stone, every so often i remember a detail that shifts things one way or the other
21:27
trying to pin down a size for various pieces of a aggregate intelligence is not the easiest of tasks, i guess
21:27
I really need to read what's been posted on the sequel so far, i've heard Simurgh comes into play in a big way so maybe we'd learn more about what the endbringers are, like if they're actually whole shards or just part of it with the rest properly in another dimension
On the question of guessing PRT ratings, at least once they have a chance to figure stuff out a bit, but before Exponential Escalation takes hold:
Blaster 3 (techlekinesis applied to moving electrons; i.e., lightning)
Brute 4 (she's got the mil-spec basic package, but that's pretty much concentrated on durability and regen, not strength)
Master 5 (neural laces multitask and remote-control like whoa)
Mover 2 (techlekinetic low-altitude flight, plus double-jumping and all those hax)
Thinker 6 (smrt)
Tinker HOLY FUCK
00:33
Fully mature ontotechnology is "Shaker 15+/Trump 15+", which is another way of saying "God". No-one's gonna have that, because it turns all stories into "I decided that everything would be perfect forever. It was. THE END."
And, yes, said mature ontotech can be used to deny things strongly enough that they never existed. Omnipotence is fun that way.
As for what one soph can do... well, there's this thing called the Magic of Friendship Technology of Synergy.
...also, the Transcend is really smug about its ability to be the pebble with the deciding vote. Somewhere in a Cirys swarm far away, an efficiency submind is complaining that that was actually a really extravagant care package and it could have managed with, ooh, a quarter of the mass-energy budget, maybe less. (A kindness submind points out that that's why they don't let the efficiency submind do the operation planning on its own.)
the highest rated tinker in the entire series was a tinker 15 who (minor spoilers for the Worm sequel) built a giant tower that was designed to shoot a entire planet's atmosphere into space for... something. Possibly to shoot down a entity or such, but the shard behind it was a little crazy and the poor tinker who got that shard didn't have a say in the matter. It was moderately Von Neumann, but a large part of the hardware was built directly by the shard-host and some of the more advanced materials were directly extruded from their body, as opposed to properly manufacturing either of those in a scalable fashion.
00:48
Taylor comes in above that
00:49
So a non numerical ranking, right next to Contessa's "Thinker Don't Ask Just Run", is well deserved
WRT to space, incidentally, inasmuch as the Lunar Fuck-You Gun will be a thing, relevant work-canon here is the Simurgh has, among other function, the job of keeping humanity limited to Earths, as that's where the shards can touch; so while manned space flight is going to get shot down, she doesn't interdict all the commsats, say. If you have a way to precog-shield whatever non-sophont payload you're going to launch - to make sure its aura of THIS HURTS YOU doesn't reach her - you can sneak one past her.
00:53
This, incidentally, is my fanon for how Sphere got the Simurgh's attention in the worst way. Just dropping stuff on Luna wasn't a problem. Dropping stuff on Luna that was going to be a moonbase in the future (i.e., presenting the possibility of humans outside the shard-zone), that's a problem big enough to rate her personal attention.
isn't a soph one of the better ways to fuck with pre-cog? Namely a soph with influence who doesn't have a shard-suppressed volition and has proper firewalls?
As another note, in this AU, while there are multiple parallel Earths - which is not the normal for even that universe; meeting that shard will be interesting - they're not used to house shards. The shards, in this interpretation, are symbiotes that live along the brane-edge and not physical entities as such, 'cause I like that interpretation much better than really oversized, poorly optimized computing devices.
that's fair, having shards that lamely sit somewhere like a blob of eldritch is boring and turns the best solution into "reverse engineer dimension-hopping and then drop a nuke on it"
This is also, in this AU, why it takes/would have taken, assuming no intervention, Flechette's power to kill Scion, because it's the shard designed as an inter-entity weapon, and as such can manage tricks like "hitting all possible versions of/all points on the quantum probability curve of an object simultaneously" and "firing at right angles to reality". You could blast away at Scion all you wanted with conventional mass-energy weapons, and it wouldn't do anything, 'cause you can't hit the symbiote/shard/core; only it's mass-puppet in four-space.
i was thinking something along the lines of "if a Tinker 15 builts a giant atmosphere shooty tower, what does a Tinker HOLY FUCK do?" "Build a Cirys Swarm, duh."
Except that's really more of the Transcend's/weakly godlikes shtick, and she's probably not going to build a God. That's the sort of thing you leave to a group of professionals, preferably with a century or two to work out the kinks.
But nothing says that she can't wake up a copy of the Transcend...(edited)
05:23
(of course, that would rather derail the story a bit. Perhaps something to save until after the planet is saved)
Presumably the upgrade included both the presence of mind to recognize the hazard of attempting god-making, and several historic records of how poorly it can go.
This is a common fanon conflict; many people say tinker ought to be a sufficient general-purpose warning that they could have whatever, and the shard-oriented theory of of power categories (I.e. the theory which says that power categories are terms in which shards think, which does have WOG support AFAIK), vs. many people saying that the purpose of power ratings as an administrative tool is to give at-a-glance sense of the power-set of a parahuman and what tactics need to be used to counter them , and thus it's essentially vital to record (either as main stats or as sub-ratings of tinker), the effective ratings granted by a given para-human's main forms of tinker-tech, so as to facilitate actually engaging with them on a tatical level
Tinkers gear-swapping is technically possible but highly unusual; most orgs don't have the size to sustain it and tinkers can't trivially work on each other's gear they just have better odds than the rest of us?
17:35
And they tend to have pretty hard-coded themeing; we remember dragon and armsmaster but there's a reason that they're the best tinkers in the game
17:35
And part of that is "they can make tools to solve specific problems with unusual versatility"
17:37
Compared to the person who is suck with only stuff with pre-designated hard-coded timers , or only nano-goo, or only dimensional pockets, they can do a lot
Eh, not really; it's important to remember that threat-ratings are tactical warnings not measures of potential
17:50
A late-game taylor with a strong tech-base and a lot of infrastructure is functionally unbeatable, but that's basically just saying "once she's won, she's won"; she's still constrained by the dance of atoms and common sense , by the sheer limits of mass and power, in a manner that makes her not even really an s-class until she has a lot more momentum and infrastructure than I expect she can realistically get without being pretty visible for a decently long period of time; I'd contently rate her at the 9-11 range; powerful and a massive threat, but by no means chart-breaking
17:54
Speaking of which; I think that actually you've underrated her pretty massively as a mover; any flight at all probably warrants something in the 5-6 area, since we're getting out of the point where normal PRT members can even seriously consider hindering her in terms of mobility; standard normie tactics for dealing with flyers are shoot them, net them, foam them, and the self-same telekinesis she's using to fly mitigates that kind of plan substantially? I"m assuming "low-altitude flight" here as >5m, such that you're capable of pretty much no-selling anything which depends on melee; that power alone means capturing her requires very good tactics or or specialized parahumans
17:58
Also; her master rating comes under the same category as the gun-based blaster power; it's dependent on her access to combat-ready drones to function in the sense of a master rather than a thinker; while such hypothetically exists without the aid of her power in practice they're so unheard of in street-level combat that having them at all is a tinker power
Neuralace and whatnot being just the controls to tinker powers in combat. Now rolling out memetics would actually be master behavior, but is probably too hard on the will of others(edited)
The main reason I decided on "Tinker: Holy Fuck" is the one thing she can do that canon tinkers can't: understand exactly how everything works , which includes the ability to teach other people how everything works and how to build more of it. That's even more powerful than self-replication, because those people now have their own understanding of it that they can build on, or pass along themselves.
tl;dr Armsmaster can build a nanothorn warhead; Dragon can examine it and build many nanothorn warheads; but e!Taylor can give someone a masters in nanoengineering and turn them loose to found Nanothorn Industries, Inc., producers of ridiculously lethal weaponry in many convenient form factors and assorted spin-off products.(edited)
That's what really makes her chart-breaking: from the PRT's perspective, she can turn people into self-replicating tinkers . Using nothing but words and a whiteboard.
Raising an army of new supers
We finally have a cape name: warmind
20:14
Her entire schtick, from her warbots to her attempts at getting a package off earth to why her self replicating tech is so terrifying revolves around building a force
How is that categorically more dangerous than, say, Teacher, or even Crane the Harmonious? (who, to be fair, are amongst the most dangerous non-natural-disaster parahumans in the setting)
But also part of my point here is - I think you're radically underestimating the ease with which you can train new engineers in a totally new construction methods
Esp since any optimizations beyond "mundane good schools" are going to be so dependent on specific psychological quirks that they won't transfer between species
11:22
Then make them no longer baseline!
Now you're Nilbog and Teacher at the same time
11:22
You'd honestly get shit done faster keeping the secrets to yourself
11:22
And pretending to be the next coming of dragon
11:23
Until you had a lot of good PR
11:23
And by a lot I mean "Your neo-guild is now the main hero org in the US" good PR
Well, Teacher can make conventional tinkers (who still don't understand what they do), at the cost of crippling their faculties with his loyalty-fu. That's not as potent as being able to stick "My First Nanomachines: Little Rascals for Little Rascals" or "Dr. Faust's Guide to Genetic Mutants You Can Make At Home" up on t'interwebs and expect results. (Not that that's what you'd call efficient pedagogy, but the thing is that it is possible .)
11:30
(Nor is either of those likely to happen, either. Is just an example.)
Also, it's pretty certain that it won't be very long before people are screaming "S-class threat!", so I am absolutely on-board with the need to be an S-class threat with really good PR .
See my main point is that making genetic mutants at home is something that you genuinely can't do with all the genetic engineering textbooks in the world; that knowledge is dependent on a context of technologies, prerequisite knowledge, logistical and engineering considerations; from the perspective of a PRT threat-rating this context adds, at most "Shrug, I guess we should up her thinker rating a few notches"; it doesn't transcend thier ability to describe her as a tinker-class threat
11:33
That's the point of the Sleeper
11:34
People were complaining about having total bone-deep knowledge of every random worldbuilding detail, so wildbow was experimenting with more mysterious elements
Short version is that it's an encyclopedia of practical engineering/colony design library complete with helpful expert systems working out the Path to That Thing You Want, primarily intended for use in survival situations where what you need is a communications laser that can reach the local stargate relay, and what you have is a rock.
11:40
Inspired by something I remember from A Fire Upon the Deep , ISTR, but essentially it works out a big ol' project plan for you, complete with helpful descriptions of how to perform each step, even when it comes to things like "make charcoal; find some rocks that look like this and behave like that; test them in these ways; etc., etc."
...you know I would probably have too much fun going camping somewhere with that and seeing "okay, so this week's project is seeing if I can get to [x]..."
That sounds like a tremendously useful device; I still wonder how long you'd have to use it before you could do any of that work without constant direction by it, though? Especially for anything more complicated than, like, late-20th century tech
That's not something that she's going to put out there on its own, because it's ridiculously dangerous in the wrong hands or even many of the right hands. But if she thinks that a detailed plan to let people grow spider-silk skin weaves using only common household ingredients is something the world should have, it's something that can provide a detailed set of baseline-friendly step-by-step instructions for how to get there from here.
I guess part of my complaint here is "modern engineering is still five worlds of black-boxing and wider than any human could learn in three lifetimes; the only pragmatic advantages over tinkering it has is when it's implemented on the scale of a civilization"
Turning the result of a complex engineering project into a simple black box with nice input and nice outputs and describable behaviour, such that it can be used without any understanding of the (very complex) internal mechanics
To an extent, yes. Things likely to go out for wide deployment will, of necessity, be very retro indeed by Imperial standards.
But on the other hand, producing devices that can be used and maintained line-replaceable-unit style won't be a problem. And within her eventual organization, there's nothing to stop her from bringing on the tachydidactics and zapping knowledge into people the fast way. Apart from having to cover it up to avoid looking like the next coming of Teacher, I suppose.
Like I said; I think maintaining a very good rep and pretending to be the next Dragon (who already has very line-replaceable, user-maintainable gear) would be the best angle
11:49
Then you can lean into the upgrades with a well-rehersed PR campaign
11:50
Rather than tanking a PR-offensive from the PRT when some random thinking figures out what you're doing
11:52
Trying to be exceptional but within the existing paradigm works better, I think; Taylor's not such an OCP that she can crush even the local powers without a lot of leadup(edited)
On the other hand, "Technically, yes, I'm an S-class threat with my army of presumably self-replicating warbots, but on the other hand, my army of presumably self-replicating warbots only came out to help fight Leviathan and then left peacefully. Have fun explaining why you don't want their help next Endbringer attack."
Better yet, the army of presumably self-replicating warbots is helping with the cleanup, rescuing survivors, providing supplies and medical care, and one of them rescuing a small girl's kitten from a tree in the middle of a flooded park has 10 million hits on YouTube. Your move, adverse PR guys.
(To be fair, it's pretty clear from the comparison of our chosen starting conditions, that I'm much more interested in the lead-up logistics and you're more interested in the end-game slapdown, I think)
Yeah. That's where you start out with the secrecy. But when you have to break the secrecy, you should go big. The kind of big where your adversaries more or less have to put up with you or look like idiots. Like, say, Endbringer attacks, where in the aftermath you have the chance to point out to your press conference that of course they're self-replicating, because how else can you get enough of them to make a meaningful, lifesaving difference against an Endbringer? And, yes, you understand the reasoning behind the PRT's concern for such things, but it's a bad policy that would have got a shit-ton of people killed had you gone along with it. So sorry.
11:58
In the early stages, of course, the best plan is the much simpler "hide things well and don't tell anyone".
I mean, this is your first try at an anti-Endbringer weapon. Not only does no-one need to know about it before you need to use it on one, but no-one should know about it in case things go very wrong indeed.
maybe let people see you with ONE warbot, that is clearly branded or something, so that when they see many they go "aha that is Taylors" and not "oh god what ELSE is happening?"
Before then, it's much better to misdirect. Keep everyone's attention on the wildly-eccentric maybe-or-maybe-not-case-53 rogue who's playing both sides of the fence and keeps leaving gifts in front of the PRT building in large bright fuchsia boxes with a ribbon on top.
I have several objections to this, but first and most vital is - hiding things well is one of the hardest things for a tinker to do; the kind of "A random suburban household suddenly starts taking in industrial resources like it's a factory" is explicitly called out as something factions are looking for in order to get valuable tinker recruits?
Oh, they won't. But it's a long way between that and making all the necessary connections.
To a certain extent, I'm playing by one of the themes I have for the ISS, which is the way that they constantly irritate other intelligence agencies by playing by James Bond rules in a universe that ought to run by le Carré rules. Which is to say: flamboyant misdirection .
The sort of thing that makes the PRT dismiss connections between her and those events in the same way as they would dismiss the idea that Mouse Protector has been secretly behind Cauldron, the Elite, and the Bavarian Illuminati all along.
That's a plausible narrative, it just seems less effective to me than just being non-mind-breaking-ly honest
12:11
keeping your capacity at 10% above what they think is sensible and revealing old capacities as new capacities when they fit into the campaign
12:13
You end up fighting a lot of people earlier, but you can still run rings around orgs on an institutional level and you don't waste energy on subterfuge that mostly exists to make you look cooler
12:15
(And honestly Taylor was going to beat those guys up as an affront to civility from square one)(edited)
It's honestly pretty much the same plan except with the words "troll them" crossed out and replaced with "troll them while pretending to be a legitimate businesswoman" though
(I mean, thinkers are known for occasionally going off down rabbit holes of bad conclusions when given insufficient or subtly wrong data. I'm picturing Watchdog's thinkers declaring that they have a Case Mauve, Nine, Aargh My Head, dammit, right there , and whoever sorts their output not believing a word of it.)
Well, regarding that:
On the former, apart from being about to have a bad experience with the official heroes and no particular way to maintain a secret identity at this point, both this Taylor and her advisor are pretty confident that not only will working within the system not work, but that the system will actively try and stop her from making a difference.
12:22
On the latter: she's getting advice from a machine well-read in the Eldrae Book of Adventuring, which is all about the "if you're going to save the world, make sure you do it in style!" theme. Magnificently complex plans with spandrels that exist for no purpose other than dazzling bystanders with performative awesomeness are pretty much exactly how things are supposed to be done, by that book.
To an extent, at home, they're often part of mission readiness. One of the "problems" of a free society is that if you want to lead, you have to persuade people to follow you, and part of that is the aesthetics of things. You have to successfully and simultaneously hit all the notes of be good, do good, and look good.(edited)
Almost certainly not, nor the Wards (except maybe Clockblocker), nor the Protectorate (except probably Assault), but they're not/that's not really the target(s) of Phase I. At least not until the big reveal at the end that's all "Behold, The Brilliance of My Cunning Master Plan That Saved Much Of The City".
How much of your plan here is on the assumption that leviathan is going to attack Brockton Bay?
12:34
Like, what's the game-plan if he (counterfactually) doesn't?
12:36
(Sorry to change the topic; specific response is - aren't the heros or villains (and associated non-parahuman associates) your main targets when it comes to PR manipulations? )
12:37
Though it could be a really cool angle of the fic to have cauldron go "Okay actually that's a PR plan that's basically aligned with out own long-game PR plan, we'll let it slide"
It's mostly probabilistic: Brockton Bay is overdue to be hit by something (especially once conflict intensifies), and given that it's coastal and has an aquifer, if it's an Endbringer, it's most likely to be Leviathan. But in accordance with that "all paths lead to victory" maxim, the overall plan will have sub-paths in it for "Different Endbringer attacks", "Endbringer attacks somewhere else; need to transport forces to hero there instead", "Slaughterhouse Nine come to town instead", and so forth, all the way down to "Things to do while waiting around being bored, like picking off the Merchants".
12:44
(Not that pantsing Skidmark and hanging him in wedgie position from the PRT's flagpole wouldn't be fun, but it is, shall we say, non-core.)
and arguably, "okay I can't fight an Endbringer but I'm pretty sure I can teleport a whole team there!" is the kinda thing that wouldn't be too outlandish for a Tinker AND buys you some good credit with the hero organisations? Because yes, that's a potent ability... but it's one that requires other more dangerous people to take advantage of
(Well, the thing to bear in mind is that the first half of Phase I is all pretty much emergency pantsing, not very well planned. Taylor's not exactly had a chance to plan anything yet, and is not going to have time to do so imminently. Her most obvious problem, apart from somewhere to hide out, amounts to Space Elf Needs Resources Badly.
So PR-wise, while solving that problem - especially as it may involve a little necessary villainy - the PR objectives amount to keeping the heroes sufficiently soothed to not make her a priority, the villains sufficiently intimidated likewise, and absolutely everybody at least as confused and off-balance as she is right now. Everything else can wait until she has more than 12% of a plan.)
hm. Tinker 'badly' in ways that visibly "fail", in dramatic entertaining and mostly harmless ways? "Okay yes she's making a flying carpet and keeps getting stuck on flagpoles; leave her alone, she can hover, it's fine, she's not a threat."
"In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!"
Rolling up on Brockton Bay’s equivalent to the Sinister 6 or Rouges Gallery (local villans, if you will) would be a great boon to PR. Shows worth and capability as a super.
This would probably involve anonymous vigilante stuff(edited)
Oh, this is going to involve very nonymous vigilante stuff.
"Dear PRT,
Please find enclosed one Hookwolf-in-a-Box. I suggest you open carefully, as he is a very bad boy indeed.
Love and kisses,
Her Elvishness"
All we have to do is implement a honorable but extremely violent law enforced with utmost skill, and hand out physical buffs, and I think we've got every cell-block leader I can remember off the top of my head
Actually, there's part of me imagining it as a sort of regular Tuesday event. Get up, go to work, find a big box and a little box on the doorstep, containing a local villain and a handy minor technological widget, respectively. (Also a note and some journalists.)
13:21
Go to your office, deal with the resulting mess, beat your head against your desk a few times...
Yeah, but that's up to them. Still HALPING.
(I suspect they'd end up with Dragon for analysis, the results of which should produce hours of entertainment and headaches.)
13:25
"It's exactly what the manual says it is. No tricks, no traps, no bugs, and can you please introduce me to whoever made it?"
This fic started out on my snippets thread as an experiment in writing something other than Jumpchain, which is all I've done up until now. It was originally going to be your bog-standard Worm v1 CYOA but as I was writing it it started evolving under me, to the point I was not...
22:26
damn I am loving this fic and it seems vaguely similar(edited)
tl;dr Panacea gets over her hangups that made her keep using her power in the least effective way imaginable
23:15
she proceeds to break half of the world within a few chapters because full-on biomanipulation with basically a FAI pulling the legwork is absolutely bonkers
canonically, Bonesaw, one of the most powerful biotinkers in the world, created and spent days seeding a elaborate parasite/prion based disease which induced amnesia/face blindness within minutes and killed within hours.
23:23
across a entire city at once, with a gaseous spreading mechanism built in
23:23
Panacea comes along, metaphorically says "that's cute", and then spends a literal 5 minutes creating a self-propagating cure.
Regarding this: "I wonder... Could Miss Militia manifest Eldrae weapons if she was given one to study?" - @Tassadar
Having consulted WoG ("See 11.h for pointers about how Miss Militia's passenger gathered weapons info about conventional arms. It also feeds into her awareness for updates on weapons (ie., as she becomes aware of more modern munitions). Any projectile firing weapon, just about, barring cruder mechanisms like catapults, and any theoretical, (appropriate) projectile (rubber bullets, hollow points, etc)."), yes. But since the shard appears to figure out what to emulate based on her awareness of them without necessarily having complete understanding of how they work, bearing in mind her origin and assuming the Protectorate doesn't have a "Building Nuclear Weapons 101" course, probably also by just seeing them in action.
Or, indeed, being made incredibly dangerous with a copy of a recent issue of Guns and Bullets , or, gods help the Earth, the Eye-in-the-Flame summer catalog.
The General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger is a 30 mm hydraulically driven seven-barrel Gatling-style autocannon that is typically mounted in the United States Air Force's Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II. Designed specifically for the anti-tank role, the Avenger delivers very...
subcritical implosion devices and fusion devices are comparatively more complex technologies, but a basic supercritical gun-type design is a fairly simple design
aha, very nice, even if it means having to give her some ferromagnetic 'armour'. At least it can be pretty and I'm sure Taylor can figure out some functionality
(Goes down briefly when hit, but can tank anything in the meantime. But for this application, you only need one hit to turn her into a EM-assisted One Punch Girl.)
"Don't do drugs, kids! It's not that I've got anything against drugs, mind you, but in this town you have to buy them from a dude who thought it was a good idea to name himself Skidmark - and who you can smell coming from three blocks away. That shit's probably cut with rat poop, know what I mean?"
in fairness there's plenty of things to have against current drugs
08:32
most illegal drugs do have rather unpleasant side effects and are addictive, and none of that is helped by the fact that, by virtue of being illegal, they're often produced in substandard and non-sterile conditions, and are cut with usually hopefully not toxic substances
08:35
now, whether that's a argument against taking those specific drugs or against making them illegal, i'm not sure.
also encourages taking them in poor manners. For example, taking marijuana by mouth is a far safer way of consuming it than smoking it - same benefits, fewer health concerns, and I think roughly the same quality of "high" - but smoking it is simpler to evade legal consequences of
@Buggy Mostly, that's an argument for quality control.
09:23
As a side note, it is also notable that one of the notable effects of the War on Drugs That Offended Someone is to push worse and worse drugs into prominence.
Way back in the day, we had opium, which made its users dopey, sleepy, happy, and other dwarves, was very hard to OD on, was cheap and available everywhere, and while withdrawal from a long-term opium addiction ain't exactly fun, compared to most withdrawals, it's a walk in the park.
hm. I'm... really not sure I'd characterise it like that. Better than heroin, oh yes, but still nasty and needs to be done under supervision
09:25
but the milder amphetamines are miles better than anything you can get on the street. And LSD in low doses looks to be safer than most stuff you get over the counter
Today, after a long treadmill of replacing drugs with worse drugs, our current market leaders are methamphetamine, which replaces the good qualities of regular speed with insanity, seizures, and being an asshole, and fentanyl, which is basically heroin's less cool brother with super-extra death.
09:27
If you're really lucky, you can get crystal meth cut with fentanyl, which...
In the beginning, I'm thinking of smoked raw opium and laudanum. It's not impossible, but it's really hard to fuck yourself up totally with those, and before Prohibition II: Pharmaceutical Boogaloo, covering a moderate addiction wouldn't break the bank.
Ideal worlds aside, we did not do ourselves any favors by encouraging people to get pharmaceutically creative in cooking up new and terrible drugs.
09:32
Another example: the progression coca -> cocaine -> crack gets worse at every step. Should have stuck with chewing the leaves and drinking original recipe coca-cola.
it was a possible derivative of a reaction I was doing, and I was aiming to get the dissolution product of sticking cocaine in water. Which also happens to be what they train sniffer dogs on (cocaine itself has no smell, but moist air produces enough for a dog).
I spent 4 months walking around with my supervisor's business card on me at all times, just in case
Because they happen to be one company of very few with the legal authorization to import coca leaves, which they turn into the cocaine-free extract (for the Coca-Cola Company) and cocaine (for Mallinckrodt, the pharma company). Except there's rather more demand for the former than the latter, so it just keeps piling up...(edited)
09:37
(I don't know why they're the people with the license, but the company in question is globally famous for its anionic surfactants, so.)
I got pinged by a sniffer dog in training at the central train station. It was a remarkably civil encounter, mostly because I am a white woman who looks very non-threatening and not a druggie.
Police offer asks, I sigh and say I am a chemist, I've been working with a substance chemically similar to cocaine, there is a white lab coat in my bag that the dog would indicate on, no they do NOT have permission to search my bag but I'm happy to pull out the lab coat and here's the mobile phone number for the head of the university chemistry department, and cops waved me on after just a peak at "yes that looks like it could be a lab coat".
Almost certainly because I have plausible reason for a false positive, I don't look anything other than slightly exasperated, and it looks like 1) it's an easily cleared up issue but 2) if they ring they WILL have to do paperwork
Today, after a long treadmill of replacing drugs with worse drugs, our current market leaders are methamphetamine, which replaces the good qualities of regular speed with insanity, seizures, and being an asshole, and fentanyl, which is basically heroin's less cool brother with super-extra death.
Let us not forget Krokodil. A drug so bad that its users are happy when they can get enough money together to have some heroin instead, because the heroin "feels clean".(edited)
No, those can't be fudged. But delivering a hasty incident report about the "parahuman terrorist" that has to be dealt with right now ? That's much easier to slant in ways that lead to the exact right/wrong conclusions.
So presumably if Taylor was questioned and flatly stated "I was human and they locked me in a locker and tortured me and then THIS happened" Armsmaster would be able to tell she wasn't lying? And then go ask Shadow Stalker lots of awkward questions
iirc from what we've seen in canon it's subjective truth (it's checking for lies, not acting as a clairvoyant fact-checker), and it's more of a scale than a strict true-false. When Skitter meets Armsmaster to tell him about her going undercover, he notes things like "Mostly the truth." a few times when she's being evasive or wording things carefully.
20:29
so if he's used to a background level of evasiveness and partial truths from SS, then he might be fooled
of course, now that i think about it, his lie detector probably doesn't work on E!Taylor at all
22:04
it's probably a high-tech equivalent of a polygraph, feeding various physiological information like heart rate, skin blood perfusion, etc into some analytical software. Possibly incorporates social predictive software as well.
22:06
so between being a near-human alien with a entirely different set of physiological responses (going so far as to have a different blood color), having non-standard neurology and social instincts, and having mil-spec security enhancements which probably close the glaring security hole presented by subconscious physiological reactions to internal mental states...(edited)
22:08
sufficient to say his lie detector is probably just going to say "orange, bologna, queen of france" for a few seconds before he gives up.
Eldrae kinesics aren't sufficiently different from human to make it much more than less reliable, especially at first. (You'll note that Tattletale's power could still get a fairly accurate read, for example.)
Now, there are such things as face-saving programs, which soften, and emotional response dampers, which more or less eliminate, the assorted tells that kinesic readers can use, which she could dig out of the library. On the other hand, the problem with using those to wipe your kinesics is that the resulting flattened affect is a pretty obvious tell in itself.
Yep.
There has not been much work done on creating more effective ways to lie without kinesic tells, since
(a) None of it would fool an alethiometer. Hell, it won't even fool an MRI machine circa now; and
(b) To steal a quotation from SC2, "Human. We Ur-Quan never lie. NEVER!
It is a weakness to lie and, as you have noticed, the Ur-Quan are not weak!"
and (c) there is nothing more useful when deceiving people than a reputation for honesty. Something readily attained at the slight cost of having to let people lie to themselves for you.
i suspect that it'll be easy enough to calibrate, because as you said they're similar, but i also wouldn't expect it to work very well at all until Armsmaster at least fiddles with the settings
02:05
two specific techniques i would expect it to use would be reading the heartrate and discerning how flushed visible parts of the skin are via camera; both things we can do already. And a triple-chamber heart (or whatever it was Taylor mentioned) and blue blood will thoroughly confound either of those, even if it's a easy fix.
02:05
granted, Armsmaster might well have been thorough enough that it can handle that much on it's own, given that Case-53s exist
02:07
hard to say. Personally I wouldn't expect lie detectors to work particularly well in the first place without some baseline interactions to work off of, but "Tinkers are bullshit" for a reason(edited)
Technically, none at all. They're continuous-flow peristaltic pumps.
11:50
(So, arguably, it's not really a pulse as we know it, but a sort of three-peaked thrum.)
This is an adapted bluelife mechanism, and was selected by the Precursor bioengineers because it's easier on the blood cells, doesn't have any valves to go wrong, and doesn't send big pressure waves through the circulatory system with each beat. Which last is rather easier on the blood vessels, too.
11:52
So the first time someone tries to take her pulse or blood pressure, boy, are they in for a shock.
The triple thrum is because, while a single complex, there're actually three pumps involved. The big one that moves blood through the body entire, and two smaller ones which take the blood returning from the paracardiac chain and push it through the lungs.(edited)
(Humans don't have one of those, either. It's a folded structure of blood-filters, glands, and ganglia that cleans and enhances the blood returning through the venae cavae and lymph from the thoracic duct, and contains a lot of the immune enhancements that enable the whole not aging process.)(edited)
More specifically immuno-/anagatho-focused than either, but it's not the worst analogy. Also, its filtering process doesn't have its own dump; it just transforms intractable problems into things the kidneys can flush easily.
In other - baseline - gross organic (sic) differences awaiting the curious anatomist, the spleen is enlarged, the liver has a more complex six-lobed structure rather than four-lobed, and the stomach has developed a double-chamber to support the use of bluelife-specific proteases.
12:39
Also, the brain's wrinklier and has a larger cortex callosum than in humans, but it's still basically a brain.
Well, having been cloned, it's not like he's in this one. (But if you can't shameless abuse the Case 70 phenomenon for Science!, what can you do?)(edited)
that's... a great point, a really great point now that i think about it
22:38
canonically, it seems that clones of parahumans fully inherit their abilities. While the fate of the Slaughterhouse 9000 rather demonstrates the perils of fork armies, it would still be a powerful strategy
22:41
(plus, they weren't proper forks. Just reconstructed clones that probably didn't have their former full expertise)
also, related, but i only recently realized how hilariously ironic Panacea and New Wave is
15:20
they're a movement based around honesty and accountability and such, but GG and Panacea basically have a arrangement that amounts to "I'll break criminals, you put them back together and make sure they don't sue us"
I am trying to remember the fic in which Amy's secret lust for Glory Girl is revealed at the bank, and Taylor's response is basically, "Well, isn't literally everyone of our age lusting after GG? Even the gay boys and straight girls? Now, not doing so, that's a condition."(edited)
...ironically, in this particular case problems might actually be solved by sufficient not-really-incest.
('Look, kids, the Omniscient Prognostication Engine has worked out all the possible outcomes from here, which range from "multiple entire worlds dead of hideous plague" to "sunshine, rainbows, and a happy old age with a bunch of freckly, platinum-haired grandchildren flying around healing people". So for the sake of all reality, for the good of mankind, for your own good, and for the OPE's shipping chart... JUST KISS, YOU MORONS.')
"While we're having this conversation, incidentally, would you mind joining our secret mostly-not-villainous organization as Head of Biotech Research and Supreme Anti-Endbringer Warhead, respectively?"
15:51
"Both of your first assignments will be to Project Making Sure No-One Dies, Ever. (Except terminal assholes, for whom we offer an Unlimited Fist-of-Death License.)"
To answer @KAL_9000 's earlier question, what you can send through a between-universe wormhole is --
(Assuming, for a moment, that you have found two universes with natural laws which are compatible enough to send mass-energy between without it dissolving instantly into adjacentia. Inasmuch as universes are random agglomerations from the primordial chaos's all-set and the set of identical agglomerations is an infinitesimal, although also infinite, subset of the infinite set of stable agglomerations, which is an infinite subset of the infinite set of all possible agglomerations... well, don't count on it.)
-- similar to a conventional wormhole; it depends on how much energy you feel like putting into it.
Yes, this does mean it could send a certain admiral and her shiny superdreadnought All You Other Endbringers Are Just Imitating to solve the problem her way.
It won't. But it could.
and if fixing the species still results in them having a few struggles with the kaiju problem, then you can helpfully send them a Sargas to help finish off the problem
21:58
and if fixing the species still results in them having a few struggles with the kaiju problem, then you can helpfully send them a Sargas to help finish off the problem
21:58
and if fixing the species still results in them having a few struggles with the kaiju problem, then you can helpfully send them a Sargas to help finish off the problem
21:59
and if fixing the species still results in them having a few struggles with the kaiju problem, then you can helpfully send them a Sargas to help finish off the problem
22:00
and if fixing the species still results in them having a few struggles with the kaiju problem, then you can helpfully send them a Sargas to help finish off the problem
What is her resistivity? Does her temperature increase when you pump manymany amps across her? Does her temperature increase when you place a conductor through which you are pumping manymany amps in contact with her?
my main concern would be putting so much force on it that it dissipates more quickly than a normal 'pop', to the point that it doesn't stop whatever the force is coming from. But if it can tank a hit from Scion, a Glorious Railgun would definitely work
but once you take out the central server (Scion) a lotta shards stop working properly or can't adapt as well
19:17
this comes up a lot in Ward
19:18
as for immediate threats being shut down or not... I'm not sure
19:19
there's a notable moment when Chevalier is about to stab Behemoth's exposed core with a mixed/merged multi-dimensional sword, and the moment his weapon touches it it just sorta breaks and splits into pieces
Project Pluto was a United States government program to develop nuclear-powered ramjet engines for use in cruise missiles. Two experimental engines were tested at the United States Department of Energy Nevada Test Site (NTS) in 1961 and 1964.
but i can't recall if that's Behemoth hitting the emergency stop on Chev's power, or if it's just two multi-dimensional effects mixing poorly and one of them won.
it's possible that the entities have that, but it's either not automatic or it's very lenient
19:21
Scion dies after his body-portal is pinned in place by a power and then his real body is shot with a big tinkertech gun
19:22
Eden dies after being stabbed in exactly the wrong spot by someone using her best precog power
19:23
but Eden didn't get the chance to put the finishing touches on that shard, but the fact that she added a "you can't hurt me" limitation once she noticed the threat indicates that the entities, theoretically, can regain control of shards on a moment's notice
and personally, i'd wager that the only reason Scion canonically died at all is that Khepri and Others bullied him until he was so depressed that he laid down and let them kill him
it sounds like if you want a higher ratio of heroes and not villains caused by negative encounters with authority, it would be more efficient to send him along with someone more diplomatic
This is true. His heart is in the right place, he just hasn't realized that he needs to invest some brainpower on the solutions-for-people-problems side of things
22:57
his lie detector suite is a step in the right direction, but he needs to take a jog in that direction
I keep wanting to bring up rhodeworks' criticism of Sophia as being 'too mean to Taylor for no reason', to over-condense.. but then I remember plenty of people are giant dicks in real life for no good reason(edited)
Well, she has a reason. It’s just that most of us wouldn’t consider “being a shard-aggravated sadist with undiagnosed clinical psychopathy” as a good reason.
random thought: i wonder if Accord would be satisfied with having only non-sophont minions workforces
04:46
his power is useful and he's not really evil, either. Its just kind of hard to work around his... stringent preferences.
04:47
offer him a very symmetrical and orderly robot army, polished to a shine, be careful with how you present information to him, and he might be a useful ally
another random thought: you said that parallel dimensions is not the normal state of the verse, so there's a shard responsible for it. That would be Coil's, wouldn't it?
The currently operational Worldline Demux is one of Scion's shards that he didn't give out. It has the sort of insane energy requirements to do what it's doing that it might not even be possible to pass it to anyone not an entity.
02:25
Given that he is a Cauldron cape, it's possible that Coil has a crippled version of Eden's equivalent shard, but whether or not he actually can split and unmake worldlines in the physical sense or whether its still the canonical simulative corcognition has yet to be decided. (Depends on whether I want him to have that much power, and/or what it'll mean for the shape of the plot.)
(To fill in a little background, Worldline Demux is a force-multiplier shard for the Entities' experimentation. It works [and big endgame-period discovery spoilers here for those who care about such things] like this:
The way universes naturally work (and this is a horrible, gross, lies-to-children popsci version of the theory) is that in macroscopic quantum systems, like universes, you can approximate the probability curve of aggregate wave function distributions as something like a bell curve. The resolved classical universe as we actually perceive and experience it is essentially the peak of the curve. The falloff to either side, for the most part, can be conceived of as naught but shadows and echoes. Not that there aren't interactions or ways of manipulating things for useful ends available with sufficiently advanced technology.(edited)
02:39
What Worldline Demux does is, by means of copious brute force applied to quantum fuckery, reshape that probability curve such that it has a multitude of lower peaks rather than one big one. The result is that you end up with multiple experienceable worldlines, one per curve-peak, which can be considered "parallel worlds" occupying the same space. This allows an Entity with it to run multiple parallel iterations of its experiments on the same planet, to multiply its potential gains.
02:42
The space in question, Worldline Demux only having so much energy to apply, is pretty much confined to Earth-local space. This is two reasons the Entities don't want humanity getting offworld; one, they might notice the difference from out there, and two, because the peaks are lower, mass-energy in Earth-local space is less real than mass-energy outside it. If you think of the height of the normal peak as "real", that amount of realness is being shared between multiple worldlines. (This is what makes Sting , Flechette's power, so damn deadly, because it synthesizes q-states that are baseline-level-of-the-universe real.)
02:42
Assorted other implications are left as an exercise for the reader.)
after reading on it a bit, apparently coils power is canonically a sort of precog that gets played out in real time. I thought he genuinely split off new dimensions, but that makes much more sense (running a second cocurrent timeline would either double the power drain on shards or double the shards.)
03:07
I remembered that being discussed in-universe a bit, but i thought that was just Tattle and Skitter not wanting to face the horrifying conclusion that he destroyed entire planets on a daily basis
03:08
that aside, would a consequence of this be that any sort of quantum fuckery is also easier/less energy intensive?
03:09
since the peaks are lower, so any modification to a individual peak ought to take less effort overall
running a very high fidelity simulation of the entire planet, to the point that butterfly effects are easily predicted years down the line... and also including other precog shardsand the shard doing the simulation
03:12
i'm pretty sure that a entire subfield of computer science is dedicated to saying "no, you can't do that."
03:13
i suppose since all the shards are networked and should theoretically have well-defined I/O you can optimize a lot there, because the shard itself is complex but it'll behave in a simple manner
03:14
but still, no wonder some people assert that entities are galaxy-mass or larger
that's fair. You're also doing things pretty differently
03:15
shards being brane entities and the Worldline Demux being a later-developed force-multiplier means that the shards have a very different origin than canon
03:17
and because shards explicitly suppress free will and manipulate their hosts that can help cut down on the complexity quite a lot. You don't need to predict the butterflies if you just squish them.
because shards explicitly suppress free will
Ah, a definitive statement on this: it's fanon. Fanfanon. Ach, you know what I mean.
For the shards to do this would be self-defeating for the Entities. They're trying to use the branemeats (to coin a term) as creativity farms to find a solution to their entropy problem, and that'd be pointless if they p-zombified them, because they could just run a giant p-zombie simulation and have done with it. They need the logotic wacky to make their plan work.
Their precog works as well as it does because most people don't exercise their free will in unpredictable ways all that much, and they have a friggin' huge dataset and oodles of computing power to throw at the problem. So usually there's just a little fuzziness in the process such that it doesn't work to pull end-of-First-Lensman-I-can-tell-you-exactly-where-individual-hairs-will-fall-in-10-years tricks. It's good, but it ain't Visualization of the Cosmic All.
11:21
(This effect is also why Contessa's PtV occasionally spits out "recalculating" and returns a different number of steps.)
This effect is also responsible for the "causality interference" that is responsible for blinding precogs to each other, but it's not just precogs. Anyone who demonstrates an unusually high Cíëlle Vagary, or worse, actual in-the-technical-sense miracles that generate impossipoints, will fuck with precognition in the same way.
11:30
(It's basically the same problem as Destiny's Vex have simulating the Guardians. You can have a perfect causal simulation that predicts that Bob there will turn left at the end of the street, but there's always that tiny unsimulatable possibility that he'll say "fuck it", and turn right anyway. Or turn up. Or turn down the bed. Or turn into a herring. Will defeats law.)
11:35
Now I'm trying to remember if in canon we ever saw Contessa go up against a high-powered combat Thinker.
To get into those spoilers I was avoiding earlier for those who just plain can't resist, their precog-simulations also have essentially the same vulnerability as the Vex's - namely, you can't simulate what you can't outcompute. Now, I'm not saying moon-brains are the answer to this problem, but I'm not saying they're not the answer, either.
ah, sorry i thought you said earlier that the shards suppress the logos, but i agree it makes more sense for them to not do that. If they did, then why not p-zombies.
19:41
oh, it was "logos-depressed" which does make more sense; cutting off the bits that are more troublesome without suppressing the useful bits
19:43
the downside of the Moonbrain Plan is that step 1 is "Kill the Simurgh". Which is a good step regardless, but there is a bit of a problem with the best solution to precogs being gated behind killing one of the most powerful precogs.
19:44
Of course, you can also try to sneak past the Simurgh, I suppose. That might be a little easier
Fair point, personally i'd be concerned about building a moonplanetbrain in the equivalent of the Entities' utilities room, but that doesn't become a problem unless Scion realizes it and takes action
22:12
Wait. Parallel-worldline-computation is still real computation whose output can be translated into realer reality without substantial investment or loss. That sounds like... a very valuable thing that the people back in the Empire would love to install in their server clusters. Possible interference with quantum computation aside.
clearly the reason we don't have perpetual motion is that someone in a parallel universe figured out how to shuffle entropy out of theirs and into our, but is being real careful to put it in places it should be anyway
my mind keeps taking the metaphor of peaks-on-a-graph and thinking "water ripples", like... waves in a pool, from people splashing about, recombining and such(edited)
09:13
except instead of 2d graphs or water, it's 3 dimensional amplitudes corresponding to particles composing a entire planet.
09:13
that would be... a splash.
09:14
it is, perhaps, a good idea to kill or subvert the entities very carefully.
As in, Earth survives, significant parts of biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere will be a little redistributed and heated up, cosmically speaking(edited)
In this case, where you've got coherent local data replaced by a mass of random q-states, we're talking "a shit-ton of mass-energy spontaneously decoheres and recoheres as super-energetic super-simple particles, mostly photons; i.e., an Earths-shattering kaboom".
This is how the Entities end the Cycle.(edited)
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